Category Archives: Culture

Free Trade Fantasies

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Yesterday the guy who wrote this piece tried picking a fight with me on twitter over my observation that some trade deals are good and some are bad.  Libertarians hear the phrase “free trade” and they fall into a trance-like state. I think if you labeled dog poop “free trade” they would gobble it up like candy. That would be after they name-dropped David Ricardo and Adam Smith.

I’ve never had a twitter fight and I would certainly be willing to give it a shot. The trouble is started by using uptalk which makes me think of punching people in the face. There’s nothing that screams smug pussy more than slapping a question mark onto a statement. I’ve made it a rule to ignore people who do it. Reading his twitter feed, I get the sense he wears his ignorance like a shield and there is no point in debating such people.

But, I don’t know him or his work so I could be all wrong. Still, life is too short to waste time on finding out. My sense is his site is mostly libertarian spank material and I have no interest in it. I know all the arguments and much of what libertarians say is reasonable, but a lot of it is nonsense too. Humans are not moist robots and our relationships are not transactional. Economic man has never existed and that’s why libertarianism has never been tried.

Anyway, after all the red Team-Blue Team stuff, he laments that many Republicans and Tea Partiers think trade has hurt the country. To libertarians, this is like learning that half the country believes in witchcraft. As I wrote earlier, the phrase “free trade” has a narcotic effect on these people.

Shockingly, the former Half Sigma has a post up that gets at the problem with libertarianism in general and free trade in particular. I don’t think his idea for socialized banking is a great idea, but the point about pure markets existing only in the imagination is important. Political systems work as long as they comport with reality. Libertarianism works only in a world with perfect economic men ruled by saints.

Similarly, free trade is a boon to both countries as long as both countries have the cultural ethics of Canada. That way, people in both parties can expect their claims to be upheld in both countries. When one party to a contract is not holding up his end, the state must step in and enforce the contract. When that party’s home government is just as corrupt or incompetent, you get something other than free trade.

Not all countries have Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. Canada is not going to invest much into competing with America because both countries are culturally similar so cooperation is natural and mutually beneficial. China, on the other hand, is vastly different from the US. They see American and Americans as competitors, even adversaries.

That’s not to say there should be no trade with China. Like progressives, libertarians tend to see things in black and white. You’re either in favor of unfettered trade with everyone or you’re a close minded protectionist. Only libertarians and lunatics think this way. Most people fall into the middle area that thinks prudent trade deals with friendly countries are good, while reckless trade deals with rogue nations are bad.

All of this is germane to the TPP deal Obama is pushing. This deal is mostly a give-away to globalopolies, rather than a trade deal. The reason it is a secret deal is to keep people from seeing what’s in it, obviously. You don’t do that if you think the details are going to win you praise from the public. But, a lot of it has been leaked through various channels and it is what one would expect from a deal drawn up by global corporations.

It’s a reminder that being for free trade is like being for leprechauns riding unicorns. All of these deals should be looked at skeptically. The debate is not between free trade and no trade. The debate is over over how much power we want to cede to global corporations and foreign governments. Sometimes it makes sense to do deals with less than sterling countries. Sometimes the interests of multinationals coincides with those of Americans.

It can only be decided on a case by case basis.

 

The Death of Pop

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One of moonbat friends sent this to me today. Being a moonbat, he stopped at the nice graph that he most likely did not understand. What he cared about was the headline. As a moonbat, he worships black people (from a great distance, of course) and he naturally assumes non-moonbats are racists who hate black people. That’s why he sent it to me. He thought it would bother me that hip-hop the most important thing since pockets.

Being a normal, I already assumed that pop music was mostly black. Every day of my life I hear heavy base coming from a crapbox, driven by a white kid or an Asian. Rock music largely died out when black people stopped playing instruments in the 1970’s. Hip-hop went mainstream in the late seventies with The Sugarhill Gang. You can count on one hand the number of black guys playing instruments in rock bands since then.

Anyway, not being a moonbat I looked at that story about the evolution of pop music and wondered what that has meant for sales. A little looking and I found this graph:

Interestingly, music sales started to fall off once hip-hop broke through to the mainstream. It continued to slide until CD’s got everyone to re-buy their music collections. The higher quality medium probably drove sales too. I know the first time I heard a CD (U2) I was stunned by the quality and immediately went out and bought a bunch of them.

Music companies were smart enough to know this was a great way to re-sell their catalogs, which they did. All of the big bands from the 60’s and 70’s not only released their old stuff, they released stuff that had not made the cut the first time. After a decade it started to fall apart as people learned how to rip mp3’s and pass them around to friends and strangers on-line.

Once you net out the boost from digitizing and repackaging music from the 60’s and 70’s, hip-hop has been a disaster for the pop music business. Demographics has something to do with it, but you cannot get around the fact that sales are at all-time lows, despite the country having more than a third more people. There’s a lesson in those numbers that extends beyond the music business.

