Category Archives: Politics

The Fury of the Central Planners

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When I was out in the provinces last month, I watched a bit of the BBC and SkyNews. One of the things I found humorous about the news coverage was the hyperventilating about Brexit. Every story had a Brexit angle, even the local interest stuff. The general impression I got from the news presenters was that they were having a tough time keeping it together. At any moment they could break down into sobbing over the horrors of Brexit. If you did not know better, you would think Brexit was code for re-opening Auschwitz.

All the prophesies about the disasters that would befall the world, if the snaggletoothed yokels voted to leave Europe, have not come to pass. In fact, the early returns suggest it has been a net positive for the Brits. Time will tell how it all unfolds as there is a lot that has yet to happen. Even so, the results thus far are making the Remain side look rather foolish. Instead of accepting this reality, the true believers are carrying on like Godzilla is about to cross the Channel and attack London, because of Brexit.

This inability to accept reality is not confined to the Brits. Tyler Cowen has an unintentionally hilarious column up demanding that we believe the libertarian economists and not our lying eyes. The short version, for those uninterested in reading it, is that he and the rest of the doomsayers forgot to carry the one and the day of reckoning is actually a little ways off. But don’t you worry though. The day of reckoning is approaching and those beastly Dirt People in the accompanying picture will be held to account.

In fairness to libertarians, modern economists are not libertarians. They dress up their act with libertarian hobbyhorse items like free weed and open borders, but modern economics is managerial central planning. They are technocrats convinced they can micromanage everything through monetary and tax policy. No matter how many times they get it wrong, they remain certain they just need to tweak their models and boundless bliss will spread over the countryside. Worse still, they fully embrace the lunacy of homo economicus.

Economics, as I’m fond of saying, is the modern equivalent of astrology. Before a battle, Cyrus II of Persia would bring in his astrologers to advice him on the time and place to attack his enemy. The astrologers would figure out what he wanted to hear, consult their maps and then tell him what he wanted to hear. Cyrus was a bad ass dude, who was rarely wrong, so it was a wise course by the astrologers to tell the boss what he already knew. When he won, they got some credit and they avoided contradicting the boss.

This old story about the eminent astrologer economist Joseph Stiglitz praising the economic polices of Venezuela ten years ago is a good example. Stiglitz was telling his hosts what they wanted to hear because they were paying him to endorse their brand of lunacy. Of course, Venezuela is now headed to total collapse because their economy has ground to a halt. In an age when Mexico’s poor people are obese, Venezuela has managed to have a food shortage. Maybe the rulers should not have listened to Joseph Stiglitz.

The fascinating thing about economists is that their error rate is outlandishly high, but they never lose credibility with the rulers. Obama called in his best seers when he rose to power in 2008. They told him that borrowing a trillion dollars and blowing it on pointless projects would result in 1.5 trillion in economic activity. They called it the fiscal multiplier. One could be forgiven for thinking that this is another version of this old joke about a stranger coming into town and spending $100 at an hotel, then changing his mind.

The Obama stimulus plan was a bust, but that was never really the point anyway. Obama wanted to lavish his party with your money and he wanted to make it look like he was doing you a favor by doing it. That’s why he called in his best magicians and astrologers to give it their stamp of approval. Being right or wrong was never a concern. It never is in economics. The chief architects of the stimulus knew it was a great career move to give their stamp of approval to what was obviously just good old fashioned patronage. All of them landed prestigious jobs in the academy and Wall Street afterward.

Anyway, I suspect the fury of the central planners over Brexit has to do with fear that the scam is no longer working. Every big foot economist from the West weighed in against Brexit. They shook their staffs and promised Britain would be visited by plagues, monsters and dark spirits if they left Europe. The voters chose Brexit anyway. If you’re in the business of fooling the people on behalf of the rulers, you need to show you can fool the voters. Otherwise, the rulers have no use for you.

After the Revolution

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My guess is more than a few readers have nursed some rather detailed revenge fantasies about what they would like to see after the revolution. Given the current crisis, it is understandable. Revenge is a big part of every revolution. While bringing back the hangman has its attractions, that’s not the sort of revolution we are likely to see. Instead, ours will be a political revolution. If the forces of darkness prevail in November, we head into the post-national, post-democratic future our rulers promise. If the forces of light prevail, then we may head into a period of raucous reform.

Let’s assume the good guys win for a change and Trump wins the November election. One thing that will happen quickly is there will be calls for him to pardon Hillary Clinton. It is well known that there is an open investigation into the Clinton foundation. It is on the slow track due to the election. If it goes active after the election, it will mean the e-mail crimes will be reopened. Official Washington will want Trump to pardon her and/or quash the FBI investigation into Clinton. We’ll hear a lot of stuff about closing the books for the good of the country.

