Social trust is one of those things that we know is important to economic growth, sound government and social stability. When the people of a society generally trust one another and wish to be trusted by others, their society prospers. The question that always arises is over causality. Some would argue that altruism is a biological trait that scales up to social trust. Others would argue that good government and the rule of law encourages positive economic growth, which in turn increases social trust. It is one of those topics that keeps academics busy.
The distinguishing characteristic of low-trust societies is a near total lack of trust in the state by the people. Russians, during the old Soviet Union, understood that everything that was said by the state was a lie of some sort. In fact, the only thing they could trust from the Bolsheviks was that whatever they said was untrue. This amplified the natural distrust of Russians as they did not have an authority to which they could appeal in order to arbitrate disputes. Contracts have to be enforceable before anyone will enter into them.
The point here is that you can debate the causality of social trust, but a society with a corrupt and untrustworthy state is going to be a low-trust society. Alternatively, to use the language of the pseudo-sciences, social trust correlates with public corruption. The causal arrows may point one way or both ways, but public corruption is a good proxy for social trust. There are measures of public corruption and the most popular is from these guys, who publish downloadable statistics every year for the pseudo-sciences.
Trust in the state is always going to drift over time, but you can spot some trends. Just take a look at the US over the last few decades. In the 1980’s, the savings and loan crisis put a lot of people in prison. Even some politicians got dinged for getting too cozy with the crooked bankers. A decade later we had the dot-com bubble and the accounting scandals, but no one went to jail. They just lost money. Less than a decade later we had the mortgage crisis and the crooks got bailed out by the government with taxpayer funds. This is a trend worth noticing.
Now, look around at what we are seeing today. The Clinton e-mail scandal is so outlandish, it is now threatening the rule of law. In the 70’s, Nixon was run from office from 18 missing minutes of tape. Clinton erased 17,000 emails, some may have been under subpoena. It is blazingly obvious that she and her cronies violated Federal law by mishandling classified information. The most logical explanation for all of this is they were selling it for cash through that ridiculous charity they run. A charity that has systematically violated the law with regards to accounting for donations.
How is it possible that this woman and her flunkies are not in jumpsuits waddling around Danbury FCI?
The first problem is the head of state appears to be a pathological liar. This Iran story is the sort of thing that used to bring down governments. It was certainly the sort of thing that should have administration officials hiring lawyers in preparation for the FBI visit. That would require an FBI that is not equally corrupt. Of course, the FBI is a product of the political class and ours is proving to be astonishingly corrupt. Today we learn that the politicians are conspiring to rig public hearings, which are the bedrock of popular government.
A certain amount of public corruption is to be expected. Politics will always attract shady characters, but it should also attract honest characters too. These are the folks that enjoy the boring work of good government. They police the system, enforce the rules and make public appeals for cleaning up the problems. Today, those people either do not exist or they have become too afraid to speak up. The American political class looks a lot like a corrupt police precinct. The crooks are in charge and they have inverted morality so that the honest fear detection by the corrupt.
It is not unreasonable to think that we may have passed the point where the political class can be expected to reform itself. Their unwillingness to even try to thwart the rise of these vulgar grifters from the Ozarks suggests the the political elite has lost the capacity to feel shame. Anyone willing to defend Hillary Clinton to the public is someone, who will lie about anything, violate any law, violate any taboo. That is a person lacking in anything resembling a soul. A political class populated with such people is a ruling class at war with itself, the very definition of a low trust state.
The truly frightening thing is that the only institution the public trusts is the military. Take a look at what is happening with the sports ball players protesting during the national anthem. This coming Sunday is 9/11 and even the most reptilian of Progressives are saying such a protest on that day would be a slap in the face to the men and women who serve the country. When no one trusts the ruling class, and the military is the only institution in which the public has faith, there is always one result. It does not have to be that way, but that’s the way it has always been.
At some level, some portion of the public understands this. The Trump phenomenon is not about Trump in the conventional sense. There’s a lot not to like about the man, but he is honest, he loves his countrymen and he is not doing this for the money. Whether or not he understands his role and the movement he is leading is unknown. Maybe his election will just be a false dawn and what follows is what always follows the onset of a low-trust state. If things are going to turn out different for us, Trump will win and usher in an era of reform.