Something similar happened with the NBA after the Jordan years. Thinking the key to prosperity was to embrace the hip-hop culture, the league encouraged the players to go full gangster rap. The result was a cratering of their TV audience, two labor stoppages and a decline in revenue from which they have yet to recover. Maybe it was just a coincidence, maybe not, but the sport still has an image problem.

 

Ross Douthat and Changing the Subject

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Here is an interesting article from a fashionable conservative.in question. I’m told Ross Douthat, in addition to having an odd name, is a reasonable fellow that reasonable people should read, if they wish be thought of as reasonable. The Conventional Right loves quoting him. Pseudo-intellectual poseurs like Ezra Klein often cheer him. Douthat’s presence at the NYTimes tells me he likes money more than being right, but there’s no crime in that. Pay me enough and I start writing paeans to Obama.

Still, experience says you have to treat the non-liberals in the pages of the times a little different than other people you read. They often employ an esoteric language that allows them to go unnoticed by the Cult, but point out inconvenient bits of reality. It’s a weird compromise and I really don’t know how these people do it. They say prisoners in the worst gulags get used to it in time so maybe that’s it.

The last time I followed certain of my colleagues into an argument about poverty, economics and culture, it took severalthousandwords to find my way back out. Thistime I’m going to try a briefer intervention, stressing again that I think conversationsabout policing are a more productive response to what’s happened in Baltimore than leaping up a level to the persistent right-left argument about the welfare state. But since that debate is happening no matter what, it might be helpful to describe a framework in which I think these arguments should take place, because quite often the two sides can’t even decide on where the argument should start. So here, for your consideration, are two premises about the last fifty years of American history.

One of the byproducts of having a religious cult take over your country is everything gets jammed into a binary model. The hive minded can only view the world in relation to the walls of the hive. You’re either inside or outside. Even those not in the dominant cult adapt to this framework.

1.) The modern welfare state has succeeded in substantially cutting our country’s poverty rate. This is a point that both right and left sometimes obscure, the right because it complicates a simple “we fought poverty, and poverty won” narrative about the Great Society, the left because it complicates claims that Reagan or Gingrich gutted welfare spending and crushed the fortunes of the poor. But the basic evidence seems very convincing: Whether it’s Scott Winship analyzing the numbers from the center-right or Harvard’s Christopher Jencks doing the same from the center-left, you can see dramatic reductions in the poverty rate since the 1960s, with various public programs, means-tested and otherwise, pretty clearly playing a substantial role.

This is a favorite tactic of Progressive types. “If both sides agree then it must be the truth!” This is a logical fallacy as there’s nothing in the premise to even suggest that both sides can only agree when they are right. Both sides are habitually wrong about all sorts of things so it’s just as likely that they are wrong now. Of course, the point of this bit of rhetorical jujitsu is to cut-off debate. Just accept it and shut up.

If you dig into the source material, they are very weak cases. Yes, our poor people are less poor and we have, during that period of declining poverty, spent trillions on poverty programs, but the causality is debatable. All anyone can say for certain is we spent a lot of money and all Americans are richer than forty years ago. In fact, the whole earth is richer.

2.) The modern welfare state has not succeeded in producing clear improvements in opportunity, mobility and human flourishing. Recall that the hope for the Great Society’s social programs, from the vantage point of 1964, was not merely to raise the incomes of poorer Americans. Their architects also aspired (to quote the chief of them) to make America “a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents … where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness … where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” And if you try to translate these soaring hopes to quantifiable indicators, the impact of public spending has not been at all what was hoped. The poor have more money, but their chances at upward mobility are persistently weak and basically unchanged relative to several generations ago. Schools have more money, but academic performance looks stagnant and big racial gaps endure. Cities have more money, but crime rates are only now returning to the levels of the early 1960s, and today’s peace has been purchased by incarceration on a scale that would have seemed horrific (because it is) a half-century ago.

This was always the argument against anti-poverty programs. It is feature of progressive thinking to forget all of the arguments from the past. The primary argument against the Great Society was that handing people checks did not address their poverty. In fact, paying people to be poor would only keep them poor. Here we are fifty years on and Goldwater was right.

These two realities, taken together, do not necessarily point toward either a left-wing or a right-wing diagnosis of our situation. You can acknowledge both realities and believe that the key issues are all economic, that the welfare state just needed to be even stronger still (and various other economic policies more worker-friendly) to make up for the devastating impact of global capitalism on wages and job security and the devastating social impact of rising inequality. Or you can acknowledge both and believe that the programs themselves are often part of the problem, that they raise incomes but also increase dependency, encourage idleness, crowd out the basic institutions of civil society, and so on through the libertarian critique. Or you can acknowledge both and argue (as I have, occasionally) that the cultural revolutions of the 1960s go a long way toward explaining how the poor in our era can have more money but less access to other basic human goods. (And therefore, because those goods are connected to economic advancement, less money than they might have had absent those revolutions.)  Or you can talk, reasonably and non-ideologically, about the multiplicity of causes behind all broad-based social trends.