That was the argument behind pardoning Nixon. Gerald Ford was pressured into taking one for the team in order to preserve “the tranquility to which this nation has been restored by the events of recent weeks could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States.” Whether or not Ford truly believed this is hard to know, because there was never a full airing of what happened to bring down Nixon. It was a Silent Coup that has cast a shadow over our politics for forty years.

Trump should not pardon Clinton. Instead he should appoint a special prosecutor with the authority to go where the evidence takes him. The Clinton crime family did not operate in a vacuum. Lots of people have greased the wheels so that these two grifters from the Ozarks could hold official Washington captive for close to a quarter century. Getting all of it out into the open would do a lot of damage to the political class, but it would do a world of good for the nation’s politics. The corrupt bargain that has prevailed in DC needs to come to an end.

The point is not to put Hillary Clinton in prison, even though that would be a happy outcome. The Clintons have come to symbolize everything that has gone wrong in Washington over the last several decades. They are an extreme example of the ethos that has come to dominate American politics. It is a culture where everything is for sale, nothing is ever on the level and no scam is too small. Washington has become something like a rotten police precinct, where morality is inverted. Instead of the criminals fearing detection by the honest, it is the honest who fear the criminals.

Along the same lines, the IRS investigation has to be reopened so that the truth of that fiasco is laid bare. Nixon was run out of town, in part, because his people talked about using the IRS as a weapon. Whether or not the Obama people were involved in the IRS targeting scandal is unknown, but it needs to be known. There are certain things that must remain beyond the pale in order to maintain civilized government. It is why the West eventually got rid of blood feuds. Politicizing the IRS is one of those things that can never be permitted.

In all probability, the people in the IRS acted on their own initiative. Lois Lerner is a fanatic. That much is obvious. Putting her in a cage for a very long time sends the message to other fanatics that the IRS is no place for their kind. It also sends the message to the politicians who appoint these people. That was supposed to be the lesson of Watergate. It was not enough to obey the letter of the law. Politicians were supposed to obey the spirit of the law. Prosecuting the people responsible for the IRS scandal reestablishes that principle.

Whether any of this will happen is open to debate. The nation is at a crossroads, similar to where we were when Andrew Jackson came to Washington. There are also similarities between this period and the end of the Industrial Revolution a century ago. Then as now, new fortunes accelerated the corruption of the political class to the point where the public had lost confidence in their rulers. In order to avoid something much worse than a period of raucous reform, we need a period of raucous reform. If a Trump presidency merely clears the field for a new generation of reformers, that would be a pleasant result.

Cause otherwise what comes net will be much worse.

The Dead Witch Crisis

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The news is now full of reports that Hillary Clinton had some sort of “episode” as she was getting into her assisted living van. It’s possible she was still drunk from the night before or maybe just so hungover she could barely walk. The campaign says she has pneumonia, which could mean anything or nothing. She has disappeared from sight so we’re left to speculate, but she is clearly a woman with serious health problems. The question people are beginning to ask is can she continue to campaign? If not, will she be forced to drop out? What would happen if she did?

The funny thing about all of this is most Americans don’t know how we actually select Presidents. The voting that is done in November will not, as a legal matter, select the next President. Voting merely selects the electors who will then meet on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December. They actually meet in their respective state capitals where they cast their votes for President and Vice President. All but Maine and Nebraska have a winner take all system for selecting electors so your vote sort of matters, unless you live in a one-party state.

Similarly, each state has rules for getting on the November ballot. For example, Evan McMuffin, the Never Trump candidate, missed the deadline to be on many state ballots. This applies to the party candidates, as well, so a last minute change would create complications for the Democrats. If Hillary Clinton was suddenly incapacitated or simply quit the race, the Democrats would have a problem. They would have to go to court in some states to have their new candidate listed on the ballot. It’s not impossible, but it would be a complication.

So, what are the possible scenarios?

At this late date, finding a replacement would be complicated. The Democrat Party has rules for this scenario so they could move quickly. The rules strongly encourage the party to pick the runner up, but they can pick anyone to fill the slot. Bernie Sanders would be the obvious option, but that would mean certain defeat to Donald Trump, the nightmare scenario for both parties. The Bernie Bros are committed, but their numbers are limited. Most Americans would assume his nomination is a surrender.

