The Dead End of Institutionalization

Today I read a piece about the horrors of Medicaid-funded nursing homes. And then a piece about Oregon's foster care system housing children in hotel rooms.

All this while Lady Marjorie and I attend her mother, who lives in a retirement home cared for by paid home health aides.

We moderns live an astonishing fraction of our lives in institutions. We are born in hospitals, go to school in government child-custodial facilities, go on to college and live in barracks -- er, dorms -- and then spend our working hours in factory-like office buildings. Then we go to die in "retirement communities" if we have the ready, or Medicaid-funded nursing homes if we don't. Used to be that parentless children were stored in orphanages. Now they are put out to foster homes except when they are stored in hotel rooms.

I suppose the reason for all this is that humans, whenever they can afford it, pay someone to look after their children. Rich women used to have wet nurses to nurse their children. Wealthy Brits used to send their kids away to boarding schools and, according to Dickens, put unwanted stepchildren away in horror shows like Dotheboys Hall or Mr. Creakle's kindly educational establishment, Salem House.

And now, with the welfare state, everyone gets their kids institutionalized, at government expense, in government child-custodial facilities, and gets granny institutionalized in a retirement community or a nursing home.

(However, I heard from an acquaintance that Medicaid now prefers to keep granny at home, paying for a family caregiver and additional help if needed, rather than putting granny in one of those horror-show nursing homes described above.)

I wonder if sometime after the end of the present moral crusade for political correctness and race and gender politics we will experience a different kind of moral revival, one that regards the institutionalization and warehousing of the young and the weak and the aged as a moral horror, and the idea of putting kids away in school, or granny away in a nursing home, as an indictment of our society comparable to plantation slavery.

Think of it this way. Some people think that the modern school was invented to make children obedient enough to submit to the discipline of the factory system. It is, in other words, boot camp for factory work in the same way that military basic training breaks a military recruit to military discipline.

But if the factory system, of ranks of people doing simple and repetitive tasks under close supervision, is to be a thing of the past as simple repetitive tasks are taken over by robots and automation then humans will be released from wage slavery to take care of each other. Mothers will not need to go out to work but can stay home to raise their children in community with the other women in the neighborhood. Daughters will be able to look after their ailing parents rather than do stupid repetitive office work or school administration as they do now under the notion that they are pursuing "careers."

On this view the present situation, where women are to be "liberated" from the caring responsibilities of the home, will end and human civilization will revert to its old shape, where women are carers and men are fighters.

Honestly, I don't have a clue what is coming next and why. But I just have this nagging feeling that the modern habit of institutionalization is riding for a fall.

Just like the top-down centralized administrative model of politics and big business.

Should We Update the Fourth?

Today, the Fourth of July, many conservative outlets are running traditional restatements of the Fourth of July and the Declaration of Independence. Typical is this piece from Powerline, that quotes President Coolidge.

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final, If governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.

But it is just that iinality that our lefty friends contest. If it is true that all men (and women and LGBT) are created equal then how come men are still overrepresented as senators and corporate CEOs? If they are endowed with inalienable rights, then how come transgendered still aren't allowed in the US military? If governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed, what about the undocumented workers that do not get to give their consent?

The point is that for 200 years or so the left has been driving a coach and horses through the principles of the American founding and has turned the educated and the marginalized against it.

In fact the whole 200 year history of the left is a reflection of the fact that the ideas of the Founding are not the last word in human social relations and identity.

I came to this realization years ago reading F.S.C Northrop. He writes in The Meeting of East and West,

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

 What does this mean? Well, in the German case, it means the whole Romantic movement, and Herder's contribution to German nationalism, and Kant's transcendentalism, and Hegel's dialectic -- the notion that reasoning and reality are not quite as simple as you might think.  Then came the middle-class Marx deciding that the bourgeoisie was no better than the feudal lords that the Enlightenment was supposed to throw on the dust-heap of history. In other words, the Declaration of Independence might be final for me, a upper-middle-class immigrant from Britain, but what about an illegal lesbian immigrant from Honduras?

