[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0he0cqHH20?rel=0]
A Republic no more.
Tag: Philosophy
Repost: TL;DR
I originally posted this on July 4, 2011. I may do this one annually like the Victims of Communism post on May 1.
One year prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the overwhelming majority of colonists considered themselves loyal subjects of the Crown, full British citizens with all the rights and privileges that citizenship entitled them to. Yes, there were problems with the way the Colonies were being administered, but these were largely misunderstandings and could be worked out.
One year later that attitude had changed. The colonies were ripe for rebellion. In honesty, not much had really changed in the way the Crown treated the colonies, the difference was that the ideology the colonists lived under had changed.
The cause of that change was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, a 46-page pamphlet published January 10, 1776. In the first three months, 120,000 to 150,000 copies sold at 2 shillings each, the rough equivalent of $15 today. In the first year after its initial printing, 500,000 copies sold in a nation of only about 3 million people. By July, 1776 it had had its effect, and the colonists by and large no longer considered themselves Britons, but Americans.
In 1776 it is estimated that 90% of the population was literate – and not just literate, but at a fairly high level. I’ve quoted this before, but Thomas Sowell on literacy and education:
A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) has footnotes explaining what words like “arraigned,” “curried” and “exculpate” meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today’s expensively under-educated generation.
There is really nothing very mysterious about why our public schools are failures. When you select the poorest quality college students to be public school teachers, give them iron-clad tenure, a captive audience, and pay them according to seniority rather than performance, why should the results be surprising?
Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.
In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.
An excerpt from Common Sense:
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.
THAT is the expression of the minarchist, or “small-L” libertarian.
Back when I wrote True Believers, I quoted Glen Wishard from his Canis Iratus post, A Thumbnail History of the Twentieth Century:
The rise and fall of the Marxist ideal is rather neatly contained in the Twentieth Century, and comprises its central political phenomenon. Fascism and democratic defeatism are its sun-dogs. The common theme is politics as a theology of salvation, with a heroic transformation of the human condition (nothing less) promised to those who will agitate for it. Political activity becomes the highest human vocation. The various socialisms are only the most prominent manifestation of this delusion, which our future historian calls “politicism”. In all its forms, it defines human beings as exclusively political animals, based on characteristics which are largely or entirely beyond human control: ethnicity, nationality, gender, and social class. It claims universal relevance, and so divides the entire human race into heroes and enemies. To be on the correct side of this equation is considered full moral justification in and of itself, while no courtesy or concession can be afforded to those on the other. Therefore, politicism has no conscience whatsoever, no charity, and no mercy.
(Emphasis in original.) Other than disagreeing with Glen’s contention that the end of the Twentieth Century marked the fall of the Marxist ideal, I think his observation is spot-on – and it illustrates the polar opposite of the minarchist ideal espoused by Thomas Paine in which government is a necessary evil. I think proof that Glen’s thinking was wishful is easily illustrated by former Vice-President and nearly President Albert Gore’s contention that the purpose of Rule of Law was “human redemption,” or Barack Obama’s declaration that his election meant “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” that the rise of the oceans would slow, and the planet would begin to heal upon his ascension. There are more, but those two scream for themselves.
The Nineteenth Century was a century of struggle between the old feudal, colonialist paradigm and the new individualist, capitalist, democratic one. Feudalism and colonialism lost. At the start of the Twentieth Century “the sun never set” on the British Empire. England had colonies in India, Asia, Africa. France in Southeast Asia and North Africa. Spain, Portugal, Holland, Germany and Italy all had colonies in Africa and Asia. South and Central America were overrun with colonies. And all of these polities were monarchies.
By the middle of the Twentieth Century, colonialism was over, and England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany were representative democracies of one form or another. England may still have a reigning Queen, but she has very little actual power.
But while the Nineteenth Century was a battle between the ideologies of monarchy and democracy, the Twentieth Century was a struggle between democracy and “politicism.” The outcome of the Ninteenth Century’s conflicts were not fully felt until the end of the Twentieth. The outcome of the Twentieth Century’s struggles, I think, will be felt much sooner. As with everything else, political change moves faster as time progresses.
As others have noted, Marx predicted that the proletariat would overthrow the capitalists in the industrialized world, but it didn’t happen. The question was “why?” and the conclusion was that capitalism made too many people comfortable. In order for the revolution to succeed, it would be necessary to change the culture of the people.
To change the culture as Thomas Paine had done in a few short months in 1776.
However, the ground in which Thomas Paine sowed his seeds of rebellion was already rich and prepared for his ideas. Near universal literacy. Exposure to and understanding of the philosophy of John Locke versus that of Thomas Hobbes. A firm faith in a Higher Power. That soil is not a good one in which to plant the seeds of politicism.
Politicism requires a different fertilizer mix. Ignorance. Illiteracy. Illogic. Envy. Dependency. Despair. Apathy.
To surrender completely to the control of others – either a secular government or a religious one – control that invades every waking action, requires people unwilling to do for themselves. The first step is and must be the destruction of education. People must be prevented from thinking for themselves, from reasoning. George Orwell explained it with “Newspeak” in his novel 1984:
NEWSPEAK was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary, that we are concerned here.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
That preparation started in the early years of the 20th Century. Thus today we have “politically correct” speech. With destruction of language skills comes the destruction of logic skills – if you can’t read, you can’t integrate ideas new to you. In fact, new ideas are gibberish – words that have no meaning. “Politically free” is a null value to someone planted in the fields of politicism. It’s a weed.
A free society requires an informed and virtuous citizenry.