They could go with a famous person with some traction in the party, but the choices are limited. Joe Biden is famous, but old and prone to saying wildly offensive things to black people and women. Elizabeth Warren is popular with the crazies, but she scares normal people. She’s also a very poor campaigner. She passed on a chance to run and passed on the VP spot. This makes forcing Clinton aside a troublesome scenario simply because the other options are only slightly better than having a corpse at the top of the ticket,

That brings up another option. Imagine that on Halloween it is reported that Clinton fell off her broom again and hit her head, rendering her incapacitated. The Democrats could reach out to Congressional Republicans and ask for a delay in the election. Congress does not have the power to dictate when people vote. They do have the power to decide when the Electors must be selected by the states. Congress could work with the states to postpone the election to December 3 in order to sort things out.

This brings us back to the first scenario, but the difference here is the crisis feel would open another dimension. The Democrats would feel free to pick anyone they like and would probably consult with the Republicans to come up with a “senior statesman” they could offer up as safe choice in a crisis. In other words, this delay would allow both parties to reset the game board so that the election was no longer about the insurgent Trump versus the corrupt system. Instead, it would be about the steady hand in a time of crisis versus the irrational hothead.

Another scenario, the high risk scenario, is for Congress to cancel the election entirely. Article II gives Congress the power to set the date electors are chosen so they can delay this indefinitely. Speaker Ryan would become acting President until Congress could come up with a new election date. Since Republicans control something like 35 state legislatures, they could stall the process so that they can stack the Electoral College with party members, who would pick a party insider. A governor like Kasich or even Jeb Bush could be installed as president.

Those are the Machiavellian scenarios. Given the nature of the political class, it seems unlikely that any of those would happen, even if Clinton drops dead tomorrow. Even so, it offers a little glimpse into the future. Over the last century, we have invested enormous power into the office of President. If you’re wondering how we can flip from republic to empire, a crisis such as the above would offer the opportunity. One candidate that is unacceptable and one that is dead, opens the door for the political class to bypass the voters and install their own man.

The Death of Official Conservatism™

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Over the last year or so, corresponding with the rise of Donald Trump to the nomination of the Republican Party, there has been a lot of talk about what is the alt-right and what it means. This also corresponds with the term itself, alt-right, being transformed from the narrow white nationalism stuff of Richard Spencer, to a catch-all term for the growing number of people criticizing the orthodoxy from the Right. In fact, this thing they call the alt-right is no longer much about race and much more about culture, Western Culture.

Another way to think of it is to imagine a town with two social clubs, organized for the same purpose, but they disagree over the goals and how to go about it. Over time, one club has fallen into quarreling and regularly kicked out its best members. Many just quit out of frustration. The result is there are more that agree about what is wrong with the clubs than are in still the clubs. The reason the dissenters have a name is the people still doing the old social club racket gave the dissenters a name they thought was insulting.

Steve Sailer has a fun way of looking at it in his Taki column, comparing the alt-right to punk rock. That’s a good way of looking at, but within that column he quotes himself from the olden thymes, where he pointed out that jazz lost its audience because it became elitist and esoteric. That’s a good way of thinking about what is happening to Official Conservatism™ today. The people scribbling and thinking for the orthodoxy have become elitist and detached, consumed by esoteric hair splitting and purity tests.

A good example of this can be seen in this piece on National Review regarding Ann Coulter’s appearance on a Comedy Central roast of actor Rob Lowe. According to the news reports, it was a setup so the beta male comics could feel butch by calling Coulter a “cunt” over and over. A normal man would wonder why such a thing was permitted to happen, but not Christian Schneider. He is only concerned about the image of Official Conservatism™ as he thinks Coulter being pilloried makes his weird little identity cult look bad.

That’s Official Conservatism™. It is a bunch of men standing aside as men from the Left assault whomever happens to be to their Right. It is a movement that never moves. It remains relatively stationary, fixed to a spot just to the Right of the Progressives. When they are not refining the narrow differences they have with the Left, they are expanding the list of people to their Right that are no longer welcome in the club. Official Conservatism™ holds its audience in contempt, preferring to focus on itself and its peculiar aesthetic.

Sailer’s jazz reference works at another level. In the first half of the 20th century, jazz was the most popular form of music because it was fun and functioned as the soundtrack for the young and rebellious. By the time rock and roll came along, jazz was no longer fun. The kids looked at it as the music of their parent’s generation. That’s what’s happening with Official Conservatism™ now that the internet has opened the field to all sorts of new voices and ideas. Much of it may be crap or crazy, but it’s fun and rebellious.

There’s more to it, of course, but being new and fun is the energy that is making the alt-right work right now. The bigger issue is the fact that Buckley Conservatism has nothing to offer. An ideology that leads men to stand aside while thugs from the Left assault the institutions of society is not much use to people, who would like to preserve their culture. It’s hard to be inspired my a movement that thinks it is OK for men to call a woman a “cunt” on TV, just as long as it does not reflect poorly on their movement. Why would anyone sign up for that?

