Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

Can Capitalism Survive Democracy? Yes, When It Decentralizes And Leaves Government Isolated.

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Michael Munger is pro-capitalism. You can check his academic credentials and his many appearances on EconTalk. He recently co-authored an article in the Independent Review under the title The Road To Crony Capitalism (echoing Hayek’s title, The Road To Serfdom, which we have serialized here). Briefly, the proposition is that capitalism in a Democracy has an inevitable tendency towards crony capitalism (which is not capitalism at all) and that this path will get us to a state-run economy quite quickly. It’s a pessimistic and fatalistic argument. We disagree about the inevitability of the tendency, but let’s first summarize Munger’s case.

Capitalism is a system of private property rights.

First, we start with a definition of capitalism. It’s an economic system of individual rights including private property rights, where goods, both producer goods and consumer goods, are owned privately. Individual private citizens can trade their privately owned goods, including their labor and ideas, with each other. They can also save some of what they produce, invest their savings in technology and service improvements, and thereby create better future conditions for each other. By means of these voluntarily arrangements, a capitalist economy results in betterment for all. While the self-interest of any one individual lies in his or her own betterment, the economic mechanism of mutual voluntary exchange results in betterment for all.

In a democracy, capitalism must accommodate the State and live by its rules.

Because we live in a democracy, we must accommodate the existence of another actor: the State or, as we more usually refer to it, the Government. The Government has a different motivation than the betterment of individuals. It aims to increase and expand its own power. Certainly, there are individual bureaucrats and elected politicians who will also experience – and seek – personal betterment, however they may define it, but the road lies through the power of the State.

The State wants to organize special interest groups into a coalition of permanent support.

The mechanism the State uses in a democracy to maintain its support is to create a number of special group interests which it can assemble into a coalition to keep the State in power. We are not so much discussing the electoral coalitions of Democrats and Republicans here, although those are highly relevant, but the more continuous and permanent coalition that keeps the State in power over the long term, and keeps State revenues and employment growing. Why do we have a powerful government? Because there is a majority coalition of special interests that want it.

Business interests are one type of special interest group that is particularly useful….

Among the many special interest groups that the State can cultivate for its support are businesses and business owners who seek a corrupt deal with the government to protect or reinforce their market position. Under what circumstances would businesses seek this special protection? In economic language, it would be at the point where, when thinking about the efficient allocation of resources, a business realizes that a dollar spent on lobbying government for special treatment is a better allocation than the same dollar spent on investment, because the benefits dispensed by government improve the accounting profits of the business.

…..so the State brings them into being via rigged regulatory incentives.

Government bureaucrats and elected politicians actively create the scenarios in which businesses can generate better accounting profits through lobbying and securing protection and special treatment than they can through honest and responsible capitalism. For example, they will institute a tax to damage a business’s profitability. Then they will offer a loophole in that tax for a company that is prepared to trade for it, perhaps by paying a fee, or paying for a politician’s election, or contributing to the coffers of a specific political party, or performing services for the government, or providing knowledge to the government.

Protections from government can include tariffs on the goods and services of foreign competitors, or the establishment of barriers to entry into a company’s industry (such as minimum capital requirements or special licenses). Or the government can establish a regulatory threshold that is so difficult to comply with that new entrants or under-funded competitors will not be able to afford the cost. The “crony” company is thereby protected by its ally, the government.

Now we no longer have capitalism. We have irreversible crony capitalism.

This “crony” capitalism is no longer capitalism. It no longer fits the definition we set out. Can the tendency to crony capitalism be stopped? Not if there exists a State that is driven by its need for expanding power to intervene with business to divert resources and effort towards keeping government strong and growing. Can we expect our business executives to be morally superior and refuse to crony up to government? Not realistically. Once one of their competitors secures an advantaged position by accepting the government’s incentives to move towards collaboration with the State, a firm would have to commit commercial suicide to refuse to comply with the new conditions for competing in the industry, and they won’t risk the loss of Wall Street and global investor assent.

Don’t de-regulate. Decentralize.

What’s the solution? There are two potential answers, but only one is practical. The impractical answer is to campaign to limit government intervention in business matters. No more tax loopholes, no more industry regulation that favors large incumbent corporations over innovative new entrants, no more legislation that favors cartels and anti-competitive behavior. Good luck with that. None of the legislative and regulatory ketchup is going to go back into the bottle.

The only practical answer is a revivified entrepreneurial capitalism. Small companies, driven by innovation, serving segmented customer needs with specialized services, funded by small investors and private capital. A highly decentralized economy. An end to the giant corporations who sidle up to government and collaborate so closely that it’s hard to say where one ends and the other begins. If it weren’t for the regulatory apparatus of the State economy, giant corporations would not exist. They lack the agility to move as fast as the dynamic entrepreneurs of the decentralized economy, and can’t innovate as quickly, so they would quickly fall behind and realize that they must break into smaller units to achieve the same dynamism.

The decentralized economy is on its way. Artificial intelligence and interconnected global trading platforms that can assemble – and just as quickly disassemble and reassemble – supply chains on the fly will make the giant crony capitalist corporations an artifact of history, and not of the future.

 

 

This Breakdown In Government, However Delightful To Subjects, Has Gone Too Far. Let’s Outsource.

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Those of us who are anti-government have the opportunity to enjoy the current dysfunction that characterizes our ruling class. But, despite the fun, hasn’t it gone too far?

Government Can’t Rule.

If ruling means that those in subordinate positions do as they are told, our current Federal Government is falling down on the job. Several states are lining up to sue the Federal Government to prevent the Trump Administration from building a wall on the southern border, which is what it wants to do. There’s insubordination for you. The Sanctuary Cities in California refuse to implement or even countenance Federal immigration laws. In the same state, the local bureaucrats refuse to be bound by the Federal bureaucrats’ rules on auto emissions and pollution. If the subordinates won’t do as they are told, the Government is losing some of its claim to be all-powerful in deciding matters for the rest of us.