Otherwise, what comes next will be much worse.
It is interesting that we have arrived at a point where it is not even low trust, but a situation that has become no trust in society. But the no trust lies not in the politicians (who were more or less regarded with a proper sense of disdain), but in the two safety nets we used to rely on to provide a clear signal of what as right and proper. First of these, and perhaps most important, was the law. If we could mostly could believe the law was beyond reproach in its application, then we had reason to believe… Read more »
The Left has been stamping on the water hose, to borrow your apt analogy, because they are committed to the principle of “order out of chaos.” The long march through the institutions, to commandeer the apparatus of state and re-purpose them to their own ends, is part and parcel of this principle. They will destroy the existing order — politically, socially, economically, and (importantly) spiritually — and then build a new order in its place, fashioned in their own image. In the 1920s we had “the New Soviet Man” so I guess they’re taking another crack at it, and we… Read more »
The problem is that the public is as deeply corrupt as the elites. Somewhere near half of the voters will voluntarily vote for the Ozark grifters.
Did a corrupted people tempt a weak elite into corruption, did a corrupt elite cause a public to stop caring and become corrupt or both? The latter I think.
What happened was the currency got cut loose from the gold standard. Then the political class discovered that you could back the currency with promises to pay someday in the faroff future instead, and they were that day freed from all previous restraints on their profligacy. Naturally, the first order of business became to make themselves and all their friends rich. And the rest is history.
Your average American is deeply in debt and often doesn’t have enough cash in the bank to cover a month’s expenses. The elite are getting us into more debt, but they’re qualitatively similar to your average American. I think Fred’s point stands.
Precisely! She is lying so that the 40+ % of her voters so they will know what to believe and what to tell others and themselves. Clinton knows we know she is lying but she also knows we will never vote for her so we don’t matter at all! She most likely laughs as soon as she gets in the car with huma and cheryl! I live in an area full of snooty lefties , they all repeat her lies as if it is Gospel.
It’s clear to me that the U.S. government is open to a RICO prosecution. It meets the definition of a racketeering enterprise under the act. Examples: Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, the “green jobs” fraud, paying farmers not to grow crops, ethanol, EPA bullying, Obamacare, bank bailouts, IRS bullying.The list is endless. The American people are being defrauded virtually full time. The problem is the FBI and the Justice Department are part of the illegal enterprise. The courts too (Roberts calling the Obamacare penalty not a tax). No wonder the political class hates Trump. He might actually kill the… Read more »
My joke is they fear Trump because if he wins, he will have to be shown the alien space craft at Roswell and he could blab about it. I’m joking, of course, but the point is Trump rails about the corruption and he probably does not know the half of it.
The spacecraft is not at Roswell, it just crashed there. It is kept at Groom Lake, NV (Area-51 for the nutters).
/sarc
I live in Roswell.
Old timers who were stationed here contend the wreckage went to Wright-Patterson.
I grew up 20 miles from Wright-Pat in the 60s. We all knew there was a hanger full of UFOs, and a freezer full of little spacemen.
I was assigned to Wright Patterson in the 1980s, to the Foreign Technology Division to be exact. FTD was the “home” of Operation Blue Book. There was a notice on a bulletin board inside the building, which read something like “The Aliens and their Spacecraft are not in Hanger XXX (where rumor had it they were), but rather are in the basement of Building YYY” (the very building where the notice was posted Thing is, that building,and another one adjacent to it, housing FTD was built on a slab. 🙂 FTD is now the National Air and Space Intelligence Center.… Read more »
For some time there have been a sizeable element of voters who would support a presidential candidate based solely on a promise of “elect me and I will tell you the truth about JFK and aliens.”