But I think just getting to the point where we could all agree that 1) public spending can make people less poor and 2) public spending hasn’t delivered on the Great Society’s social promises would be a big win for reasonable debate. Because that combination of realities, and the various questions that it raises, is why this argument exists, why it’s genuinely interesting, and why it isn’t going away anytime soon.

This last bit is a dopey version of what you see from conventional conservatives after a race riot like we had last week. It is a systematic and studied avoidance of unpleasant realities. Conservatives are so afraid of being called racists, they turn themselves into knots trying to prove they never for a minute noticed that all the rioters were black.

This tendency in the hands of progressives is aimed at shifting the focus away from the fact that they have been in charge for more than half a century and none of the prophesies have come true. West Baltimore is worse now than it was at the start of the Great Society. Acknowledging that means questioning the one true faith and that can never happen so let’s talk about something else.

The Messiah and David Brooks

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I wrote the other day of the religious aspects of Cultural Marxism. In fact, I find it more difficult to the use the term “Cultural Marxism” the more I think about the outlook of our cultural elites. Cultural Marxism assumes a consciousness of purpose, an end in mind, when I don’t see evidence of that in these people. What I see is a grasping in the dark for what, no one can seem to describe.

This David Brooks column is what I mean.

Lately it seems as though every few months there’s another urban riot and the nation turns its attention to urban poverty. And in the midst of every storm, there are people crying out that we should finally get serious about this issue. This time it was Jon Stewart who spoke for many when he said: “And you just wonder sometimes if we’re spending a trillion dollars to rebuild Afghanistan’s schools, like, we can’t build a little taste down Baltimore way. Like is that what’s really going on?”

The audience applauded loudly, and it’s a nice sentiment, but it’s not really relevant.

The problem is not lack of attention, and it’s not mainly lack of money. Since 1980 federal antipoverty spending has exploded. As Robert Samuelson of The Washington Post has pointed out, in 2013 the federal government spent nearly $14,000 per poor person. If you simply took that money and handed it to the poor, a family of four would have a household income roughly twice the poverty rate.

Yet over the last 30 years the poverty rate has scarcely changed.

To be perfectly honest, I think Brooks is a gold plated phony. By that I mean he has carefully cultivated a persona that satisfies the sort of people who run the NYTimes, PBS and tax-dollar funded think tanks. He makes a living flattering people who have the money to keep him in the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed.

That said, he can write and that lets him break the bad news to his patrons in a way that allows them to accept it. In this case, it has to do with the multi-generational war on biological reality, otherwise known as the War on Poverty. This project has largely been a Baby Boomer project to rebuild America into an egalitarian utopia.

As Brooks notes, it has been mostly a failure. I think he overstates the success, but there’s an argument that it has done some good. All of those government employees would be living in squalor if not for the trillions in social welfare transfers. The same can be said of the vast war machine we have financed for seventy years. I know families that are now third generation defense contractor.

The sadness in the tone of his piece is what is worth noting. As the Boomers begin falling into the abyss, they have to look around and wonder if it was worth it. If you were born in 1950, for example, you grew up in America that is vastly different than today. It’s one your grandchildren will never enjoy. The trillions spent knocking down what you inherited could maybe have been spent more wisely.

I don’t think Brooks and his coevals in the managerial class are just looking at the material side of the ledger. They are looking at the spiritual side. They have spent their whole lives waiting for the prophesies to come true and we are no closer to the egalitarian paradise than fifty years ago when much of this madness began.

In a fantastic interview that David Simon of “The Wire” gave to Bill Keller for The Marshall Project, he describes that, even in poorest Baltimore, there once were informal rules of behavior governing how cops interacted with citizens — when they’d drag them in and when they wouldn’t, what curse words you could say to a cop and what you couldn’t. But then the code dissolved. The informal guardrails of life were gone, and all was arbitrary harshness.

That’s happened across many social spheres — in schools, families and among neighbors. Individuals are left without the norms that middle-class people take for granted. It is phenomenally hard for young people in such circumstances to guide themselves.

Yes, jobs are necessary, but if you live in a neighborhood, as Gray did, where half the high school students don’t bother to show up for school on a given day, then the problems go deeper.

The world is waiting for a thinker who can describe poverty through the lens of social psychology. Until the invisible bonds of relationships are repaired, life for too many will be nasty, brutish, solitary and short.

Put another way, the organic ways in which society managed the unproductive classes were blasted to bits by a bunch of people convinced they knew better than the dozens of generations that came before them. The proposed replacement for those ways have utterly failed, meaning everything guys like Brooks grew up believing was nonsense after all. Meathead is learning that Archie was mostly right.

