Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

The Sharing Economy Increases Human Wealth While Decreasing GDP. Let’s Try To Measure The Right Things.

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Human wealth should be defined by the widely shared ability to use things that help us flourish. It’s hard to aggregate these “things” in any shared measure, since wealth includes owning a nice car or being able to use Wikipedia immediately and for free. If I buy, or even rent, the car, it counts toward GDP; using Wikipedia counts for nothing in the National Income Accounts, but it’s pretty useful in terms of increasing my utility.
One thing that this means, of course, is that the idea that price-based “standards of living” have been stagnating is just misguided. New measures of GDP would help, but the larger problem is that any purely market-focused metric will miss the ability, and in fact the desire, of human beings to cooperate in groups.To paraphrase Adam Smith, the diversity of things that can be shared is limited by the extent of the cooperation horizon. In the case of Wikipedia, this means that the community working on providing informative entries should be worldwide, to encompass as much expertise as possible.
But that is not always the case, because larger “cooperation horizons” may be associated with higher transaction costs. In the case of sharing physical products or tools rather than information, there is a problem of delivery and return of the physical items.But there are still possibilities for sharing.
For one thing, the software or app that makes the platform work can be shared. It can be “open source,” in fact, with systems of access to editing and credit for improvements that work for Wikipedia. Ironically, investigating the history of open source illustrates some of the problems and paradoxes at work. One of the ur-texts of the history is “Computers: Software Is for Sharing,” published by Time magazine on July 30, 1984. If you can get access to it, you’ll see that the article describes the problem of splitting software from the physical electronic platform for which it was created.The irony is that this article about how information wants to be free is itself trapped behind Time’s paywall. The notion of “open source” is generally associated with software, but observers in a variety of fields have recognized the underlying problem: economic efficiency would seem to dictate that price equals marginal cost, but for software and other kinds of information the marginal cost is essentially zero. In economic terms, information “wants” to be free.“Free” could mean libre, or exempt from restrictions, meaning that there are no restrictions on publication or dissemination. But “free” also has the literal meaning of gratis, being available without charge, and available for adaptation to contexts quite different from its creation or original use. One advantage of making information free is that it connects with “permissionless innovation,” by making it possible for entrepreneurs, inventors, and people who have a problem to take something someone has devised for use in one setting and use it for their own purposes. Cooperation is useful, because we can’t know what innovations will be useful, either in their first form or in their subsequent forms.All of this is clearly an argument for using “open source” conventions, wherever that’s possible. The phrase “open source,” and the sentiment it embodies, is ancient. But the modern use in the context of software and widely disseminated information is usually dated to 1984, when Stewart Brand told Steve Wozniak:

It seems like there’s a couple of interesting paradoxes that we’re working here… On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Wozniak replied, “Information should be free but your time should not.”

Brand reportedly responded: “But then, at what point of amplification is your time being so well rewarded that it’s getting strange or so under-rewarded that it’s strange? There’s problems there with the market.”

Open source software is freely available, freely reproducible, freely editable, and technology neutral. Where does it come from? Clearly, society needs inventors to discover new information and programmers to create new software. We must cover the average costs of this valuable service. But once that new information exists and is available to anyone, the cost of sharing is negligible.

The cost of dissemination is a few keystrokes, an internet connection, and space to store the digital content. Information needs to be libre, but it can’t be gratis. Open source software, managed by a cooperative system that solves problems of triangulation, transfer, and trust, is one answer. Wikipedia, for example, doesn’t pay anyone, but it can provide incentives through giving public credit for doing good work.

Economists call this “voluntary provision of public goods.” The mystery, in traditional neoclassical economics, is not why there is so little of this kind of cooperation, but why there is so much. To be fair, Adam Smith and other “founders” of political economy were quite aware of the diversity of human cooperative capacity, but we have lost sight of this sphere of activity in favor of a narrow focus on markets.

Alexis de Tocqueville famously highlighted this general capacity for cooperation by forming voluntary groups, for humans in general but with a focus on the USA in particular. Tocqueville was no fan of using majority rule for everything. The problem with political democracy, he said, is that citizens are isolated and “enfeebled.” They can do hardly anything by themselves, and they can’t force others to help them. He admired the American solution to this problem: Organize into private groups, and leave government out of it. As Tocqueville put it:

The political associations which exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds — religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive, or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association….

[The people] all, therefore, become powerless if they do not learn voluntarily to help one another. If men living in democratic countries had no right and no inclination to associate for political purposes, their independence would be in great jeopardy, but they might long preserve their wealth and their cultivation: whereas if they never acquired the habit of forming associations in ordinary life, civilization itself would be endangered.

An interesting recent example, one that is largely operating at a level below public recognition, but which is nonetheless quite widespread, is “tool libraries.” It’s not pure ownership, it’s not renting, but it is cooperative sharing. And it doesn’t appear at all in GDP, even though voluntary private associations like this dramatically increase our wealth.

Suppose there are 30 of us, all of whom live in a small neighborhood, or even in a single block of a densely populated city. What we share is that each of us has a tool, a different tool, for woodworking or car repair, or some specialized activity we are all very interested in. Then the 30 of us collectively have an extensive tool “shop,” though the shop doesn’t exist in any one place. LocalTools.org provides software for groups of people to use to share tools, and to do it in a way that dramatically reduces the cost of having a well-stocked workshop.

After all, good tools, especially specialized tools, are expensive, and it is the nature of highly specialized tools that most of us don’t need them very often. But the right tool, exactly the right tool, is often indispensable for doing a task well. Maybe that tool is a compound miter saw, and maybe that tool is open source software to adapt to local conditions for sharing a compound miter saw; many things are now possible.

If a local group can solve the problems of finding each other, registering which tools are available and when, making it possible to reserve one or several tools, effecting the delivery and return of the tool, and using sensors connected to software that measures abuse or damage to the tool, with a time stamp to attribute responsibility, then a group of people can each have better tools than any of them could have afforded individually. This kind of organized sharing is enormously beneficial, because it also reduces storage costs dramatically. There are problems to be solved, but rapid progress is being made in solving sharing problems.

Centralized ownership with sharing, or distributed ownership with sharing, simultaneously increases wealth and decreases measured GDP. We shouldn’t let our inability to measure increased wealth convince us that we aren’t making progress. Because if there are opportunities to cooperate, people who are allowed to help each other will find ways to do it. The misguided focus on outdated metrics based on price rather than cooperation is leading to concerns about a “growth recession,” when we are actually in a golden age of rapidly increasing wealth.

Michael Munger is Professor of Economics at Duke University and Senior Fellow of the American Institute for Economic Research. This article appeared at aier.org.

The Literary Poetic Justice Warrior Fighting Hollywood’s Progressive Bigotry on Broadway – Atticus Finch

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Harper Lee’s marvelous 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is now a Broadway play starring a dumber Jeff Daniels as widowed father and attorney Atticus Finch. Set in the Democratic Jim Crow south, specifically 1936 Alabama, the novel is a charming story of childhood set against the backdrop of segregation and overt racial hatred. It also contrasts youthful exuberance and traditional social mores, kindness and revenge, progressive education and home schooling, and civilization vs. mob rule.