“Free,” “informed” and “virtuous” have become null terms.
The 21st Century will be a century of struggle between freedom and politicism. Polticism has two competing versions – Marxist and Muslim. Freedom?
Null term.
When in the course of human events . . . .
Happy (In)Dependence Day.
UPDATE 7/12/13: I’m putting this above Bill’s video. I cannot imagine a better example of what I’m writing about above:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0he0cqHH20?rel=0]
UPDATE 7/4/13 – Bill Whittle has something to say on the subject:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqZkTsmv4kw?rel=0]
Quote of the Day – HPMOR Edition
I’ve been reading the fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by author Less Wrong since about the time chapter 77 went up. Less is the nom de plume of Eliezer Yudkowsky:
a resident of Berkeley, California, has no formal education in computer science or artificial intelligence. A former child prodigy, he scored a 1410 on the SATs at age 11 and a perfect 1600 four years later. He co-founded the nonprofit Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (currently the Machine Intelligence Research Institute) in 2000 and continues to be employed there as a full-time Research Fellow.
He is also heavily involved in the Center for Applied Rationality.
In my previous post Faith in Government, I referred to the collection of essays on the left sidebar of this blog under the heading “The ‘Rights’ Discussions,” in response to a Facebook post on a whole list of proposed new individual rights. A good chunk of those essays were a back-and-forth between myself and a math professor, Dr. Danny Cline, partly on whether rights were something human beings understood instinctively. He said yes, I said no.
In the TSM tradition of using someone else’s words when they say it better than I can, an excerpt from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality – Chapter 87, Hedonic Awareness:
“Is there some amazing rational thing you do when your mind’s running in all different directions?” she managed.
“My own approach is usually to identify the different desires, give them names, conceive of them as separate individuals, and let them argue it out inside my head. So far the main persistent ones are my Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, Gryffindor, and Slytherin sides, my Inner Critic, and my simulated copies of you, Neville, Draco, Professor McGonagall, Professor Flitwick, Professor Quirrell, Dad, Mum, Richard Feynman, and Douglas Hofstadter.”
Hermione considered trying this before her Common Sense warned that it might be a dangerous sort of thing to pretend. “There’s a copy of me inside your head?”
“Of course there is!” Harry said. The boy suddenly looked a bit more vulnerable. “You mean there isn’t a copy of me living in your head?”
There was, she realized; and not only that, it talked in Harry’s exact voice.
“It’s rather unnerving now that I think about it,” said Hermione. “I do have a copy of you living in my head. It’s talking to me right now using your voice, arguing how this is perfectly normal.”
“Good,” Harry said seriously. “I mean, I don’t see how people could be friends without that.”
She continued reading her book, then, Harry seeming content to watch the pages over her shoulder.
She’d gotten all the way to number seventy, Katherine Scott, who’d apparently invented a way to turn small animals into lemon tarts, when she finally worked up the courage to speak.
“Harry?” she said. (She was leaning a bit away from him now, though she didn’t realize it.) “If there’s a copy of Draco Malfoy in your head, does that mean you’re friends with Draco Malfoy?”
“Well…” Harry said. He sighed. “Yeah, I’d been meaning to talk with you about this anyway. I kind of wish I’d talked to you sooner. Anyway, how can I put this… I was corrupting him?”
“What do you mean corrupting? ”
“Tempting him to the Light Side of the Force.”
Her mouth just stayed open.
“You know, like the Emperor and Darth Vader, only in reverse.”
“Draco Malfoy,” she said. “Harry, do you have any idea –“
“Yes.”
“- the sort of things Malfoy has been saying about me? What he said he’d do to me, as soon as he got the chance? I don’t know what he told to you, but Daphne Greengrass told me what Malfoy says when he’s in Slytherin. It’s unspeakable, Harry! It’s unspeakable in the completely literal sense that I can’t say it out loud!”
“When was this?” Harry said. “At the start of the year? Did Daphne say when this was?”
“No,” Hermione said. “Because it doesn’t matter when, Harry. Anyone who said things – like Malfoy said – they can’t be a good person. It doesn’t matter what you tempted him to, he’s still a rotten person, because no matter what a good person would never -“
“You’re wrong.” Harry said, looking her straight in the eyes. “I can guess what Draco threatened to do to you, because the second time I met him, he talked about doing it to a ten-year-old girl. But don’t you see, on the day Draco Malfoy arrived in Hogwarts, he’d spent his whole previous life being raised by Death Eaters. It would’ve required a supernatural intervention for him to have your morality given his environment -“
Hermione was shaking her head violently. “No, Harry. Nobody has to tell you that hurting people is wrong, it’s not something you don’t do because the teacher says it’s not allowed, it’s something you don’t do because – because you can see when people are hurting, don’t you know that, Harry?” Her voice was shaking now. “That’s not – that’s not a rule people follow like the rules for algebra! If you can’t see it, if you can’t feel it here,” her hand slapped down over the center of her chest, not quite where her heart was located, but that didn’t matter because it was all really in the brain anyway, “then you just don’t have it!”
The thought came to her, then, that Harry might not have it.
“There’s history books you haven’t read,” Harry said quietly. “There’s books you haven’t read yet, Hermione, and they might give you a sense of perspective. A few centuries earlier – I think it was definitely still around in the seventeenth century – it was a popular village entertainment to take a wicker basket, or a bundle, with a dozen live cats in it, and -“
“Stop,” she said.