It’s why the threats from the geezers about purging the alt-right from Official Conservatism™ are met with roars of laughter and funny memes on twitter. If you are a young guy that thinks Progressivism is a cancer, what has Jonah Goldberg ever done for you? What has Hugh Hewitt ever done, beside collect a paycheck and lecture you to be quiet? The answer is nothing. When the bully boys of the Left come to put a beating on you, these two will be penning articles about how you tarnished the brand.

Skepticism, about attempts to define the alt-right, is wise as the people doing it have an agenda. Some are hoping to elevate their status as media personalities, while others are just hoping to tar members of the establishment, by associating them with something scary. The reality is it is just a new label for what Nick Land called the Dark Enlightenment. I’ve always found this map to be useful in understanding the wild and crazy world of alternative media on the internet. As you can see, there is a lot of overlap, but a great diversity in starting points.

The Right has always been a perspective from a number of starting points rooted in the human condition, biological reality. It has never been a fixed ideology and that is why Official Conservatism™ is dying off now. It was a long attempt to build a fence around the free range of thinking, to set borders and apply rules within it. It is why the Buckleyites look increasing like the Progressives they claim to oppose. In the end, ideologues all come to agree on the same thing – control.

Eric Hoffer said, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Official Conservatism™ is well into the racket stage. The adherents, if they even believe in anything other than personal enrichment, defend the cause solely because it is where the money is at the movement. They are ideological Willie Suttons. They are “conservatives” because right now that’s where they can make money. When the time comes, they will move on to something else.

The Low-Trust State

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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.

Travelogue: Open Borders

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Whenever an American is required to go out into the provinces, he is inevitably forced to hear some harangues from the locals about the doings in the Empire. Europeans believe themselves to be worldly sophisticates and they invest a lot of effort into maintaining that delusion. At this point in history, it may be the only thing Europeans are good at doing. They really are a bunch of ridiculous posers and they are so endlessly smug about it. This suggests it is a studied and cultivated habit, not just a weird quirk.

In Iceland, I was subjected to a long boring lecture by an Icelandic woman over the wonderfulness of open borders. She was unaware that I am a FOP (Friend of Pepe) so she was operating under the impression I was sympathetic. It was hard to keep a straight face, given that Iceland is a rocky island in the North Sea. Even if they welcome the world, the world will not be moving to a barren moonscape that is cold in the dead of summer.

Open borders is a strange religion with many in Europe. The news is a pretty much just a non-stop celebration of open borders. They talk about it with such reverence, you could be mistaken for thinking “open borders” is the new name for God. Today the news is celebrating the first anniversary of Alan Kurdi, the hoax perpetrated by the Western media to help sway public sympathy for allowing in a billion Muslims. The news, of course, still maintains it was a real story, which is like watching people talk seriously about Big Foot.

On SkyNews they had one of the typical panel discussion things that American news channels like so much. It was, of course, a multi-culti festival of virtue signaling. All of them had on their serious face as they competed for the title of most pompously pious on the subject of migration. One of the people was a middle-aged honky with the title “comedian” which was the only thing funny about him. The others were brown women representing both diversity and girl power

The moderator, to his credit, brought up the fact that most people just saw it as virtue signaling. The unfunny comic looked as if he was about to have a stroke. If he did fall over, it would probably have been the only time he had made anyone laugh. The African woman next to him then explained that she did not understand the phrase virtue signaling, so she went into a speech about her virtue.

The backdrop to much of this is Brexit. In the run-up to the Brexit vote, the remain side was at great pains to show the issue was about economics. Now that they lost, they are sure it was about xenophobia and racism. They carry on like Brexit is going to return the world to the Dark Ages. One of the Girl Power! Trio on the set went on a rant about how awful it was going to have to show her passport when traveling to Europe. She made it sound like customs was the showers at Auschwitz.

In a conversation with an Irishman and another Icelander at breakfast, I was told that nationalism was the worst thing since the other worst thing and that open borders has made the peace in Europe. The absurdity of this was amusing for a bit as the two of them competed with one another as to who was the most ridiculous person in the room. Finally, I had enough and reminded them that Europe was at peace because the US kept the peace.

That went over like a Hitler salute and the reason is many Europeans have come to define themselves by their relationship to America and Americans, or at least what they imagine to be America and Americans. The median age in Europe is 38 so few living Europeans have known anything other than life in the American Empire. As a result, the culture has changed to reflect this reality. Dependence eventually creates a dependency culture and that’s the culture of Europe today.

