Communism Week: The Real Revolution of the Modern Age

Our age has been a great age of unimaginable novelty and "progress." But it has also been a great age of nostalgia and reaction, the eternal yearning for a lost Garden of Eden. It has seen cultural movements longing for the lost community of the village in socialism, and other movements returning to the old community bonds of blood and land in fascism. Meanwhile most of the rest of us have found refuge in the materialist, mechanical model of the world that rose to majesty in the last millennium and seemed to predict the movement of the heavens: the science of Galileo and Newton.

But even the mechanical world of substance and absolute space and time has fallen by the wayside, and this has precipitated a revolution in thought and deed beyond imagining. For we have now learned that the micro world of the "atom" and the macro world of the "universe" cannot be understood in terms of the familiar world of day-to-day life and the mechanical world of Newton, of ballistics and action and reaction.

Up until yesterday you could understand the flight of a cannon ball or the operation of a heat engine or the forces in a building structure from notions very near to daily life. Even the motions of the planets could be understood in these terms. But in the modern science of quantum mechanics, that undergirds everything from smartphones to laser lighting to electricity, the old concepts of daily life no longer apply. Energy is neither particle nor wave, yet its operations must be understood as a bit of both. The nearer you get to an elementary state the less you can consider things as anything other than a state function of probabilities. This would be intolerable but for the fact that quantum mechanics and its probabilities and uncertainties works, and not only works, but works miracles.

The impossible wonders of the quantum world are happily handled for us by intermediaries, the scientists, technologists, and businessmen that know how to unlock its wonders. They have provided us with interfaces, the light switch and the touch screen, that enable us to use these wondrous gadgets by actions common in daily life: the flip of the switch, the dab of the finger. And so we use the unfathomable world of the quantum state in daily life, even though the quantum world is indescribable and the kid transmitting her latest trivial act to her friends on Instagram knows nothing of its mysteries.

But there is another world that is just as unfathomable and indescribable. It is the world of the modern  economy, and the market economy is just as mysterious and indescribable as the world of the quantum. And yet the modern economy has poured riches unimaginable upon us, in the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years that, in the United States has increased personal income from $4 per person per day to $140 per person per day, all in "real" dollars. You could look it up.

We are all terrified by the implacable power of the market that has given us so much, and so we have deputized political leaders and their henchmen to pummel the market into submission, or at least something less frightening. Needless to say, they have done it very badly, and no wonder. Politics is division and distrust, yet the modern economy requires us all to engage in its global trust network, trusting anyone that can be trusted. Government is force, yet the modern economy requires us to be sensitive to the slightest economic breeze and trim our sails to its vagaries. System and hierarchy are domination, yet the market yields up its power to anyone that can innovate and serve the consumer.

We must accept the obvious. The tools and the culture of politics do not work in the modern market age. The more force, the more division, the more system, the more you get North Korea, or the Soviet Union, or Castro's Cuba, or the wreck of Venezuela. The modern economy and modern society must work on the foundation of what we might call the "market state function," expressed in its prices, and the willing surrender of everyone to its signals. But how do we neutralize the terror of the market, the helplessness we all feel as individual humans before the searing power of the market, and steer people away from the natural instinct to create a personal refuge from the terrors of the market.

Maybe the way to make the market work for all of us right in front of our eyes, in the smartphone and its applications. The cumbersome world of the taxicab is transformed when you create an application, per Uber and Lyft, that connect buyer and seller, resolve the higgling of the market into a simple offer of a price, and regulate all market participants through the operation of the 5-star rating system that enforces the market's culture of trust. The innovation of AirBnB allows individual householders to enter into the hospitality market with the same market reach as any global hotel chain.

Each of these applications includes three crucial features: First is the universal reach, instantly, to anyone with a smartphone and the app. Second is the payment method, integrated into the app, so that payment, and the whole complicated problem of billing and accounts receivable is not an issue. Third is the rating system that leans very hard on everyone to be trustworthy.

I suspect that, where the smartphone "app" is concerned, you ain't seen nothing yet. Its power lies in the way that it reduces the frightening complexity and terror of the marketplace to operations of daily life that anyone can understand and easily accept, the flip of the switch, and the dab of the finger, the shaking of hands.