In 1776 the Declaration of Independence was a statement of fighting words against the world of the absolute monarch, and its "final" words were directed against King George and his aristocratic supporters in Britain.

But now we are engaged in a climactic struggle against the new ideology, the ideology that comes out of the French Enlightenment and German Romanticism. Listen: they had a point! John Locke is not the last word in political philosophy!

But now, I argue, you have to be a blithering idiot or a superstitious lefty not to see that the cure has been worse than the disease. Yes, American constitutionalism assumes that you are a middle-class individual. Not good enough. But treating everyone like helpless victims, oppressed and exploited by a racist, sexist, society, and developing huge administrative programs to minister to those making the transition from agricultural idiocy to urban competence, has in the worst case birthed the most evil killer regimes in human history, and in the best case provoked a demoralizing dependency on big government where in the bottom third of society the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

And while we have been having this argument over the last two hundred years something amazing has been happening. It is what economist Deirdre McCloskey calls "The Great Enrichment." We are talking about an increase in real income in the US from $3 per capita per day to the current US $144 per capita per day. As McCloskey writes, there has never been anything like it in history ever. Hey, we are talking about a 30-times increase in human prosperity. Almost two orders of magnitude!

Stop right there. Do you realize how utterly amazing that is?

Being a dull sort of person, it took me until a couple months ago to realize that I have the data on the Great Enrichment, right here on usgovernmentspending.com for the US, and ukpublicspending.co.uk for the Brits. Imagine! So I wrote about it here. No really, take a look at the data.

It is amazing, and the most amazing thing is that the Brit version shows that per capita income in the UK was going down in the UK until after the end of what I call the Second Hundred Years War between Britain and France on the battlefield of Waterloo. In other words, the Great Enrichment for the Brits might have started earlier but for the fact that its ruling class was fighting a jolly old war against the French.

The point is this. Our lefty friends have been spending the last 200 years telling us that it is the worst of times and the truth is that it is the very best of times. In fact there never was another time in history of such amazing prosperity, not just for kings and their feudal supporters and rich bankers, and not just for the middle class, but for workers all over the world.

Here is the clincher. In the Soviet Union and China, and also in India, the rulers that kicked out the Czars and the Sons of Heaven started out believing that the lefty gospel was true, that centralized administrative control of the economy was the way to material abundance, not to mention material equality. So we had a scientific experiment on the Great Enrichment, as near as that is possible with actual humans and actual economies and actual governments.

And the verdict is clear, as clear as things ever can be in human affairs. China started an amazing increase in human prosperity starting the day after it abandoned Maoist economics in 1979 under Deng Xiaoping and allowed capitalism to bloom. India started an less startling but still remarkable increase in economic prosperity starting in the 1990s after it abandoned the Fabian socialism that its leaders had learned from the Deep State of their British colonial masters. It is perfectly obvious that leftist economic thinking has nothing to do with the case in the economic miracles of China and India.

Yes, but what do we do? If the ideas of the American Founding, good as they are, do not persuade the average dull lefty then what?

Thank you senator, I'm glad you asked. The answer is my "In this School of Life, We Learn" yard sign.



I go through each item, line by line, at the American Thinker.

But the crux of my thinking is this. Every time that liberals come up with another plan for a big government program, the question to ask is this:

If government is force, and politics is division, then are things really so bad that the only solution is to divide Americans one from another in a new political battle, and is it really a matter of life and death, for surely that is the only warrant for another government program of force is that millions will die unless we force Americans into ranks and files to contribute to and to submit their lives to this new increment of systematic domination.

You will notice that the warrant for the global trillion dollar per year climate program is that it is "saving the planet." You will notice that the reaction of Democrats and #TheResistance to reform of Obamacare is that "millions will die."

Am I right or am I right? The only warrant for government force is that the alternative is the end of the world.

Now I am a dull sort of chap, and I don't pretend that I have come up with anything new with this. I am just parroting back what I have learned through my extensive reading. Some day some young genius will come and make these ideas dance.

But meanwhile this is all we have.

GOVERNMENT IS FORCE. I got that from a crazy libertarian.

POLITICS IS DIVISION. I don't remember where that came from.