Most importantly, great literature, including To Kill a Mockingbird, uses well conceived fictional characters to instruct its readers about the heights of human virtue and the depths of human depravity. Without it, the alternative is a society with no depth of soul. As literature teacher Lisa VanDamme tells us,

Extensive knowledge of the consequences of history’s ideas and actions, of the classics of literature and the characters and situations they describe; these are the raw material from which rational moral principles are drawn.

While Aaron Sorkin’s Broadway production combines some interesting stagecraft and great performances, it gives the racial aspect center stage. To that end, the story’s hero, Atticus Finch, is riddled with guilt, aloofness, indecision, and anger. In contrast, the original Atticus Finch was independent in every sense and never wavered in his convictions. Ostensibly, the intention was to make the production relevant to 21st sensibilities and audiences, which is a nice way of saying submission to today’s progressive philosophy of anti-west tribal group-think. For Sorkin and Daniels to tell their  tale, Atticus had to be emasculated.

The Essence of a Father

Harper Lee’s masterpiece was an enlightening study of human nature. Her characterization of Finch illustrated the classical liberal values of self-reliance, compassion, tolerance, justice, and most of all, the essential role of a loving, dedicated father in the life of a child. When Atticus’ daughter Scout comes home from first grade, after being told by her new teacher that her father doesn’t know how to teach reading, she complains, “But if I keep going to school, we can’t ever read anymore.” Here, Atticus takes over.

That’s really bothering you, isn’t it. Yes, sir. Do you know what a compromise is, he asked? Scout replies, bending the law? No, an agreement reached by mutual concessions.

He continues to speak as an adult while respecting her childhood,

It works this way, he said. If you’ll concede the necessity of going to school, we’ll go on reading every night just as we always have. Is it a bargain? Yes, sir!

He then cements the deal with an understanding, and uses the adult language she had learned reading with her father every night,

By the way Scout, you’d better not say anything at school about our agreement. Why not? I’m afraid our activities would be received with considerable disapprobation by the more learned authorities.

This is the stuff of civilization, the trader principle in action. Yet, there were very few examples of fatherly affection or life lessons in the play – the children were played by young adults. Lee’s novel was once popular reading among American junior high and high school students. Like Scout and her brother Jem had a virtuous moral character to aspire to, so did America’s teenagers. In fact Atticus, in partnership with the Finch’s African-American housekeeper Calpurnia (whose motherly wise counsel was also omitted), gave young readers an emotional experience of admiration for man’s highest potential. Sorkin and Daniels chose to offer a more “mature” version.

The Virtue of Virtue Signaling

Throughout the novel, Atticus respects the life experiences of others. He is also aware of a justice system whose participants include flawed characters. Although averse to criminal law, he is asked to defend a black man against a fraudulent rape charge of a white woman. After interviewing the defendant, Tom Robinson, he agrees to take the case because he knows Robinson, also a loving and dedicated father, is an innocent man. He also knows Tom is likely to be convicted and his own family ostracized. In the play, Daniel’s portrays Atticus as man too naïve and confused to know this. But why?

A rhetorical question to be sure. Sorkin took an American treasure and turned it into a vehicle for race hustling. The rationale is economic inequality and crime statistics disparities between whites and blacks in America. White privilege and its systemic racism (whatever that means) are the villain, and it can’t be their fault, they’re progressive elites after all. Yet the root cause of progressivism is hubris, and its mission is an enlightened society planned by their experts. As such, in the early 20th century, it became a popular idea to weed out the undesirables according to their Darwinesque fitness tests. Their scientific application of this is eugenics, and it is justified as women’s health care. Because America’s northern capitalists won the Civil War for the abolition of slavery over the agrarian feudal lords of the south, this seemed like a pretty good alternative, and the rationale for Jim Crow segregation.

Despite this oppression, economist Thomas Sowell observes that “The poverty rate among black families fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent in 1960, during an era of no anti-poverty programs.” Two parent black families were the norm, yet the resulting “systemic racism” of 1965s progressive Great Society now manifests itself in postmodern urban plantations that have the same attributes as antebellum southern plantations – dilapidated housing, government dependence, violent surroundings, despair, and broken families.

Atticus Faces a New Collectivist Threat

This is where Atticus Finch and Tom Robinson come in. The greatest social problem facing America today is fatherless children, and it is never discussed. Not only do many young boys have no loving and dedicated father at home, masculinity and self-reliance are marginalized in favor of victimhood. This, despite the fact that America today is the most open, prosperous, and opportunity laden society in the history of the world. Heroes, real and fictional, only show up in comic book movies, professional sports, and narcissistic politicians. What America really needs are more classical liberal heroes, but Sorkin and his ilk have no use for self-reliance and tolerance.

Otherwise, the Broadway show has some wonderfully entertaining and worthwhile moments. The script included a lot of very funny dialogue, as did the novel, but in the end, the Mockingbird symbolizes innocence. Tom Robinson was innocent, yet killed, and there were other innocent characters in the novel who enhanced the lives of those around them, especially the reclusive neighbor Boo Radley, who faced obstacles rooted in collectivist thinking. Not the least of which were the two mobs, the one that threatened Atticus while trying to lynch Tom Robinson the night before the trial, and the jury that convicted Tom Robinson at the end of the trial. Scout was able to disarm the first mob by appealing to a couple of its members as individuals.

Unfortunately, despite his best efforts, Atticus was not able to dissuade the jury. He had to deal with them collectively and couldn’t overcome their collective peer pressure. But this is no reason for Sorkin and Daniels to form another mob to kill the mockingbird by hanging undeserved guilt around his neck, and maybe yours.

 

Splinternet: The Balkanization Of The Internet.

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Fifty years ago this week, at 10:30 on a warm night at the University of California, Los Angeles, the first email was sent. It was a decidedly local affair. A man sat in front of a teleprinter connected to an early precursor of the internet known as Arpanet and transmitted the message “login” to a colleague in Palo Alto. The system crashed; all that arrived at the Stanford Research Institute, some 350 miles away, was a truncated “lo.”

The network has moved on dramatically from those parochial—and stuttering—origins. Now more than 200 billion emails flow around the world every day. The internet has come to represent the very embodiment of globalization—a postnational public sphere, a virtual world impervious and even hostile to the control of sovereign governments (those “weary giants of flesh and steel,” as the cyberlibertarian activist John Perry Barlow famously put it in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996).

But things have been changing recently. Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, once said that national law had no place in cyberlaw. That view seems increasingly anachronistic. Across the world, nation-states have been responding to a series of crises on the internet (some real, some overstated) by asserting their authority and claiming various forms of digital sovereignty. A network that once seemed to effortlessly defy regulation is being relentlessly, and often ruthlessly, domesticated.

From firewalls to shutdowns to new data-localization laws, a specter of digital nationalism now hangs over the network. This “territorialization of the internet,” as Scott Malcomson, a technology consultant and author, calls it, is fundamentally changing its character—and perhaps even threatening its continued existence as a unified global infrastructure.

The phenomenon of digital nationalism isn’t entirely new, of course. Authoritarian governments have long sought to rein in the internet. China has been the pioneer. Its Great Firewall, which restricts what people can read and do online, has served as a model for promoting what the country calls “digital sovereignty.” China’s efforts have had a powerful demonstration effect, showing other autocrats that the internet can be effectively controlled. China has also proved that powerful tech multinationals will exchange their stated principles for market access and that limiting online globalization can spur the growth of a vibrant domestic tech industry.