The role of politics and government is to protect us from existential perils, and one of the existential perils is the terror of the all-powerful marketplace. Unfortunately, as vast human experiments have proved, from plantation slavery to collective agriculture to nationalized industry, politics cannot protect us from the existential peril of the marketplace; it only makes things worse. The most obvious example of this truth is the real live political and economic experiment of the last 65 years in Korea. From a land devastated by civil war we have today a socialist North Korea with a per-capita GDP of about $600 per year, and capitalist South Korea with a per-capita GDP of $27,500 per year. Case closed.

But we can implement interfaces with the marketplace to make it less terrifying. Indeed, we already have. So it only remains for each of us to lead, follow, or get out of the way of this beneficial enrichment, and abandon the false gods of politics as the way to bend the arc of history towards justice.

Because we can tame the terrors of the marketplace, not by the crush of the clunking fist or the divisive tricks of the politician, but by softening the terrors of unfathomable marketplace into the familiar actions of daily life that are programmed into us by human life down the ages.

That is the story of our time: the Double Revolution, in science and society, that is transforming our lives.

The challenge of our time is this: to humanize the terror of the universe and the market into the familiar acts and operations of daily life. And yield up astonishing cooperation and prosperity for every human that believes and practices its protocols.

But how do we do this? I'm glad you asked.

Next up: My Perfect Plan to solve all our problems.

Communism Week: The Problem With Political Power

When a man like President Obama rephrases the hope of Dr. Martin Luther King that the arc of history bends towards justice, he means that only politics can bend the world towards justice.

That is the Great White Hope of the left, that the sorrows of the world can be healed with politics, and specifically, a politics of equality and liberation -- directed of course, by people like us.

Of course this is a misreading of the nature of politics, which is simply to rally the people and unify them against an existential threat, usually represented by the tribe across the river or in the next village.

In the larger communities of the agricultural or industrial era that extends beyond the blood kindred this means that politics involves dividing people: three tribes against two, or two tribes against one.

Simply put: in order to unite people into a cause you must divide them off from something else. This obviously worked well in the hunter-gather age, because then humans were divided into tribes of the kindred and really were in existential peril from the neighboring tribe attempting to invade their land and appropriate its food-bearing potential.

In the agricultural age and especially the industrial age politics has adapted into the imagined tribe of the noble's peasants and followers, and now into the imagined community of the nation state. Still, up until yesterday, the noble or the leader of the nation state ruled a people that lived off the land, the produce of its rich acres. Up until yesterday the world could still be understood in the loyalty to clan and kindred or an imagined clan or kindred: if you belonged your owed loyalty to your clan chieftain or national monarch, and the chieftain or monarch protected you on your land from others that might want to appropriate your land.

Not any more. Instead of the comforts of tribal belonging we have the paradox of individualism. Each of us is no longer primarily the member of a tribe, but a responsible individual that must go out and find, each for himself, a way to work and thrive and this life is no longer manifested in a subordination to a lord of the land, or the boss of a factory, but in subordination to the supply and demand of the market.

This is very new and very frightening. I think this is the most important thing to understand about the modern world and to understand the way that politics and culture and work and play operate today.

I think that the rise of socialism and fascism both represent a deep aching for the imagined security and familiarity of the old equality of the hunter-gatherer village, and the old loyalty of blood, and the old attachment to land. So socialism and communism imagine that the old way yielded a satisfying equality in which everyone belonged and everyone mattered. Fascism -- here used just as a descriptive, not a pejorative -- imagines the comfortable past when everyone belonged to a blood kindred that had lived upon its ancestral lands since time immemorial.

But socialism and fascism are not solutions to the modern problem. The millions of graves give eternal testimony to that.

The modern era offers a different proposition. It merely says that each of us, as individuals, should subordinate ourselves to the needs and the demands of others, in other words, offer our skills and labor on the labor market and accept the decision of the market with grace and good cheer.

Anyone that has ever been "unemployed" or searching for work understands the holy terror of such a situation. How do I know that there are any jobs out there? How do I know what skills are in demand? How can I possibly measure up to the implacable demands of the employers? Everything is uncertain, contingent, and apparently chaotic. And above all, terrifying.

And so we have looked to politicians and activists to protect us from the existential peril of the marketplace. And politicians and activists have offered solutions from the past, in government and political division. But politics and government are clearly not the appropriate means.

