The Wages of Narrative

As I was traveling from Seattle to Fort Lauderdale yesterday I saw (but fortunately did not hear) on CNN the sainted Hillary Clinton in an interview. The chyron said that she was now considered herself part of the "Resistance."

Oh please!

Actually, I suppose it makes a grim sort of sense -- and I do not mean in the sense that everything about Hillary Clinton is grim.

We have reached a moment when the idea of "narrative," the precipitate of the left's misreading of modern philosophy, is not just everything, it's the only thing.

The point of modern philosophy issues from the realization that you cannot put your finger on the really real. It starts with Descartes trying to doubt everything, continues with Hume showing that you cannot prove cause and effect, and continues with Kant and his realization that it is the mind that constructs an image of reality, a theory of the world, through the sense impressions it processes.

Then the left extended the idea from philosophy to politics, and declared that, always and everywhere, the powerful construct a false theory of the world to justify their unjust rule.

The left was right about that. Of course the ruling class tells lies to justify its rule and to bathe in a comfortable story of how it got to rule.

Today we have a world in which the left is the ruling class. It is the left's lies that justify the ruling class and its right to rule. Now the left's narrative of resistance has become the ruling class's narrative of power.

In that narrative an avant-garde of educated, evolved elitists advocate for and protect traditionally marginalized peoples from the hegemony and exploitation and oppression of privileged white males, and that justifies their political power and hegemony.

You can't argue with success. That narrative got the cadre of educated, evolved elitists all the way from the comfort of a privileged childhood to ideological hegemony and political mastery. Even though most of these elitists are educated white males or educated white females born to privilege and numerous connections to the powerful.

Right now the ruling class feels rocked back on its heels because a political neophyte beat their candidate in a normal "change" election. And now they must form a "Resistance" against the fascist power that oppresses them. What planet are they on?

First, liberals and lefties are the ruling class; it is their self-serving narrative that is the water that all we fish must swim in. So liberals and lefties should realize that many of us would find the taste of that water foul and unhealthy and determine to change the water.

Second, the most normal thing in the world is for voters to change party after two terms with the same president.

Third, all government is a train wreck. That's why rulers pay bribed apologists to construct a narrative that makes it all out to be a glorious victory. Unfortunately even with the best apologists in the world it becomes harder and harder as time goes by to persuade people with the fiction that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. 

Fourth, all government is force. People on the receiving end of force, whether black homeboys in the 'hood chased around by racist policemen or conservative student journalists in a liberal university, really hate it.

Fifth, the central argument of the left, that capitalists and the bourgeoisie and white men in general are monstrous oppressors like the feudal barons of old, is a lie. Simply put, the capitalists and the bourgeoisie and white men in general are not that interested in power. What do capitalists do? They retire and devote themselves to philanthropy. What does the bourgeoisie do? It gives workers the vote. What do white men do? They feel guilty about the race and gender crimes that the left scrapes up to intimidate them and give women and minorities affirmative action and welfare.

Sixth, and perhaps most important, is that power and force are not that important any more. The simplest illustration is the fall in violent human death, from 500 per 100,000 per year in hunter-gatherer society to 50 per 100,000 per year in agricultural society to 5 per 100,000 per year in capitalist society. Why did this happen. I simply believe that less force is needed today that in former times.

We live in a society where price and trade are lubricants that reduce the need for force. 

But the left is a movement that insists that, on the contrary, more force is needed. We tried that, in the Soviet Union and in China, and it led to mass murder and mass poverty. It is leading to mass murder and poverty in Venezuela today.

Why can't the left see that? It is because in their world narrative is everything. It is the narrative of inevitable victory that sustains an army through trial and setback, and that every army commander knows how to sustain. And it is the simple philosophy of the worker Nicholas Higgins in Mrs. Gaskell's North and South. For him the only remedy for workers like him is to fight the bosses.

And so the dullest woman in America reminds the world why she should never be president, by assuring us that she is down with the "Resistance."