“- roast it over a bonfire. Just a regular celebration. Good clean fun. And I’ll give them this, it was cleaner fun than burning women they thought were witches. Because the way people are built, Hermione, the way people are built to feel inside -” Harry put a hand over his own heart, in the anatomically correct position, then paused and moved his hand up to point toward his head at around the ear level, “- is that they hurt when they see their friends hurting. Someone inside their circle of concern, a member of their own tribe. That feeling has an off-switch, an off-switch labeled ‘enemy’ or ‘foreigner’ or sometimes just ‘stranger’. That’s how people are, if they don’t learn otherwise. So, no, it does not indicate that Draco Malfoy was inhuman or even unusually evil, if he grew up believing that it was fun to hurt his enemies -“
“If you believe that,” she said with her voice unsteady, “if you can believe that, then you’re evil. People are always responsible for what they do. It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you to do, you’re the one who does it. Everyone knows that -“
“No they don’t! You grew up in a post-World-War-Two society where ‘I vas only followink orders’ is something everyone knows the bad guys said. In the fifteenth century they would’ve called it honourable fealty.” Harry’s voice was rising. “Do you think you’re, you’re just genetically better than everyone who lived back then? Like if you’d been transported back to fifteenth-century London as a baby, you’d realize all on your own that burning cats was wrong, witch-burning was wrong, slavery was wrong, that every sentient being ought to be in your circle of concern? Do you think you’d finish realizing all that by the first day you got to Hogwarts? Nobody ever told Draco he was personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society he grew up in. And despite that, it only took him four months to get to the point where he’d grab a Muggleborn falling off a building.” Harry’s eyes were as fierce as she’d ever seen him. “I’m not finished corrupting Draco Malfoy, but I think he’s done pretty well so far.“
The problem with having such a good memory was that she did remember.
She remembered Draco Malfoy grabbing her wrist, so hard she’d had a bruise afterward, while she was falling off the roof of Hogwarts.
I’ve never read the original Harry Potter novels, but five chapters into HPMOR I was hooked. If you’ve not read it, I give it my strongest recommendation. Then you, like me, can wait for each new chapter to be published.
Faith in Government
I have this T-shirt, I got it recently, that says:
FAITH in GOVERNMENT
Defies Both
HISTORY and REASON
But that’s not the Quote of the Day. This is:
The administration has admitted to spying on everybody, including the press; collecting every bit of communications and personal data it can, including credit ratings, purchases, and browsing history. Nowhere have they said Congress is exempt. Verizon was the first phone company where it was admitted that everything they touch goes to the NSA. Upon taking office, every member of the House and Senate is handed a Blackberry to do everything on. Who has the contract for the Congressional Blackberries? Verizon.
Since this started in 2009, one has to assume that every member of Congress regardless of party has been compromised, or has family that has been compromised; and is being blackmailed, extorted, or bribed in some form or combination, and is under the control of the administration. This explanation is the Occam’s Razor for why the Congress, the Republican Caucus in particular, has been so passive and refused to fight back against Obama.
There are implications for the future of the country.
Indeed there are. And they’re not pretty.
I’m most of the way through reading the book Why Nations Fail. The overarching theme, it seems to me, is the same one put forth by Adam Smith, F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell, among others – human nature doesn’t change. Added to that is Robert Heinlein’s observation:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
Prosperity – a good marker for societal success – follows liberty. Though it is far from the sole condition necessary for prosperity, liberty is an essential condition. But liberty is quite rare, difficult to win, and apparently impossible to maintain for extended periods. In contrast to the Declaration of Independence, throughout history governments have been instituted among men almost exclusively not to secure the rights endowed upon them by their creators, but instead to secure the power and privilege of the powerful and privileged. Because human nature is what it is, who it is that has power and privilege may change over time, but the function of government remains, with few exceptions, to protect that power and privilege – regardless of who holds it.
Liberty endangers the power and privilege of those currently holding it. The authors of Why Nations Fail point out repeatedly that governments – again, almost without exception – tend to do whatever they can to prevent economic “creative destruction,” because with it comes shifts in who holds economic, and thus political power.
Liberty is dangerous, and it is most dangerous to the powerful and privileged. I am once again reminded of something I’ve quoted repeatedly from a post by blogger Ironbear several years ago:
It would be a mistake to paint the conflict exclusively in terms of “cultural war,” or Democrats vs Republicans, or even Left vs Right. Neither Democrats/Leftists or Republicans shy away from statism… the arguments there are merely over degree of statism, uses to which statism will be put – and over who’ll hold the reins. It’s the thought that they may not be left in a position to hold the reins that drives the Democrat-Left stark raving.
—
This is a conflict of ideologies…
The heart of the conflict is between those to whom personal liberty is important, and those to whom liberty is not only inconsequential, but to whom personal liberty is a deadly threat.
At the moment, that contingent is embodied most virulently by the “American” Left. This is the movement that still sees the enslavement and “re-education” of hundreds of thousands in South Vietnam, and the bones of millions used as fertilizer in Cambodia as a victory. This is the movement that sees suicide bombers as Minute Men, and sees the removal of a brutal murder and rape machine from power as totalitarianism. This is the movement that sees legitimately losing an election as the imposition of a police state. This is the movement that believes in seizing private property as “common good”. That celebrates Che Guevara as a hero. The movement who’s highest representatives talk blithely about taking away your money and limiting your access to your own homestead for your own good. The movement of disarmament.
The movement of the boot across the throat.
Think about it. When was the last time that you were able to engage in anything that resembled a discussion with someone of the Leftist persuasion? Were able to have an argument that was based on the premise that one of you was wrong, rather than being painted as Evil just because you disagreed?