Follow The Money

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By the time this is posted I will be somewhere over the Atlantic on my way to Iceland. I will then move onto Ireland where I will spend a few days with the bog monkeys. Since there is some chance I may be tricked into having an adult beverage or two and thus be rendered unable to post, the following has been pre-recorded.

–Z

One of the benefits of reading lots of history is you often see the same catalysts, causes and dynamics turning up in the story. The Roman Empire had a lot of problems toward the end, but a big one was their financial structure. Their lack of money led them to do things that made their situation worse. Similarly, the French Revolution had a “want of money” angle to it. The crown was broke and did a lot of very stupid things, as a result of being broke, that compounded the many social problems brewing in the country,

It’s tempting to wonder, for example, what would have happened if Louis XIV had been a bit more prudent or showed a bit more foresight with regards to the financial system of his country. Alternatively, what would have happened if his heirs had better advisers, who would have pushed for mild steady reform in order to slowly bring the French financial system into line with the emerging modern world. Heck, what if Louis XV had simply avoided the mistake of hiring economist John Law.

The best historians, I think, look at the men of the time and ask why were they unable or unwilling to do the necessary things to avoid catastrophe. In almost all cases, there were plenty of people advising the rulers that were making a blunder. In many cases, the rulers knew they were blundering, but events constrained them from acting. In the decades leading to the French Revolution, many smart and influential people knew reform was necessary. They just did not know how to go about it or what they were able to do, within the limits placed upon them, made things worse

Anyway, that’s the vibe I get when reading these stories about the Fed and their deliberations on the economy. Due to the sensitive and precarious nature of their positions, they tend to speak in riddles, but if you are careful, you can tease out some meaning from their public statements. They are very guarded and they reserve their more candid opinions for private conversations, but they rely on the broader financial public to put pressure on policy makers. These staged events are an esoteric form of lobbying.

The United States has a Federal debt that rivals what we had while fighting two empires in World War II. Current debt is close to 100% of GDP and that was the peak during the war years. The difference is we are not battling two empires in a shooting war. Now we are maintaining a global empire. The financiers understand this difference and they certainly recognize the danger it poses. The costs of fighting Hitler and Tojo were temporary and extraordinary. The cost of empire is permanent and ordinary, at least for a while longer.

These debt levels are only possible in the artificially low interest rate environment created by the central bankers. The trouble is they appear to have gone beyond the point of diminishing returns with interest rate policy. We are effectively in a no-growth economy now, despite historically low borrowing rates at all levels. The West is not in recession nor is it facing collapse, but it is exposed. There are no financial tools left in reserve to face the next unknown financial calamity and the bankers know this.

The trouble is the cost of reform is so frightening, no one is willing to face up to it. Interest on the Federal debt is about 6% of annual spending. If borrowing rates returns to historic norms, debt service will grow rapidly. Some estimates say it would exceed 20% of the annual budget within a decade. That’s based on the assumption the economy would not collapse, but rising rates would throttle real estate, tip over bank balance sheets and send the equity markets into free fall. All the attempts to keep the plates spinning have made artificially low borrowing rates the norm. Everything is now based on it.

The Federal government is not about to go bankrupt anytime soon. Federal outlays are about 20% of GDP right now, which is more than manageable. State and local government account for another 20% or thereabouts. Government spending in Germany is at 44% at the moment. It is 44% in Britain and 52% in France. In other words, the US has the same problems we see with all social democracies, but we’re not Zimbabwe. The US dollar is also the world’s reserve currency so that gives the US a much bigger margin for error.

Still, there is a sense you get from theses statements from central bankers is that they know these artificially low borrowing rates cannot go on forever. The longer they continue, the worse it will be when they finally return to normal. It’s just that no one knows how to fix it. The political costs of inflating our way out of debt are too high. Letting rates go up means recession and political panic. A continuation of debt monetization limits the freedom of action of central banks when the next crisis arises and there will always be another crisis.

That is what most likely worries the more sober minded bankers. A decade of 4% inflation would be unpleasant politically, but not end times bad. A slow rise in interest rates would not collapse the world economy either, but it would usher in a long recession similar to the 1870’s, where asset values tumbled for a decade as the Second Industrial Revolution came to an end. The real danger is the unknown crisis that does threaten the foundations of the system and the central banks have no tools to face it.

That’s where the West is at the moment. Things are plodding along, but there’s nothing in reserve in case of a crisis. The US economy is stagnant at the moment, but if it falls into recession, there’s nothing the Fed can do about it. Negative rates are unlikely and probably not effective anyway. The Fed balance sheet is already bloated so further monetization is going to be hard. The financial system is a citadel whose walls need rebuilding, but no one has a clue as to how to go about do it.