Government Can’t Control Its Own Bureaucracy.

We’ve been peppered lately with comedic snippets about a “coup” attempt by members of the FBI. There’s no need to respond to this particular piece of political theater, except to note that the FBI members in question are government employees. In functional parts of the world, like the private sector, an employee revolt would be short-lived. Dismissals would come quickly, and possibly lawsuits. How should we think of an organization that acts as if its head were a criminal? We certainly wouldn’t buy anything from it. We shouldn’t “buy” any part of what government tries to sell us.

Government Can’t Legislate.

The job of the legislative part of the government is to draft laws and pass them so that the executive can execute. Since the goal of government is to accumulate more and more power over the private sector, it certainly wants its legislative branch to be active and productive in getting new laws on the books. But it’s got itself into a position where the legislature is “divided” between a Republican-led Senate and a Democrat-led House, and so nothing much gets done, legislation-wise. Why would government shoot itself in the foot like this, strangling its own productivity? It certainly doesn’t speak to sound or clear-headed management.

Government Can’t Count.

We recently read that an audit revealed that $21 trillion of expenditures was unaccounted for – it was spent, but not tracked and so nobody knows what it was spent on. We understand that there are some things – like installing nuclear weapons on the moon, perhaps – that government doesn’t want us to know about. But really? Twenty-one trillion dollars. It just seems sloppy.

 Government Can’t Appoint.

Another job that government seems to stumble over is hiring. If the organization exists to expand its power over us citizens, and if bureaucratic enforcement of a growing body of rules and regulations is its main weapon, it needs to keep adding bureaucrats. But, apparently, there are all kinds of internal arguments over who should get hired, to the point that no-one gets hired. Again, this seems sloppy. It seems like the organizational design is not well thought-through, and the processes are not well enforced. No self-respecting CEO or Board Of Directors would put up with this kind of strategic failure.

Government Can’t Keep People In Or Out.

It was disclosed recently in the UK that the richest individual was moving out to Monaco, to avoid paying taxes to the UK government. It seems as though it’s a significant revenue blow. Doesn’t it seem like, if you are running a confiscation scheme, you need to keep the people you are confiscating from inside the walls of the reservation?

On the other side of the “can’t keep them in / can’t keep them out” dilemma, Italy, the USA, Hungary and others are finding it incredibly difficult to keep out those immigrants who want to replace the rich by coming in as starving refugees with no assets and no relevant skills. Isn’t this going to dilute the tax revenue yield of the average person in the jurisdiction, while at the same time raising the cost in government expenditures for that same average person? It doesn’t seem prudent, on many levels.

Governments Can’t Maintain Their Relevance.

Government markets itself as the solution to the people’s problems. But the people see it as the problem – the biggest problem they face. This is a colossal marketing failure – akin to a brand-owning company like Kraft Heinz destroying the value of its brands, or a football team losing all of its games. The government is supposed to maintain its legitimacy, but virtually no-one grants it any credibility any more.

Who’s managing this thing? There’s a need for a rethink. Perhaps a hostile takeover from somewhere. The US Government has implemented its own hostile takeovers in places like Iraq, and now it’s thinking about one in Venezuela. Maybe they should invite a reciprocal takeover from outside. In sports, teams in trouble hire a new coach who has been successful elsewhere. How about Kim Jong Un? North Korea seems to be doing better. In business, companies sometimes outsource functions they can’t run effectively themselves. How about bringing in Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party? He could install a lot of hard working Asians in government and make it work.

There must be a better way.

Government Is The Main Problem, Say A Record Number Of Americans.

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Think of all the troubles in the world. Climate change. Student debt. Terrorism. Job insecurity. What’s the number one most mentioned problem, according to a recent Gallup poll? Government itself. Thirty-five percent of Americans put that concern above all others. It’s a record number, according to the pollsters who have been tracking this since 2001.

Not only that: there have only been a handful of times when any number one issue clocked in with this level of intensity: terrorism after 9/11, Iraq after the war began, and the economy after 2008.

When I saw the numbers, my first thought was that Democrats made up the margin of change. They don’t like the president. He drives them crazy. So it makes sense that they would more quickly name government as the leading problem — which in turn raises the question of why they would push so hard for government to exercise more power over our lives.

It turns out, however, that it is not movement among Democrats but among Republicans that is the most noticeable on the graphs.

Having Trump as their president in office, then, has not increased confidence in government. If anything, it has had the opposite effect, turning Republicans themselves against government as never before. But notice that the loathing is nonpartisan.

Other polls such as Pew Research report similar results, with only 18 percent showing confidence in government at all. This is down from 78 percent half a century ago.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that government is getting worse. It suggests instead a kind of rising consciousness about a problem that has been there all along, from Woodrow Wilson to Donald Trump. Government is the least effective way to solve any social problem. It overrides the capacity of people to deal with their lives and problems in a way that is manageable and adaptable. It creates bureaucracies instead of solutions, wastes resources while everyone else is trying to conserve them, and entrenches rules that do not pertain in a world of fast-paced technological development.

What these two years of political wrangling have shown us is something that will be unavoidable in the coming years. There will never be unified government, operating with a single goal, whether that proposed goal is a restoration of nationalism or the elimination of fossil fuels supposedly to save the planet. The vast gulf that separates the two parties, with extremes driving the ideological debate on either side, is what government now has to offer us. Which is to say: more division, more vituperation, more politics of dogs eating dogs.

Why not give up on the whole failed project?

And this makes it all the more strange that the no-confidence position is not being well represented in the intellectual sphere. Just this week, Russ Douthat writes about the new trend among those on the political right to come to terms with a big state and assign it the job of managing society toward correct ends. He calls them “state-power conservatives”:

If we assume that people tend to seek power, and devise justifications for seeking power, where it can be plausibly exercised and won, then the state-power conservatives may not need the strongest intellectual arguments to change the way the right thinks about the state. Instead limited government conservatism may give way to an attempt to improve on Trumpism with clearer blueprints and smarter cadres for the same reason that changes often happen in political ideology — because the people whose thinking is changing feel that they don’t have any other choice.