The elites now exist to survive their illegitimacy. Everything is co-opted or hijacked to those means, nothing is left untainted or corrupted to those ends. It is an ugly nasty reality, but one we must face if we are to survive this juggernaut. Trust left long ago, it is only an illusion, a fig leaf. Whether it is Gotterobamarung, the psychopathic vagina in an oven mitt, or Donald Trump, it is gone beyond the question of trust, the destruction of it is a forgone conclusion. The consequences of that, what comes next is what you got to be truly concerned… Read more »
I live in a university town. Ever since they gave eighteen year olds the vote it has been a one party state. And every year it has become more thoroughly corrupt. Millions of dollars flow through this liberal/progressive enterprise with cronies pocketing public dollars by getting contracts for things that don’t need to be done or that are needed and get done in extravagant ways. The cash flows back in the form of campaign donations and jobs post “public service”. The students, when told about these things go on supporting these thieves without blinking an eye, showing how corrupt they… Read more »
“…they gave eighteen year olds the vote.”
Brains don’t fully mature until around 25 or so. The rationale back in the day for lowering the voting age to 18 was that if you could be drafted to go to Vietnam you should be able to vote. I kind of agreed with that back then, but now I think that maybe they should have simply raised the draft age to 21 instead.
Is this a recent development? 200 years ago people were considered adult at about 16, started families, and were supporting themselves. Back then males were routinely apprenticed at age 12 and females were groomed for family life and upkeep.
If elected, Trump will have to conduct an immediate Erdogan-style purge of the federal bureaucracy and replace them with loyalists. The entire Uniparty Establishment is deeply corrupt and committed to the status quo ante and, if left in place, will conspire to destroy his presidency. Obama’s military leadership needs to go in the first weeks, followed by the entire management structure of the DoJ, the (thoroughly corrupted) FBI, the CIA, and the IRS. Obama is busy “burrowing” his political appointees into civil service status so this will necessitate reassigning these losers into do-nothing jobs while keeping their titles and status.… Read more »
Firing the civil service violates the Pendleton Act, alas. And Trump will have to work around completely fair and balanced, totally nonpartisan Matt Lauer — late of the Clinton Global Initiative — to get a word in edgewise in the debates. I honestly expect “questions” like “Mr. Trump, even your supporters compare you to Hitler. Why are you like Hitler?”
I addressed the civil service status issue in the first paragraph–send those burrowed appointees and their peers off to Kabul and/or Mosul to supervise a paper shredder in a basement of a safe house. If they don’t want to go they can leave government service.
As to the fifth column, Trump will simply have to take command of the stage. Matt Loser can ask whatever he wants. Trump’s mission is to convey his message, not to respond to Matt’s inane questions. I have no doubt Trump can handle that.
Yep, the old ” transferred to Alaska ” … Step one, Identify a large base that has under utilized space/offices/etc. Transfer certain offices and/or departments to that base. Then transfer those folks to that base or resign. Oh, and save-pay and let ’em shuffle paper and remove their authority to do jack squat. That would about do it for a lot of the problem.