I have to chuckle at the last paragraph. Brooks and his coevals are in the pumpkin patch waiting for the “thinker who can describe poverty through the lens of social psychology” because it will take a super genius to unriddle this problem! After all, if the credentialed members of the managerial elite are stumped, well, no mortal can solve this problem.

Steve Sailer is working from the premise that we are going through a replay of the late sixties and early seventies. The coalition of fringes is once again blowing apart and taking a bunch of us with it. There’s some truth to that, but history only sort of repeats itself.

Forty years ago as the optimism of the sixties devolved into the cynicism of the seventies, the faithful still had communism, socialism and Cultural Marxism to keep them going. The spiritual side was still there, even if the material side was a bust. Today, there is a spiritual exhaustion to go along with the material disasters.

No one knows what to do next. So they wait for the messiah.

It’s About To Get Uglier

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Baltimore has always been full of tension, by nature of the historical arrangements that evolved following the Civil Rights Movement. The uneasy coexistence after Reconstruction between blacks and whites south of the Mason-Dixon Line was held together via legal and private discrimination. Whites stayed in their areas and blacks stayed in their areas. Both sides policed their side of the line, figuratively if not always literally.

The Civil Rights Movement swung a wrecking ball through that arrangement. After all, the northern whites were sure their way of handling blacks was superior. In the north they herded blacks into urban ghettos. That way they could pretend to treat blacks as their equals because they were never within eyesight of them.

So, the northern whites swung the wrecking ball through the Southern way of dealing with blacks, by banning public and private discrimination. In Baltimore, this resulted in a thing called “block busting.” Jewish neighborhoods would suddenly sellout to blacks or their intended landlords. The surrounding blocks would be quick to sell at a discount and whole areas of the city went from white to black.

Since the old covenants against selling to blacks or renting to blacks were no longer enforceable, there was no way for these old neighborhoods to hang tough against the onslaught so they fled to the county. To this day state regulators in Maryland try to trap real estate agents into making discriminatory statements. They now say these things in code.

That’s how things evolved in the Baltimore area. The phrase “good schools” means few blacks. The word “diversity” means lots of blacks. Those with anything on the ball have fled the city and moved to the county. There are sections of Baltimore county that are very black, but very safe and middle class. There are areas that are very white, as well.

The city has become an urban reservation, for the most part. There are parts that managed to remain white, but they are upper middle class areas where home prices prevented block busting. There are very wealthy areas as well, and the small gentrified areas near the tourist traps. Otherwise, the city is a holding pen for people no one wants in their neighborhood.

This has worked fairly well for the area. The cops keep the tourist areas running which brings money into the city. That also keeps the state involved, hoping to avoid the fate of Detroit. Having massive Federal spending in the state due to proximity to the Imperial Capital has financed these arrangements. West Baltimore operates as a giant reservation system, holding the pre- and post-convict population of the city.

Now, the Soros Army is at the city walls demanding the whole system be dismantled. They have no replacement for the current arrangements. They are here for the mayhem. These incidents are just billionaires playing human chess with the hoi polloi. Imagine Soros betting the Koch Bothers a dollar over whether he can burn Baltimore to the ground.

Unlike Ferguson, Baltimore is not a small town with small town police and small town criminals. Baltimore is a big city with big time criminals. The city is called Bodymore Murderville for a reason. The locals are proud of that label for a reason too. More important, there are rich people with assets in the city they want protected – by the police.

The cops are already reporting that things are getting hot on the streets, following the announcement that the six cops will be hanged in accordance with the demands of the Soros Army. The rational thing here is for the cops to simply withdraw, letting the animals kill as many libertarians and anarchists as they can find. That would do us all a favor, but that will not happen.

“I have been to five calls today and three of those five calls for service; I have been challenged to a fight. Some of them I blew off but one of them almost got ugly. I don’t want anybody to say that I did not tell them what is going on. This is no intel this is really what’s going on the street. This is my formal notification. It is about to get ugly.”

Here’s something the news will not report. That’s a cop patrolling a mostly white area and he is a white cop. The whites in the city are frightened out of their minds right now and the white cops are now paralyzed. White cops will be banging out sick, taking vacation and   applying for jobs outside the city.

Things are going to get very ugly.

Bioethics is a Farce

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If you are a Christian, you believe the ethics and morality of your faith are transcendent. Muslims believe that the gobbledygook in their holy book is revealed truth and applicable at all times and all places. The Spartans believed the gods Ares and Apollo favored the Spartans and their ethics. Being a strong warrior was the ultimate good so leaving defective infants in the woods or tossing them off a cliff was considered perfectly logical and ethical.

Even murder has been, to some degree, within the bounds of acceptable in Western society. The weregeld in the Salic Code was literally the price of a man. Kill a man and you paid his family or clan a fee. There was no distinction between murder and manslaughter so it did not matter if you accidentally killed the man or hunted him down, the fee was the same.

