The office building in which I work is having some renovations done. The renovations have been going on for so long I no longer remember when they started. The office towers are having the windows replaced. They do a space when it becomes vacant so it has been on-going for a long time. The tenants on our floor moved out so they have been doing the windows in those units. For some reason we agreed to let them do out office last week. As a result I am working at home.

The plan was to let them do their thing starting last Wednesday and they would be done by Monday. Of course, they were not done by Monday. My office looked like a bomb went off yesterday morning. Some Hispanic guys were milling around with tools, but that’s all they were doing. Another Hispanic guy, who was obviously of European stock, appeared to be in charge. The rest looked like extras from a National Geographic special on the Mayans. Lots of little brown oompa-loompas.

The guy in charge tried hard to avoid me, but I finally cornered him. He was evasive in that Latin way you know if you have ever been to South America. They appear to be saying yes, but they are so vague you really have no idea. On the one hand they are effusively agreeing with you. On the other they are never actually committing to do that which will resolve the confrontation. In my case, I wanted to know when the job would be done. The guy in charge said a few hours, but maybe a few days. Who knows?

Watching the scene, I got a good dose of the Latin Way. This is when a job requiring five people has ten people trying to do it. Because it is a five person job, the extra five people slow down the required five people. Another take on this is where they have three people working in such a way that they produce the work of one person. To white people, two working together can do the work of three. three working together produce the work of five. For Latin America, it never works out this way.

Yesterday morning, that meant some of the Mayans moving around with tools in their hand,  others taking turns moving a ladder around the room. Then some of the tool carriers would move a ladder or maybe move some tools around. Everyone once in a while they would say something in their language and one would leave for some reason and the return empty handed. They were working hard, but with no purpose. Instead of screwing off, they just looked busy, but the result is the same.

I fully understand why contractors, landscapers and so forth like Latin labor. They show up and try hard. With the right supervision, they can be excellent workers. That’s the problem. There’s no “smart fraction” coming over to supervise the Mayans. This old chart from the NY Times lays it out clearly. The Mexican immigrants coming to America are mostly dimwits. Add in the cultural issues and the odds of this group spawning a smart fraction capable of rising up in a modern technological society is rather slim.

This is the fundamental problem with the pro-immigration argument. The cheerleaders operate as if every human on the planet is capable of becoming the next Steve Jobs, which is so obviously not true it has to be a lie. Even when they acknowledge that some fraction are never going to be more than guys who carry things for a living, they claim that children of these people will magically flower into high IQ strivers. Biology says that is no more likely than some generation of cats producing litters of puppies.

At the other end the open borders crowd likes to extol, we have Indians. That’s sub-Himalayan Indians. I see car loads of them coming in to work at a programming or engineering shop. There are firms around here that specialize in bringing in these people on John McCain Temporary Work Visas. Those visas he thinks we need to create, despite having over twenty types of them now. These firms rent out apartments, set them up with bunk beds and pack them with Indian engineers and programmers.

What this is all about is avoiding the cost of locals. You can bring in an entry level programmer for about two-thirds the cost of training a college kid. Unlike the college kid, they have no outside distractions, don’t take days off and don’t require constant supervision. Their upside is very low, but they are temps so who cares. If anyone wants to know why kids are not going into STEM fields, just look at the numbers. Pay for engineers and programmers has been stagnant for two decades.

I think the dilemma for patriotic Americans is they sympathize with the contractors and landscapers. The Mayans seem nice. They work hard, even if they are not terribly bright. Everyone knows why the contractors prefer these people over the alternative. At the other end, the Indians also seem nice, when you see them. Unless you are in a stem field or very observant, you don’t notice the 100,000 or so temporary STEM workers brought into to cut the throats of Americans.

By our way, I mean the into the race realism camp.The answer is most certainly no, as he likes his pay check, but he flirting with dangerous ideas of late. Unsaid in the this post is that he obviously read and probably still reads Steve Sailer, who made some unfortunate observations about New Orleans once. This essay by Williamson has some observations that are the sorts of things that got Sailer hurled into the void. First he gives the standard lines conservatives are allowed to say about economics.

Economists have many different models explaining how economic growth happens. And though the relative merits of those models are hotly contested among economists, as are the relative weights that should be assigned to many variables, a few factors keep turning up: productivity, capital accumulation, population growth, and technological progress. (Those are the basis of the Solow-Swan model of growth.) While government policy certainly has an effect on those factors, they generally operate at some remove from it: You cannot simply pass a law mandating greater productivity or technological innovation. You can encourage your population growth by (for example) liberalizing your immigration rules, which will probably work if you are New Zealand or the United States but not for Rwanda or Haiti, or a sparsely populated rural community in the United States. Policy can encourage capital accumulation, but it cannot ensure it. We have invigorating political fights about the tax code and stimulus spending, and those are important fights to have, but many of the most important factors driving economic growth are beyond direct political control.