The Pendleton act was supposed to make the bureaucracy non-partisan, but the result has been to make it all one party – the big govt. gang. It is right at the crux of the problem. Imagine if bureaucrats faced the prospect of having their managers replaced by hostile partisans who wanted to search for scandals and had the power to fire those who didn’t co-operate. That would certainly make ME more conscientious and non-partisan. Maybe the Pendleton act just created the appearance of less corruption, by making it hard to put in new managers to find the problems. You all… Read more »
“Firing the civil service violates the Pendleton Act, alas.” So? What with illegal (and “legal”) immigration, the NSA and unreasonable search and seizure, civil forfeiture, and Clinton’s emails, it’s obvious that the Beltway Behemoth has no respect for rule of law, so why should Trump? Seriously, I just want a reasonably sans, reasonably non-intrusive government, one that doesn’t shred marriage, doesn’t screw with education, doesn’t redistribute male wealth to “independent womyn” freemartins, and doesn’t deliberately import tens of millions of foreigners slavering for the white man’s gibs and the white woman’s pussy. Not a high bar, you would think, so… Read more »
Agreed King George! Who gives a shit about illegal unions and hurt feelings at this point! What difference does it make when you know the house is full of vermin and you need to fumigate the premises? These people work for American tax payers and are paid by the tax payer, as much as they may be considered a pain-in-the-ass by bureaucrats. Ever gone to a store where customers are treated that way? They don’t stay in business long. But for the government, their inefficiencies and defects only call for more funding to correct the problems. Talk about a circle… Read more »
Don’t waste your time defending the doctors. They are the root of the problem. Without their county state and national medical societies there would have been no licensing, school accreditation or national standards for hospitals. These are all the basis for ever escalating costs and lack of real competition. Look up the web site of your state medical association and its PAC. It lobbies on hundreds if not thousands of bills in your state legislature every year without any thought as to the cost to society of their meddling. Without the ability to bully others via the licensing mechanism your… Read more »
Point taken Doc. I come from manufacturing where in any population you need to have quality controls. Whether doctors, lawyers or widgets, you need someone watching over the proceedings and outcomes of the “business” to determine where corrections need to be made. Hence, licensing to determine who should be allowed to practice, and the training they receive is understood to conform to some ideas of “solid” science and not quackery, and that the care of patients is the foremost concern. However, as with everything, the drive for maximizing profits and cutting costs overrides everything and in medicine that means shortchanging… Read more »
Consider Hope (Aaron Zelman, L. Neil Smith, 2001). Give thought to the Trump parallels working in the present election cycle.
That’s just the thing — not every general at the Pentagon is a PC eunuch. The last gasp of the Weimar Republic — the move that gave Hitler the chancellorship — was army chief informing Hindenburg that his forces couldn’t (or wouldn’t) suppress a “right wing” coup when it came. I thought Trump understood this and would pick a military man for VP. He didn’t, and Hillary is dumb and narcissistic enough to think she can saber-rattle Russia and otherwise carry on like a neocon and not have it backfire on her. It won’t take a full-on tanks-surrounding-the-White-House situation; all… Read more »
In fact, nearly every general and admiral is a PC eunuch. A few one and two stars slip through because there are so many, but if they say much they are sidetracked until retirement. The rank and file aren’t much better. The good men leave rather quickly. This has been going on for decades.
I am a retired Army artillery officer – not a general, I assure you – and regretfully, I have to say you are right. The trend is so old that even Eisenhower openly talked about it when he was president. But under Obama it has only accelerated rapidly. If you look at the number of flag-rank officers fired by Obama it is astonishing. Then when you consider that they were almost all war fighters rather than butt kissers, it is depressing. BTW, what Ike said to a reporter was that it would be easy to cut the defense budget. All… Read more »
Indeed, COL Hackworth was right. An officer above the rank of Lieutenant Colonel becomes a politician vs. a soldier.
LTC Allen West is the only guy with the balls (and the obvious shield) to fix the military as Trump’s SECDEF.
I’m sure he is not the “only” guy but he sure is would be a great pick. I have said that one of Trump’s first moves should be to ‘fire’ all of Barry’s appointee’s and their respective hires. It follows that with all the available slots, a lot of retirees with solid creds might be lured back into “MAGA!”