The Left has painted itself into a rhetorical and logical corner, and unfortunately, they have no logic that might act as a paint thinner. It’s not possible for them to compromise with those that they’ve managed to conflate with the most venal of malevolence, with those whom they’re convinced disagree not because of different opinions but because of stupidity and evil, with those who’s core values are diametrically opposed to what the Left has embraced. There can be no real discourse, no real discussion. There’s no common ground. There can be no reconciliation there – the Left has nothing to offer that any adherent of freedom wants. The only way they can achieve their venue is from a position of political ascendancy where it can be imposed by force or inveigled by guile.
And all adherents of freedom have far too many decades of historical precedent demonstrating exactly where that Leftward road leads – to the ovens of Dachau.
But it’s not just the Left. BOTH sides currently in power are threatened by personal liberty. Creative destruction threatens them. The Left calls itself “progressive,” but as was noted a while back, they’re not – they’re the very definition of conservative, because they’re trying to conserve their power and privilege. They do that by building a class dependent upon government, a class that will keep reelecting them to ensure their gravy train doesn’t stop. The only thing they want to change is the size of that dependent class to further guarantee their power and privilege. And the GOP? They want to conserve their power, too, but they’ve earned the sobriquet of “the Stupid Party.”
Steven Den Beste wrote an excellent essay on the topic back in 2002, Liberal Conservatism, in which he put it this way:
I am a humanist. I am a liberal, in the classic sense of the term, meaning that I think that the goal of a political system should be to liberate the individuals within it to have as much ability to make decisions about their own lives as is practical, with as little interference by other citizens or the mechanisms of the state. I strongly believe in diversity at every level: diversity of opinions, diversity of political beliefs, diversity of lifestyles. When in doubt, permit it unless it is clearly a danger to the survival of the state or threatens the health and wellbeing of those within the state.
Which, in 2003 in the United States, makes me a “conservative”, at least in the reckoning of self-anointed “Liberals” in this nation.
But what it really makes him is a libertarian.
What threatens the power of the established classes?
Personal liberty. Private property. Rule of law. The things the Constitution was originally written to defend. Why? Because these things mean change, change that cannot be controlled, and change threatens the status quo.
Rand Paul frightens the hell out of both sides. So does the Tea Party.
Perennial gadfly Markadelphia has, in repeated comments here, decried the fact that more and more of the wealth of this nation is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. He is right to notice that and raise objection. However, his “solution” is to use government force to take that wealth (“make the rich pay their fair share”) and redistribute it according to, I suppose, some wise plan conceived by our betters in Washington. Markadelphia has an overweening faith in government.
What that concentration of wealth indicates to people like me, on the other hand, is what is known as “regulatory capture” and “crony capitalism.” Government is seen by us as unlikely to be a solution, because it is part of the problem. In point of fact, people like me don’t see “solutions” – we see trade-offs. Whatever we do will have consequences over and above what might have been intended. We recognize that fact, and are concerned with minimizing such consequences. The Left seems oblivious to negative outcomes. Intention it seems, is more important than result.
For our skepticism, we are accused of “hating the government,” and being “insurrectionists.” I’ve been up front ever since I started this blog that if I thought a revolution would fix anything I’d be on the front lines pulling a trigger. But I, like the majority of people on my side of the fence, understand that Ambrose Bierce was right:
Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
The authors of Why Nations Fail illustrate this truism repeatedly. The number of times in recorded history where revolution has resulted in an improvement in conditions for the common man can be counted on one hand with fingers left over. We don’t have guns so we can revolt against the government, we have guns to make the government think twice about what it can do to us. Robert Averech put it well:
Liberty is too messy, too chaotic for the forces of the Democrat party. They yearn for conformity, for a uniform sameness that gives the illusion of a serenely content society. That’s why they want to get rid of cars and shove us all into railroad cars. Socialists just love cattle cars; they just relabel them high-speed rail.
That’s why Democrats want to get rid of the Second Amendment. An armed citizenry can resist an unjust government.
Not revolution, what we want is a restoration of government to its original mandate – the protection of the rights of individuals. The problem is, over two-and-a-quarter centuries of entropy has made the majority of the population of this nation unwilling, if not unable to accept that the government shouldn’t stand in loco parentis.
Take, for example, this Facebook post I came across the other day:
NEW MEME I’M WORKING ON
Here’s the first draft. Interested in feedback for revisions, additions or deletions:*****
ENTITLEMENT:
We, the human beings on Plant Earth are endowed with certain inalienable rights. We receive these from our Creator and/or the intrinsic sense of justice that dwells in all people of good conscience.We are entitled to:
• Freedom of Speech
• Freedom of Worship and the Freedom from Worship
• Freedom from Want
• Freedom from Fear
• Access to Health Care
• Clean Air
• Clean Water
• Freedom from Economic and Sexual Exploitation
• Justice and Transparency in Financial Transactions
• A Living Wage
• Democratic Governance; Free and Fair Elections
• Equal Justice, Due Process, and the Rule of Law
• Public Education
• Public Libraries
• Public Parks
• Public Roadways
• Collective Bargaining
• Just Distribution of the Tax Burdens of Individuals and Corporations
I’ve already taken on the “freedom from fear” meme, but I could make a career out of fisking this list. Hell, the nine posts on the left sidebar under the banner The “Rights” Discussion do a pretty good job of demolishing it, but there are a LOT of people out there who would read this list and nod their heads sagely headbang while throwing up “hang loose” and peace sign hand gestures.