We know this because huge and tragic human experiments have been conducted over the last century in attempt to show that politics and government can protect us against the existential terror of the market place. These vast human experiments have proved, from plantation slavery to collective agriculture to nationalized industry, that politics cannot protect us from the existential peril of the marketplace; it only makes things worse.  The most obvious example of this truth is the real live experiment of the last 65 years in Korea. From a land devastated by civil war we have socialist North Korea with a per-capita GDP  of about $600 per year, and capitalist South Korea with a per-capita GDP of about $27,500 per year.

The per-capita GDP of North Korea is below the per-capita GDP of the United States in 1800. The per-capita GDP in South Korea is about the same as the US per-capita GDP in 1994. Case closed.

And things are not so good the lands of "social democracy" where politics and government are used to obtain economic security for the politically connected from the rest of the community that is not so politically connected, and promises of security have been made that cannot be redeemed. The fact is that government and politics do not deliver prosperity and security; they are only tools to defend against existential peril.

Yet, we still need some means to soften the terror of our subordination to the marketplace, because we humans are designed and built to live and wive and thrive in human face-to-face community and not in the cheerless canyons of the market's domain where there seems to be no place where weary can shelter in the shade.

The question is what would work to humanize the terrible power of the marketplace. That is the topic of The Real Revolution of the Modern Age.

Communism Week: Marx's War on the Bourgeoisie

One of the takeaways from The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels is the belief that the old feudal order of nobles and peasants would be replaced by a neo-feudal order of capitalists and proletarians. They two would-be revolutionaries leave us in no doubt that the relations of capitalists to proletarians will be a reprise of the relations between nobles and peasants.

In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, [the bourgeoisie] has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

And really, why not? Of course the bourgeoisie would act like any other ruling class that had come into power. It would take advantage of its power, erect ideological ramparts to defend its power, just like every other ruling class down the ages.

But what happened?

What happened is that the bourgeoisie did not take advantage of its power. Having obtained the political power in the middle-class revolutions of the early modern period, it then proceeded to give the vote to the proletarians in their turn, and allowed the proletarians to enact the whole neo-feudal welfare state with benefits and goodies mainly paid for by the bourgeoisie.

But why? Why did the bourgeoisie not bid for total power? And why did the Educated Youth of the 19th century insist that the bourgeoisie would bid for total power?

Let us first deal with the simple issue. All politics is "us" against "them," of course, mobilizing our guys, the good guys, against the evil overloads and exploiters that are planning to take over and conquer us. The genius of Marx and Engels and the left that followed them was to perceive that class politics should be the "us" and "them," the politics of the future. Thus it made perfect sense to argue that the "them" of the new politics were rulers like like the old ones, only these new monsters would step out from the usual veiled apologies for power and substitute "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation" for the usual identification of the ruler with God.

And really, why not? Why wouldn't the bourgeoisie follow in the footsteps of all previous rulers and rule over the proletarians like the feudal lords did over their peasants.

But they didn't. Remarkably, the bourgeoisie was not that interested in power, and it still isn't. It didn't make a bid for total political power, not in the 19th century, and not in the 20th century. Even the great business titans, men like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, men that had established monumental fortunes from cheap oil and cheap steel, did not use their wealth to obtain political power. Instead they retired from business and used their wealth to create modern philanthropy. Today's titans seem to be more interested in eradicating malaria and going to Mars. But why?

In my view this is not from any particular virtue in the business titans, but from the basic nature of business. Business is not about seizing power and forcing people to do your will. It just doesn't work that way. Business is built on trust and reciprocity, coming up with good ideas, serving the consumer and figuring out how to make your employees more productive.

Even the slave plantations, the first instance of large-scale capitalist enterprise, decided that it was better and more profitable to encourage the slaves to grow their own food and use their own initiative, than to use them as mere human machines.

This is a stunning change in human culture, that other people are trustable suppliers and customers rather than dangerous threats to our way of life. In my view it issues from the change from agriculture as the basis of economic life to the present industrial and post-industrial economy. Back in the old days, possession of land was the basis of wealth, and you had to defend your land to the death else someone would come and seize your land and plunder your wealth and leave you to die. Today possession of a great idea is the basis of wealth. Everything else can be bought and sold on the market. It doesn't make any sense to conquer and plunder, because every factory, every business contributes to the whole, and loot and plunder ruptures the normal economic relationships and just reduces the wealth of all.