Several countries have built—or are contemplating—domestic networks modeled on the Chinese example. To control contact with the outside world and suppress dissident content, Iran has set up a so-called “halal net,” North Korea has its Kwangmyong network, and earlier this year, Vladimir Putin signed a “sovereign internet bill” that would likewise set up a self-sufficient Runet. The bill also includes a “kill switch” to shut off the global network to Russian users. This is an increasingly common practice. According to the New York Times, at least a quarter of the world’s countries have temporarily shut down the internet over the past four years.

Most assertions of government authority aren’t quite so heavy-handed. Recent years have seen the emergence of a softer form of digital nationalism, evident in the proliferation of so-called data localization (or data protectionism) laws in countries as varied as Vietnam, India, Argentina, Venezuela and Nigeria. Broadly, these laws take two approaches. Some countries require that data on their citizens (or certain types of data, such as medical or financial information) must be physically stored on servers within their countries. Others allow the data to leave their borders but insist on a copy remaining domestically.

Many of the justifications cited for such laws are valid, ranging from privacy concerns to national security. But sometimes the very real failings of the internet, such as hate speech and disinformation, are co-opted to justify laws that give repressive governments a way to monitor online activity and speech. For all of the undeniable faults of the multinational tech companies, a Vietnamese or Cambodian dissident might still prefer their information to be under the control of Google or Facebook rather than their own governments.

According to a recent study by a Brussels think tank, at least 45 countries now have some version of data localization requirements in place. The trend is no longer restricted to authoritarian states. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Korea and Switzerland are among the countries that now restrict cross-border flows of data. The European Union’s influential General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), while not specifically about localization, imposes such stringent obligations that it makes it hard for companies to move data across borders, thus effectively serving as a similar requirement.

The cumulative effect of all these laws is starting to be felt throughout the network. Companies that work with data in multiple jurisdictions are among the hardest hit. Peter Yared, the founder of InCountry, a San Francisco startup that helps businesses comply with international data regulations, says that companies are struggling to understand local requirements, purchase or rent servers, hire staff and deploy new software to comply with a panoply of emerging (and often fluctuating) laws. “People in compliance, information security and technical operations departments are starting to sweat a little bit right now,” he says. “It hasn’t quite hit business leaders yet that they could face large fines or be ejected out of large markets like India.”

Many of these laws are ostensibly designed to rein in Western multinationals, but bigger companies are generally better able to accommodate the resulting uncertainty than smaller ones, which lack the necessary resources. Likewise, developing countries, often at the forefront of digital nationalism, could end up being among its chief victims. Countries such as India and the Philippines have important outsourcing sectors that rely on a unified global information network. Their moves to set up roadblocks on that network could come back to haunt them.

The great risk is that digital nationalism will Balkanize the internet, breaking it up into a patchwork of incompatible and irreconcilable fiefs. To an extent, this scenario, sometimes referred to as Splinternet, is already happening at the level of content and services. China’s population (around a fifth of humanity) does not have access to Wikipedia, Facebook and most of Google. When the EU’s GDPR first came into effect, many American media companies decided that the safest course of action, at least temporarily, was simply to stop offering their content to European consumers.

This Balkanization also could play out in the internet’s underlying core technical infrastructure. Over the last decade, several countries, citing cultural sensitivities, have considered banning or otherwise restricting the .xxx top-level domain name (generally used for pornography), raising the prospect that the internet’s naming system could eventually fracture. Responding to Edward Snowden’s revelations about U.S. spying, Brazil mooted the idea of building a separate undersea cable link to the EU to bypass existing internet infrastructure. And recent debates at the Engineering Task Force, a key internet standards committee, have sometimes been tense. In the lead-up to the introduction last year of a new security standard, representatives who wanted to maintain a backdoor for government agencies clashed with those advocating more robust encryption.

None of these debates has so far managed to shake the underlying foundations of the network, but the prospect of a technical Splinternet is no longer as inconceivable as it once was. In the decades ahead, we may look back wistfully to a time when data could move freely across the globe, without virtual customs or immigration checkpoints.

The internet was never just a technology or an engine of globalization. It was, at its core, an idea. Stefaan Verhulst, a co-founder of the GovLab at New York University (a think tank where I am a senior fellow), argues that, in its early days, the internet was very much a project of classical liberalism, embedded with “ideals like human rights, freedom of expression and free trade. If you care about those notions, then internet fragmentation is a problem.”

Like classical liberalism, the internet may also be a good idea in urgent need of updating. Much as the individualism and freedom of classical liberalism have been distorted into the inequalities and ethical transgressions of modern capitalism, so the internet’s culture of “permissionless innovation” has been abused, transformed into the centralized, controlled network of today. The original dream of an unfettered global public sphere is probably over. Understanding why that happened is the first step to reclaiming at least part of the original vision and to mitigating the most damaging effects of digital nationalism.

It’s no coincidence that the rise of digital nationalism corresponds with a similar resurgence of its offline variety. A technology community that has long prided itself on its radical difference, its apartness, turns out to be susceptible to many of the trends that influence the world at large. Over the last decade or so, the internet has suffered the same distortions of wealth and power—and the same resulting resentments—that have spurred the rise of illiberal nationalism and populism. Google today accounts for around 90% of online searches around the world; Facebook and Google together draw an estimated 84% of global advertising dollars (excluding China). Amazon accounts for 49% of online spending in the U.S., and Alibaba claims 60% in China. This was not the original dream.

Many of the anxieties to which this consolidation of power has given rise are legitimate; some are spurious and are used to advance ulterior motives. It has all been fertile ground for digital nationalism. When governments call for regulation to combat fake news, they tap into real concerns over the unaccountable power of social media; they also open up avenues for censorship. When developing countries insist on keeping their citizens’ data to combat “data colonization,” they raise genuine issues about the Western, especially American, bias of the internet; they also create backdoors to eavesdrop on citizens and erect barriers to protect local commercial interests. Modern nationalism, as the Harvard sociologist Bart Bonikowski has noted, depends on the widespread “mobilization of resentment”; this is true of both its digital and offline variants.

It turns out that the way to deal with offline and online nationalism may be quite similar: Restore a sense of inclusiveness and fair play, flatten some of the sharpest inequalities and rediscover and stress the principles that made the network so inspiring (and radically creative) in the first place. As it happens, there is a tool kit, both existing and emerging, to do some of this.

Mr. Verhulst, from the GovLab at NYU, argues that laws and principles from a previous era should be updated for the 21st century, by applying telecom universal service obligations to broadband, for example, and diversity and equal-time rules (sometimes applied to radio and television) to large news and social media networks. “It’s not like we don’t know how to go about this,” he says. “We just have to be more creative and think of what we can learn from models that were used in the past.” Competition law is another area that has received a lot of attention, specifically the need to update its provisions to take account of the (nominally) free business models practiced by many digital companies.

Another idea is to develop “club”- or “zone”-based approaches to running the internet—discrete, interconnecting blocs whose nation-members would make commitments to liberal principles like free trade, privacy and freedom of expression. Such blocs would be a far cry from the original vision of a single global network. But adherents, like Geoff Mulgan, the former head of Nesta, a British innovation foundation, argue that such “coalitions of the willing” are the best way to arrest the continuing fragmentation of the network. “I don’t see what the alternative is,” Mr. Mulgan says. “The old global vision is breaking up.”