We know, we have always known, that Hillary Clinton just does not get it.

On Political Lies and the Necessary Enemy

Notice the big thing about the current Cold Civil War in America? Each side accuses the other of lying.

Any liberal screed about Donald Trump will say that he lies. Of course he does. He is telling the white working class what it wants to hear. And any conservative worth his salt will say that liberals have been lying about everything since the dawn of time, or at least the New Deal.

But I would like to say to both sides: what planet are you on? All politics is about lying, at all levels. Politicians running for office lie, because the voters will not put up with the truth. Politicians in office lie because the people will not allow that all government is a controlled crash, and that failure and scandal go with government as bread goes with butter.

Of course, sometimes the lie problem gets bigger than normal. That's when the lies from your own side start to prick your ideological bubble. I'd say that this is a bigger problem for liberals, because liberals are protected from reality by the ruling class's ideological hegemony enfored through the mainstream media, education, and entertainment.

That's why liberals are beside themselves after the Trump win in November; they were utterly unprepared for the normal process where the White House changes party after two terms with the same guy.

So here is a piece by a liberal about liberal melancholy (from Freud, of course):

The real purpose of the Trump-Russia scandal is indeed to “save the world,” but not in the sense liberals think. For it allows liberals to sustain the illusion that their worldview still corresponds to reality, to avoid confronting the disquieting truth that the world as they knew it no longer exists, and that Trump himself is the bloviating, pumpkin-hued harbinger of its death.

But amusingly, the reality that he finds punctured is the "age of Third-Way liberalism, of technocratically managed economic growth through the promotion of interconnected markets, the free flow of financial capital, and deepening international trade," and this has created "a rising tide of people are returning to the moral and economic vision of the socialist tradition."

See, as a racist sexist homophobe I would have said that the writer J.M. Bernays misses the point. The problem is that on the one hand liberals have been fooling themselves that they are all in favor of international trade, which they are not. On the other hand liberals have been running the top-down administrative state that buys votes with government programs and screws up the economy and makes promises of free stuff to people that cannot be kept.  I would say that liberals have been lying to themselves for decades and that finally, now that they are running out of money to bribe the voters, they are reaping the whirlwind.

Victor Davis Hanson is more direct about all this.

The entire menu of race, class, and gender identity politics, lead-from-behind foreign policy, political correctness, and radical environmentalism so far have not won over most Americans.

And that means, he writes, that "You Gotta Lie."

OK. The lies of the left are particularly egregious, and their identity politics is nothing but a return to tribalism, and their form of tribalism is particularly harmful because the world of the market economy rewards people that extend their trust beyond the boundaries of tribe to embrace the whole world of people that can be trusted and their identity politics teaches people not to trust. The whole point of the left is to teach the workers that they can't trust the bosses and to teach women and minorities that they can't trust the white man.

But let's face it, the nation state is a form of tribalism, only its tribe is the people speaking the same language within some national territory. The leaders of the nation state and their bribed apologists are shameless in developing and broadcasting a national myth, of the glory of the people that became the British, the Germans, the French, the Americans. And never more so than when they are engaged in a world war against each other.

The argument that I make is that the nation state and its national myth is a better and more advanced myth than the class warfare myth or the minorities and women marginalization myth. It has room for the market economy, although it tends to  want to declare economic warfare on other nations. Not good.

But at least, in nationalism, the Enemy is beyond the border. In the left's politics, the Enemy is right here at home, just down the street.

And the left's politics of activism is always one step from actual political violence, because the demonstration and the "peaceful protest" is always and everywhere a show of force.

Pocahontas' Agenda on Victims of Socialism/Communism Day

Bill Maher just called Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) "Pocahontas" on live TV!

Jolly good fun, but then Sen. Warren reeled off her talking points, and Bill Maher didn't have anything witty to say about her foolish ideas. Here is my transcription (6:45).