Here’s the author’s profile picture:
Yup, another unreformed 60’s hippie. According to his “about me” page, he taught English as a Second Language from 1981 through 2007, he currently lives in Washington, D.C. and he is an “Aggressive Progressive.” Quelle surprise! Gee, I wonder if he’s read Paulo Friere’s Critical Pedagogy.
This is, quite literally, what we’re up against. People like this are every bit as activist as NRA members, and I’d venture to guess there are MORE of them (since they have infested the public school systems and taught our kids for decades), albeit less focused or organized. Or rational.
A while back, Oren Litwin, aka “Critical Mastiff” when he comments here, said this:
If the non-socialist end of the political spectrum cannot create a political philosophy that is both good theory and emotionally appealing, we’re doomed.
Any political philosophy that is not self-reinforcing is by definition not the best political philosophy. Libertarianism (with a small “l”) features a stoic acceptance of individual risk (i.e. the lack of government intervention) for the sake of long-term freedom and prosperity–yet takes no measures to ensure that the society educates its young to maintain that acceptance of risk. The equilibrium, if it ever exists in the first place, is unstable and will collapse.
This aside from the fact that libertarianism is emotionally cold and unfulfilling to most people, who have not trained themselves to consider lack of outside restraint to be worth cherishing.
Bill Whittle has described the Left’s “emotionally appealing” political philosophy thus:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5HT64S_wJY?rel=0]
I think he’s on to something there. But what about a good “emotionally appealing” alternative? Orin says Libertarianism is “cold and unfulfilling to most people,” (or downright frightening some), but that’s a marketing thing, I think. Bill Whittle has something to say on that subject, too. Here’s the first part:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okF-UPzUvrQ?rel=0]
I have a major quibble with Bill on this, though. “Leave Me Alone” is not the position of the Republican Party. Both the Democrats and the Republicans are shot through with people who very much DO want to tell people what to do. It seems that wanting to tell people what to do is a primary requirement for wanting to run for public office. “Leave Me Alone” is a libertarian position. Heinlein wrote in his 1966 Hugo and Nebula winning novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:
Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up.
Andrew Klavan just the other day echoed the thought:
If I could reach into the heart of humankind and pluck one flaw from its unknowable depths, it would be our seemingly irresistible desire to tell one another what to do.
It seems the only response to that deep yearning, that seemingly irresistible desire, is to try to do something about limiting their ability to act on it. Heinlein also wrote in Mistress:
It may not be possible to do away with government — sometimes I think that government is an inescapable disease of human beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved and inoffensive — and can you think of a better way than by requiring the governors themselves to pay the costs of their antisocial hobby?
Now there’s a thought!
On to the second leg of the Libertarian tripod, “It’s Your Stuff”:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur2ewO9B2FM?rel=0]
If you don’t believe that “six or seven out of ten” college students self-identify as socialists, consider the fact that a 2002 Columbia Law poll found
Almost two-thirds of Americans think Karl Marx’s maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” was or could have been written by the framers and included in the Constitution
That’s right in the middle between six and seven out of ten for the math impaired.
Seems like things haven’t changed much in the last decade.
On to part three – “Don’t be a Jerk”:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX8ZGSkGOFI?rel=0]
But they’re not conservatives – they’re libertarians. And they’re not represented by either side currently in power.
And they’re not likely to be, either. Go back up and re-read that first quote. If in fact the Ruling Class is that firmly entrenched, then there is little hope left for those of us in Angelo Codevilla’s “country class” – those of us who are “small ‘L'” libertarians. Liberty is on life-support. The continued concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands is guaranteed, and the inevitable outcome will be a failed state and eventual societal collapse at the hands of people who live to tell others what to do.
Billy Beck calls it “The Endarkenment.” He’s been predicting it for quite a while. And it comes from “Faith in Government,” in defiance of history and reason.
Quote of the Day – Jonah Goldberg Edition
From his NRO review of the book The End Is Near and It’s Going to be Awesome by Kevin Williamson, Leviathan Fail:
While new iPhones regularly burst forth like gifts from the gods, politics plods along. “Other than Social Security, there are very few 1935 vintage products still in use,” he writes. “Resistance to innovation is a part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business — despite flooding the market with defective and dangerous products, mistreating its customers, degrading the environment, cooking the books, and engaging in financial shenanigans that would have made Gordon Gekko pale to contemplate.” Hence, it is not U.S. Steel, which was eventually washed away like an imposing sand castle in the surf, but only politics that can claim to be “the eternal corporation.”
The reason for this immortality is simple: The people running the State are never sufficiently willing to contemplate that they are the problem. If a program dedicated to putting the round pegs of humanity into square holes fails, the bureaucrats running it will conclude that the citizens need to be squared off long before it dawns on them that the State should stop treating people like pegs in the first place. Furthermore, in government, failure is an exciting excuse to ask for more funding or more power.
RTWT. I had Thomas Sowell’s A Personal Odyssey lined up next in the nonfiction queue, but I think I’m going to have to get a copy of The End is Near and read it next instead. Kevin Williamson echoes some of the things Bill Whittle has been saying of late, but I have some disagreements with Whittle’s optimism, and it seems Jonah Goldberg has some (albeit minor) disagreements with Williamson. I’m looking forward to the read.
Quote of the Day – Glenn Reynolds Edition
What’s up with this? It’s not based on any concern with safety. Lego guns, cap guns, bubble guns, nibbled Pop Tarts, and fingers are no threat to safety. And the wild overreaction in these cases says there’s more going on here than simple school discipline. As I said, who treats a 5-year-old this way? It smacks of fanaticism.