SYSTEM IS DOMINATION. I got that from Frankfurt School lefties Horkheimer and Adorno.

Onwards and upwards, and God Bless the United States of America, the last best hope of freedom.

How About Those Millennials!

Flying from Seattle to Fort Lauderdale on the Alaska Airlines daily non-stop I got to sit next to a millennial.

And do you know what I have to say? The kids are all right.

This young man is a personal trainer in Vacaville, California. That's mid way between San Francisco and Sacramento on I-80. He'd worked for the man for several years, but now had opened his own gym and was running classes and selling videos of his classes. Indeed he was making money off his gym every which way.

So he knew all about paying business taxes! In California! And he was full of entrepreneurial energy, and thinking up new ideas to monetize his gym and his expertise.

But while we could agree on the fact that there is no such thing as a free lunch or lifetime employment, this young man had all the conventional ideas about global warming and immigration.

And he voted for Bernie Sanders! Bless his heart!

Which shows that, in this school of life, if there is one thing we learn it is that people are all over the map.

We had a good, spirited discussion, occasionally interrupted by the mountain woman across the aisle, who was moving from Yakima, Washington, up towards Chinook Pass.

I think that I gave a good account of myself on everything except immigration.

This guy pointed out that he has all kinds, races and immigrants, in his gym, and hires all kinds in his gym, and if they pay the fees and/or do the work, they all belong in America. Nation of immigrants. Wonderful people.

Oh, and by the way, this young Millennial had a problem with Make America Great Again. What do you mean, Great Again, he said: America is Already Great! What a guy!

So how do you counter with the Trumpian notion that we need to protect existing Americans, keeping jobs in America and dialing down the immigration?

I didn't have a ready-made argument for this -- an argument that might persuade a young businessman full of energy and confidence in his own ability to make the world work.

In l'esprit d'escalier I think my argument would go like this.

The only thing that government does that is worth a darn is to protect its people. We all agree that the first job of protection is to protect people from enemies, foreign and domestic. But nearly everyone thinks that protection must go further than that. It must also provide some sort of economic protection.

Now if you are a libertarian conservative like me you say that this economic protection should be minimal, providing protection from fraudsters and sharks. Other than that, the market and its prices should rule, because anything else is folly that will just demonstrate, probably sooner rather than later, the Law of Unintended Consequences, and make things worse.

But the fact is that nearly all people in America -- and doubtless elsewhere in the world -- think that government should provide much more economic protection than the program of the minimal state. An example is the Voter Survey Project for 2016 that showed near unanimity on the idea of keeping Social Security and Medicare as is. I blogged about it here. Most humans want government to provide substantial economic protection. I'd say that means limiting immigration, to protect domestic wage rates from the law of supply and demand, and limiting the competition from emerging nations like China with modest tariff protection.

Yes, immigrants -- like me -- are the best people in the world. But the protection of the American people, physically and economically, comes first. Now, a wise and worthy ruling class will study their settled science and wisely advise their subjects on the practical and just limits of economic protection, so that's all right. For instance they would advise their subjects against foolishness like advocating lifetime employment, or minimum wages, or defined-benefit pensions, or any of that rubbish.

Then there is the more controversial argument of the alt-right, that immigration equals invasion. This argues that immigrants are not just customers and workers, and they are not just competing for Our Jobs; they bring their culture, and most likely their culture is less friendly to the individualist free economy, separation of church and state, and tolerance for others that characterizes our American culture. Yes, indeed; just ask the native Americans about that.

The more immigrants, the more they are going to change the culture, and the more likely that some immigrant group, or coalition of immigrant groups, will form a head of rebellion against the current dominant culture. Or the current ruling class might mobilize immigrants against their local political opponents, as in cultural elite plus immigrants against the white working class. But that would never happen here.

OK. So now I am ready to deal with the next millennial that's inhaled too much of the ruling class's conventional wisdom.

Science and the Partisan Divide

There's a great analysis out this week of the 2016 election by the Voter Study Group of the Democracy Fund. Among other things it breaks out Trump and Clinton voters according to twelve "issues."