The point here is that ethics and morality are not universal in humankind. There are common threads, but the prevailing religion of the society codifies the attitudes of the people. If the people’s culture permits sex with children then sex with children will be ethical according to their religion. If the culture of the people prohibits adultery, then you get a all sorts of religious and ethical prohibitions against adultery like forcing women to wear blankets over their heads in public.

In modern America, it is more difficult to stake out the ethical turf because our religion is invisible to us. The people in charge are all adherents to Cultural Marxism, but they not only deny it, they don’t think of it as a religion. Instead, they think “science” and “maths” lead them to their ethics. The results are these weird debates like the one over gene editing.

A bioethical firestorm erupted last week when Chinese researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University published research in the journal Protein & Cell detailing how they had tried to use the CRISPR gene-editing tool to change the genomes of 86 human embryos. The team, led by the gene-function researcher Junjiu Huang, used embryos from IVF clinics that had been double-fertilized, giving them three sets of genes instead of the usual two. Such triploid embryos cannot grow into babies.

The researchers sought to make changes in a gene that causes the sometimes fatal blood disorder beta-thalassemia. The aim is to find out just how effectively and efficiently CRISPR can make changes to genes in human embryos, with the ultimate goal of altering embryos such that any subsequently born babies will be disease-free. This is known as germ-line modification, since the corrected gene will be passed down to subsequent progeny.

The Chinese scientists essentially ignored recent calls for a moratorium on editing human reproductive cells and embryos. The month before their paper appeared, Sciencerecommended that such research be “strongly discourage[d]” while the “societal, environmental, and ethical implications of such activity are discussed among scientific and governmental organizations.” Meanwhile, Nature had editorialized that “genome editing in human embryos using current technologies could have unpredictable effects on future generations. This makes it dangerous and ethically unacceptable….At this early stage, scientists should agree not to modify the DNA of human reproductive cells.” Some 40 countries have preemptively banned germline genetic engineering. (The United States is not among them.)

Not too surprisingly, both Science and Nature reportedly declined to publish Junjiu Huang’s study on “ethical” grounds.

The research naturally provoked some bioethical handwringing. “No researcher has the moral warrant to flout the globally widespread policy agreement against altering the human germline,” declared Marcy Darnovsky, the executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society. “The medical risks and social dangers of human germline modification cannot be overstated.” She further urged, “We need to act immediately to strengthen the global policy agreements that put human germline modification off limits.” In The Christian Science Monitor, University of Wisconsin at Madison bioethicist Alta Charo asked, “Do we really want to have the power not just to select among the choices given to us by nature, but to create entirely new choices of our own specification?”

Catholics have little problem with these problems, having had 2,000 years to work out the details of the nature of man. Most Christians, getting their ethics from the Catholics, have an easy answer, too. Having a supernatural source for your ethics naturally makes these things easier to sort. You look in the holy book or ask the holy man and you have your answer.

In the materialist world of today, the utopians always fall on the side of trying to perfect life on earth. That means anything that can be done should be done. Eugenics, after all, was about “fixing” the mistakes of nature by eliminating from the breeding stock those people deemed unfit. This lack of a limiting principle means anything goes. The only check is the long hangover from the Christian era.

That’s what makes the very idea of bioethics laughable to me. From what authority do these people derive their authority? They can’t point to science as their authority for obvious reasons. God is dead so he has nothing to say on these matters. Ultimately, bioethics is just the opinion of men and the loudest voices will prevail.

When it comes to altering the human genome, all the megaphones are on the utopians side so that’s what will become “ethical” in the coming years. How that will unfold is a mystery, but my hunch is no one reading this will live long enough to see a race of super intelligent chimps enslaving humanity.

Africa: Corruption

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I’ve been posting about Africa this week mostly because I find it interesting. My guess is most of my readers find the topic a bit dull. Never let it be said you are not getting your money’s worth here at The Z Blog. My interest is mostly anthropological. Africa has been populated by humans longer than anywhere on earth. More important, Africa has not changed a whole lot since modern man debuted on this planet.

Of course, there’s the fact that a billion Africans are sitting around their hut dreaming of life in your neighborhood. My guess is ten percent of them will make their way to Europe and the US over the next 25 years. I’m probably being conservative. The US political class would gladly take 100 million Africans tomorrow. Either way, it’s probably a good idea to get learn a bit about our soon to be fellow “citizens.’

In prior posts, I’ve highlighted the fact that Africa is poor, disease ridden and full of stupid, violent people. That’s not a great recipe for building a competent modern society. One of the great measures of a society is the corruption index. It’s a measure of social trust. Low trust societies cannot engage in complex social investment. High trust societies can create large-scale social institutions.

Here are the numbers for Africa. The lower the number the higher the corruption. As a touchstone, the Anglosphere is in the high 70’s.