In fact, it seems like a kind of quasi-religious fanaticism. I think it’s about the administrative class — which runs the schools with as little input from parents as possible — doing its best to exterminate the very idea of guns. It’s some sort of wacky moral-purity crusade. If a few toddlers have to suffer along the way, that’s tough. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
Government v3.0, Confidence and Preference Cascades
In 1776 Thomas Jefferson, at the urging of the other Founders, wrote the Declaration of Independence – the fundamental philosophical document underlying the creation of these United States. As a fundamental philosophical document it was, in part, a statement of how things ought to be, followed by a description of how things really were. In particular, this passage was a statement of how things ought to be:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
With very few exceptions in history, governments have been “instituted among Men” for very different reasons than to secure the rights of the governed. Governments throughout history have been established for one reason and one reason only: to secure and expand the power and privilege of the powerful and privileged.
Just a year earlier in his bestseller Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote:
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise.
That was written from the perspective of an eighteenth-century Englishman, having come from a nation in which the Divine Right of Kings was already pretty severely curtailed by a Parliament of Lords and Commons. But the coming Revolutionary War was based in resistance to that government extracting wealth from its colonies in violation of the rights of the people living in those colonies.
I’m currently reading Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. I should probably have waited until I finished the book before writing this essay, but so much is going on right now that the urge to write struck, and I must obey. I’m about a third of the way into the book, and the authors have made the point, repeatedly, that all governments are, in their term, extractive – that is, government takes from the governed and redistributes that wealth…somehow. As Paine put it “we furnish the means by which we suffer.” In the overwhelming majority of cases throughout history, that wealth has gone to line the pockets of King and cronies – securing and expanding the power and privilege of the powerful and privileged. At best, these extractive governments result in technological and societal stagnation. At worst, eventual societal collapse. BUT – in those rare cases where “the right people are in charge” – occasionally a government works to allow its people to increase the overall wealth of the State.
This generally doesn’t last long. Robert Heinlein put it thus:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
What about “anarchy”? The authors provide a couple of examples, but these go to illustrate their contention that, if actual, measurable wealth-creation is desired then some sort of centralized control is a prerequisite. But central control is not sufficient in itself. It is a mechanism as easily (more easily) implemented to extract wealth as to allow its creation.
Why not? Why does wealth creation not occur without centralized control, nor last long even with it?
Human nature.
John Locke identified the incentives that led to economic advancement in America: life, liberty, property. Governments that protect these three things provide incentive for that extremely small minority — frequently despised, often condemned and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people — to create wealth. They create this wealth not for the betterment of their fellow man, but because they can be (largely) assured they can keep it.
Still, a rising tide lifts all boats as the saying goes.
And stealing is easier than work, as another saying goes.
In 1911 fascist sociologist Robert Michels proposed what he called The Iron Law of Oligarchy:
It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy.
And:
Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy.
In the ten years I’ve been posting on this blog, I have been echoing this Iron Law, calling it “entropy,” but in the end, it all boils down to the same thing – human nature. Stealing is easier than working, and where better to steal than from the lofty (and protected) perch of Government Authority? It’s already legal, how hard is it to just turn the screws a little tighter? It’s for the Greater Good, you know. Once you’ve convinced yourself of that, how hard is it to justify a little well-earned luxury? Or extorting a little graft?
Government is power. Power corrupts and attracts the corrupt. We forget this at our peril. Per the Iron Law of Oligarchy, government set up for any reason other than the protection of power and privilege are inevitably suborned. Henry Louis Mencken observed:
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.
Author and scientist Jerry Pournell has written what I think is a corollary to Michel’s Iron Law of Oligarchy, Pournell’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
And that second group will fight to retain and increase the power and privilege their position gives them. The examples are almost endless, ranging from spending thousands of taxpayer dollars on vehicles and lavish office furnishings to outright embezzlement.
And it isn’t just the executive and legislative branches that are affected by corruption and power-hunger. The Judicial branch has examples as egregious. But overall, the people have trust and confidence in their government. The West in general, and the U.S. in particular is what is termed a “high trust” society. Economics blogger Arnold Kling says this about social trust:
If you can trust the processes of government, then that is a good thing. Good trust in government is based on processes that provide for accountability, checks and balances, equal protection, and punishment of official corruption.
Trusting the virtues of government leaders is a bad thing. It leads one to cede rights and powers to government that are easily abused.
…My idea of a high-trust society differs from that of many elites. Elitist journalists think that a high-trust society is one where we trust the mainstream media. Elitist politicians and activists think that a high-trust society is one where we trust legislators, regulators, and experts to exercise broad authority. In contrast, I believe that a high-trust society is one in which processes ensure that elites are subject to checks and accountability. It is particularly important for legislators, regulators, and experts to have their authority limited and their accountability assured.
Robert Heinlein again:
Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure “good” government, it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare — most people want to run things, but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the “backseat driver” syndrome.
So, in general the population of the United States accepts a certain level of corruption, overreach and petty tyranny because, well, human nature. We believe that some people cannot be trusted, but most can. We expect the mechanisms of our government, the checks and balances, to rein in the worst cases and we live with the minor stuff because overall, the system works.
In recent weeks multiple political scandals have hit the news, and older ones have been revived. Let’s list some:
- Holder’s refusal to prosecute the New Black Panthers for voter intimidation
- Fast and Furious gun-running to Mexican drug cartels by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
- The prosecution of Gibson Guitars for, well, for apparently importing wood.