When you talk about what's really the basics of the progressive agenda: raise the minimum wage; expand Social Security; reduce the cost of college so people don't get crushed by student load debt; more, not less regulation of... financial institutions; progressive taxation, make those at the top pay their fair share...

Americans by about two to one are with us on that.

Let's play President Eisenhower and make this problem bigger. I'm all for higher wages; all for better pensions; all for cheaper college; all for financial safety; all for the rich paying more on taxes than the poor. So let us tick off the reasons why I think that college professor Elizabeth Warren gets it all wrong.

Minimum wage. The problem with raising the minimum wage by legislation or by regulation is that wages are prices. And science tells us that when government messes with wages and prices it makes things worse. Right now Venezuela has wage and price controls and no food to eat. Let's admit that legislating wages levels is a denial of settled science, and basically puts the young and poor and untrained out of work while rich kids get unpaid internships. What could we do? Well, we could reduce legal and illegal immigration. There is no mystery here; it is simple supply and demand. More workers like me from abroad means more people competing for the same job.

Expand Social Security. Really? Right now Social Security has trillions in unfunded liabilities and it is the biggest government program in America, at $972 billion in FY17. You could look it up, Senator. But I'm all in favor of bigger pensions for Americans. I know. Let's privatize Social Security with a top-up for low-paid workers so that people are saving their own money, retiring when they want to, and maybe ending up with a significant net worth when they die. Whaddya say, Sen. Warren? Shall we call it "generational justice for workers?"

Reduce the cost of college. Stop me if you've heard this one, Sen. Warren, but the experts are pretty well agreed that the cost of college has gone up mainly because of government subsidies and government regulation. Here's a cunning plan: end all government subsidies for universities and end the Pell grants and the student loan program. Then see who really wants to go to college. To help poor kids get more education I propose a Billionaires College Fund, funded and run by America's billionaires, to provide college funds for needy students. And let's clear away all obstacles to on-line education. I also suggest a War on Credentials and a revival of apprenticeships where kids can work while preparing for their careers. Of course, some billionaires, like Peter Thiel, are paying kids not to go to college. I wonder why?

Regulate financial institutions. Everyone wants a safe financial sector that doesn't crash every generation. But expecting government to do a good job with that is like asking the fox to guard the hen-house. That's because it is government that is usually to blame whenever there is a financial panic. The Crash of 2008 was caused by government shoveling trillions into sub-prime mortgages that ended up being under-collateralized. The Tech Bust of 2000 was due to the Fed easing up after the Mexican peso crisis in 1994 and the Long Term Capital Management failure in 1998. More than that, the problem is that the government uses the financial system as a piggy bank, and time after time sets a bubble in motion with excessive credit creation, and then blames the "greedy bankers" when things go wrong. I don't see that you have any idea of this end of the credit problem, Senator.

Progressive taxation. You say that the rich should pay their fair share, Sen. Warren, so I guess you haven't noticed, as a busy politician, that the rich are already paying a ton of money in taxes. The top one percent get about 20 percent of the income and pay nearly 40 percent of the federal income tax. The top 50 percent of taxpayers pay over 90 percent of the federal income tax. I'm not sure what you consider a fair share, but I'd say that we must be pretty close to that right now. Personally, I'd prefer the rich to pay less in tax, because I think that whatever they do with their money, it is bound to create more jobs than government spending.

Aside from the arguments above, there is the simple math that government spending right now is about 34 percent of GDP and government revenue right now is about 33 percent of GDP. And that is before we figure the cost of regulation. I don't know what vital communal things government can do, but I'd say, on Victims of Socialism/Communism Day, that we have gone about as far as is prudent without descending into the vile dungeon of injustice and cruelty that always goes with socialist and communist governance.

The Good Old Jobs are Not Coming Back

I was talking with an acquaintance the other day and he predicted that the time is not far off when AI will take all our jobs. He mentioned how Google recently switched out its Japanese-English Translate app with an AI based app. Just as an experiment to see whether it was any good. Google started getting emails telling it how much better its Translate had become.