All told, it’s a pretty strange time for conservatives suddenly to decide they like government, and the worst imaginable time for the Left to celebrate the state as never before. Based on the attitudes of the public alone, we ought to be seeing the opposite from both sides. Here we have a measure of another problem, the alienation of the intellectual class from the problems as understood by ordinary people.

 

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. 

Adam Smith Knew That Empathy Is The Core Skill In Economics, And, As It Turns Out, Baseball.

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We have often emphasized that empathy is the core skill for entrepreneurs. It’s the mindset that focuses on understanding customer wants, needs and dissatisfactions from their point of view. Getting inside their heads, it’s sometimes called. Walking on their shoes. Adam Smith captured it in the Theory Of Moral Sentiments.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

Empathy is the principle on which capitalism is based, the emotion on which the 3000% increase in standards of living that capitalism has brought us is built.

Now we find that empathy is core to baseball as well, or at least to the engine of the game, which is the pitcher on the mound and the catcher behind the plate. One of the most valuable catchers in baseball is Jeff Mathis. He is an expert at “game-calling” – “the process of determining which pitches his pitchers throw and in what location”. It’s a skill that is impossible to observe but has an enormous impact on a team’s success.

“In the catching fraternity, he is revered for being the best at what they all want to be the best at“, said Texas Rangers general manager Jon Daniels (who just gave Mathis a two-year, $6.25 million contract.

When asked about Mathis, pitchers talk about their trust in him. They seldom shake off his calls. How does Mathis explain his ability to generate such trust?

“It’s them knowing that you genuinely care for what’s happening to them on the mound,” Mathis said. “It’s getting to know them inside and out – their family, what they like to do, what they like to eat.”

Adam Smith couldn’t have said it better.

PHOTO: CHARLIE RIEDEL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

No-One Likes Public Transportation. Happily, Capitalism Is Helping Us Escape From It.

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Americans don’t like public transit, and you can’t blame them. Inconvenience, ineffectiveness, and sluggishness are some of the main issues they often complain about when explaining why they aren’t taking the bus or riding the metro these days.

But while we’ve known this for quite some time, a new report from TransitCenter, a research and advocacy group, has now proven that even fewer people are relying on government-run transportation alternatives.

You can thank capitalism for that.

Thanks to the boom of the sharing economy, people never had as much access to efficient transportation options as they have now. And with entrepreneurs seeing an untapped opportunity in major urban settings, commuters are being given even more options as bike- and scooter-sharing companies are popping up everywhere.

Most importantly, Americans are getting into driving again.

With many regions benefiting from the availability of cheap gas and competitive automakers developing popular and affordable vehicles, U.S. commuters are dusting off their driving licenses and taking control of their own commuting schedules.

The report, which surveyed public transit riders from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and Seattle, found that a quarter of the 1,700 respondents had gone from using transit “all the time” to being “occasional” riders. At least 9 percent of riders abandoned the public option completely.

In addition, the survey found that riders now have more access to cars, with 54 percent of respondents saying they were driving full-time as opposed to 43 percent the previous year. The number of users who said they had no access to a car also decreased from 27 to 21 percent. And while the survey does show that services like Lyft and Uber are taking over certain densely populated urban areas, access to private cars is still beating public transit in most cities.

While to some, these numbers may seem shocking, they confirm previous research showing that America’s use of public buses had fallen by 5 percent between 2016 and 2017.

Naturally, public transit advocates such as Ben Fried, the TransitCenter communications head, are not happy.

The congestion created by the increased use of private cars will eventually take its toll, advocates argue, and public transit officials need to work on making the system more efficient so they are “fast, affordable, convenient,” he told reporters.

But what transit advocates forget to mention is that, no matter how hard officials try to modernize the system, a government-run service will always have a major disadvantage when it comes to the market. And that’s because companies and entrepreneurs respond to real needs, providing a service where there’s a demand.

Private Is Always Better

Government-backed services often act outside of reality, caving in to dreams of social order and equality without checking in with those who will actually be using the services. And that’s simply because they do not have the proper knowledge of what residents actually need.

To a bureaucrat, small groups of individuals and their needs don’t matter. What’s important is to create one massive response that will, hopefully, work for everyone.

Unfortunately, government-backed programs have one potential advantage over private ones, and that’s a bottomless pit of money. Other people’s money, that is.

Still, even this potential advantage is proven disadvantageous in the long run as companies with limited capital have all the more incentive to be truly efficient, forcing them to meet people’s demands so they can make a profit. In the end, public transit loses again, no matter how much money the government pours into it.

Chloe Anagnos is AIER’s Publications Manager.

The Government Has Outsourced The Police State To Google, A Multinational Enterprise With No Allegiance To Americans.

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Lew Rockwell interviewed Tucker Carlson about his book, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution. The interview appeared on lewrockwell.com as a transcript. We’ve edited out Mr Rockwell’s questions and we publish the transcript below, editing out some “you knows” , “I means”, and other conversational diversions, because Mr Carlson has an interesting point of view.

Why does the ruling class hate the American working class so much?

Why do they want to replace it with immigrants? That’s kind of the central question.

This is the only revolution in anyone’s memory waged against the working class, not on its behalf. Typically, you know, revolutions are supposed to be for the unemployed.  But they’re inconvenient.  They complain.  They’re living proof that the power schemes of the people in charge have failed.  If you’re running a country and your middle class is dying, you’re demonstrably a failure.  And so you want to get rid of that evidence as fast as you can.