- The collection of months of phone records from the Associated Press by the Justice Department
- The investigation of Fox News reporter James Rosen, also by the DoJ
- IRS targeting of right-wing groups applying for tax-exempt status while greenlighting left-wing applications, and the suppression of this information before the November election
I’ll ignore the Benghazi scandal at the moment, because all of the items listed above share a common theme – suppression of political opposition by an administration – protecting the power and privilege of the powerful and privileged. Here’s Piers Morgan’s take on it from a few days ago:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKO8A285Rr0?rel=0]
Peggy Noonan wrote last week in her Wall Street Journal op-ed This is No Ordinary Scandal about the IRS debacle, concluding:
Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don’t, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn’t stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.
She followed up with another piece, A Battering Ram Becomes a Stonewall, repeating:
Again, if what happened at the IRS is not stopped now—if the internal corruption within it is not broken—it will never stop, and never be broken. The American people will never again be able to have the slightest confidence in the revenue-gathering arm of their government. And that, actually, would be tragic.
Bob Krumm retorted to that last:
Actually it wouldn’t be “tragic” if the American people were not to have confidence in this or any arm of their government. It would be exactly what the Founders called for. My favorite quotation from the entire 85 editions of the Federalist Papers is this one from Federalist 25 by Alexander Hamilton:
“The people are always most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion.”
In fact, you could almost sum up the gist of the entire Constitution with that single statement, as the Constitution attempted to set up a system where no branch of government was in sole possession of the means of injuring our rights. How far we have strayed, however, when the wing of the government that determines how much of our labors are to be taken into the Federal trough also inquires about our associations, our religious practices, and soon, our medical care. Peggy, you are right to call for a special investigator. But you are wrong to assert that it is a tragedy if, as a result of this scandal, we no longer have confidence in the IRS. The real tragedies would occur as a result of believing that any branch of government was deserving of our unsuspicious confidence.
Thomas Jefferson also wrote in the Declaration of Independence:
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Back in 2004 TheGeekWitha.45 wrote:
We, who studied the shape and form of the machines of freedom and oppression, have looked around us, and are utterly dumbfounded by what we see. We see first that the machinery of freedom and Liberty is badly broken. Parts that are supposed to govern and limit each other no longer do so with any reliability. We examine the creaking and groaning structure, and note that critical timbers have been moved from one place to another, that some parts are entirely missing, and others are no longer recognizable under the wadded layers of spit and duct tape. Other, entirely new subsystems, foreign to the original design, have been added on, bolted at awkward angles. — We know the tools and mechanisms of oppression when we see them. We’ve studied them in depth, and their existence on our shores, in our times, offends us deeply. We can see the stirrings of malevolence, and we take stock of the damage they’ve caused over so much time. Others pass by without a second look, with no alarm or hue and cry, as if they are blind, as if they don’t understand what they see before their very eyes. We want to shake them, to grasp their heads and turn their faces, shouting, “LOOK! Do you see what this thing is? Do you see how it might be put to use? Do you know what can happen if this thing becomes fully assembled and activated?”
But C.S. Lewis observed not so long ago:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.
When “moral busybodies” achieve positions high in bureaucracies, when they “write the rules, and control promotions within the organization,” then tyranny – even the petty tyranny of lemonade stand inspectors – is never far behind.
Let me switch gears here for a moment. I follow Bill Whittle’s work fairly closely, including his sporadic Stratosphere Lounge vidcasts. For a while now, Bill has been painting a rosy picture of our political future. He credits Thad McCotter, former Michigan Congressman, for the observation that our Constitution was written essentially by farmers for an agrarian nation. It was not well suited to an industrialized nation where large and diverse populations lived crammed into urban areas, and an extremely small minority – despised, condemned, and opposed by all right-thinking people – accumulated vast quantities of wealth. That produced Government v.2.0 – large, ponderous, heavily bureaucratized and regulating. With the strictures laid down by the architecture of the Constitution, this took some time, but the Iron Law of Bureaucracy enabled the bypassing, dismantling, folding, spindling and mutilating of the original document under the banner of necessity.
But, McCotter advises, the Information Age will eventually change all of that. When an individual can pick up an iPhone and order steel from China, the world is a very different place and our massive, sclerotic Gov.2.0 can no longer keep up. Case in point – gun control. The recently released design for a functional printable handgun resulted in the inevitable government crackdown on that design, but it’s too late – “You can’t stop the signal.”
The idea of Government v3.0 has resulted, unsurprisingly, in a book – America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity In The 21st Century. Glenn Reynolds wrote an op-ed recently on the idea, Future’s So Bright We Have to Wear Shades. Excerpt:
The book’s authors, James Bennett and Michael Lotus, argue that things seem rough because we’re in a period of transition, like those after the Civil War and during the New Deal era. Such transitions are necessarily bumpy, but once they’re navigated the country comes back stronger than ever.
—
If America 2.0 was a fit for the world of giant steel mills and monolithic corporations, America 3.0 will be fit for the world of consumer choice and Internet speed.
Of course, America 2.0 won’t really vanish. Just as the America 1.0 spirit of entrepreneurialism and ingenuity survived in the shops and garages that gave birth to the Internet era, the big bureaucracies won’t vanish — they’ll just become smaller and less significant. And, hopefully, more solvent.
In a way, our current problems exemplify the need for change. As Democratic strategist David Axelrod said last week, “the government is so vast” that we can’t expect a president to actually be in charge of things. A government that is too big for its chief executive to manage is something that can’t go on forever. Time for change, and the sooner, the better.