Or what about the Google Map app, that is processing the movement of millions of cellphones along all the streets and highways in the world, and then tells you which route to take to the hospital? How do they do it?

But today's politics is all about the villainy of the globalists and the neo-liberals. (That's when it's not about the villainy of the "haters" and the "xenophobes.")

Here is a piece about a Cadbury chocolate factory closing in England, with the jobs going to Poland.

For nearly a century, residents of Keynsham knew that their local Cadbury confectionery plant was a source of employment. Then, on Oct. 3, 2007, it all changed. The word went out that the factory was to shut down and move to Skarbimierz, Poland. Just like that, come 2011, one hundred years of history were rubbed out thanks to a closed-boardroom decision. As Meek writes, the factory’s leaving meant the loss of “highly paid, permanent, solidly pensioned jobs…not because [the workers] had done anything wrong, or because their products weren’t selling, or because the factory was unprofitable, but because their Polish replacements could do the same job for less than one fifth of the money.”

OK. Let's look at the other side of it.

"For nearly a century" the Cadbury plant had provided "highly paid, permanent, solidly pensioned jobs." Think what that means. It means that, without any particular effort, the folks near that factory had great jobs, great wages, great tenure, and great retirement. For nearly a century.

The point is that such a setup is an extraordinary exception. That is not how the world works, not under capitalism, not under neoliberalism, not under Trumpism, not under New Dealism, and certainly not under Communism from Lenin to Castro and Chávez.

The real world changes, from day to day, from year to year, and we had all of us better work hard to keep up or we will get left behind at the side of the road, hungry and wounded.

The promise of human community and government is that each of us is not alone, forced to face the world without our fellows. But no community, no government, can provide us with "highly paid, permanent, solidly pensioned jobs" forever. Human community and government can file the rough edges off inevitable change, but it cannot make everything smooth for all time.

Anyone that tells you different is lying.

There are lots of articles floating around about how the globalists are lying. Or that Trump is lying. Of course they are. They are lying because the voters want to be told that they can have "highly paid, permanent, solidly pensioned jobs" forever. Or they want to be told that great manufacturing jobs are coming back to Make America Great Again. Or that the government can solve the health care problem with a top-down administrative single-payer system. All politicians lie, because we voters insist that they tell us lies.

Sorry, fellahs. Those "good jobs at good wages" in the grand old manufacturing plants are not coming back. There is no going back to lifetime employment and solid pensions. The supposed social gains and the workers rights displayed in the break room at work are written in sand. And that is just the private sector. The government sector is even worse, with the promises of pensions for seniors and government retirees also written in sand, and welfare wreaking cultural suicide and education failing to educate, and Obamacare a predictable trainwreck.

This is a rough time for our liberal friends who have been living in a liberal bubble, superinflated on Obama's watch. That's why liberals are so frantic and so angry since Trump's election. They thought that their Liberal Reich would last for a thousand years, because their Leader told them so, and they cannot believe, not yet, that they have been lied to.

Just like the white working class was lied to, that the welfare state and labor legislation would solve their problems forever. Just like blacks were lied to, that the civil rights era -- or the First Black President -- would solve their problems forever. Just like women were lied to, that women's liberation would solve their problems forever.

Like I said, government can file off the rough edges of life. Sometimes. But don't assume it. The only thing to do is watch the market. What is happening to the market in skills like yours? If you don't like what you see, you had better do something about it, now.

But whatever you do, don't listen to a sauntering politician, whether left, right, or center. Because he's not going to solve your problems for you. Only you can do that.

Women and Sex and Love and Marriage

My American Thinker piece this week tried to explain the left's abandonment of the white working class all over the world as comparable to the sexual despoiling of a young woman by a caddish sexual predator: seduction, exploitation, abandonment. One reader wrote me to mention how much women in sexual relations outside marriage suffer from domestic violence.