I forgive Marx and Engels for not seeing this 170 years ago; who knew back then? I do not feel so forgiving towards their modern epigones; they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

The fact is that the modern bourgeoisie, the middle-class responsible people that go to work, pay their taxes, and follow the rules, are the salt of the earth, and the people that want to marginalize the middle class are monsters.

Next up: The Problem With Political Power.

Communism Week: Marx's Economic Errors

After the fun of revolutionary politics in the 1840s Karl Marx settled down to write an economic treatise, Capital: a Critique of Political Economy. He took the basics of the classical economists and used it to prove that, indeed, the capitalist economy was horribly oppressive.

Today I am going to look at two of Marx's assertions: first, that capitalism leads to "immiseration" of the working class and the petit-bourgeoisie; second, that wage labor and production for profit are inherently oppressive.

First of all, "immiseration." Marx rightly understood, from the logic of markets, that profits get squeezed out of any industry, and that that the downward pressures on prices in a mature industry would necessarily cause a downward pressure on wages. If there are good profits to be made on capital invested in a particular industry, then everyone will crowd into this "good thing" until the goodness is all squeezed out of it. This is certainly true; it happens again and again as a once bright young industry matures and competition drives prices down. But it is not just the workers and the white-collar workers that suffer. The capital returns go down for the widows and orphans, and so does the remuneration captured by top managers. So Marx is wrong to say that the workers are uniquely immiserated by mature capitalism. Everyone suffers when an industry declines and falls.

Actually, what really happens in a mature industry is that the workers expect to keep their above-market wages, the managers expect to keep their above-market salaries and bonuses, and the stockholders expect to receive their customary dividends. Then one day the whole thing collapses, because too much debt, and everyone is out of a job or out of money.

But Marx was wrong in a bigger sense. Capitalism is an emerging phenomenon that constantly renews itself. Money is constantly looking for new opportunities; ambitious young men are constantly trying out ideas that they hope will become the next big thing; young workers naturally move to where the jobs are to get hired into growing, profitable industries. And, what nobody knew in the 1840s was that with the textile revolution and the railway revolution that had utterly changed the face of Europe, you ain't seen nothing yet. Because the next big thing was oil, then electricity, then automobiles, then electronics, then information.

Marx was also wrong in sneering at wage labor. His analysis was based on the understanding of value developed by the classical economists. They observed that there were two kinds of value: use value and exchange value. Some commodities, like gold, had a high exchange value, but little use value; while other commodities, like labor, were intrinsically useful, but with very low exchange value. Marx boiled this down into contrasting "production for use" against "production for profit." Well, yes, but if you don't make a profit on your production then your production is not very long for this world. For Marx, workers working for wages were basically exploited because they did not receive the full value added in their labor; the employer captured a good part of the "surplus value" added by labor.

True, workers don't capture the full value added. But in taking fixed wages, they are assigning a certain amount of risk away from themselves. Prices for products fluctuate; so if wages are kept steady then someone has to accept the risk that the wages may squeeze profits if product prices go down. The worker getting fixed wages is not necessarily at a disadvantage. Compare a factory worker with a peasant farmer renting land. The peasant has to face the full risk of fluctuating agricultural prices. But the factory worker has assigned to the factory employer the risk of fluctuating product prices. When you accept risk you have the opportunity for big gains -- and big losses.

It is not surprising that Marx got a bunch of things wrong in his Capital. That is the way the world works: two steps forward and one step backward. The problem is that you will read the work of a modern Marxist in vain to find any understanding of how our knowledge about the economy and markets has advanced since Marx wrote his great work.

For instance, the first volume of Capital was published in 1867. But in 1870, the marginal revolution was introduced by Menger in Austria, Jevons in Britain, and Walras in Switzerland. In marginal economics, value is set in the price "at the margin" at the latest sale on the market. That is all. You will look in vain to see marginalism dealt with in the works of the Marxists.

But the spirit of Marx lives on, that workers are especially vulnerable to exploitation; that there is something underhanded about "production for profit;" that there is something virtuous about economic activity outside the profit system in "production for use" and in cooperatives and non-profits.

Why has capitalism gotten such a bad rap over the years? I will try to address that in the last of this series.

Meanwhile stay tuned for Marx's War on the Bourgeoisie.