The question is no longer whether national governments should have a say but what form their authority will take and how it will ultimately shape the network. In the old vision, nation-states were the enemy of innovation and freedom. Those were the Wild West days, and it is understandable that internet purists—and many average users—are nostalgic for them.

But things have changed a lot since that first email was sent in California. Amid the creeping nationalism and illiberalism of today, we may no longer have the luxury of rejecting governance and governments. Fifty years after the birth of the internet, it may well be that national governments, wielding enlightened regulation, are the last best hope for maintaining a network that is—at least relatively—open and free.

Mr. Kapur is a senior fellow at the GovLab at New York University. This article first appeared at wsj.com

6 Charts Show The Overwhelming, Never-Ending Growth Of Big Government.

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Federal spending and federal taxation in the United States set new records in 2019. And the federal budget deficit swelled to more than a trillion dollars. Europe is in the middle of an enormous spending binge. But apparently hard-core laissez-faire libertarian purists have taken over the world’s governments.

At least, that’s the case in the minds of many leftists and conservatives who have convinced themselves that “market fundamentalists” have conquered the world’s institutions, and have enacted a global regime of near-zero taxation, free trade, and almost totally unregulated markets.

We hear this over an over again when everyone from The Pope to Bernie Sanders claims “neoliberalism” — a term used to “denote… a radical, far-reaching application of free-market economics unprecedented in speed, scope, or ambition” — has forged the world into a paradise for radical libertarians.

As one writer at The Guardian assures us, the UK must end the nation’s “generation-long experiment in market fundamentalism.” Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson insists that American policymakers “worship” markets and have a near-religious devotion to capitalism.

The neoliberal takeover is so complete, in fact, that we’re told neoliberals are the ones really running the Labour Party. Meanwhile, sociologist Lawrence Busch informs us of a “neoliberal takeover” of higher education. “Free-market fundamentalists,” Busch contends, have transformed America’s colleges and universities into swamps of capitalist obeisance.

By What Metric?

But whenever I hear about how government intervention in the marketplace is withering away — to be replaced by untrammeled markets — I am forced to wonder what metric these people are using.

By what measure are governments getting smaller, weaker, and less involved in the daily lives of human beings?

In this country, at least, this case certainly can’t be made by consulting the data on government taxation and spending.

From 1960 to 2018, federal tax receipts per capita increased from $3,523 to $5,973, an increase of 70 percent.

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Combining state and local taxation with federal taxes, the increase is even larger. Taxation per capita at all levels combined grew 118 percent from $5,247 in 1960 to $11,461 in 2018.

The size and scope of government isn’t just growing to reflect population changes. After all, the US population only grew 81 percent from 1960 to 2018. And the federal government, embroiled in a global cold war amidst a rising tide of social programs, wasn’t exactly vanishingly small in 1960.

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In all these per capita graphs, I’ve factored in population growth because many defenders of government growth claim that governments must get larger as populations increase. Even if that were true, we can see that total spending and taxation is outpacing population growth considerably. But it should not simply be accepted that population growth ought to bring increases in government spending and taxation. Military defense of the United States doesn’t become more expensive simply because the population grew. Moreover, innovation and productivity gains make products and services less expensive in a functioning private economy. This is often masked by relentless money supply inflation in the name of price “stability.” But the natural progression of an economy is toward falling prices. Only with government procurements have we come to expect everything getting more expensive every year.

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Fueled by huge deficits, federal spending has outpaced tax collections. Per capita federal spending increased by 191 percent from 1960 to 2018, climbing from $4,300 to $12,545.

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The deficit topped a trillion dollars during the 2019 fiscal year, a new high for a so-called “boom period” during which deficits are supposed to shrink.

Ultimately, of course, huge deficits will put an additional burden on the taxpayers beyond the hundreds of billions of dollars per year necessary to simply pay interest on the debt. The huge debt levels put upward pressure on interest rates, and require more central-bank interventions designed to prop up demand for government debt. These interventions both crowd out demand for private debt, and have led to asset-price inflation as a result of money-supply inflation. This benefits the wealthy, but harms first time home buyers and ordinary savers.

The government spending itself is a problem as well. Governments try to play off government spending as if it were all a free gift to the taxpayers as some sort of “return” on the “investment” of taxes paid.

As Murray Rothbard has noted, however, government spending is just as damaging as the taxation that came before it. Government procurements bid up the prices of goods and services that could have been available at lower prices in the private sector were it not for the government spending. Steel and other materials would be less expensive for entrepreneurs. High tech workers could be employed innovating and making things for ordinary taxpayers instead of for government agencies and bureaucrats. Small business owners and ordinary consumers all are worse off as a result.

So, given that spending and taxation are at or are near all-time highs right now, where exactly is this takeover by laissez-faire libertarians we keep hearing about?

It’s certainly not in the regulatory side of the government.

The number of pages published in the Code of Federal Regulations increased 710 percent from 1960 to 2018, and 37 percent over the past twenty years. Every additional page represents new regulations, new rules, new punishments, and new fees. These are costs employers must contend with, and consumers must ultimately pay for. Protectionists who think that manufacturers would flock to the United States were it not not low tariffs might consider the regulatory burden placed on employers by our own domestic policies.

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Both staffing and budgets for federal regulatory agencies continue to balloon. The combined budgets for federal regulatory agencies have more than tripled over the past 40 years, rising from under 20 billion in 1978 to 65 billion today.

Part of this has been to pay salaries for the ever growing army of federal employees. Employees at regulatory agencies doubled over the past forty years, rising from 140,000 full-time equivalent positions in 1978 to 280,000 today.

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The US population increased by 47 percent during that time.

When the federal government isn’t spending more, it’s taking on more risk, committing the taxpayers to more bailouts, and flooding the market with government insured debt. As The Washington Post reported earlier this month, “In 2019, there is more government-backed housing debt than at any other point in U.S. history.” And these government guarantees are up considerably since the 2009 housing crash. The Post continues: “Now, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration guarantee almost $7 trillion in mortgage-related debt, 33% more than before the housing crisis … Because these entities are run or backstopped by the U.S. government, a large increase in loan defaults could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Yet, in spite of all this, we’ll no doubt continue to be told that government is withering away, government institutions are “underfunded,” and extreme anti-government libertarians have taken over. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the success of certain free-market ideas — however limited that success may be — has helped to restrain the growth of government taxation and spending. Without this so-called “victory” of the libertarians, we might be looking at a per capita tax burden that grew 200 or 300 percent in recent decades, rather than a “mere” 118 percent.

But given the ongoing growth of government taxation, spending, and regulation, it should be abundantly clear that we are hardly living in an age of “market fundamentalism,” laissez-faire libertarianism, or policymakers who “worship” the market. If anything, trends appear to be moving in exactly the opposite direction.

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. This article first appeared at mises.org.

The World’s Least-Free Countries Reveal Just How Much ‘Socialism Sucks’.