Otherwise, what comes next will be much worse. As poster ‘ahem’ said at American Digest some time back: Trump’s campaign is where America is turning to clean house while clinging to vestiges of civilized behavior. It represents an opportunity for renewal on many levels. If it doesn’t work, I fear America is in for much worse than it has already seen. The normal citizen in flyover country recognizes that his betters in The Uniparty have been p-ssing on his shoes for decades and telling him/her it is raining. They have done this so brazenly that even one as mild-mannered as… Read more »
Unfortunately, “much worse” is probably the endgame here. I live in a state that leads the league tables in exactly two things 1) unfriendliness to business and 2) number of elected Assembly/State Senate folks indicted and jailed. This past year 2 of the 3 top officials in the state government were convicted and sent to jail. The Governor avoided the same fate thus far by controlling the investigatory process. Hell, one State Senator in the act of embezzling public healthcare funds spent nearly as much on take out sushi as Bob McDonnell was accused of taking in total. The US… Read more »
The doctors and educators are getting rich off of entitlements that grow at 8-10% annual compound interest. The educators are crazy and greedy. The doctors are merely greedy. The public employees, unionized or not, have bribed legislatures into granting them salaries and pensions that will bankrupt the states and municipalities. The rank and file are likely too dull to comprehend the problem they have created. The union leaders got theirs already and don’t care. The bankers of course profit off every transaction. It reminds me of the old Soviet joke: A banker, an educrat, a hospital administrator, and a public… Read more »
re: “The doctors … are getting rich off of entitlements that grow at 8-10% annual compound interest. (snip) The doctors are merely greedy. el_baboso You are wrong here. Doctors in solo & small solo practices are being financially ruined currently. Declining reimbursements and mandated electronic medical records have increased overhead to the point where MDs are forced to join groups and become employees of hospitals to survive as we speak. My internist this summer closed his office after 25 years and moved to another state to join a large group practice and I was offered a Nurse Practitioner in his… Read more »
I’m a doctor who was herded into group practice and eventually found myself working for one of the university-based mega-corporations with multiple hospitals and practices. The problem is not with individual physicians, who are largely ignorant of the history of their own profession, but in the system that the combination of organized medicine in concert with government intervention has fostered. A good read regarding this is in chapter nine of Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. The problem I have had in getting my own colleagues to understand the nature of the problem is that what history they do know… Read more »
Who is pocketing the cash then? The rate of growth of health care entitlements is part of the public record. I don’t see too many doctors and hospital administrators living in the neighborhoods that I and my friends live in. i have known a couple of docs who left their practices to get a pay bump as administrators. I’ve known a few who have relocated successful practices in middle class areas to go make bank in wealthy areas. I guess that you could try to differentiate the medical bureaucracy from the doctors, but my experience is that doctors run the… Read more »
Who is pocketing the cash then? Good question, and someone should be able to figure it out from freely available info. My guess is the pharmaceutical companies (see e.g Mylan), hospital ancillaries (see grief counselors and such), and FDA stonewalling, foot dragging and cronyism account for a big chunk of it.
I will point my finger at the trio of regulators, insurers, and lawyers. The Insurers collect premiums both from health insurance, and from liability insurance, from both individual practitioners, and institutions. In some specialties insurance can approach half a million a year. This must be passed on. Outsized liability and legal costs are also a significant factor in pharmaceutical costs.
Doctors are still well paid, but they spend less time on the job. The work is distributed to mid level practitioners. Dealing with regulatory compliance requires many more employees per physician than was necessary in the past. And the oversight necessary to keep up at the hospital and insurance levels also mandates ungodly amounts of employees and money. The monster as a whole is sucking up the money. Making the monster more efficient is hopeless. It needs to be destroyed. The only way to do this is to abolish licensing.
And destroy third-party payer! Corporate medicine, the beast born of that corrupt scumbag Bennett, is destroying providers.
Why aren’t hospitals and doctors carrying large numbers of low-cost loans, a sort of medical GMAC? (GM’s finance arm made the money; cars, like college degrees, were just the excuse to sell loans.)
Without licensing the entire regime falls apart, and all kinds of alternatives come into being. Right now there are no alternatives because the regime has evolved into a sclerotic position. The presuppositions of the managerial class are the only drivers.
Sorry, what are the “entitlements” that doctors get that grow at that rate? Please name them. Thanks.
The main benefit to doctors is being members of a protected class that does not have to compete to survive and has a high minimum income in exchange for essentially working as government functionaries.
Medicare. Medicaid. Obamacare. I recommend usgovermentspending.com, which has some good charts. The very first chart on Medicare spending shows that spending has increased from about $0.3T per annum in 2005 to well over $0.5T in 2015. While Medicare spending growth has slowed in recent years, that is masking the growth in Obamacare which was projected to cost about $200B per year in 2014 before the current insurance death spiral began. (Source: Heritage Foundation) I’m not going to quibble over the definition of “entitlement.” Government medical expenditures are classified as entitlements. Doctors and hospitals are rational economic animals. Their prices correlate… Read more »
I know this is reckless talk, but a military coup might be the last true option if we don’t get a Trump reprieve this November. Who’s going to prosecute the government under RICO? The government?