Country Name Corruption Country Name Corruption
Algeria 36 Malawi 33
Angola 19 Mali 32
Benin 39 Mauritania 30
Botswana 63 Mauritius 52
Burkina Faso 38 Morocco 39
Burundi 20 Mozambique 31
Cameroon 27 Namibia 49
Cape Verde 57 Niger 35
Central African Republic 24 Nigeria 27
Chad 22 Republic of Sudan 11
Comoros 26 Republic of the Congo 23
DR of the Congo 22 Rwanda 49
Djibouti 34 São Tomé 42
Egypt 37 Senegal 43
Equatorial Guinea 19 Seychelles 55
Eritrea 18 Sierra Leone 31
Ethiopia 33 Somalia 8
Gabon 37 South Africa 44
Ghana 48 Sudan 11
Guinea 25 Swaziland 43
Guinea-Bissau 19 Tanzania 31
Ivory Coast 32 The Gambia 29
Kenya 25 Togo 29
Lesotho 49 Tunisia 40
Liberia 37 Uganda 26
Libya 18 Zambia 38
Madagascar 28 Zimbabwe 21

If you take a simple average, the typical African country is about as corrupt as Mexico. The difference is that Mexico is right next door to a giant economic power with a very high level of social trust. The typical African country is surrounded by countries that are bordering on anarchy. Place like Sudan and Somalia are in the state of nature.

If you are living in one of these countries, you cannot trust anyone from the state. Call the police and they will want a bribe or they will rob you. Go to court and the judge will demand a bribe from you and your opponent. Even if you pay, he may still rob you. The only thing you can really count on are your blood relations and even there the wise man is cautious.

Now, you talk to your cousin Tongo who is back visiting from France and you are going to think that maybe he has it great. The cops don’t ask for bribes. The government gives him free stuff. If someone steals his free stuff he can go to the authorities and they will try to get his stuff back. Even better, there are all sorts of “public” things that are magically maintained and they even work!

The problem is your new neighbors will most likely bring those old habits with them. Africa is a low-trust world because it is full of Africans. Transplant them to Sweden and they are not going to take up curling and start investing themselves in traditional Swedish social life. Europe and probably America is going to become much more African over the next 25 years.

The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name

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The riots in Baltimore the other day were pretty mild by the standards of these things. The riots in the late sixties burned out big chunks of major cities, including Baltimore. This riot broke a few windows, mostly in neighborhoods that can’t get much worse. A few broken windows is not going to change much. The big damage was to the tourist trade as the news made it appear that the city was just sacked by the Goths. As a result conventions have been cancelled and who knows how many holiday plans have been altered in order to avoid the city.

The funny thing about these things is we have three narratives. There’s the one from the Cult of Modern Liberalism we get from just about everywhere in the media. That’s the one where the poor, dispossessed blacks have been brutalized by the Pale Penis People to the point where they revolt. Their peaceful protest against the PPP is turned into a riot by overzealous cops, the same cops who killed the poor innocent black body, this time named Freddy Gray.

The trouble with this narrative is it is never supported by the facts. In most of these cases, the truth makes the liberal narrative appear insultingly stupid. Michael Brown was a giant thug. The guy in New York was a career criminal. Freddy Gray appears to have died by accident. Of course, Baltimore is a black city run by blacks and it has a black police force. Whatever problems they have are not the fault of the blue-eyed devil.

Conservative Inc. swings into action with its own spin on things. This piece by Kevin Williamson is fairly typical of their role in the public drama. They point out that the people in charge are all members of the CML and have been following all of the favored policies of the Left for generations. Their argument is that the riots and the squalor are the logical result of liberal policy making. Kevin’s article makes that case in the specific as well as the general, referencing other dilapidated cities.

The problem here is other cities have extremely liberal governments yet they manage to avoid the mayhem we see in Baltimore or Detroit. Kevin briefly mentions San Francisco, but prefers to focus on the black arrests rates, as if they are somehow unwarranted or out of line with black arrest rates nationwide. He’s ham-handedly trying to argue that the pasty-faced lefties running these cities are bigots. The fact that the Hispanics and Asians seem to be doing just fine in these places is conveniently avoided.

Then there’s the other narrative, the one no one dares say for fear of being labeled a monster. On the television you see young black males mugging for the cameras as they commit pointless acts of mayhem. You see blacks running from burning stores with arms full of goods. Of course, the liquor store is robbed and you see blacks carrying away the liquor and beer. These scenes are narrated by the same old voices saying the same old things. To spice it up, they interview a local, who mumbles through the interview, confirming everything you see on TV.

This, of course, is the simple reality of places like Baltimore, Detroit, East St. Louis and so on. When the government banned private discrimination in in the 1960’s, whites fled the cities to avoid having to send their kids to school with blacks. Responsible and intelligent blacks tried to keep it together, but they threw in the towel in the 80’s and 90’s when crack turned American cities into war zones. They headed for the suburbs to live with the whites. What’s left in these urban reservations are low-IQ violent nitwits.