But this week is full of such talk. There's the liberal fascination with the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale about an America run by the religious right and with Christian magnates refreshing themselves with "handmaids" in addition to their wives. Heather Wilhelm writes that this is pure liberal projection. (Anyway, Christianity has been a big force for monogamy and has notably structured its belief system towards women's spiritual needs).

Then there's the K.C. Johnston and Stuart Taylor book on The Campus Rape Frenzy. About how the Obama administration twisted the Title IX statute into a license to hunt male sexual predators on campus. And how due process is thrown out the window in order to pursue live white males.

Remember the Sexual Revolution that was going to liberate both men and women from their hangups about sex and also smash the patriarchy? So how come that lead to the hook-up culture on campus fueled by half a bottle of vodka per person to be consumed before the evening's frolics?  Gilbert GT. Sewall writes how the hook-up culture works on today's campus.

On campus, if you are a girl, you are declared hot or not. A large number of girls want to be hot. Running with the fun crowd means heavy partying and sex. There can be great emotional blackmail and unrelieved pressure to put out. Young women who don’t get slandered or dropped.

How come the college girls, hot or not, aren't liberated by their sexual liberation?

I guess the thing that annoys me the most is that, after demanding the waving away of all sexual mores, the customs and culture around sex and marriage built up by our forefathers, the left now wants to rebuild the sexual behavior boundaries with the sweet use of government force, only liberal political activists need apply. Really? So rules about sex were a good idea after all?

Well, if you ask me, it is pretty obvious what is needed, given the testimony of my reader about non-marital domestic violence, and the stories about Columbia's Mattress Girl, who clearly pursued her former lover out of her rage that issued from his abandoning her.

Human society needs a culture around sex that moderates the instinctive sexual predatory behavior of males, and honors the love-forever instincts of females.

I'd say that such a culture would make it shameful for a young man to pursue a young woman for sex without making a commitment of fidelity, and utterly foolish for a young woman to consent to sex before obtaining a commitment of fidelity from her lover.

That, of course, is what marriage is all about. It is a declaration of fidelity and commitment made before the world and in particular before the two families in question. So it curbs male sexual predation and helps women secure commitment. What a concept!

Meanwhile the kids have to navigate the storm-tossed waters of the post Sexual Revolution world of college. I am intrigued by the various strategies young people have evolved to avoid the hook-up scene. One of them is homosexuality, male and female. Another is the "friends-with-benefits" notion of sticking with one partner throughout college, recognizing that the partners will likely separate after college. Another is the decision to have nothing to do with the opposite sex and play video games in the basement. Another, that I have seen in a number of young people of my acquaintance, is simply to stick with the same partner right through college and graduate school until careers are set and then get married. How about 30-year-old Jon Ossoff, great white hope of Georgia Democrats, who has been with his current girlfriend for 12 years?

Meanwhile, we have our liberal friends who think they can solve all this with liberal activism and government regulations and social media naming and shaming.

Where do they go to learn to be so foolish?

Berkeley Riots: What Comes Next?

When I wake up in the early morning these days, I fear civil war. I wonder if the Democrats that, in 2000 and in 2016, refused to concede the election understand this. I doubt if the Antifa in Berkeley do; they are just repeating their lessons in activism back to their teachers.

And so we come to the Berkeley riots.

You can see where the authorities went wrong in Berkeley. It was the failure to use force against the anti-Milo protesters on February 2. The authorities failed to deny the lefty protesters their heckler's veto.

In other words, it is fine to protest, but not if the protesters prevent a speaker opposed to them from speaking.

Why is this? It is not because drowning out your opponent's speech is unfair. It is because threats of force encourage your opponents to use threats of force to make sure that their guy does get to speak.

Which is exactly what has happened at Berkeley. Young male Trump supporters are flocking to Berkeley for the chance to crack the skulls of the "girls and the beta males."