Except the military is almost completely compromised now. Political and PC through and through. They’ve made it a very hostile environment for those ” not on board with change” to stay in. I’d wager, less than 20% of the officer corps could be trusted … and it pains me to state that.
“First you need honest people”
Dad
Society always gets the government it deserves (i.e. one which springs forth from the inherent character of the nation). If the government is corrupt, that’s a reflection of the people. The fabric of the “American character” seems tattered beyond repair. As Kirk pointed out many times, we may experience an Augustan Age of restoration in our time. But the trend is definitely toward decline.
My parents live in a lily-white, upper-middle-class gated community filled primarily by middle-aged and old people.
People don’t trust enough to leave their cars or houses unlocked.
To quote the proprietor of this blog site, this will not end well.
Want to hear something funny?I forgot to close the front door at home, when we went to get chicken food today. This is in the suburbs. Everything was fine when we got home.
We have another place about ten miles away. It’s surrounded by county parks and a wildlife refugee. If we don’t have someone living there, the thieves break in all the time. I’ve never seen anything like it.
I have a place like that. Whenever friends come over to shoot I collect all the shell casings that they don’t want for reloads and distribute them around the gates. I’ve also left some steel targets with penetration holes in them sitting near the front of the property. That way if folks have any thoughts about doing things they have to also give some thought as to the consequences.
Slightly different tone here at the Zblog on Mr. Trump than just a month ago. I said then and now that Trump’s mission is to restore the two party system. His mission can only be accomplished by first smashing the GOP into tiny pieces. Reformation is impossible the powers that be are too deeply entrenched, virtually all “Republicans must be swept away. The new GOP may carry the same name but must be new from the ground up. The other great revolution must be a Free Press. Public or political class corruption? What came first the chicken or the egg?… Read more »
At this point a Caesar would be a relief. At least we would know what comes next.
A major problem with government is incentives. The private sector is rewarded for efficiently satisfying customers. The public sector is rewarded by loyalty to superiors, and amassing and centralizing power. While bureaucracy grows in both, in the private sector there are pruning mechanisms – units get sold or eliminated etc. In the public sector there are no pruning mechanisms. Every page, every sentence, every word of legislation and regulation is fertilizer that enables public sector bureaucrats to grow the bureaucracy and the power of the state. Public sector bureaucrats are in fact punished for efficiency and problem solving – they… Read more »
You don’t. You can’t. You shit can them all. They are nothing but a drain on society covered in the mantle of “public servants.”
“Their unwillingness to even try to thwart the rise of these vulgar grifters from the Ozarks”
Hillary is not from the Ozarks, but from Chicago. Bill just wants to have sex, Hillary really wants power.Sort of like her former boss who is from Hawaii, but spent a lot of time in Chicago, learning to be a south side of Chicago style politician.
NOBODY did anything. If you don’t do anything your are complicit and even endorsing their crimes. Take for instance Comey….. Congress….. YOU!!!
As my Dad used to say…..”The only thing I have against Graft….Is I’m Not Getting Any”!
“The truly frightening thing is that the only institution the public trusts is the military.”
You mean the outfit that a week or two ago declared it couldn’t account for $6.5 trillion? The outfit that has been “just following orders, sir” to send people 7000 miles away to fight and die in vain in perpetual wars based on lies against a tactic, for the sole benefit of MIC and bankster profits? The outfit that has been at the vanguard of some of the most grotesque social engineering in the history of the country?
Sounds more like the “Low-Info State.”
LOL==her being a liar is not the problem.
the corruption from the DOJ on down IS THE PROBLEM.
comey refused to apply the existing law and penalties.
he went to the trouble of listing the violations, directly associated them WITH HER NAME and then refused to apply the penalties,
intent is not contained within these codes and statutes,
the corruption was made evident again.
what better be obvious is that we are ruled by imperial scum, a cartel of imperial scum operating above the law.
wake up.