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Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell are well-known free market economists, and they do not look with favor on a disturbing trend among American young people. “In the spring of 2016,” they tell us, “a Harvard survey found that a third of eighteen-to twenty-nine year olds supported socialism. Another survey, from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, reported that millennials supported socialism over any other economic system.” (p.8)

Unfortunately, the young people in question have little idea of the nature of socialism. Lawson and Powell would like to remedy this situation, but they confront a problem. Ordinarily, one would urge students to read Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, Mises’s “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” and similar classic works, in order to understand the basic facts about the free market and socialism, but the millennials are unlikely to do so. One must attract their attention. What can be done?

Lawson and Powell have had the happy idea of presenting elementary economics in a humorous way that will appeal to those “turned off” by serious and sober scholarship. In the latter adjective lies the key to their approach. Both of the authors enjoy drinking beer, and they travel around the world to various socialist countries in pursuit of their beloved beverage, making incisive comments about the economy of each country as they do so. They write in a salty style that will make millennials laugh, though some readers will find it jarring.

For the young, “socialism” means no more than vague ideas about “fairness”, but, the authors note, the term has a precise meaning: “To separate the state from socialism in any large society is like trying to separate private property from capitalism. It can’t be done. I’ll say it once more for the people in the back: socialism, in practice, means that the state owns and controls the means of production.” (p.128) No country is completely socialist, but some are more socialist than others. How can the degree of socialism be evaluated? Lawson has, along with James Gwartney, produced an annual economic freedom index for the Fraser Institute, which the authors use to answer this question, sometimes with surprising results.

Many professed socialists look to Sweden for inspiration, but according to the freedom index, “Sweden gets a 7.54 rating, which is good enough for twenty-seventh place out of the 159 countries in the study. . .Bottom line: Sweden is a prosperous, mostly capitalist country.” (pp.10-11)

The authors must now confront an objection. Why should we not prefer welfare-state capitalism to the straightforward free market economy the authors want? They reply that Sweden prospered under freedom, but the increased taxation needed to finance the welfare state has brought about stagnation. “Sweden grew most when it was freer than it is today.” (p.13)

If some people admire Sweden, few except fanatics have good words for the economy of Cuba. Nevertheless, must we not recognize the wonders accomplished by the Cuban socialized medicine? We must give the devil his due. Lawson and Powell are not convinced. “Official Cuban health statistics are impressive. . .Yet, we also know that the hospitals most Cubans use are so poorly equipped that people often have to bring their own sheets. What gives? The silence [on the streets} is part of the answer. The lack of automobiles means a lack of traffic fatalities. Since automobile accidents are a leading cause of death among younger people, the lack of automobiles has a disproportionate impact on life expectancy statistics for reasons that have nothing to do with health care. The low rate of infant mortality is a product of data manipulation.” (p.53)

Why has Cuban socialism, like all other centralized socialist economies, failed? The authors present with great clarity the essential point: “’[A]lmost a hundred years ago, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained that socialism, even if run by benevolent despots and populated with workers willing to work for the common good, could still not match capitalism’s performance. Socialism requires abolishing private property in the means of production. But private property is necessary to have the free exchange of labor, capital, and goods that establish proper prices. Without proper prices, socialist planners could not know which consumer goods were needed or how best to produce them. . .Socialism also gives tremendous power to government officials and bureaucrats who are the system’s planners—and with that power comes corruption, abuse, and tyranny.” (p.37)

Socialist tyrants were the greatest mass murderers in history, and the young must be apprised of this melancholy fact. “Stalin ranks just behind Mao as history’s second greatest mass murderer, with Hitler coming in third—and all three dictators were, of course, committed socialists of one sort or another.” (p.115)

Some millennial socialists respond with a distinction. The despotic governments mentioned were not genuinely socialist. The authors answer with appropriate severity: “This is the same dirty trick socialists have played for decades. Whenever things go south, as they inevitably do, they claim that it wasn’t ‘real’ socialism. I [Lawson[ find the whole thing more than a little disingenuous and very irritating. When socialists, democratic and otherwise, held up Venezuela as a great socialist experiment in the 2000s, the message was, ‘See, we told you so; socialism works!’ but when failure happened, the message changed to, “No, wait—that’s not real socialism!’ They want to claim socialism during the good times but disavow it during the bad.” (pp.127-128) A related gross error, the famous “nirvana fallacy,” is to compare an ideal state of affairs, conjured up by socialists, with difficulties of real-world capitalism.

If the authors are ready to rebuke the errors of misguided youth, they look with sympathy on some of their hopes. Many young people condemn the drug war, with its rampant racism and mass incarcerations, and they are right to do so: “The U.S. government’s war on drugs is unwinnable because, in the language of economists, it is a supply-side war, when demand isn’t very price-sensitive. This means when the U.S. government scores a ‘win’ in the war, the price of the remaining drugs goes up more than the usage falls. As a result, net revenue to drug cartels increases, which increases their ability to corrupt law enforcement and buy weapons and other smuggling equipment. The result has been an endless cycle of increasing violence along the entire supply chain in Central and South America. . .” (p.135)

It is not only the drug war, but the war on terror as well, that ought to be condemned, and here once more, the many millennials who protested against the war are in the right. “We feel the same about the war on terror. The wars and violence associated with it in the Middle East are a major reason for Europe’s immigration wave. . .advocates for capitalism can be against war precisely because war undermine capitalist institutions and freedoms.. . .Chris Coyne wrote a book entitled After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy, in which he shows that when the U.S. engages in foreign intervention, it rarely creates the kind of lasting institutional change that supports what some might call a ‘neoliberal’ society.

Economist Robert Higgs’s classic book, Crisis and Leviathan, shows how crises in the United States, especially wars, have led to expanded government at the expense of markets. Chris’s latest book, Tyranny Come Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism, co-authored with another friend of ours, Abby Hall, has shown how U.S. military interventions abroad ‘boomerang’ back to the United States in ways that decrease our freedoms at home. See, anti-war isn’t a uniquely leftist position. Capitalists should be anti-war too.” (pp.136-137. I regret the use of “neoliberal” as a term of praise and the solecism “advocates for.”)

I confess that I approached the authors’ project of a drinking tour of the socialist countries with skepticism. Would it be more than a jeu d’esprit? Reading the book has laid my skepticism to rest. Socialism Sucks has the potential to do great good, if it gets into the right hands, and its impressive sales suggest that it will do so.

David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute, and editor of The Mises Review. Originally published at mises.org/wire.

California’s Disastrous State Illustrates The Limits Of Progressivism.

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More than 2 million Californians recently were left without power after the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric—which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year—preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.

Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so overregulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents, and infectious diseases.

Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.

Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales, gasoline, and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous, and under nonstop makeshift repair.

Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon—the result of high taxes, hyper-regulation, and green mandates—add insult to the injury of stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state’s failing high-speed rail project.

Residents shrug that the state’s public schools are among the weakest in the nation, often ranking in the bottom quadrant in standardized test scores. Elites publicly oppose charter schools, but often put their own kids in private academies.

Californians know that to venture into a typical municipal emergency room is to descend into a modern Dante’s Inferno. Medical facilities are overcrowded. They can be as unpleasant as they are bankrupting to the vanishing middle class that must face exorbitant charges to bring in an injured or sick child.