That’s the standard product from Conservative Inc. Their’s is a fight lost long ago, but they are still allowed to wear their uniforms and have parades once in while so they wave the flags of free market capitalism. Then we have this:

But there is a critical variable that is at least partly within the direct control of government: the quality of government. The quality of government — its honesty, competence, reliability, and predictability — has an effect on most of the important economic variables. And not just government itself, but other institutions with the power to shape public life, such as unions and large firms. Quality is something outside of and different from policy specifics, which is why similar policies often produce wildly different outcomes in different polities: Single-payer health care in Bahrain turns out to be very different from single-payer health care in Canada. A high level of government-enforced union involvement has been catastrophic for the U.S. automotive industry but not for the German automotive industry, which is a lot less of a mystery than it seems when you account for the fact that the UAW is not IG Metall, GM is not Audi, and the U.S. government is not the German government.

Guess what else is different? That’s right. Ingolstadt is full of Germans while Detroit is full of non-Germans. It is a lot easier to have a sane government when your smart fraction invented large chunks of Western Civilization. When your smart fraction is barely capable of running a small-time drug den without killing one another, you’re probably getting a government that reflects that fact.

There is no way to put a happy face on this fact: Critical American institutions are of shockingly low quality. Corruption is a part of that: At No. 19 on the Transparency International rankings, the United States is tied with Uruguay. Its transparency score of 73 is far behind where you want to be, among such category leaders as Denmark, New Zealand, Sweden, and Finland (91, 91, 89, and 89, respectively). We lag well behind our Canadian neighbors and such important international competitors as Germany. Our overall standing is not terrible, but it does not place us among global leaders, either. Moderation in the pursuit of honesty is no virtue.

There’s an elephant in the room here. Kevin is a bright guy and he must surely know it, but he likes living an easy life so he avoids stating it directly. Further, he surely knows his readership knows it too. Perhaps Kevin Williamson is deliberately doing the dog whistle thing. On the other hand, the blinkered way these guys see the world can never be discounted. it’s possible he has described the elephant in the room without actually noticing it. Some people never notice what’s going on around them.

Every society goes through periods when its ruling class can no longer police itself. The Founders of America recognized this problem and designed a political system that would turnover a little more frequently than what they saw in Europe. For example, the typical king was on the throne for a couple of decades. According to this site, which seems authoritative, the typical British monarch hung around for 21 years.

Even when you drop out long serving monarchs and the short timers, you’re looking at a two decade reign. Most likely, Britain has had fewer violent changes of power than other countries, but that could be wrong. The French had a long run of peaceful transition. The Germans were at the other end as far as length of reign. Even so, most subjects could expect to serve maybe two monarchs in their lifetime.

Hereditary rule has some obvious problems. No matter how well the ruling elites police their own, you can still end up with a lunatic on the throne. Charles VI reigned for 42 years, despite thinking he was a wolf and made of glass. Christian VII of Denmark stuck around for over four decades, despite having an obsession with his penis. He jerked off so much it effected his health. He also would slap people for no reason and insisted on playing leap frog with visiting dignitaries.

When there is no system to prevent a lunatic from gaining power, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get a few lunatics in power. When you have no way to remove them you either get some long serving lunatics or you get a lot of assignations. A system that requires the occasional assassination of the ruler invites all sorts of intrigue and paranoia. Every king has to assume he is surrounded by potential assassins. It is just a terrible way to police the ruling class.

Representative democracy is a cure for that. Even if you cannot prevent a lunatic from gaining office, his term will end soon enough. In theory, the churn of office holders will allow the ruling elite to sideline a nut before they get into office. If one slips by, then he can be removed in the next election. It’s not perfect, as the fickleness of voter’s means a good ruler could be turned out over something silly. But, everything is trade-offs, so not having a lunatic in charge comes with the risk of losing a good ruler on occasion.

Up until the 20th century the system worked pretty well in America. There was no way to be a career politician, unless you were wealthy. Most office holders either got rich first or inherited their money. Getting office without having got rich was extremely difficult. It was a pretty good system until socialism came along. The Founders could not imagine a sprawling welfare state with highly paid, semi-permanent office holders in charge of it. But, that’s what Progressives gave us.

Reading this bit of nonsense from Lamar Alexander, who is still alive and still in office, suggests we have entered one of those times when the elites can no longer police their ranks. He is a senator from a sensible state, which means he can be a pest on a national scale. Such an important job should be filled by someone with a stake in the success of the state and its people. Instead it is filled with a lifetime seat warmer who probably lives in Northern Virginia. He takes his vacation to the state he theoretically represents.