But I also think there’s something deeper going on, which is that technology has eliminated a lot of the value in labor.  So in 1947, no politician could attack the working class.  That was the heart of the country.  Our industrial base needed workers to build things.  And now we have an economy based on finance, and technology promises to replace a huge percentage of those people who still work with their hands.  So actually, labor isn’t worth much anymore.  And so you can attack people you don’t need.  It’s disgusting because the point of leadership is not simply to reap its benefits but to rise to its obligations.  And the first obligation is to the people beneath you.  If you’re a parent, your obligation is to your kids; if you’re an officer, to your troops; if you’re a CEO, to your employees; and if you’re the U.S. government, it’s to your citizens.  So there’s something not just unimpressive but something immoral about their failures, in my opinion.

When we look at Silicon Valley, it seems like the government, maybe for the first time in history, has outsourced the police state to these private companies. So that we have to worry about Google and Facebook and the rest of them.

Google Is A Bigger Threat To Our Liberty Than The US Government.

If you’re a kind of conventional conservative, like I have been for most of my life, you’ve been trained to believe that the singular threat to our liberty was government.  That’s what Reagan said.  He was probably right at the time.  And it takes a while, if you’ve grown up believing that, to readjust to the new reality, which is now the singular threat to your freedoms, to your freedom of association, certainly to your freedom of speech, to your ability to think, is technology.  It’s the big tech companies.  It’s Google primarily, but it’s also Facebook and Twitter and the rest.  Simple question: Who knows more about you, Google or the Social Security Administration?  There’s no contest.

And Google is the biggest company in the history of the world.  I’m not really surprised that conservatives still defend it because they’ve been so trained by Libertarian economists and the Chamber of Commerce to kind of bow down to any company because that’s capitalism, the free market or whatever the slogan is.  But I’m really surprised and horrified that the left has given up its long-standing position that concentrations of power, corporate power, are a threat to a democracy.  They were right, absolutely.  I laughed at them.  I shouldn’t have; they were right.  And now they’ve decided to enter this bargain with corporations, where the companies fund left-wing activism in exchange for suspending all criticism of their greed and power.  It has completely changed my politics, I’ll tell  you that, because I think it’s real; it’s a threat.

They’re embracing what they euphemistically call the European tradition.  And, of course, that’s a tradition without a Bill of Rights, without a First Amendment.  And there’s no greater threat, I would say, to our democracy than these companies.

They’re Not American.

We’ve been trained to believe that these are American companies because they’re primarily staffed by Americans, they were incubated partly at taxpayer expense on the campus of Stanford.  They could only have grown in a country with a legal system, with a patent system like ours.  So America made these companies possible.  But they’re not American.  They’re multi-national corporations that have no loyalty to our country or our government.  They are, in fact, owned by foreign countries in large part by the sovereign wealth funds of nations that hate us or are our rival.  So, in fact, they’re foreign entities in our midst, which control almost all information in English.  So, by definition, why is that not a terrifying reality?  It is.  And I’m not sure why more people aren’t saying that, but they should be.

On your show, if you accuse somebody of a crime, you are liable.  You could be sued.  Google cannot be.  If we planned some crime on G-mail, they can’t be held accountable.  That’s because they have an exemption under the Decency Act, which gives them immunity from that.  In exchange, they say, we’re not a media organization; we don’t edit the content; we’re a conduit to this information because we’re a neutral platform.  And that’s how they describe themselves.  That’s a lie.  And now we have documents showing it’s a lie.  They edit content.  Google, among other things, is a news organization.  It edits content.  It decides what you can see and what you can’t.

Government Is Complicit.

The Republicans are in charge of the Congress.  They should be protecting the population from this obvious risk but they’re not.  Mike Lee, Senator from Utah, is the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrusts.  Google is obviously a monopoly; it’s got a monopoly on search.  So I brought this up to him, why aren’t you doing something about this, and he looked kind of embarrassed and muttered something about the free market or capitalism, neither of which applies, of course, to Google, but whatever.  That was the talking point and he kind of moved on.  The truth is the public is not being protected from the threat because there’s a bipartisan agreement that Google’s interests are more important than those of the population.  That kind of tells you everything right there.

I know that government has intersected with the growth of the tech sector at every turn.  There’s a reason that Amazon might move to northern Virginia and that’s because the U.S. government, after 9/11, expanded the information-carrying capacity, the pipeline in northern Virginia, at public expense, in order to protect the country from terrorism.  So there’s many examples of these companies piggybacking on federally funded military projects, defense projects, and turning a profit.  I mean, this is a long-spanning kind of tradition, of course, of where does government begin and where does the company end, it’s not always clear.  It’s not clear at Raytheon or Boeing and it’s not clear at Google.

And yet, again, these are not American companies.  Google has, just yesterday, pulled itself out of the running to work with DOD on a project because it said working with the American Defense Department is inconsistent with its corporate values.  And yet, they’re full speed ahead on catering to the government of China, the Fascist government of China in its efforts to suppress free speech within China.  Their loyalty is not to our government.  This is a foreign entity and I think we should start to see it that way.

We’ve Disaggregated Risk From Benefits.

If you’re in charge of something, again, whether it’s a family or a company or a country, you have to be all in.  That’s why the captain goes down with the ship, because that’s an assurance to the rest of us.  He’s the captain, he’s got his quarters, got better food, but in the end, if something goes wrong, he takes full responsibility for it.  And that’s the way human society, successful ones, have always been organized.  If you reap the benefits, you have to take the risks.  And we’ve disaggregated risk from benefits all up and down our society, the banking sector, most famously, but also in our political sector and our tech sector.  So in other words, these guys are running companies that hurt the country, our country.  And yet, if our country goes south, how many of them have foreign passports, how many consider themselves as American, how many of them think nationality is even a legitimate category?  None.

They’re not loyal to America and yet they have enormous power over America.  That’s a system that cannot continue.

Why do they hate Trump so much?