Of course, no one is allowed to say any of this in public. Racial solidarity requires blacks, who know better, to defend their dimwitted brothers rioting in the streets. Liberal whites think there’s profit in the riots so they cast about for a black hat on whom to pin the blame. Crime thinkers like John Derbyshire believe that the truth of things will eventually will out. I think John is right that reality will always win eventually, but I know I’ll never live to see it. Everyone alive today is too deeply invested in the myth that if we just turn the right knobs and push the right buttons, biology will be overcome. Fantasy is powerful stuff.

The fantasists may be onto something though. Baltimore has about 200,000 people that are useless. The males just want to commit crimes, get high and screw. The females just want to get high and screw. The city would love to ship them off somewhere, but somewhere does not want them either. John Derbyshire’s dream of race realism is not going to change the fact we have a lot of useless people and nowhere to send them.

Maybe we’re better off leaving reality as the hate that dare not speaks its name. The fantasy keeps everyone committed to papering over reality and doubling down after each failure. Ferguson will fade away and those people will go back to doing what they were doing before they got famous. Baltimore will go back to being Baltimore. The dogs will bark and the caravan will move on.

The Ghetto Welcomes You

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Baltimore calls itself “Charm City” because they used to have a sense of humor. The city is one of the least charming places on earth and it used to be a lot worse. At its peak, Baltimore was a gray, dumpy industrial town. Today, it’s Detroit on the Chesapeake with a better tourist area. Otherwise, Baltimore is an unrelenting shithole that should probably be given the Dresden treatment.

That tourist area is a big draw, particularly the ballpark. I’ve been to most of the ballparks in the US and Camden Yards is right up their near the top of the list. The park is a great place to watch a game and the surrounding blocks offer some great places to eat and drink. The Federal architecture is some of the best you will see.

Beyond that, and much closer than the tourists realize, are my people. Most Americans just don’t know what’s lurking in many of our cities. They stay off of streets named Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Everyone knows where to avoid, even if they don’t exactly know why. It’s as if their mental map has these places labeled “here be monsters.”

But, urban reservations are not a great way to keep the blacks under control unless you are willing to enforce the borders. If you let the wildlings break free of their areas and get into the tourist areas, you get scenes like last night. The hoodlums and corner boys will join in the fun and start doing what they do best, cause mayhem.

Baltimore is a good example of what happened when Progressives are allowed to rule unchecked. West Baltimore is a scary black ghetto and the main hub for narcotics trafficking in the region. If you ever want to understand why I think libertarians are fools, go to West Baltimore, but do it in the morning hours when the locals are asleep.

The rest of the city is a mix of gentrified hipsterville, old industrial and un-workingclass whites. The poor white areas are just poor white areas. Modest crime, mostly drugs, but otherwise no trouble to anyone. The hipster areas are the tax base and the future of the city, it is hoped, but they are bounded by the more rugged areas of the city.

Unlike New York or Washington, Baltimore can’t ship their problem blacks out to the suburbs. Whites fled Baltimore in the 60’s and 70’s and they are wise to this tactic. Some of it has been done Ferguson style by preying on the poorer white suburbs just outside the city, but it is hard to relocate 300,000 blacks without people noticing. The result is they remain in the urban reservation system built up fifty or more years ago.

In years past, Baltimore has tried to import Hispanics into the city hoping they would drive out the blacks. The last white Mayor and current presidential candidate spent years begging Hispanics to move to Baltimore. This worked in DC, but there was a close suburb able to take the refugees. Prince Georges County absorbed the blacks from DC on Section 8 vouchers. This mostly happened in the housing boom, which is why PG County was one of the hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis.

But, Baltimore is not built for this type of ethnic cleansing. Hispanics prefer the safety of the surrounding counties where there are jobs and fewer black guys with guns. The result in Baltimore is sort of frozen in place. On the one hand you have the promise of the gentrified areas, but those areas are surrounded by a city run by the Black Guerrilla Family.

Drive around Baltimore and you can’t help but feel a little sad. There’s a lot of potential, but it is a city that seems to look for the wrong answer at every turn. Then again, the right answer, the one everyone sort of knows, can never be said, much less implemented. Frankly, shuffling these people from place to place like a bizarre game of Old Maid means someone gets stuck with the dysfunctional population. That’s Baltimore.

 

Trolling Kevin Williamson

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The other day Kevin Williamson posted this over at NRO and I took the opportunity to troll him a bit, as the cool kids would say. What I did was bait him into responding to my comment about Uber and its fan boys in the libertarian cult. In fact, I was deliberately provoking him and his fan base into thinking about something more than their normal red team/blue team myopia.