The study assumes that people just "come" to these positions, but of course that is nonsense. Ordinary people do not have any ideas, except those that are implanted by ideologically motivated elites and other ideological entrepreneurs.

But I want to look at each issue, where the voters are, and where the "settled science΅ is. Which is shorthand for what I believe. Oh, and let's also guess where the ruling class comes down.

Issue 1: Politics is a rigged game. Voters are about agreed on this. Settled science? Really, you could knock me over with a spoon. Of course politics is rigged; that is the whole point of politics. Ruling class: Who me?

Issue 2: Importance of Social Security/Medicare. Almost everyone is on the left and on the right agrees that Social Security/Medicare are important. Settled science? Social Security/Medicare is a terrible idea that is bound to crash and burn and in the mean time is a crushing injustice on the young 'uns. Ruling class: Huh! We really snookered them on that one.

Issue 3: Foreign trade. Clinton voters are a bit to the left of Trump voters, but on the whole everyone is suspicious of it. Settled science? Tax foreign trade like we tax everything else, no more and no less, and shut up. Ruling class: We are for foreign trade except when we are against it.

Issue 4: Attitudes on gender roles. Clinton voters are mildly left; Trump voters are right in the middle. Settled science? Most people would be utterly lost without well-defined gender roles. Ruling class: a screwed up population is easily led.

Issue 5: Pride in America. Clinton voters are moderately proud of America, and Trump voters very proud of America. Settled science? Nationalism is probably the best thing going that gets people to unite and forget their partisan squabbles. Ruling class: Yes, but when does nationalism verge into Nazism?

Issue 6: Perception that "people like me" are in decline. Clinton voters are about even on this; Trump voters are in agreement. Settled science? In any economic revolution, people will worry about their status. Ruling class: Don't look at us, baby.

Issue 7: Attitude towards black people. Clintonites are warmish towards black people; Trumpists are cool towards black people. Settled science? Since the white working class has to pay for race politics it is not surprising they don't like it. Ruling class: Yay! Divide and conquer.

Issue 8: Feelings about Muslims. Clinton voters have good feelings about Muslims; Trump voters have bad feelings about Muslims. Settled science? Muslims are great, as long as we are ruthless about deporting the terrorists like they do in Italy. Ruling class: We can handle this, because we are educated and evolved.

Issue 9: Attitudes on immigration. Clinton voters are pretty OK on immigration, Trump voters are pretty un-OK. Settled science? Immigration directly affects wages, and obviously lowers the potential wages of the native-born. Ruling class: No human is illegal.

Issue 10: Attitudes on moral issues. Clinton voters are strongly left; Trump voters are mildly right. Settled science? Lefty moral issues lead to men that don't work and women that don't marry. Not good. Ruling class: We should not impose our morality...

Issue 11: Attitudes on economic equality. Clintonites are strongly left; Trump voters mildly right. Settled science? Probably any government policy trying to fix inequality is going to make things worse. Ruling class: Divide and conquer.

Issue 12: Attitudes towards government intervention. Clinton voters in favor. Trump voters opposed. Settled science? Law of unintended consequences says intervention makes things worse. Ruling class: More government, more jobs for us.

So what does this all mean? It means, I think, that the attitude of all voters is: Stop the world with government force, I want to get off. It also means that the propaganda of the ruling class has a big effect in America: see especially gender roles. But the settled science says that the market and its prices are the gentlest way imaginable to force us humans, who hate change, to adjust to a changing world with the minimum of hardship, fines and jail time and executions.

It is interesting that the two issues in which average Clinton and Trump voters are all on the same side of the line are Pride in America and "people like me" in decline. People are still proud of America despite half a century of anti-national propaganda from the ruling class. And people feel in decline despite the ruling class's insistence that things are getting better in every possible way due to our ruling class education and wisdom.

The basic problem is that people are asking for stuff they shouldn't be asking for. They think that government can make their lives better. Instead, per JFK, we should ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country.

Saving Jobs. For What?

What will be the jobs of tomorrow? There is a simple answer to that: nobody knows.

Meanwhile people are all upset about jobs leaving for Mexico, or the replacement of expensive American-born workers with immigrants from South and East Asia.

So what will we be doing with our lives in 2050?