Trump’s main sin is the fact that they can’t control him and he’s likely to say anything.  Trump’s one gift is being able to smell what’s true, the obvious truth, and say it out loud or ask a question about it.  He asks questions like why do we have NATO.  Wasn’t the point of NATO to keep the Soviets from invading western Europe; they don’t exist, why do we still have it?  Why are we still in Afghanistan?  We’ve been there 17 years, we’re not succeeding, why are we still there?  So the threat that Trump poses is really simple – he calls them out on their failures.  He asks questions that, for some reason, no one has asked.  The most obvious of all questions, why are we signing trade deals and not making the other signatory live up to them.  That’s not a complex question.  I don’t understand much about trade, but I recognize that as a legitimate question.  We’ve got troops on the Korean peninsula.  They’ve been there since 1950.  The Koreans are not paying us for that.  We’re protecting them from being invaded but they’re not paying in.  Why is that?  Maybe there’s a good reason.  I don’t know.  Why are we still in Afghanistan?  I don’t know.  Maybe there’s a good reason.  Speak slowly so I can understand what that reason is.

They won’t engage because they don’t have an answer.  Their answer is, shut up, Racist.  So Trump’s main threat to them is he’s the one guy who doesn’t care if you say, shut up, Racist.  He says, yes, whatever, what’s the answer?  And that quality of his, above any other, is why they hate him.

I think you’re absolutely allowed to hate Trump or any other politician.  I think it’s OK.  I don’t like politicians but I’ve spent my life covering them.  They’re horrible.  So I think it’s totally legitimate to dislike a politician, for sure.  What’s not legitimate is to ignore the concerns of your fellow Americans and attack them for asking to be represented or asking to have their questions answered legitimately or for voting for a candidate.  If you find yourself truly hating half the country, the problem is with you, not with them.

This originally appeared on the Lew Rockwell Show on October 12, 2018.

The Man Who Found Honor and Humor in Dirty Jobs.

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In the month prior to the 2016 presidential election, our latest Poetic Justice Warrior gave an interview with outdoorhub.com and was asked about voting. His recommendation was –

Spend a few hours every week studying American history, human nature, and economic theory. Start with “Economics in One Lesson.” Then try Keynes. Then Hayek. Then Marx. Then Hegel. Develop a worldview that you can articulate as well as defend. Test your theory with people who disagree with you. Debate. Argue. Adjust your philosophy as necessary.

And don’t vote until you do this. Voting is not a duty anyway. The message is stunning, and perfect. He is stating that economics is life and moral philosophy is essential. This fits perfectly with the Poetic Justice Warrior Society Manifesto which says, “Our lives are spent accumulating knowledge, learning from mistakes, and establishing principles for living that can only be altered through rational consideration, empirical evidence, and solving contradictions.” It is with purpose and pride that we highlight the ongoing achievements of Mike Rowe as a modern crusader for human flourishing.

Dirt Is Not The Enemy

Rowe’s opinions about education and work are nearly identical to those of Poetic Justice Warrior Booker T. Washington. Washington taught his students skills for honest work, making a living, becoming prosperous, and integrating into mainstream society. Rowe’s hero was his maternal grandfather who “dropped out of the eighth grade to work. He had to. By the time he was 30, he was a master electrician, plumber, carpenter, mason, and mechanic. That guy was, to me, a magician.” His grandfather’s education never ended, and the value he brought to himself, his family, friends, and community are inestimable. This is what entrepreneurs do, and no bureaucracy could plan it. And Rowe has dedicated himself to this work ethic, and to self-creation with his iconic television show Dirty Jobs.

The thing that makes ‘Dirty Jobs’ different is that it’s one of the few shows that portrays work in a way that doesn’t highlight the drudgery. Instead, it highlights the humor. In order to make ‘Dirty Jobs’ authentic, I really can’t be overly informed. The minute I am, I become a host. It’s a very tricky business paying a tribute to work, because TV is very bad at it.

Rowe’s genius is making abstract concepts simple – “Dirty Jobs is maybe the simplest show in the history of TV, with the possible exception of The Gong Show.” He does it by establishing fundamental principles, “I can say the willingness to get dirty has always defined us as a nation, and it’s a hallmark of hard work and a hallmark of fun, and dirt is not the enemy.” It’s the economic way, but the political way is our dominant philosophy, and the currency of the political class is complexity. To them, everyone needs a public university indoctrination. As Rowe explains,

The idea that a four-year degree is the only path to worthwhile knowledge is insane. It’s insane. You’ve got a lot of very, very smart people standing by waiting for somebody else to do the work. Not a recipe for long-term solvency in my opinion.

As a result, there are millions of well-paid career opportunities in America waiting to be filled. As poetic justice would have it, Mike Rowe is doing something about it, he is offering scholarships to individuals who aspire to life-fulfilling work in the skilled trades.

S. W. E. A. T.

The one size fits all solution of the political way, such as obscenely expensive college for all, avoids reality, and has consequences. Rowe calls this the skills gap. Poetic Justice Warrior Maria Montessori believed that education should develop the mind of each child, the purpose is for them to develop principles that will guide their actions. In many cases this means an alternative path toward productive work. According to the Mike Rowe Works Foundation website:

Skilled workers keep our polite society humming along. They are individuals who found opportunity where no one else thought to look. They are entrepreneurs running successful businesses. They are happy people who manage to figure out a positive work-life balance. They don’t resemble the unflattering, blue-collar workers often portrayed in the media.

Not only is Rowe educating America about the 7 million high-paying vocational career opportunities awaiting human minds, his scholarships are available to anyone who meets some simple qualifications:

We’re looking for the next generation of aspiring workers who will work smart and hard. This program doesn’t focus on test scores, grades, or grammar. It’s about the people who share our values and understand the importance of work ethic, personal responsibility, delayed gratification, and a positive attitude.

But its not quite that easy; there is the Skill and Work Ethic Aren’t Taboo (S.W.E.A.T.) pledge for these Poetic Justice Warrior apprentices. The first pledge is “I believe I have won the greatest lottery of all time. I am alive. I walk the earth. I live in America. Above all things, I am grateful.” The last pledge is “I believe that all people are created equal. I also believe that all people make choices. Some choose to be lazy. Some choose to sleep in. I choose to work my butt off.”