Bill Whittle thinks the way to Government v3.0 is through what he calls “parallel structures.” One example is homeschooling. You pay your property taxes which go to fund public education, but you keep your kids out of that system and pay – again – to give your kid an actual education. Further, you join up with other homeschooling families and form a cooperative to keep your costs down. Get retired business professionals to teach, for example.
Another example – stop thinking of yourself as defined by your employment. Instead of doing the America 2.0 thing of trying to work for one company or in one industry for your whole career, think of yourself instead as a contract worker. What can you do? What are your hobbies? Can you monetize them? A good example of this is Larry Corriea, ex-gun dealer, ex-accountant, now author – but he could do any or all if necessary, and he’s fully self-employed now.
It sounds wonderful.
But it ignores the Iron Laws of Oligarchy and Bureaucracy.
The transition from Government v.1.0 to Government v.2.0 was inevitable. It was an expansion in the power of bureaucracy, and it increased the power and privilege of the powerful and privileged. Government v.3.0? Not so much. If you think lemonade stand inspectors are bad, wait until the government really starts reacting against the Information Age economy.
The concept of the Preference Cascade is credited to Turkish economist Timur Kuran. Glenn Reynolds described the idea in a 2002 op-ed, Patriotism and Preferences. In short, average people behave the way they think they ought to, even though that behavior might not reflect their own personal feelings. Given a sufficient “A-HA!” moment when they discover that their personal feelings are shared by a large portion of the population their behavior may change dramatically. An example of this is the British colonists before and after publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. A year before the Declaration of Independence, America was full of patriotic British convinced that things could be worked out with King George, but on July 4, 1776 the colonies were full of Americans determined that they needed independence. Another is the recent “Arab Spring.” The catalyst there has been credited to the self-immolation of Tunisian merchant Mohamed Bouazizi in protest of his treatment by government authorities.
The Information Age allows the sharing of this kind of information at light-speed and it bypasses government censorship. Note governments now trying to slam doors shut on IP telephony, instant messaging, etc.
In 2005 at the now-defunct blog Silent Running, its author wrote:
(Lord Kenneth Clark) said one of the most important features of a civilization, if not the most, was confidence. Confidence that it would still be around next year, that it was worthwhile planting crops now, so they could be harvested next season. Confidence that soldiers wouldn’t suddenly appear on the horizon and destroy your farm. Confidence that an apple seed planted in your backyard will provide fruit for your grandchildren. That if you paint a fresco, the wall its on will still be standing in a century. That if you write a book, the language you use will still be understood half a millennia in the future. And that if you hauled stone for the great cathedral which had been building since before your father was born, and which your baby son might live to see completed if, the good Lord willing, he lived to be an old man; your efforts would be valued by subsequent generations stretching forward toward some unimaginably distant futurity. And above all, the self-confidence that you are part of something grander than yourself, something with roots in the past, and a glorious future of achievement ahead of it. When the Romans lost that self confidence, when they began doubting their own purpose, they began to die. When the Rhine opposite Cologne froze on the last dying day of the year 406CE and the motley horde of Suevi, Alans, and Vandals charged across the Imperial border into the province of Gaul, that was the beginning of the end merely in the physical sense. They were simply taking an axe to an already rotten tree.
Here is a one-dollar bill:
It’s ink on paper. It represents an idea, one that is shared by billions of people all over the planet.
This is also ink on paper. It too represents an idea shared by billions of people all over the planet.
Why will one of them get you a hamburger off the value menu at McDonalds, and the other won’t? Because of what those billions of people believe.
The current National Debt is in excess of $16,800,000,000,000. Our unfunded liabilities under current law exceed $124,000,000,000,000.
The Information Age is here. Government v.2.0 is massive, sclerotic, invasive, inept, corrupt, incompetent, malicious, vindictive – it is, in short, what the second type of bureaucrats make it in the furtherance of the bureaucracy and their own power and privilege. And the Iron Law of Oligarchy says:
Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy.
People keep acting as though things can keep going on as they have, but as Glenn Reynolds keeps repeating, “Something that can’t go on forever, won’t.”
At some point there will be a preference cascade. What that cascade will result in is impossible to predict, but I doubt it will be the rosy Government v.3.0 predicted by Bill Whittle and the authors of America 3.0. I think Bill doubts it, too. During his speech here in Tucson last week, he pulled out a dollar bill and one of those hundred-trillion Zimbabwe dollar asswipes. During the Great Depression, he said, America had not fully transitioned to the Industrial Age. A great number of people still lived on farms or at least grew a significant portion of their own food in gardens, so starvation wasn’t a significant cause of death, but now? Cities and suburbs exist on two or three days worth of food that must be trucked in. If the common belief in the value of the dollar goes away, what will that look like? And, pace Peggy Noonan, if people lose all confidence in not just the revenue-gathering arm of Government v.2.0, but all of it, what will that look like?
One thing’s for sure – the powerful and privileged will do whatever it takes to keep as much power and privilege as they can. And Government v.2.0 will be the tool by which it’s accomplished.
Quote of the Day – Affirmative Action Edition
From Grumpy Old Fart in a comment:
Affirmative Action is, and always has been, the political equivalent of insisting that Tiger Woods use the women’s tee because he’s black.
Can I get an “AMEN!”?
And read the rest of the comment. Spot-on.
Thomas Sowell – Intellectuals and Race
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6ImP-gJvas?rel=0]
I may be giving you filler, but it’s QUALITY filler.
“…people are not inherently good in nature…”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGEiA80ZL08?rel=0]
Some people misunderstand what that phrase actually means, even after it’s been explained to them.
(h/t to Van der Leun for the video.)