What Comes Next

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I was listening to the James Miller interview of Greg Cochran the other day and at the end, Miller stated that he would not post an unedited version of the interview for fear of repercussions. The unedited version was six hours, but Miller cut it down to two hours. Cochran is not a PC guy and he says what he thinks, which can get you fired these days. Miller is a young man, who needs his job, so he has to be careful. It was an act of bravery for him to do the interview. Miller works on a college campus and there you can be declared a heretic simply by association.

A hobbyhorse item around here is the comparison between modern America and theocracies like Iran. In both countries, the ultimate authority is in the hands of a class of people charged with maintaining public morality. In both countries, those rules are arbitrary and capriciously enforced. In Iran, someone accused of heresy cannot appeal to the law. They must appeal to a cleric. In the US, someone accused of hate think cannot appeal to the courts or the ordinary rules of society. Instead, they are reduced to groveling at the feet of social justice warriors, hoping for leniency.

America is not a theocracy, of course, but it is a useful comparison. The PC enforcers on the college campus or in the corporate HR department are filled with the same self righteousness as the enforcers of Islamic law in Iran. In both cases, they feel they are entitled to commit monstrous acts, because they do so in the name of some great cause. The PC enforcers are not acting in the name of an anthropomorphic deity, but their justifications are just as supernatural. The endless war on abstract concepts like racism, sexism and so on is just as mystical as making war on lust or greed.

The reason to contemplate this is that at some point, people get tired of being pushed around by lunatics. Much of Donald Trump’s appeal is due to his dismissal of the PC piety that has come to dominate politics. A vote for Trump is really just a vote for the big old middle finger to the people in charge. The reason the alt-right was so happy to have Clinton engage them was so they could tell her and the rest of the Cloud People to go fuck themselves. There’s a lot of pent up “fuck you” out there after decades of preaching and scolding from our betters.

The thing is, Trump is probably going to lose in November. It’s not because the majority of voters are not down with the middle finger movement. It’s that most people are afraid of risk. Trump is a wild man and that makes him a wild card. Most men prefer the certainty of slavery than the risk of freedom, so rolling the dice on Trump is a lot to ask of voters. That does not change the fact that most people are sick to death of the PC enforcers. It’s just that they can’t quite bring themselves to defy their masters. Staying home, voting third party or knuckling under and voting for Clinton is safe, for now.

This brings me back to Iran. In 2011 protests erupted after the government rigged the elections. Students mostly, went to the streets and within days a full fledged revolt was underway. Given what had been happening with the so-called Arab spring, there was a hope that the mullahs would be forced out and something close to sanity would be restored to Persia. If you are going to pick a country that can join modernity, it would be Iran. That’s not what happened. President Obama came to the defense if his coreligionists and the protests were eventually crushed.

It is an important lesson. It is assumed that the reactionaries always lose and maybe they do in the fullness of time, but in the case of Iran, there’s no sign of that happening just yet. The reason is they have a firm grip on all of the social and political institutions and they are willing to do what they must to maintain power. In America, the Progressives have a similar hold on society and they are every bit as ruthless as their counterparts in Iran. They may not yet be sending trouble makers to labor camps, but they are willing to ruin careers. Has anyone seen Milo Yiannopoulos or Robert Stacey McCain on twitter recently?

The point is the Persian Awakening fizzled out mostly because the people in the streets were unwilling or unable to do what was necessary to break the will of the rulers. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was because the people in charge had lost the will to fight. In Iran and America, that will to fight must be broken before the enforcers begin to yield to the people. Simply voting for Trump is not enough. Even putting him in the White House will not be enough. Twitter memes and mockery from comment trolls is not going to break the will of the lunatics.

In April 16, 1963 Martin Luther King wrote an open letter that came to be known as The Letter from Birmingham Jail. The letter addressed the particulars of the protests going on at the time, with regards to the Civil Rights Movement. The contents of the letter are no longer relevant, but the lesson is relevant today. What King was up to was giving the white majority a choice. They could go to war with the black population or negotiate a full integration of blacks into American society. The white world deal with King or the guys setting cars on fire and smashing windows.

Whether they know it or not, that’s the choice facing the ruling class. There is no doubt they nurse fantasies about crushing the hate thinkers after the election. Corpulent gasbags like Sloppy Williamson and Jonah Goldberg have written extensively about their desire to run people like you out of the country. The Left, of course, is chomping at the bit to stack the courts with authoritarians, who will vaporize the Bill of Rights and anything resembling citizenship. There were plenty of Bull Connors 50 years ago too.