The Greaseman Cometh

One original tenet of the Poetic Justice Warrior Society is gratitude. In March 2017 Rowe released one of his famous (The Way I Heard It) podcasts, and used it to pay tribute to two other individuals who are worthy of gratitude. This is what Poetic Justice Warriors do. In the podcast Rowe read an excerpt from Lawrence W. Reed’s book Real Heroes. In it, he tells the story of a skilled laborer, inventor, and entrepreneur named Elijah. He was a young man who worked as a greaseman on America’s early railroads, and the son of a slave who escaped to Canada on the Underground Railroad.

Why does Mike do this? “He’s addicted to paved roads, working electricity, and flushing toilets.” Life is good. In Rowe’s spirit of “I am looking forward to the future, and feeling grateful for the past,” please feel free to open this link to Mike’s 10 minute podcast about Elijah, and take our Self Assessment.

Photo by Fancycrave on Unsplash

Socialists Can Build An Airplane But They Can’t Read And Respond To Market Signals To Keep It Flying.

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Years ago, when an editor asked me if Boeing would be around to pay off a 100-year bond it had recently offered, I flippantly replied that 100 years was only two product cycles for the company.

I underestimated the duration of its products. The Boeing 747 first flew in 1969 and a freighter version will continue to be built near Seattle at least through 2022. The Boeing 737, which first flew in 1967, faces an order backlog that extends through 2027. An all-new replacement for the commuter workhorse is unlikely to appear until the 2030s.

Which makes all the more anomalous Airbus’s decision to end production of its impressive and giant A380, which has been flying only since 2005.

Socialism is currently in vogue. If the word means anything in today’s context, it means projects of unusual government ambition, built on our globally shared capitalist technological and commercial base. The A380 was exactly such a project. Underwritten by massive European government subsidies, the plane was an engineering sensation. Passengers loved the roomy jet. Yet now it’s kaput. What went wrong? Or to phrase the question more usefully, what technological and commercial realities would its sponsors have had to overrule to assure its success?

The list is not a short one. They would have had to overrule the desire of passengers to fly direct, bypassing the crowded hub airports (like London’s Heathrow) for which the A380 was built.

They would have had to overrule the preference of business travelers for frequent departures. With 535 seats to fill, the superjumbo was hopelessly matched against operators offering more convenient schedules by using smaller planes.

Most of all, they would have had to overrule the public’s appetite for lower fares. On a per-seat basis, a new generation of super-efficient twin-engine planes such as the Boeing 787 proved cheaper to operate even though the four-engine A380 could accommodate twice as many customers.

In the end, enough socialism could be mobilized to get the plane built, but not enough to make it commercially viable. Europe’s governments would have needed to extend their dominion beyond their own taxpayers who financed it. They would have needed to dictate to the world’s airlines and travelers and even the aerospace industry’s global supplier base, which proved unwilling to develop a new fuel-efficient engine for a plane with a doubtful future.

This should guide us in our thinking about what kind of “socialism” is possible today. Governments can tax their own people until they rebel at the ballot box, refuse to pay, or emigrate. They have no power, in our world, to dictate what kinds of goods and services and technologies (green or otherwise) the global marketplace will accept.

When the end came, it came because the A380’s last dedicated customer, the government-backed Emirates Airline of Dubai, gave up on the superjumbo. Planes in pristine condition were lingering unsold on the used-plane market. A 10-year-old jet was recently retired by Singapore Airlines . Now it’s being broken up for scrap, proving once again socialism’s knack for making grown men cry.

Boeing’s management was vilified at the time for declining to compete with Airbus to replace its own fabulously successful 747 jumbo jet. But Boeing treated its business like a business. Its forecasts showed the market was likely to evolve in ways unfavorable to another very large passenger plane.

French and German politicians ignored such considerations. They were more interested in making a showy statement about Europe’s technological prowess. Boeing chafed for decades at the subsidies they poured into Airbus. Airbus, for its part, was not above portraying the money U.S. taxpayers spent defending the free world as a backdoor handout to Boeing through its defense business. This debate is likely now to get an ugly second wind if U.S. negotiators insist that Airbus pay back the estimated $20 billion in “launch aid” the A380 failed to recoup (the answer will certainly be no).

The parallel to California’s bullet train hardly needs to be drawn. Gov. Gavin Newsom seems already to be walking back his apparent cancellation of the grossly over-budget project. He may hope that Green New Deal dollars from Washington will become available after 2020 to replace the funds California isn’t willing to provide.

But California voters have already gotten the right message: Billions were poured into the project so former Gov. Jerry Brown wouldn’t have to admit a mistake.

The same consideration for years deterred Airbus from blowing the whistle on the A380, but let’s end on a positive note. Today the socialist miscalculations of our infallible leaders are measured mainly in dollars. This represents a great leap forward over the socialist failures that characterized the last century.

Appeared in the February 20, 2019, print edition of WSJ. PHOTO: FRANCOIS MORI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Once Democratically Chosen, There Is No Reversing Socialism.

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Almost every conceivable form of “socialism” was tried over the last 100 years. There has been Marxian socialism in the form of Soviet-style fully nationalized economies with strict and comprehensive five-year government central planning. There was national socialism in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, with private enterprise placed under total government control with Nazi four-year central planning. There was Mussolini’s Italian fascism, under which private businesses and workers were forced into cartels and trade unions with government oversight and command of prices, wages, production, work conditions, and trade. There was British “democratic” socialism under the post–World War II Labor-party government, with nationalized industries, socialized health care, and central planning. There was a French version under the name of “indicative” planning, under which the government manipulated prices and production incentives to direct capital and labor where the central planners thought they should go. There have been government planning through regulations and redistributions of wealth through fiscal policy. This regulatory-redistributive model of government oversight and directing of social and economic outcomes grew out of the discovered and admitted inescapable limits and shortcomings of more-direct government planning and control of economic affairs.