It is not a handful of wackos here and there. If some states or regions were struggling to find competent men to staff the elected posts, it would be self-correcting. That’s not the case. It appears to be a problem almost everywhere. Florida has a career criminal in the House. They also have a paranoid schizophrenic. Massachusetts has a sociopath with an imaginary family tree as one of their Senators. You could spend all day listing Congressmen and Senators who are completely nuts or just plain grifters.

The nuts appear to be a minority, but the grifters and sociopaths are probably a majority all elected officials at this point. It is not just the legislature. The ruling class of America has very little in common with Americans. These people look sort of like the people they claim to represent, but they may as well be space aliens. They live in a different world from their citizens and they have alien ideas about the nation.

I think a good starting point of any reform program is to accept the rule that if you have never had a job, you are not an American. That disqualifies you from office. Term limits has been discussed for a long time and it sounds good until you take a look at how the elites operate. The office holders are the tip of the iceberg. The important bit is under the waterline. That’s the vast bureaucracy that ruthlessly enforces the rules, the administrative and managerial class that formulates the rules and the vast army of lobbyists and think tanks who provide the elected officials with marketing material.

So, how is it that Americans have allowed things to degrade to this point? Part of it is fanatics wake up every morning with a plan to advance the cause. Normal people wake up every morning with more pedestrian thoughts in their heads. Another is the natural evolution of a ruling class is to tend to the walls of the castle. They are always looking to secure their position. Over time, they tinker with the rules, change the laws, alter the contract so they face less pressure. Their position becomes unassailable.

The solution, of course, is for the public to revolt and hang all of these people. It’s not that the next group will be better quality. It’s that they will operate with the knowledge they could be hanged at any moment. Perhaps installing a gallows outside the door of the House. Every poll has to pass through the shadow of it on the way in and out of the building. They say the prospect if imminent death focuses the mind.

Wendy Davis the adventuress from Texas that is the Left’s new hero. She came to fame when she filibustered a bill in the legislature that would ban abortions after 20 weeks. It was a publicity stunt that allowed her to catch lightning in a bottle with the national media. Like all modern politicians, she has little in the way of qualifications, other than a dogged determination to remain in public view. That means creating a fantasy biography that attempts to turn a parasitic life into heroic tale of struggle.

Davis is trying to parlay her 15 minutes of fame into a national political career, but even politics has some standards. A mediocrity with a good personality can go places in politics. A mediocrity that reminds you of your first ex-wife better have another skill. Like the music business, politics is full of one-hit wonders, who have that summer of success, but can never follow it up with a second hit. That appears to be the story arc of Wendy Davis, as she struggles to find a way to remain in the media.

Interestingly, Progressives remain committed to her, even though her ridiculous backstory has been revealed to be less than authentic. They are trying to carry on as if that truth has not been revealed. This piece in the NY Times on her reads like it was written by Hollywood. The writer carefully weaves Davis’s thin resume into the conventional narrative about the modern super woman so popular with feminists. By the end, though, the writer is forced to confess the obvious.

Meanwhile, the reality of Davis’s achievements were all around me as I drove back to my hotel, along a route that took me through her old City Council district, where few people probably spent much time wondering about what personal sacrifices went into the building of this bridge or that residential tower. What had once been a languid cow town was now a sleek city where folks still un-self-consciously stroll around in cowboy hats. Davis played a notable role in the integration of what Fort Worth had always been with what it was becoming. It struck me as a pretty good campaign theme. But perhaps it wasn’t good enough: It was impersonal, unrelatable and technocratic, a nice tale for a Texas Democrat to promote on the way to a landslide loss, just as the state’s last Democratic candidate for governor, former Mayor Bill White of Houston, did in 2010.

Instead, Davis had reassured voters with a near-perfect narrative: a portrait of herself as modern-day Supermom, a woman who existed only in our imaginations.

Reality says Wendy Davis could have stayed at Harvard and not a single Texan would have noticed. Her life is inconsequential. Crediting her with the growth of Texas is like crediting my cat with the building of the Pyramids. At least there are pictures of cats in those pyramids. It reveals the hollowness of feminism in particular and Progressivism in general. Modern feminism is just unicorn hunting, as there is not escaping the realities of biology. As a result they are forced to rely on narrative, rather than reality.

That’s why Davis can be looked at as the predecessor of Lizzy Warren. Like Davis, Warren has no real accomplishments. In the case of Warren, she married well and that opened doors in the academy. her fake back story about being an Indian completed the puzzle. Like Davis, Warren is just a story designed to fit into the Progressive narrative, not a real person doing real things. Even her Senate run was just a story manufactured by the local media. Warren was just playing a role.