See liberals? That's why it is the job of the police to stop violence.  Period.

If the police do not stop the violent protests of liberals then what? Do they only apply force to red-neck fascists when they have the effrontery to travel to Berkeley to protest? Do they step back and let the protesters fight it out? Do they close down the event and send the protesters home? Do they interpose their bodies between the two opposing sides?

You can see that the right thing to do would have been for the Berkeley authorities to firmly deal with the violence of the first protests in February, and make sure that Milo Yiannopoulos got to speak and that protesters did not succeed in stopping his speech.

But we are past that happy moment now. Now it will take a more robust application of force to put a stop to what liberals used to call the "escalation." (Yeah. Remember back in the Cold War when liberals were all worried about the dangers of escalation?) And if the Berkeley authorities do not put the foot down when Ann Coulter goes to Berkeley on April 28 then it will be harder the next time.

Putting the foot down, liberals, means preventing protesters from blocking Coulter's access to the speaking venue. It means preventing violence between the two forces of protesters. It means preventing hecklers from interrupting Coulter's speech.

It was always going to come to this. The whole liberal activist culture and its sacraments of "protests" and "marches" are lies. There is no need for protests and marches, not when all adults have the vote and when the ruling class pays especial interest to the grievances of women and minorities. And the liberal activist culture depends on the tacit cooperation of the police in allowing a kind of ritual violence of "protest" by liberals. Don't try liberal tactics if you are a conservative.

And street protest works. Politicians tend to wilt when the professional left puts people in the street with protest signs and protest chants. It plays so well on TV.

Recent commentators put the blame for the present situation on President Obama. It is he that transformed his presidential campaign in to Organizing for Action and has trained 30,000 activists in left-wing protest culture.

So what happens next? Does Berkeley shut down the protests and let free speech reign? Or does the left's protest culture notch another win in its belt?

All I know is that back in the 1970s Americans hated the left-wing protests of the "kids," and they voted for Richard Nixon twice. It was only the cunning of the Watergate scandal that put a temporary stop to the conservative revival and elected Jimmy Carter for a single term before the election of Ronald Reagan.

Will history repeat itself? Will the current left-wing outrages build support for President Trump and the Republican Party? Or has the left learned from the failure of the Sixties and raised up a whole generation of lefties with its hegemony over the schools and the colleges?

Nobody knows. But they say that while history doesn't repeat itself, it certainly rhymes.

The Fundamental Problem With Government

More and more, I am becoming convinced that the fundamental characteristic of government is that it cannot change its mind, cannot retreat, cannot cut spending. Why is this?

Well, obviously it issues out of the very nature of government, which I define as:

An armed minority, occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

The point of this definition is that it covers every government from a criminal gang in an inner city, to a guerrilla group in the hills, to a modern national welfare state.

Now, as British politician Norman Tebbit argues, it is probably a good idea for a government to do a little more than that. If it has good laws to encourage enterprise, a stable currency, good roads, etc., this enhances its power and keeps the people from forming a head of rebellion.

But the basic thing that every governing class understands is defending its territory, rewarding its supporters, and getting the revenue to fund those two vital tasks.

Notice the basic parameters of this situation. The governing class needs that revenue, else the supporters may start to get restless. But the way to maximize that revenue is to promote a healthy, growing economy that throws off revenue like a dog shaking itself after a swim.

So the sensible thing for a cunning ruling class would be to limit the amount of revenue spent on the supporters, for this one very good reason:

If things go south, then where is the money going to come from to reward the supporters?

Hello Venezuela. Venezuela once had a prosperous economy founded on its oil resources. But the Chávez regime decided to ramp up the rewards to its supporters by looting its oil industry. The policy looked like political gold for a while, and every lefty in the world cited Venezuela as an example of social justice and redistribution.

Yet now Venezuela is a basket case; its population lost an average of 20 pounds each last year, and its economy has dissolved into hyperinflation. What went wrong?