No one would dare to connect the crumbling infrastructure, poor schools, and failing public health care with the non-enforcement of immigration laws, which has led to a massive influx of undocumented immigrants from the poorest regions of the world, who often arrive without fluency in English or a high school education.

Stores are occasionally hit by swarming looters. Such Wild West criminals know how to keep their thefts under $950, ensuring that such “misdemeanors” do not warrant police attention. California’s permissive laws have decriminalized thefts and break-ins. The result is that San Francisco now has the highest property crime rate per capita in the nation.

Has California become premodern?

Millions of fed-up middle-class taxpayers have fled the state. Their presence as a stabilizing influence is sorely missed. About one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California. Millions of poor newcomers require enormously expensive state health, housing, education, legal, and law enforcement services.

California is now a one-party state. Democrats have supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature. Only seven of the state’s 53 congressional seats are held by Republicans. The result is that there is no credible check on a mostly coastal majority.

Huge global wealth in high-tech, finance, trade, and academia poured into the coastal corridor, creating a new nobility with unprecedented riches. Unfortunately, the new aristocracy adopted mindsets antithetical to the general welfare of Californians living outside their coastal enclaves.

The nobodies have struggled to buy high-priced gas, pay exorbitant power bills, and deal with shoddy infrastructure—all of which resulted from the policies of the distant somebodies.

California’s three most powerful politicians—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and Gov. Gavin Newsom—are all multimillionaires. Their lives, homes, and privileges bear no resemblance to those of other Californians living with the consequences of their misguided policies and agendas.

The state’s elite took revolving-door entries and exits for granted. They assumed that California was so naturally rich, beautiful, and well endowed that there would always be thousands of newcomers who would queue up for the weather, the shore, the mountains, and the hip culture.

Yet California is nearing the logical limits of progressive adventurism in policy and politics.

Residents carefully plan long highway trips as if they were ancient explorers charting dangerous routes. Tourists warily enter downtown Los Angeles or San Francisco as if visiting a politically unstable nation.

Insatiable state tax collectors and agencies are viewed by the public as if they were corrupt officials of Third World countries seeking bribes. Californians flip their switches unsure of whether the lights will go on. Many are careful about what they say, terrified of progressive thought police who seem more worried about critics than criminals.

Our resolute ancestors took a century to turn a wilderness into California. Our irresolute generation in just a decade or two has been turning California into a wilderness.

(C) 2019 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC. Photo by Nathan DeFiesta on Unsplash

Two Bernies. One Creates Value and Jobs and Improves Lives. The Other Destroys.

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A pair of Bernies, one running for president, the other a wealthy corporate executive and philanthropist, are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, as well as the cultural divide. One has made life better for many. The other wants to suck the life out of as many as he can.

Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, now 90, recently said that Sen. Bernie Sanders, campaigning for president as a Democrat with a Socialist’s pedigree, is the “enemy of every entrepreneur.” Sanders, who represents Vermont, has made a public career out of vilifying corporations, free markets, and the wealthy.

Meet the creator. Fear the destroyer.

Marcus, with Arthur Blank and Ken Langone, started a company in 1978 that today has more than 2,200 stores across all 50 states and in Canada. When those men were putting long, grinding hours into their startup in the late 1970s, Sanders was “working” for the American People’s Historical Society. There he made a 30-minute documentary about Eugene Debs, the perpetual Socialist Party presidential candidate whom he called “the great American trade unionist, socialist and revolutionary.”

Home Depot currently employs more than 400,000. Since its inception, it has created millions of jobs. Home Depot also provided health care insurance for, again, millions of families whose husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers have worked for the company, now 27th on the Fortune 500 list, where it has been found every year for the last 25.

In addition to the jobs provided by Home Depot, vendors that depend on the company for much of their sales, many of them small businesses that have increased in value, have also created jobs as they have grown along with the chain.

Meanwhile, Sanders, who has never started a business, wants to guarantee a job to everyone through government fiat, and has overheated dreams about forcing the country into a Medicare for All system, an impossible-to-pay-for arrangement which no other nation in the world has, not even the Scandinavian countries he says are his models.

Marcus has also helped make Americans who never worked for Home Depot better off — and we’re talking about more than the millions of consumers who have eagerly patronized the chain, and contractors who buy material there. A share of Home Depot stock bought in March 1989 is now worth 200 times the purchase price. The company has created immense wealth for the millions who own and have owned stock directly and through institutions. In fact, Home Depot created as many as “20,000 millionaires overnight” when the company went public

Meanwhile, a share of Sanders, if there was such, bought in 1989 would certainly have brought a loss. Rather than create wealth, it’s Sanders’ aim to forcibly spread it around.

The pair is also far apart in philanthropical terms. While Bernie the Destroyer is fully committed to giving away other people’s money, Bernie the Creator, who understands the capitalism that Sanders hates “makes charitable-giving possible in the first place,” donates wealth that he produced. He recently said that he has given away more than $2 billion of his own money to roughly 300 different organizations. Sanders’ charitable contributions equal only 3.3% of his income, which is somewhat benevolent among the group of stingy Democratic presidential candidates, but less than half as generous as the American families earning between $25,000 and $50,000 a year.

Had a Sanders regime been in power when Marcus and his colleagues were starting Home Depot, the company simply would have never existed. Though he has tried to back away from some of his more hard-core socialist positions, because he knows they won’t play well to an audience larger than the hysterical fringe that’s followed him since his early days, Sanders at one time openly admitted he believed in “the public ownership of the major means of production and their conversion into worker-controlled enterprises.” Knowing this, Marcus and the others would have logically reasoned there was no sense in starting a business that the government was going to eventually seize.

In this tale of two Bernies, one has tried to foster the best of times while the other would usher in the worst of times if he gets the raw political power he craves. It’s wisdom vs. foolishness, light vs. dark, hope vs. despair.

— Written by J. Frank Bullitt

What Exactly Is Political Economy? It’s Nothing But Three Big Myths (Busted Here).

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Myths abound. This reality is unsurprising given that the number of ways to be wrong is immensely larger than the number of ways to be right. And because of the enormous complexity and dynamism of society and the economy, myths about society and the economy are especially abundant.

Most economic myths are (relatively) small. Trade deficits are evidence of domestic economic failure or of foreign government cheating – minimum-wage legislation is a boon for low-paid workers – government debt owed to ourselves isn’t a problem even if the size of this debt is massive – active supervision by antitrust authorities is necessary to keep the economy competitive – more immigration lowers the standard of living for many native-born workers – middle-class Americans have stagnated economically for more than 40 years – sound money can be supplied only by the state – economic growth depletes resources: these and a practically uncountable number of other such myths are, and for many years have been, current.

Although such myths will never be completely slain, their baneful impacts can be reduced by sound and unrelenting economic education and public commentary. (To this end, AIER is doing more than its share.) But even more destructive than are these (relatively) small myths are three Big Myths – foundational misconceptions of the nature of social and economic reality.

Big Myth #1

The most pernicious of all Big Myths is that the economy and society – or, at least, any economy that is productive, and any society that is good – are the conscious creation of the state. Classical-liberal scholars have fought for centuries against this social-creationist myth. In the 18th century Adam Smith celebrated the market’s invisible hand and warned against the “man of system” who arrogantly fancies that he (or she) can rearrange flesh-and-blood people in society as a chess player rearranges inert pawns and princes on a chess board.