Communism Week: Europe in the 1840s

This week everyone is marking the centenary of the Bolshevik October Revolution in 1917. So I think it is a good idea to spend a week on this blog reviewing Communism and its sister Socialism. And the place to start, in my view, is Europe in the 1840s.

I propose that it was natural for young heads full of mush, chaps like Karl Marx, son of the leading lawyer in Trier, in Germany just a few kilometers east of the border with Luxembourg, and Friedrich Engels, son of a cotton manufacturer, to think that things were going to hell and needed a complete makeover.

First of all, the end result of the French Revolution, a breakout of the emerging bourgeoisie, was that the kings returned to France, and in the Treaty of Vienna the kings of Europe reorganized things to make life difficult for a post-monarchical world to be born. In Germany, in particular, the spirit of German Liberation of 1806, in which the Kings of Prussia used chaps like Alexander von Humboldt to reorganize education and son-of-a-sergeant Gerhard von Scharnhorst to reorganize the army, died with the reassertion of monarchical power after the defeat of France. Remember, we were supposed to be in a Age of Reason. How come all the reasoning ended up in a return of kings and bishops? If you were a son of the bourgeoisie it looked like all that Enlightenment had been for nothing. Stronger measures were needed.

Then there was the emerging market economy and factory production. It's easy for us to look back at the Great Enrichment, that raised real per-capita income from $1-3 per day in 1800 to $100 per day today, and realize that all the turmoil had a happy ending. But in the early to mid 19th century, it looked chaotic and brutal, and you had ordinary people fighting against it. You had Luddites breaking machines; you had the Scottish Insurrection of 1820; you had Tolpuddle Martyrs being convicted in 1834 of organizing a union and getting transported to Australia. It is not hard to imagine a social and economic disaster coming out of the cotton textile factories and then the railway revolution. Where would it all end?

We now know that the in the first half of the 19th century a new world was aborning, transforming utterly the economy, religion, government, culture. But when you are living through a transformation you do not know the outcome, and all around you people are insisting that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, you tend to think that Something Must Be Done to make us safe. But how?

The new age philosopher Ken Wilber built his system on the work of the developmental psychologists, people like Piaget and Kohlberg and Beck and Cowan. The developmental idea is that humans ascend through different psychological stages both in individual lives and in society as a whole. But when things go wrong, then people instinctively go back down the development ladder to "what worked." That is the best explanation I have heard for fascism. When the mechanistic market economy seemed to fail after World War I, Hitler led the Germans back to blood and soil; the racism of Aryans and the conquest of the East. And the Jews, who exemplified the market economy, were to blame.

So naturally, chaps like Marx and Engels, marinating in all the ideological frenzies of 19th century universities, actually looked back to the good old days of village communitarianism in order to solve the problems of the emerging industrial era. They knew that feudalism was wrong; they prophesied that the market economy would make the bourgeoisie into the new feudal lords. So they wanted to go back a couple of stages to the good old village community of equality. That is what humans do when things seem to be going wrong. They go back to the past.

It is a particular irony that the political-religious movement that saw itself as the acme of the future was actually "reactionary," looking for solutions in the past. Hey, that's the way the world works.

And you could say that Trumpism is a response to the failures of globalism, saying "let's go back to the good old ways of the nation state and Make America Great Again."

Of course Communism and Socialism have been horrible disasters, economically, religiously, culturally, and politically, with 100 million dead over the last century, and billions more subjected to poverty and misery. You could say that it has failed, every time it has been tried. So in the next few days, we shall look at what went wrong, and why:

Marx's Economic Errors

Marx's War on the Bourgeoisie

The Problem with Political Power

The Real Revolution of the Modern Age

My Perfect Plan to solve all our problems.

All Politics is Identity Politics

I was looking at a long thumb-sucker at Weekly Standard about identity politics: "The Primal Scream of Identity Politics," by Mary Eberstadt.

I was thinking how to write about it and shine my sharp light upon the question of identity politics when my attention was drawn to another, similar thumb-sucker at Clarement Review of Books, "The Democrats' Dilemma" by William Voegeli.

I realized that, for people like you and me, there is something scandalous about identity politics. That, of course, is because we are live-and-let-live middle-class people that are pretty comfortable with the Bourgeois Deal: work hard, be responsible, obey the law. We really don't want to enlist in anyone's political army, let alone an identity-politics army.