Perhaps the most baleful influence is the smartphone. On the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, Scott Rasmussen reminds us that all the stuff you could buy from Radio Shack, "personal stereo, AM/FM clock radio, headphones, calculator, computer, VHS camcorder, mobile cell phone, regular speed dial phone, portable CD player, mobile CB radio, desktop scanner, phone answering machine, cassette tape recorder and radar detector," plus camera, GPS, and language translator.

Rasmussen calls the iPhone a "revolutionary consumer product," but that is the least of it. Smartphones and their associated technology are transforming business and the economy at the speed of light. And what about politics, where a politician like Donald Trump or Emanuel Macron can win the presidency of his nation over the heads of the existing political parties and all the pompous producers of conventional wisdom?

When we talk about jobs we have tended to focus on the jobs destroyed by the Industrial Revolution. There were the Luddites that ran around destroying machines. And the left in the late 19th century talked about "deskilling," the replacement of skilled craft workers with machine minders. And yet country people ran, not walked, from the countryside to the city, as the people of China are doing today. Just how satanic is work in a mill and a house in an industrial slum compared to toiling and starving in the countryside?

You can make the argument that the progress from hunter-gatherer to agriculture to industrial to information revolution has been one long de-skilling process. Jared Diamond, of Guns, Germs and Steel, pointed out that a hunter-gatherer in New Guineas knew 800 plants and when each produced fruit, and which were edible and which poisonous, while the agriculturalist knew how to grow a couple of grains for food, and we know how to drive to the supermarket. That is progress?

Well, we have just gone through the Great Enrichment with income increasing by 30 times, and nobody had a clue it was coming.

The oldsters complained that writing would mean that people would lose their memories, that printing would remove the need for learning, just as cars remove the need for horsemanship. And Google Search removes the need for library card catalogues.

What are we going to do when all the skills of the world are programmed into a smartphone?

The answer is simple; we will live in Jane Austen's world where everything came down to the right marriage, and people did nothing except worry about the next competitive social event.

Of course, the significance of Jane Austen's world is that it was the last hurrah of the agricultural age, where wealth and status depended on the ownership of good rich acres.

So are we living in the last hurrah of the information age, after which everything will change and the absolutes of information age life will seem like a costume drama?

In another half century we will know that answer to that, and most likely nobody will have had a clue what was coming.

Is the GOP Health Plan Doomed?

To the average racist sexist homophobe on the Right the GOP effort to "repeal and replace" Obamacare seems like a Keystone Kops routine that is doomed to defeat.

Maybe, but here are a bunch of reasons why not.

First, the Republican Party is not like the Democratic Party. I don't know exactly how the Democratic Party works, but based on nods and winks I've received over the years I'd guess that it is much more difficult for a Democrat to rebel against party discipline than for a Republican. I imagine that's because party funding comes from government employee unions and left-wing billionaires and the ideology comes from left-wing activist groups and foundations. These guys are all pretty clear about what they want from the political system and what they want from Democratic politicians. When lefties get themselves all worked up about the eevil Koch Brothers they are assuming that the Kochs operate the same as George Soros. But they don't; Soros seems to be interested in power while the Koch Brothers are not.

Therefore, we would expect the Republican process for getting a health bill out of Congress to be a lot more messy and out in public than the Democratic process.

Second, read Buchanan and Tullock's The Calculus of Consent. It will teach you more than you want to know about voting systems. Long story short, when you pass any bill in Congress you have to buy the votes of the folks on the fence. This means that during the negotiation process the people on the fence will appear to be holdouts, and it will look as though the bill's sponsors are never going to get the bill passed. Every time the Republicans put off a vote on their Obamacare replacement the media and the right wail that the Republicans are hopeless and can't pass anything. Maybe, but the holdouts are not pure ideologues; they are practical politicians that have a pretty accurate estimate of what their votes are worth. Obviously, it doesn't pay to compromise too early.