Just as the Persian Awakening was crushed, the alt-right will probably be crushed, but these things don’t go away. They go underground and regroup. They learn from the defeat and come back better and more prepared to take the fight to the enemy. What comes next is always worse than what the ruling class imagined the first time. In retrospect, they always wish they had taken the first offer and loosened their grip every so slightly. Whether of not the Cloud People recognize what is on offer is hard to know, but the way to bet is they invest everything them have in crushing their opposition.

What comes next, however, will be much worse.

The Hater’s Ball

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I got an e-mail from someone asking me questions about the alt-right. At first I thought it was a joke, but a little research revealed the person to be a reporter for a legitimate media site. Some guy from the Washington Post did a story on the hate think community the other day and he followed up with a primer for the good thinkers.  Hillary Clinton is planning to bravely take on the alt-right in a speech somewhere, assuming they can sober her up and keep her from toppling over. Now that the Cloud People have a label, they plan to demonize anyone that opposes them as members of the alt-right.

I’m not sure of the protocol on these things so I’ll leave the identity of my correspondent out of this, but the query had the feel of an e-mail blast hoping someone would respond. One question was “When did you join the Alt-Right?” It’s the sort of question asked by people who have spent their life accumulating credentials in order to advance in the bureaucracy. “Comrade, I joined Party after leaving University, where I got degree in ideology and policy.” Managerial class types just assume everything works like the exam system of the managerial class.

I don’t consider myself in the alt-right, but I suppose that depends upon how you define it. If memory serves, Richard Spencer coined the term Alternative Right and his thing is white identity and white nationalism. I have no interest in those things and I don’t write much about race. I’m a biological realist and I think most of what we are as humans is in our genes, but I think forming a white ethno-state is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. The only thing dumber is the blank slate nonsense that comes from the managerial class through the mass media.

On the other hand, big foot journalists are now applying the label “alt-right” to anyone outside the government approved Left-Right orbit so maybe that does place guys like me in the club. John Derbyshire coined the term “Dissident Right” which is probably a better label. I don’t dream of a honky paradise. I just want one of the political parties to be slightly to the right of the Democrats of 1960. Half a century of cultural lunacy is enough. Let’s go back to what used to work for the bulk of the citizens.

None of that is important. What is important is the people in charge feel they need to do something about the growing hate-think community. Having Clinton waddle out in front of other humans is a high risk stunt, given her brain injuries, but having her take on the alt-right suggests the Cloud People are worried. As Hitler said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Maybe it was Gandhi who said it. I get the two mixed up all the time.

The reason the Cloud People are suddenly concerned about the hate thinkers is the numbers. In the 1980’s, Official Conservatism™ included people like Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Peter Brimelow and Steve Sailer. The people outside the sphere of acceptable opinion were the sort of people who handed out literature on street corners extolling the virtues of the Albanian political system. The hard core racists and radicals were small in number and comfortably outside the tent so no one paid any attention to them.

Over the last thirty years or so, one group after another has been cast out of the increasingly narrow sphere of acceptable politics. Conservatism is basically low-tax liberalism now. It’s not just on the right either. Old school progressives like Bernie Sanders are now outside the realm of the acceptable on the Left. Cesar Chavez would be a hate thinker today, simply because he strongly opposed illegal immigration on economic grounds. The difference between the Left and Right today is over patronage and how often to bomb the muzzies.

The result of several decades of purges on the Right is that the “alt-right” is now bigger than the Official Right™ and it certainly is where the cool kids are hanging out on-line. The hate thinkers are also younger, on average, than the old farts in the mainstream media. One of the strange things about the alt-right is it is populated with young guys with everything to gain from a rebellion and old eccentrics with nothing to lose from a rebellion. The young guys are clever and funny, while the old guys are brilliant at noticing patterns in society and human behavior.

The safe bet is the increased attention to the hate thinkers will result in a holding of hands and chanting of lines from the liberal catechism. Howls of racism and antisemitism will echo through the halls of officialdom. We got a taste of this in the primary when guys like Jonah Goldberg tried to slime Trump as a closet Klansman simply because David Duke said nice things about him. Among the Cloud People, being called a racist is the worst thing imaginable, so it is their most powerful abracadabra word.

The trouble is the hate thinkers really don’t care and they seem to relish this sort of attention. The gag you often see is “When I was a conservative they called me a racist. When I was a libertarian they called me a racist. When I was a Tea Partier they called me a racist. Now that I’m alt-right I don’t care what they call me.” Often, the response to the charge of racism is mockery. It’s really hard to shout people down when they are laughing at your efforts. That and the old guys have been called these things so often they don’t pay any attention to it now.

Welcome to the Hater’s Ball Cloud People.