Quite simply, the government promised more to its supporters than it could deliver. One fine day eevil American frackers, no doubt supported by the CIA, flooded the world with cheap oil and natural gas, and the price of oil dropped by 50 percent. Suddenly the Venezuelan government could not afford to reward its supporters as they had become accustomed.

Now if the Venezuelan government had been a business it would have declared bankruptcy, stiffed the shareholders, and paid the bondholders 25 cents on the dollar. And the workers would have found jobs elsewhere and the equipment and factories would have been sold off to other businesses.

But government isn't a business, so the Venezuelan government inflated the money supply, controlled wages and prices, seized businesses, jailed its opponents and armed its supporters and sent them out into the streets.

From this textbook case of national self-immolation you can see that there are three things a government cannot do.

A Government Cannot Admit It Was Wrong. I think this is because the real job of a government is to lead the nation in war, and a war leader cannot admit his doubts and mistakes. He must lead and inspire the nation to work and fight for the inevitable victory. Therefore,

A Government Cannot Change When Things Go Wrong. The basic fact of existence is that it is one thing after another. Whether you are a housewife or a CEO, things go wrong and you have to fix things and apply the lessons learned. But government cannot admit that things have gone wrong, except to blame them of saboteurs and wreckers, and therefore cannot seem to change.

A Government Cannot Cut Spending When Things Go Wrong. Check my definition above. The basic government program, indeed the only program, apart from defending the borders, is to reward the supporters. How can the government cut the rewards to the supporters? Chances are the greedy pigs would start looking for another armed minority to promise them the rewards withdrawn by the present armed minority.

What is the meaning of the three catch-phrases above? They tell us that the only business of government is war. If you are fighting a war then you cannot admit things are going wrong, because then people would start to lose heart and wonder if the war is really worth it. But that would defeat the whole purpose of the war, which is to win it, come what may. Then, if the government cannot admit that its war is going wrong, it cannot admit it when it sensibly changes strategy after the inevitable disasters and reverses of a war. And the government certainly cannot reduce spending on the war and its soldiers, not until the last coin from under the last mattress has been spent on furnishing and supplying the armed forces in the march to victory.

See how this notion tells us that the whole welfare state culture is horribly mistaken?

First, pensions. It is pretty obvious that the current pension model is broken. Our Social Security model was designed in the 1930s when the average life expectancy was 60-something instead of the present 70-something. But it is politically impossible to adapt the program, because people that have paid in all their lives demand the full benefit. Government cannot admit that there is a problem with Social Security, cannot admit it needs to be changed, and cannot bring itself to tell people that their benefits are going to be cut.

Social Security needs to be privatized, so that the pensioning of our senior citizens can constantly change and adapt to new realities. But that won't happen until it is completely broken.

Obviously the same thing applies to health care. The provision of health care is an immensely complicated affair, and obviously needs to constantly adapt as problems arise, and as new technology, new techniques, new understandings about disease and ageing appear. But government is incapable of acting except in response to the needs of organized political interests. And the central issue in any change becomes what to do about the people that might lose their benefits.

In education the notion, over a century ago, was probably to spread literacy. Then it became training factory workers. Today? Yes, just what is the point of today's government education system? Inquiring minds would like to know. But the teachers and administrators demand that we should continue the current system without diminution.

And then welfare. We know that it is a disaster, but the Democrats cannot agree to change it because its recipients and its administrators are their supporters, and the purpose of a government is to reward its supporters.

When the next civilization arises out of the ruins of our own, I hope that its founders will assert that no collective task, except defense, should be assigned to government. Because look what happened to "Western Civilization."

This is not to say that everyone should be "thrown upon the market" without mercy. Not at all. I am just saying that there are plenty of ways to perform "collective" tasks without doing them with government. And I am saying that government is the last place to look if you are searching for mercy.

No doubt, as the #WeBelieve yard sign says, "Kindness is Everything." But Government is Force, and that is all it is.