Third, I don't know what people think "repeal and replace" means, but it certainly does not mean that we are moving away from entitlements and free stuff. And with the white working class being Trumped into the Republican Party all bets are off, because the white working class believes they have paid their fair share and thus deserve to get their fair share of the benefits. Short of an alt-right revolution we are not going to get beyond the entitlement state and its promises of benefits for votes, and maybe not even then. The alt-right is anti-free market and pro America for Americans. In other words, the alt-right is perfectly happy using government power to reward its supporters. The number of people that recognize that the entitlement state eventually runs out of other peoples' money and also that actually want to do something about it is very small.

Fourth, the whole point of government is to protect us from change. The job of armies is to protect us from the change proposed by pirates and plunderers. But of course this kind of protection is only temporary. At some point the army protecting us will disappear and leave us to the mercies of the barbarians, as the Germany Army left every woman in eastern Germany in 1945 to the mercies of the Soviet invaders. The logic of this protection idea immediately suggests that the government can protect us not just from physical change but also from economic change, and that is what government has been doing for the last 150 years. The way it does this is by protecting us from the price system with subsidies and benefits and entitlements. Unfortunately the government programs are fantasy and the price system is reality, so eventually the fantasy dissolves. But hey, if the fantasy lasts until after I am dead, who cares?

So if you ask me, I'd predict that the Republican Congress will pass some sort of Obamacare repeal-and-replace. If it does its job right it will introduce a bit more price discipline but not enough to please us right-wing nutcases, and not enough to elect a Democratic Congress in 2018.

Dems Start to Pivot, But How?

You heard it here first. In the July/August 2017 The Atlantic two Democratic operatives with bylines (© Glenn Reynolds) are starting the pivot away from Trump-Russia-Trump 24-7.

Frankline Foer notes that dear old Bill Clinton was right on the white working class thing back in 2015. And Peter Beinart has an on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand piece about immigration, the choice between diversity and unity.

OK, you say. How in the Sam Blazes are the Democrats -- that have spent 50 years since Archie Bunker calling the white working class racist, sexist bigots -- going to do this? And how is the Democratic Party that never saw an illegal immigrant it didn't like going to get all flag-happy about people born on the Fourth of July right here in the good old US and A?

All I can say is, just watch 'em. Before you can say Walter Cronkite there will be chin stroking elite journalists all over TV telling you that that's the way it is about how Donald Trump has betrayed the white working class and how all the Republican flag-waving of the last half century is actually a betrayal of everything America stands for.

That's what you can do when you are the ruling class and nobody is allowed to hear a discouraging word from the opposition. You will read The New York Times and never get to read a piece about activists demanding trans-gender cake-baking rights. It will all just go down the memory hole, and good little girls will be asking their conservative friends, with a grimace to indicate their utter sincerity, about the new hate and the new hyphenated phobia cooked up fifteen minutes ago by progressive activists.

Still, it might be a stretch to actually turn on a dime. Old stager Wesley Pruden rehearses the difficulties in this piece.

Some of the Democratic messages, which have been dispatched with such sound and fury are that “straight” folks and particularly straight white men, are so bad they’re not entitled to rights, civil or otherwise. Cops are all bad because they’ve set out to wipe out black folks, and therefore it’s OK to kill as many cops as possible.

Free speech is cool, and everyone should be able to say anything, anywhere, as long as it’s approved by the liberal canon, except that it’s not cool to say “liberal” anymore because somebody stunk up the word and all the liberals are now “progressives.”

Then he segues to Democratic officeholders urging caution and the need to win elections.

And really, I can't feel that the problem is that hard. Pretty soon the Democrats will hit upon some new program offering free stuff, and the voters will start voting for it. Maybe it will be free college, or free health care, or free child-care, or free vacations, or free housing, or free assisted living, or free driverless cars.

Yeah! How come Republicans don't want people to have driverless cars! Are they mean or just stupid?

Who cares? Humans like free stuff and they will vote for the man that offers it to them, whether he is a Viking chieftain offering their longship crews loot and slaves, or a Columbus offering his men the gold of Eldorado, or a Samuel Gompers who offered his union members "more," or a Barack Obama offering an Affordable Care Act that will lower your insurance premium by $2,500 per year.

It is just the dumb middle class that imagines a world of responsibility and private property and savings and marriage and children. Who cares about them?