Ruling Class Madness

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I ran across this tweet and I was struck by the one entry in the thread where Noah Smith says supply and demand do not apply to labor markets. It does not have a place in the discussion, but it is an example of something the managerial class types believe, in spite of everything we know about the world. Noah Smith, from what I gather, is one of the new breed of libertarians, who embrace central planning and the custodial state. I’m not a reader so I may be misjudging him, but I really don’t care all that much either.

What struck me is how common it is to hear economists and pseudo-economists make the claim that the laws of supply and demand do not apply to labor markets. In fact, they regularly argue that the axioms of their field don’t apply to all sorts of things that cause trouble for the orthodoxy. In that twitter post, it appears that some Progressives are now saying it is bad idea to build more housing in their favorite cities, because that will magically make housing more expensive. It’s nonsense, but how long before some economist offers a supporting study?

It is easy to pick on economists for stuff like this, because they deserve it. The managerial class is shot through with guys toting economics degrees, offering up statistical justifications for their favorite policy. Today the libertarian economist Tyler Cowen argues for more currency manipulation, which one would think is something libertarian economists would oppose. They routinely argue against manipulating the supply of goods and services, but for some magical reason it is good for the state to control the supply of money.

I’ve often compared economics to astrology because it is almost as empirically sound as astrology and it holds a similar place in the ruling class today as astrology did in the olden thymes. The rulers today bring in the court economists to read their figures and predict the possible futures. In the olden thymes the court astrologer was brought into to read the stars and tell the king what the omens meant. In both cases the ruler was simply looking for confirmation so that’s what he got from his trusted magician.

It’s not just the economists. Security experts are always on our televisions telling us about the need for government surveillance of the public. After all, it is a dangerous world out there and if we’re going to invite the world into your towns, we have to have cameras on every corner. If that bit of thinking is not crazy enough, none of them ever talk about what happens when someone we don’t like gets that massive data trove collected by the surveillance state. They just pretend that can’t happen, even though it always happens.

An axiom of data collection is that the easier it is to collect, the harder it is to protect. An axiom of life is that anything worth stealing, gets stolen. For a long time, liberals argued against the state collecting data on citizens for exactly this reason. If they can get it, they will misuse it and then someone will steal it. But, all the alleged experts on these issues tell us that the NSA is an exception so no one will ever steal this stuff or misuse it. One has to wonder how many times we have secret data stolen before they stop insisting it can’t be stolen.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will know I have walked through the impossibility of open borders, self-government and individual liberty working together. If we do away with citizenship via open borders, there is no reason for anyone to have loyalty to the government. Things like patriotism and national loyalty stop making sense in a world of open borders. That means the state cannot rely on people “doing their duty” as they no longer have a duty to the state. How else will they get people to obey the rules?

The open borders types never bother to explain how their new borderless society will work or what would happen if it turns out to be something other than paradise. When anyone bothers to ask them, they respond like it is obvious, but to date no one has tried to explain how a world without borders could possible work. The best they can muster is something about “who we are” which is ridiculous in a world without borders,  as there is no “we” for us to be. It’s madness dressed up as morality.

Guys like Steve Sailer think all of this is deliberate. The people at the top not only understand the factual realities, they understand the implications of their preferred polices. They know the currency manipulation we see cannot last. They know open borders is doomed to failure. They know the surveillance state cannot work. They are just cashing in while they can. Wealthy interests pay them to keep the lie going as long as possible. It’s not a ridiculous possibility. To get to the top of the power structure, you have to be pretty clever, but also spectacularly devious and dishonest too.

Alternatively, they could see everything everyone else sees, but they have no answer for how to square all of these circles. Building more housing in major cities is what is needed, but the entrenched interests see no advantage and they have prominent spots in the managerial class. Running a surveillance state is a terrible idea, but no one knows how to put the genie back in the bottle so they just make peace with it as best they can. The libertarian economist knows the truth about policies like open borders, but he likes his job at the university too.

Sometimes, societies evolve down a dead end. Study the French Revolution and you begin to see that it was not so much a revolution as a collapse. The old order had reached a point where reform was impossible. The cost of maintaining it exceeded the benefits so it broke apart in big chunks like a building falling over in an earthquake. Perhaps that’s the issue faced by America. The current arrangements are unsustainable, but the cost of reform seems prohibitive, so all efforts are put into keeping the plates spinning, not matter how absurd.

There’s another possibility and that is our betters have been gripped by some sort of collective madness. This used to be the reason people gave for why the Germans went nuts and backed Hitler. Germany was the most advanced and sophisticated culture on earth and then within one generation it veered into barbarism. That’s not an answer that explains much, but to date no one has ever explained why the Germans turned to Nazism. Similarly, there’s no good explanation for why our rulers indulge in the madness we see on a regular basis now.