Uber is all the rage with liberals and libertarian types these days. It seems as if they can’t stop yapping about it. Managerial class types and their attendants, particularly the attendants, have an obsession with cabs. The foot soldiers of the people in charge spend a lot of time in cabs and they consider it one of their worst indignities so maybe that’s why  they obsess of Uber.

This newfangled car service is not better or cheaper. By “better” I mean that in the purely utilitarian sense. Carrying someone from one spot to another via motorized transport is not all that involved. You either get there or not, within an acceptable time window. Uber adds nothing to this. My bet is Uber is slower, on average. From what I gather, it is not cheaper.

What Uber offers is an aesthetic. Instead of climbing into a grimy cab like the other servants, Uber offers a normal car. That way, the customer can pretend they are the one with the attendants. If you are working in a NYC office, you’re either in charge or working for someone in charge. Obviously, most are just servants and that reality is manifest every single day. In the egalitarian paradise, this is tough to take.

There’s also the prospect of shooing away the riff-raff. In a prior age, the house servants were highly intolerant of the field workers, gardeners, tradesman, etc. They considered themselves better than the servants who toiled outside. There’s a fair bit of that here too. The office drone with his state college diploma looks down on the horny-handed sons of toil working the cabs. They would just as soon not see them at all. Too much of a reminder.

A big part of gentrification, after all, is removing from sight the unpleasant aspects of reality. Crime is certainly a big part of the mix, but there’s a reason why the affluent work so hard to keep the servants quarters as far from them as possible. Replacing those proletarian cabs with the nondescript sedans of Uber drivers just looks so much nicer.

That was the bait. Somewhere in the comment’s Kevin responded and confirmed all of this.

Uber drivers do not necessarily earn less money. Consider the NYC situation, in which 1 in 5 taxis (at least) is driven by an unlicensed illegal immigrant, mostly making chump change while the medallion-holding cartel members do well. Uber isn’t any less expensive when going from downtown to JFK, but even if it were more expensive, I’d use it, because it is convenient, because NYC taxi drivers are mostly horrible, and because I do not like doing business with politician-enabled cartels.

I don’t have an issue with taste or even snobbery being the reason behind liking Uber. I wear nothing but Polo dress shirts because it signals good taste. The fact that they fit well is important, but if some off-brand fit just as well, I’d probably still buy the Polo brand. This is a normal part of human relations and is another example of why libertarianism is nonsense. Economic man does not exist.

Uber’s popularity with libertarians is two-fold. One is they hate taxis cartels. This is a safe target for them because liberals are no fans of taxi cartels either (See above). This allows libertarians to indulge in all of their favorite rants, without incurring the wrath of the Cult. With the legalization of weed, libertarians need a new windmill.

They also hold it up as an example of how free markets work to improve the quality of life. They are generally right about this of course. Markets allows society to set preferences based on price thus satisfying as many people along the demand curve as possible. While this is not the natural order, it is the preferred order if you wish to have prosperity.

But, that’s not what’s going on with Uber. They are operating like privateers. The Crown has licensed people to engage in a particular type of commerce. That always attracts privateers who see to profit from the cartel, by undercutting it at the fringes. This was true when trade was conducted on foot and true in the age of sail.

This is where Uber comes in. They help privateers avoid the rules set forth by the state for cab drivers. Those rules have a cost so the Uber driver can therefore provide a better service at the same price or even lower. They can also pay Uber a cut. That sounds great if you are convinced those regulations on taxis have no utility. Uber is just finding a way around the highwaymen of the taxi service.

Fair enough, but we don’t know if those regulations are worthless. They did not spring from nothing. Laws and regulations are intended to solve a problem. You may not think the problem is worth solving. You may think it is best served privately. You may hate the solution with the intensity of a thousand sons suns. I get that so there’s no need to hassle me over it. None of it matters. Laws and regulations are not passed by chance.

Now, the reason for those rules may no longer be operative. Those rules may be corrupted or have become corrupted. We can’t know that Until we think about why the rules exist. This is where liberals and libertarians  hit the rocks. They get their panties in a wad and reach for the sledgehammer. Kevin thinks Uber will bust up the taxi cartel so that’s enough for him. What comes after does not enter his thoughts.

This is the crux of conservatism. I’m perfectly happy to replace taxi cartels with something or even nothing, as long as I know what the something or nothing means. That starts by understanding why every city of earth has sought to regulate livery service. What are these issues the cartel system is supposed to address? What is the cost of not addressing it? What are the proposed replacement? Will it address the old problems and will it create new problems?

Much of what plagues us today is due to Progressives swinging the wrecking ball on the assumption a perfect replacement will spring magically from the rubble. Libertarians have this same defect. They never stop and wonder why the thousand generation that have come before them chose something other than their preferred option. There’s a reason for it. The conservative seeks to know that answer first. Everyone else just wants to swing the wrecking ball.