But politics is always identity politics. Let us take Britain, which I know best. You can say that in the Plantagenet era, politics was about whacking the French in the Hundred Years War. Were you for or against the king's just claims in the north and the west of France. Then in the War of the Roses, it was whose side were you on: the Yorkists or the Lancastrians.

Once you get into the Elizabethan era we start to get into religious identity politics. Protestant vs. Catholic, and this religious conflict went right on until 1688 when the Dutch invaded Britland and modified the politics to fight the French and their Catholic religion. Now we enter the age of patriotism: are you for or against the nation?

Then, after the Battle of Waterloo, the music changed. Politics became about class identity. Luddites had already been breaking machines; then there was a worker rising in Scotland in 1820 and the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1832. Politics started to become a question of for-or-against the workers, and we started to experience the modern division, in which the intellectuals side with the workers against the middle class. This class identity politics continued for over a century until 2000, after which, in Britain, the division became between the middle class and a coalition of intellectuals and immigrants. The white working class "white van man" started to move away from the Labour Party.

I am saying that there is nothing remarkable or scandalous about this. Politics is division, and people will divide according to some divisive principle: court intrigue, class, religion, race, nation, whatever.

In the United States, since 1933, there was clearly a class politics, with the intellectual elite bidding to lead the workers against the middle class, and providing the intellectual power to use political power to load up the workers with various economic benefits, from pensions to health care to labor union privileges, all to be paid for by the middle class and the rich. That was what the New Deal Democrats were all about.

But the music stopped in the Sixties, when the intellectual elite, basking in the glow of the Civil Rights Acts, decided to make politics about race and gender identity rather than class identity. Now politics was no longer about whether you were for or against the workers; it was whether you were for or against women and minorities.

But nobody thought about what would happen to the workers with this new political alignment. We do now.

In her piece on identity politics Mary Eberhardt notes how the leaders of race and gender identity politics are becoming more and more strident. Eight years after America elected its First Black President Salon executive editor Andrew O’Hehir writes about Trump as America's First White President, "the first president defined by whiteness, the first whose glaring and overwhelming whiteness is a salient issue that lies at the core of his appeal."

OK, fine. But wouldn't the white working class, after being abandoned and humiliated by the intellectual class, find some other means of connecting into the political system? And since we are now in an era of race identity rather than class identity, wouldn't they eventually get with the program, with the New Thing of race identity?

In his identity politics piece, William Voegeli goes heavily into the fact, popularized by Charles Murray, that the intellectual class done pretty well for itself out of its political leadership, economically and status-wise. And he notes the white electoral divide.

According to CNN, voters of all races with a postgraduate education accounted for 18% of the 2016 electorate, and favored Clinton by a margin of 58% to 37%.

The white working class, by the way, hates the credentialed managerial elite. It "resents professionals" because its interaction with the educated elite mainly consists of "being bossed around, second-guessed, and condescended to."

It is comical to see the hysteria on the left with regard to race and gender.

Slate’s L.V. Anderson spoke for many upper-quintile Democrats when she stated that Trump’s victory caused white liberals to "see our unjust, racist, sexist country for what it is."

Translation: Oh boy, our race and gender identity politics is starting to look like a loser. Oh no!

Notice how conveniently my reductive Three Peoples theory explains all this. If there are three peoples then it is natural that in politics the three will divide up into two against one, and the politics of the last 200 years has been about the intellectual elite People of the Creative Self, the 18 percent with graduate degrees, enjoying life as professionals working at Dickens' Circumlocution Office to back the People of the Subordinate Self against the People of the Responsible Self.

For some reason, though, the People of the Creative Self can't bring themselves to represent the whole of the People of the Subordinate Self. They have to play favorites. This I do not understand.

I have frequently affirmed the fundamental injustice of the intellectual elite's program, which was to enroll the People of the Subordinate Self in their political army with promises of loot and plunder and lifetime employment and pensions, and then abandon them when they were no longer any use. And this is doubly wrong because in the Great Enrichment, people don't really need to organize in political armies; economic growth just falls into our laps if we allow the innovators to innovate.

And what were their erstwhile political soldiers to do, when they had been taught to repose on their benefices and not keep themselves up to scratch in the skills needed in the ever-changing economy, and the economy changed, and it was no longer possible to sit life out as a unionized manufacturing worker with a union pension?