Costs and Consequences of Socialism-in-Practice

The human cost experienced from the extreme forms of socialism-in-practice goes beyond most of our imaginations. Tens of millions of people — ordinary, unarmed, and innocent men, women, and children — were starved, tortured, shot, or worked to death in slave-labor camps in the name of building that bright and beautiful paradise on earth that the communists, fascists, and Nazis all promised would belong to those they had designated the righteous and justly deserving social class, national group, or racial tribe. British democratic socialism foundered on the discovery that even in a democracy, government socialist planning entails imposing commands on everyone that succeed in only making life stagnant, dull, and poor for most in society. Indeed, this is how we have ended up with highly regulated economies combined with often-extensive networks of income redistribution and social safety nets.

A Green New Deal Means Central Planning

Now additional voices for a new socialism are on the public scene, such as the recently elected Democratic-party representative from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Even before being sworn in to the House of Representatives in early January 2019, she and others presented a proposal for a special and select congressional committee for the preparing and implementing of a Green New Deal.

Make no mistake, this is a plan for the introduction of comprehensive government planning over every facet of American social and economic life. Arguing that the world is facing an environmental Armageddon due to global warming, the time for doing nothing or relying upon carbon taxes to reduce use of fossil fuels or business regulations to influence how private enterprises produce  goods and services, they say, is behind us.

A Carbon-Free Road to Social Justice

This must be done in conjunction with commitments and goals for “social, economic, racial, regional, and gender-based justice and equality.” Labor unions must have a prominent place, with the ability to direct wages and employment conditions for workplace justice in the pursuit of a post-carbon economy. The federal government should take equity positions — that is, total or partial direct ownership — in businesses, industries, and sectors of the economy as a means to hit the target of radical environmental change.

The goal is to have a “100 percent” fossil fuel–free economy within 10 years. All businesses and residential structures will have to be dramatically made over to environmentally friendly renewable sources of energy. Where and what is produced will have to be commanded by the federal government for both industry and agriculture.

At the same time, this grand and comprehensive central planning of American society to save the planet can also serve as “an historic opportunity to virtually eliminate poverty in the United States and to make prosperity, wealth and economic opportunity available to everyone participating in the transformation” of the country.

The Hubris of Our Would-Be Central Planners

The hubris just oozes from every presumption according to which these American central planners just know what needs to be done and why everyone else must cheerfully, enthusiastically follow the commands of our would-be national-socialist führers. The plan for this Green New Deal shows its totalitarian premise in each of its proposed elements. No corner of the economy would be exempt from the green planners’ control. Every human association and status in society would be subject to modification as determined by the social-justice warriors in power.

Once Democratically Chosen, No Reversing Socialism

But what happens to democracy after that? What if “the people” have second thoughts in election years 2022 or 2024 or 2026 or 2028? What if other voices challenge the premises and the policies of the Green New Dealers? If planetary existence and social justice for all time are at stake, can our democratic socialists allow the fickle and wrong-headed voting decisions of some of the people to alter the collectivist course that has been taken?

Surely, it would be irrational to permit the central plan to be dismantled, to backslide into chaotic and petty profit-motivated self-interest, to undo all that the revolution had been attempting to achieve. The socially just people’s will could not be allowed to be reversed because of some people’s misinformed and misguided voting whims under the influence of sinister interests swaying them against their true and real interests.

Oh, we have heard all this before, and no doubt, if they were to come to power, we would hear it all once more. But, but … it can’t happen here! Think again. The logic of central planning undermines the institutions and the spirit of liberty. By concentrating power and decision-making in the hands of those in government, socialist central planning first weakens and then eliminates autonomous centers of choice and association.

Property Rights and Personal Choice

One of the most essential aspects of private property rights is that it creates potential centers of control and discretion outside of the clutches of those in political authority. Private property in functioning free markets enables sources of employment and income independent of the government. The individual does not have to worry about loss of a government job, or his government-supplied income and benefits, or his chances for personal betterment due to any disagreement with or peaceful opposition to the policies and practices of the state.

Competitive, free markets provide avenues for a plethora of ways for multitudes of people to simultaneously follow diverse ends with alternative means considered better than those selected by others in society. Mistakes and second thoughts concerning what goals and purposes to pursue and how best to do so may be modified in many different ways by different people at different times, without needing to persuade or gain the electoral agreement of enough others through a voting process.

Central Planning Means Centralized Decision-Making

But this is exactly what our new American socialists are impatient with and want to do away with. There needs to be one master hierarchy of values, with one centrally guiding and implemented master plan to bring it to fruition, with all in the society accepting and making their own personal wishes and desires subordinate to it.

What they really want is a version of “democratic centralism” — that is, an inner circle of people ideologically motivated by the same general collectivist purposes and ideals who bargain over and divide the social spoils for the identity-politics-based factions and interest groups that they, respectively, represent, with no interference from the ignorant “reactionary” and supposedly race- and gender-bigoted individuals and groups who don’t understand the nature of a real “people’s democracy.”

The role of these uninformed masses, who must be constantly subject to government “re-education,” is to produce the wealth and output that the Green New Deal planners need to pursue their power-lusting dreams. And don’t worry, if they cannot plunder enough wealth through taxation to cover the costs of their social-engineering schemes, they say they will turn to the Federal Reserve to create all the paper money they will need to pay for all that they want to do. Welcome to the possibility of a Venezuela-style hyperinflation on the back of a stagnant economy built on the political insanity of those who claim to know how everyone should live under the central planners’ agenda for a new, carbon-free world.

These are dangerous ideas that threaten anew the foundations and functioning of what remains of personal freedom and free enterprise in the United States. The Green New Dealers’ self-righteous fanaticism and ideological enthusiasm for a collectivist America should not be underestimated. Understanding their misguided political assumptions and the damaging economic consequences that would follow from their coming to power is essential if a “green” road to serfdom is to be avoided.