In the 19th century Herbert Spencer observed that nearly all legislative schemes for uplifting society are doomed to fail because “[t]hey have their root in the error that society is a manufacture; whereas it is a growth.” In the 20th century F.A. Hayek repeatedly insisted on the vital importance of recognizing that while modern society and the economy are indeed the results of human action, they are not – and cannot possibly be – the results of human design.

In the 21st century this essential truth is emphasized and explained eloquently by a host of brilliant scholars, including, for example, Steve Davies, Richard Epstein, Deirdre McCloskey, Tom Palmer, Matt Ridley, and Mario Rizzo.

Yet this Big Myth seems only to spread and strengthen. Listening to politicians, and reading everything from popular punditry to much seemingly deep scholarship, makes clear that large numbers of people – I dare say most – conceive of social order, economic growth, and widespread prosperity as being unobtainable unless engineered into existence by the state.

Big Myth #2

An implication of this Big Myth is another Big Myth – namely, because all that is good in our social and economic relations is made possible by the state, each of us is deeply and forever in debt to the state. The state, dogmatically believed to be a secular creator, is therefore supposed to be owed by each of us everlasting thanks and offerings. (Oh, and owed also praise: singing the national anthem is not far removed from singing “Praise to the Lord” and other Christian hymns that I sang as a boy attending Catholic mass.)

“You didn’t build that!” was Barack Obama’s way of scolding everyone who denies that the state owns an open-ended claim on Americans’ incomes. According to this Big Myth, to complain about paying taxes – and, worse, to actively oppose tax increases – is selfishly to resist giving to the secular creator what is owed to it by each of us puny beneficiaries of the state’s beneficence, magnificence, and grace.

Big Myth #3

A third Big Myth is that government carries out the will of the people as long as its top officials are chosen by majority rule. At root, this naïve faith in majoritarian democracy is mistaken because there is, in fact, no will of the people. “The people” is not a sentient creature with a mind and preferences and fears and hopes. “The people” includes, of course, sentient individuals each with his or her own mind and preferences and fears and hopes. But this reality of each member of the group does not transform the group into a giant individual equivalent in all but size to each of the flesh-and-blood men, women, and children who comprise the group.

This ‘non-sentience’ of a group of individuals does not mean that two or more – or even millions of – individuals cannot agree upon goals to pursue collectively. Should we or should we not pool some of our resources to build a highway? Should we or should we not organize to provide community policing or national defense? And some form of democratic decision-making is the best means available for registering the preferences of each individual in a way that results in an acceptable collective decision.

But this reality does not mean that the results of the democratic decision-making process reveal that “the people” have a will that is in any way similar to the will that is possessed and exercised by each individual. All that even the best collective decision-making process does is to discover a compromise outcome that is acceptable to each member of the group.

Anthropomorphizing any group of individuals, and supposing that the results of majority rule express the will of this collective creature, creates the false and dangerous impression that if any individual objects to a majority-rule outcome, this individual is attempting to elevate his paltry self over a will not only as real as his own but also greater because it is that of many individuals. But, again, “the People” is not a being with a mind or a will. It follows that no method of collective decision-making, not even the most ideal form of democracy, reveals the People’s will. That which is unreal cannot be revealed.

Big Myths Be Gone!

If society would be rid of these three Big Myths, legitimate disagreement would still reign over the size and scope of government. Compromise for collective decisions would still be necessary, and democratic decision-making would remain the best means of achieving this compromise. But the risk of tyranny would be much reduced from what it is now because no one would anthropomorphize collections of people or deify the state.

Donald J. Boudreaux is a senior fellow with American Institute for Economic Research and with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University

The Modern Poetic Justice Warrior Who Rejects Hollywood’s Totalitarian Lovefest – Clint Eastwood

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The State of Georgia is one of the cheapest places in America for Hollywood studios to produce films. By using local crews they get large tax incentives. While this is political interference in economic activity, Georgia has nonetheless become the third largest filmmaking market in the United States, until now. In May 2019, Georgia’s governor signed into law a bill banning abortions after five weeks of pregnancy. Since then, Disney, Netflix, Viacom, Sony, Universal and other studios have threatened to boycott Georgia and cripple the state’s film industry if this law is enforced, except Poetic Justice Warrior Clint Eastwood.

Of course, Netflix will continue to produce in the Middle East where abortion is virtually illegal and female mutilation is common, and Disney is not inclined to disrupt its profitable partnerships in China where abortion is mandatory and unborn females are sacrificed first. As poetic justice would have it, Eastwood’s next film will be produced in Georgia, because, well, it is the true story of something that happened in Georgia. Not coincidentally, it combines elements of the last three articles in the Modern Poetic Justice Warrior series – the Drive By Media, the Diversity Delusion, and the Immorality of Government Force.

High Plains Drifter

The tagline at the end of the trailer for Eastwood’s new movie titled ‘Richard Jewell‘ says “The world will know his name and know the truth.” This is eerily similar to the end of Eastwood’s allegorical western movie classic High Plains Drifter. As the Eastwood character rides out of town the morning after the destruction of Lago, he passes its mayor and sheriff. Mordecai is erecting a gravestone and says to the passing Stranger, “I never did know your name.” The Stranger gazes at the headstone and says to Mordecai, “Yes, you do.” As he rides off into the desert, the sheriff then gazes at the new headstone. It bears the name Sheriff Jim Duncan.

Sheriff Duncan had been whipped to death by three men hired by the townspeople to protect the town’s secret of their gold mining operation. It turns out that Lago’s residents had also double-crossed Duncan’s murderers over the gold rights and were now desperate for protection from them. That’s where the Stranger comes in.

Metaphorically, Richard Jewell is Sheriff Duncan. In this case, Jewell was the security officer at the 1996 Olympics Games in Atlanta Georgia who discovered a bomb at Centennial Olympic Park and did everything he could to notify authorities, evacuate the area, and save as many people as possible from death and injury. But the Drive-Bys needed a sensational story, the Diversity crowd needed a white guy, and the Government needed an easy scapegoat. Richard Jewell checked all of their boxes for identity group stereotypes and vulnerability.

Unforgiven

Clint Eastwood’s singular ability to repudiate movie industry arrogance is rooted in two core principles – character and excellence. His excellence reached new heights in the characters of his last feature film of the American western genre, Unforgiven. Like a great artist integrates abstract concepts into a philosophical theme, Eastwood delivered a complex assortment of characters, each wrestling with conflicting moral choices, and all operating in an environment of fear. For the moviegoer, it challenges everything we thought we knew about the heroes and villains of the Wild West. One example of Eastwood’s genius is the journalist W. W. Beauchamp. As one reviewer relates,

Beauchamp is a writer that tells of derring-do heroics, gunslingers with a glint in their eye who deal death as some sort of heroic encore. This gives Unforgiven an excellent sleight of hand, for this West is grim and a destroyer of all illusions and it’s not controversial to say that this is indeed a good thing.

In this sense, Unforgiven is a wonderful metaphor for destructive social and political forces including media, who according to Secretary Hillary Clinton, are “our body politic immune system.” Another reviewer observes, “In fact, nearly every action in the film, however noble its inspiration, is ultimately perverted by an economic system founded on desperation.” Among other things, Unforgiven is about the disintegration of an individual’s spirit and society’s cohesiveness when people’s lives are merely damaged goods to be traded. This moral principle in Eastwood’s dystopian epic is a violation of the trader principle. As philosopher Ayn Rand explains in her novel Atlas Shrugged.