Obviously, the era of race-and-gender politics is reaching what the Brits call its sell-by date. But don't worry, we will find another way to divide and keep tempers and emotions high.

If nothing else, this is because men have a culture of insult, and like to insult people to their face; women have a culture of complaint, and like to complain to their friends about other friends who are conveniently not present. Why change when we are all having so much fun?

Did You Know that the Pill Helps Economic Growth?

According to The New York Times President Trump's policy reversal on Obamacare, rescinding the no-cost birth control mandate, is going to slow economic growth.

That's because the pill increased women's participation in the workforce back in the 1970s. By 8  percent. "In fact, about a third of the increase in how many women attained careers in fields like law and business was due to birth control." And rescinding free birth control is a burden on women, to the tune of $1.4 billion a year.

President Trump wants 4 percent growth. But that won't be possible without "policy interventions, and tax changes or tough talk on trade won’t cut it."

Sorry NYT. You are clueless. It is the "policy interventions" like Obamacare and Dodd-Frank and regulation up the ying-yang on everything from renewable energy to labor law that put the kibosh  on growth. And it is a global tragedy that folks like you don't get it.

Finally, says the Times:

If contraception goes back to costing hundreds of dollars a year, women will feel the financial pinch. If that happens, we’ll all suffer the economic consequences.

Imagine that! a few hundred dollars a year is going to sink the economy! Start the policy interventions this afternoon!

Actually, of course, these liberals are clueless. It is policy interventions and clueless free stuff that hinders economic growth, not products and services priced in the market. And young women that push for careers in law and business can certainly afford to pay for their contraceptives, and if they can't I'm sure that Daddy can.

Really, of course, the cluelessness goes deeper. The purpose of women on this Earth is not to boost economic growth. It is to put the next generation on the ground and then get them off the nest. You can have all the economic growth in the world, but if women don't have 2.1 children, on average, then your country and your people are going into the toilet. Or you will have to import millions of the uneducated and un-cultured to the market economy, and those immigrants are going to cost a bundle. See California and Germany.

And then there is the whole question of What Do Women Want? What upscale women want, far too often, is to pay someone else to raise their kids while they do high-status stuff instead. These days high-status stuff means a professional career, or activism. But the studies show that ordinary women want to concentrate on their families. They like to work, but their preference is part-time work so they can concentrate on raising their children.

But who cares about what ordinary women want?

The funny thing is that liberals are sitting here in the ruin of their cultural and economic ideas, and still asking for more. John C. Wright, the sci-fi author, has just put out, in the aftermath of Harveywood, a withering critique of the sexual revolution, and how it leads directly to young women getting exploited and then blaming everything in sight for their misery but the misery of being flung around in the pitiless culture of sex by "consent."

She has been taught that consent, just consent, and nothing else, is the sole measure of whether sex is licit or illicit. Whatever is without consent is rape, even if she consented at the time. Whatever is with consent is legitimate, even if she is not married to the man she is servicing sexually. But the whole point of luring and tempting a young girl with offers she lacks the strength of will to resist is to obviate her consent.

You see, if you live in a society where consent is the sole measure of right and wrong in matters of sex, then consent also does not matter. Only power matters.

In other words, "consent" is meaningless, a band-aid plastered over the debased culture of the sexual revolution. The simple fact is that men are sexual predators, and every society needs to enact cultural norms and guardrails to restrain that predation. In the old days of the "double standard" women who observed the niceties were not be the object of sexual predation, and there were penalties for men that violated the norm.

We are now, of course, trying to recover something similar today. That's what all the fuss about rape culture is about. It is recognizing that "consent" is not enough. But it is trying to enact a culture to protect young women without admitting, and declaring before all the world, that the sexual revolution is a failure. Because we People of the Creative Self cannot admit that the old bourgeois culture of the People of the Responsible Self was right after all.

And this is to say nothing about the real drawbacks of the sexual revolution, that STDs very often lead to sterility, particularly in women, that delayed childbearing past 30 means difficulty getting pregnant, and that the Pill often results in depression in women (like 20 to 30 percent more than those not using the Pill).

But what is that compared to to vital importance of women in the workforce contributing to economic growth and the transcendental truth of the sexual revolution?