 Richard M. Ebeling, an AIER Senior Fellow, is the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina. This article appeared at AIER.org and has been edited for length.

Why I Hope Maduro Wins And North Korea Keeps Its Nukes.

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A second summit meeting for the US and North Korea is reportedly scheduled to take place. Expert opinions on where these negotiations are headed range from the insightful to the incredibly naive, with mainstream media consumers consistently finding themselves in the latter category. Trump supporters believe their president is going to pull off some Art of the Deal wizardry and convince Pyongyang to completely denuclearize, and mainstream Democrats believe Trump is being foolish, facilitating the nefarious agendas of an evil dictator. As happens with pretty much all US foreign policy issues these days, the picture is completely obscured by the mass media’s obsessive fixation on Trump.

People who are well-informed tend to say that North Korea will never denuclearize, mainly because its government has no meaningful incentive to do so in a world where Muammar Gaddafi was murdered in the streets as a direct result of US regime change interventionism shortly after relinquishing Libya’s nuclear program. As bad as western sanctions are, they’re nothing compared to what happened to Libya.

I agree that Pyongyang as we have known it will never denuclearize, no matter how charming or threatening Moon and Trump get. There can certainly be peace between the Koreas, but the notion that Pyongyang as we know it will just give up the DPRK’s nuclear weapons is a fairy tale for children and mental midgets. Those words “Pyongyang as we know it” are key, though. There are circumstances under which North Korea could voluntarily give up its nukes, be relieved of sanctions, and be treated like a normal nation by the unipolar world order in the near term. They’re just not circumstances any of us should want.

The way I see it there are only three possibilities:

  1. North Korea keeps its nukes as an effective deterrent against regime change interventionism,
  2. North Korea relinquishes its nukes because the US and all rivals have relinquished their nukes, or
  3. North Korea relinquishes its nukes because it entered into the US-centralized power alliance.

The only way North Korea will be treated normally by the unipolar world order is if it joins that unipolar world order. If it allows itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized empire. If North Korea denuclearizes, that is what will have happened, and that has always been the ultimate goal of the pressures that have been stacked upon it. If Kim Jong-Un is sufficiently different from his predecessors, and if he is presented with the right combination of carrots and sticks, who knows? North Korea has $10 trillion worth of natural resources that it can’t access or sell due to sanctions, and you may be sure there are powerful people in both the east and the west courting Pyongyang to get that wealth into their pockets. Maybe Kim’s power base could be persuaded to consent to relinquishing the DPRK’s sovereignty like so many nations before and join the blob to relieve the pressure.

But what would that mean, exactly? It would mean that one more nation which tried to insist on its national sovereignty was bullied and starved into joining the US-centralized empire to survive. The empire would be one nation more, and the remaining unabsorbed multipolarist governments would be one nation less.

The reality is that it is impossible to be truly anti-war without opposing the unipolar global dominance of the United States and its tight network of allies which operates functionally as an empire. It is impossible for this empire to remain dominant without the threat and enforcement of military violence; the carrot of military alliance and the stick of military assault are the glue which holds the empire together. The world can never know peace while this is happening. If you support the continued world dominance of the United States, you can perhaps claim to be against some wars on a case-by-case basis, but you cannot claim to be anti-war or anti-interventionist.

With Venezuela it’s the same as with North Korea: the US-centralized power alliance is bullying a noncompliant nation in a key strategic region into allowing itself to be absorbed into the blob of an empire that is held in place with endless violence. Of course I fully support the sovereign right of the people of Venezuela to shape their nation in accordance with their will, but the Trump administration’s regime change interventionism there has nothing whatsoever to do with the will of the Venezuelan people. The Guaido pretend government that the US is working to install has been built by the engineers of imperialism from the ground up to ensure a Venezuela that is loyal to US interests, which John Bolton himself acknowledges have a lot to do with oil.

If the US succeeds in disrupting the lives of Venezuelans so much that the military shifts alignment and ousts Maduro in desperation, sure the sanctions will end, and maybe things will be better for some (mostly white, wealthier) Venezuelans, but ultimately what will have happened is the empire succeeded in bullying another sovereign nation into relinquishing its sovereignty.

Same with Iran. If Bolton’s crew succeeds in securing regime change in Tehran, the mainstream narrative is that it will mean freedom and democracy and the wind in women’s hair, but what it will primarily mean in reality is that the US-centralized empire succeeded in toppling yet another government of yet another oil-rich nation and installing a puppet regime to complement its Israeli and Gulf state allies, thereby shoring up regional dominance in the Middle East. From there we may be certain that Syria will suffer the same fate.

Anyone who sees that war is wrong should oppose this tooth and claw. The continued growth of the unipolar blob is a movement away from a world of peace and national sovereignty and towards a world of endless military violence enforcing the depraved will of the same thugs who inflicted unforgivable horrors on Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and so many other nations.

The way to prevent nuclear war with North Korea is to leave North Korea alone, stop sanctioning them and stop threatening them. The way to help the people of Venezuela is to end the sanctions which are starving them. The way to help the people of Iran is to end the CIA covert ops and starvation sanctions and stay the hell out of their country. The way to help Syrians is to stop arming and protecting the extremist militias who tried to topple Damascus, end the sanctions, end the illegal occupation, and respect the nation’s sovereignty. The way to advance peace is to oppose the institution that has done more to undermine peace than anyone else in the world, namely the US empire.

Of course we should want everyone to be free from oppression, and of course we should want the world to be free of nuclear weapons. But we shouldn’t support the toppling of foreign governments by a power whose consistent record of disastrous regime change interventionism is established beyond a doubt, and we shouldn’t support that power in bullying sovereign nations into relinquishing their sovereignty to escape brutalization. That is not the kind of world we’re trying to create here. The bigger the warmongering imperial blob grows, the more powerful it gets. If you want a world full of peace and harmony, put your emphasis on opposing the toxic activities of the power most responsible for preventing it.

This article originally appeared at caitlinjohnstone.com

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