The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material. It is the principle of justice.

The Mule

Hollywood actors flailing to be relevant have their narcissistic awards shows. Since 2016, these spectacles have become arrogant hate-fests for actors peddling their ignobly inspired commodities, themselves. Multiculturalism is their life-sapping opiate. For contrast, in 2018, Clint Eastwood was recreating a story about drug cartels peddling their own life-sapping opiates through an elderly, cash-strapped Korean War veteran. This hugely successful film, The Mule, was snubbed by the Academy for too little dramatic effect or too much political incorrectness. After all, Sinaloa (a Mexican drug cartel), is well, Mexican. In either case, Hollywood in its shameless reality, and The Mule based on a true story, are both reflections of a society in decline.

While Eastwood’s politics are live and let live libertarianism, the entertainment elites demand ideological purity that is fluid and deadly. As Eastwood explained in a Parade Magazine interview in 1997,

Abuse of power isn’t limited to bad guys in other nations. It happens in our own country if we’re not vigilant. Those in power get jaded, deluded and seduced by power itself.

Today’s entertainment industry denounces the classical liberal values that made them wealthy and gives them voice. All too many celebrate the thugs in Venezuela, Cuba, and Washington. The entire cabal is wedded to platitudes, have no interest in consequences, and are getting rich. As Rand explains about Eastwood’s warning,

Having money is not the measure of a man, it is how he got it. The power to create value, or the ability to manipulate? When men become the tools of men, blood drips. Chains or dollars, take your choice, there is no honor.

A Fistful of Dollars

The spaghetti western was particularly well suited to develop Clint Eastwood into an international star. In the enigmatic Stranger of High Plains Drifter, Eastwood was able to put a face on poetic justice punishing vice by having Lago’s residents paint their town red and renaming it Hell. However, in many other roles such as Dirty Harry, Eastwood’s character was more of an ends justifies the means vehicle for vigilante justice. In either case, his stories had a Mickey Spillane quality of appealing to mass audiences hungry for a hero with the courage to stand on virtuous principles.

Regarding rights as a moral principle, Eastwood told USA Today in 2004, “People should be able to be what they want to be and do what they want — as long as they’re not harming people.” This is the ethics of John Locke, and the essence of Clint Eastwood,

There’s a rebel lying deep in my soul. Anytime anybody tells me the trend is such and such, I go in the opposite direction. I have a reverence for individualism. I’ve always considered myself too individualistic to be either right-wing or left-wing.

Memorializing Richard Jewell’s story in the form a feature film quietly exposes Eastwood’s character – self ownership, which is the essential concrete for Locke’s founding American principle of self-government. The American Revolution was successful, in part, because it didn’t destroy society’s institutions. Instead, it created new ones founded in objective law. Eastwood hasn’t totally repudiated Hollywood. Instead, he created a more noble institution – Poetic Justice Warrior Clint Eastwood.

 

Is Democracy Doomed To Die? Unfortunately, That’s Just Wishful Thinking.

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Although I generally agree with Pat Buchanan in his observations about the world, lately I’ve been a bit confused about his comments on “democracy.” Whether Buchanan is telling us, as in April, that democracy is in a “death spiral” or more recently, that it’s “a dying species,” I’m not sure that he’s providing a consistent concept of his key term. In April, Buchanan lamented that “in Washington our two-party system in in gridlock. Comity and collegiality are vanishing.” Meanwhile “across Europe splinter parties arise and ‘illiberal democracies’ take power.”  Buchanan is right that moral and social consensus is breaking down in Western countries; and to whatever extent it is still present, it is being increasingly imposed from above. The ones who typically take a lead here are social engineers working for public administration and the educational and media establishments. Moreover, citizens have become increasingly disempowered as the permanent governing class takes over society, and at least sporadic reactions have set in with the rise of a populist Right.

If this is indeed what is now happening, then present trends toward intrusive bureaucratic government providing “democratic” socialization and diversity-training will not likely be reversed in the near future. This form of rule continues to elicit electoral approval, and those who vote for governments favoring multiculturalism and the enforcement of PC are more numerous than those who oppose it. In the recently concluded national election in Canada, more people voted for parties of the Left, which favor all the policies that Buchanan and I deplore, than supported the bland conservative opposition. (Populist alternatives hardly exist and have no purchase north of our border.) In Germany the admission of a million and a half Third World migrants, which initially caused cries of outrage against Merkel’s leadership, failed to produce a stampede toward the Right. Quite the contrary! Although the immigration-critical AfD gained about two to three points in most of Germany as a result of Merkel’s immigration policy, far bigger gains have accrued to the leftist, antinational, and pro-immigration Greens. In our presidential race in 2016, more votes went to the candidate of the left, Hillary Clinton, than to Trump.

Although the populace has been conditioned by key social and cultural institutions to vote as they do, those who exercise this right do have other electoral choices. Once in the voting booth, they could throw their support to the non-establishment Right. That they generally prefer a socially leftist, immigration-friendly establishment may indicate something about “the people.” No one put a gun to the heads of French voters when over 66% of them voted against the nationalist Marine Le Pen for the candidate of the Left and the globalists Emmanuel Macron. And the majority of those votes came from the indigenous French, not from Third World immigrants, who make up less than ten percent of the French voting population.

Buchanan’s more recent column about democracy’s “death spiral” brings up another question: Is Buchanan speaking about the disintegration of our current managerial democracies or about something else? His column cites Chilean workers in Santiago rioting over a 5% rise in subway tolls, Hong Kong residents protesting the removal of their freedoms by the mainland Chinese government, the sometimes violent demonstration of the Yellow Vests in Paris and other French cities over the government-imposed rise in fuel coasts, and the efforts of the Catalan independence movement to make their territory independent of the rest of Spain. Although these are all newsworthy events, it’s not clear that they show that our current version of democracy is collapsing. What they prove is the presence of other developments: e.g., the weakening of historic nation-states, the limits of Chinese authoritarian rule, and/or popular impatience with public administration.

Mind you, I am not writing as a “democracy-booster” or as a fan of the present understanding of democratic government, which is certainly open to criticism.  I’ve my own idea about what a democracy should be; and it’s much closer to the nineteenth-century Swiss model or Jefferson’s society of yeoman farmers than it is to what the U.S., France, Canada, or Germany have become. But Buchanan leaves me unconvinced about the direction in which we’re headed politically when he observes:

If the beneficiaries of freedoms and democratic rights come to regard them as insufficient to produce the political, economic and social results they demand, what does that portend for democracy’s future?

Perhaps a reasonable answer to this question at least in Western countries is that we can expect “more of the same.” A majority of the French, for example, are not about to vote for the Rassemblement National because the yellow vests protested, any more than these voters threw their support to the populist Right when Third-World immigrants rioted in the Paris suburbs a few years ago. Canada is not about to go populist, and our own non-establishment president can’t bring his poll numbers above water.  Perhaps western populations are too complacent in the face of an establishment that they should oust. But that doesn’t mean (far from it) that the “system” is in danger.

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