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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

Silicon Valley Went All-In For Progressive Democrats. Now Those Progressives Are Out To Destroy Their Donors.

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The term “useful idiot,” often credited to Vladimir Lenin, applies to people supporting a cause or movement injurious to their own self-interest. Nowhere is this more relevant these days than in Silicon Valley, a place dominated by brilliant technologists and marketers who often seem to have the social and political acuity of middle schoolers, as evidenced by their strong support for progressive Democrats poised to destroy the underpinnings of their businesses.

California governor Gavin Newsom is expected to sign the recently passed Assembly Bill 5, which will effectively turn many contractors into employees. AB5 codifies the California Supreme Court’s unanimous May 2018 ruling in Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court of Los Angeles that many contractors should be treated as employees. The legislation’s prime backers are the state’s unions, which see it as an ideal way to organize now out-of-reach workers.

The new measure is potentially devastating, though, for companies like Uber, Lyft, and Postmates, all built around part-time employees, and none yet profitable. Many other tech firms—including profitable ones—use contractors for everything from app development to catering to cleaning. As many as 2 million Californians are employed in so-called gig work. If AB5 passes, job losses won’t just be felt by the ride-hailing firms but also by many other businesses, including newspapers, small trucking firms, some medical providers, and even franchise owners.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Silicon Valley, like many industries, placed its bets on both political parties. Moderate Republicans like Pete McCloskey, Ed Zschau, and Tom Campbell routinely won congressional elections, as did similarly minded members of the state legislature. But over the past few decades, the Valley has become politically monochromatic, with virtually no elected Republicans. Almost all contributions from Silicon Valley tech owners and employees in the 2016 and 2018 elections went to Democrats. Tech money helped Newsom outspend his GOP rival by three to one—with major contributions from former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Lauren Jobs (widow of the Apple founder) at the top of the donor list. Former Google chairman Eric Schmidt heads data efforts for several Democratic presidential candidates, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and arch-populist Elizabeth Warren. Tech employees are, if anything, more progressive-leaning in their political contributions than their corporate masters.

Just a few years ago, these investments seemed to be paying off. The Obama administration was deferential to tech firms, steering away from any hint of antitrust action. Google representatives met in the White House weekly, and more than 250 people shuttled between working for Obama and Google during his presidency. Now, this power is being challenged. Google is being sued for monopolistic practices by 48 states. Though progressive California has stayed out of the fray, AB5 demonstrates that the tech moguls are losing ground there, too, to better-organized and more politically savvy public-employee and service unions.

The new legislature’s makeup reveals how much power has shifted to the unions. Beyond protecting gig workers, organized labor has broken with tech on education reform, long a Silicon Valley hot-button issue. Under the current legislative super-majority, the Democrats have worked overtime to make sure that California’s schools—ranked 40th on Education Week’s composite score of national school performance—remain mediocre by undermining charter schools, eliminating exit exams, banning suspensions for unruly students, and, as a recent proposal suggests, introducing a new ethnic-studies curriculum for public school students.

The Californian ruling caste’s progressive sentiments have not translated into broad-based economic benefits. According to an analysis by Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, California has created surprisingly few high-wage jobs over the past decade, with 86 percent below the median pay and some 40 percent paying under $40,000—in one of the nation’s most expensive states. In a tech-dominated economy, virtually every other sector has grown slowly, well below results in such key competitors as Texas and Arizona. And even the bounty of Silicon Valley has not helped the state’s middle class, since some 40 percent of all tech jobs have gone to foreign workers.

California, in fact, is creating a huge class of workers struggling to achieve anything close to middle-class standards. Gig-economy workers epitomize this trend. One survey of workers in 75 countries found that most gig contractors earn less than minimum wage, including in the United States. Roughly half of California’s giggers struggle with poverty. The reasons are not hard to identify: they lack many basic protections that full-time employees enjoy—for example, enforcement of civil rights laws.

Some identifiable progressives, like Chris Lehane and David Plouffe (who managed Obama’s 2008 campaign), maintain that the gig economy is “democratizing capitalism” by returning control of the working day to the individual. They point to opportunities that gig work provides for people to make extra money using their cars or homes. Uber and Lyft represent their employees as creatives or professionals, moonlighting as drivers to save up for a vacation or expensive date. That may be true for some, but for many others gig work can look more like modern serfdom.

The battle between the Valley and the socialist-oriented progressives is just beginning, both in California and around the country. The traditional Democratic elite has been recruited to argue the tech leaders’ case. Former senator Barbara Boxer works for Lyft, and Tony West, brother-in-law of presidential contender Kamala Harris, is counsel for Uber. They’re helping direct a wave of tech dollars into Sacramento and Washington to reverse the tide, including a proposed $90 million ballot measure to undermine AB5.

How long will Silicon Valley’s leaders accept these conditions? Both Lyft and Uber have shifted some of their operations out of state, Lyft to Nashville and Uber to north Dallas. Apple has opened a huge new operation in the suburbs outside Austin. But there may be no escape if the ascendant Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders ends up in the White House, particularly with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. In these circumstances, Big Tech is likely to be treated in Washington with the kind of scorn that Amazon faced in New York City from local congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now increasingly the national voice of the party grassroots. If Warren wins, tech companies and their high-wage upper-tier workers will have to deal with demands to put workers on their boards and pay huge taxes to fund expanded Social Security and Medicare programs. Privacy legislation could impede their highly profitable tracking and data-collection businesses, and antitrust enforcement could see the breakup of companies like Google and Facebook. At least one progressive, Oregon senator Ron Wyden, has even suggested that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg face “the possibility of a prison term.”

The tech elite has financed a Democratic Party that now appears to favor socialism over capitalism. A socialist movement is even percolating among Silicon Valley tech employees, many of whom see little opportunity to amass enough wealth to buy a house in the exorbitant Bay Area. Like those French aristocrats who backed revolutionary ideas in the late-eighteenth century only to find themselves riding tumbrels through angry crowds, tech elites have spent a fortune promoting a “woke” politics that is turning against them. They may not lose their heads, but they could find their riches fleeced by former allies. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving, self-involved, and cognitively gifted group of . . .  well, idiots.

Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. 

These Are The Three Irrational Planks Of Leftist Thinking.

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America is fighting a culture war and the Progressive Left is the aggressor.  The latest front was opened on June 21 when the House of Representatives passed the so-called “Equality Act,” which would allow boys who self-identify as girls to compete in school sports as girls.  Conservatives point to the Democrats’ embrace of transgender ideology as further evidence the party has gone off the rails, but typically left unexplained is how and why Leftists get to the positions they hold.  Here is an attempt to do that.  It has three parts.

1. Will Takes Precedence Over Reason

We start from the position that Leftists maintain that citizens cannot truly pursue happiness or realize their individual potentialities unless they are free to will whatever they want to do.  In philosophy the fancy term for this is “voluntarism,” which connotes a theory or a general outlook that gives prominence to the will in opposition to our intellect.  The will is that part of our psychology that consists in making choices and in selecting one object among various particulars.  Obviously, the will and the intellect work together in making choices, but a disorder arises deep in the soul whenever the operation of the will is given free rein over our intellectual powers.  We see this in instances when reason is put in a secondary role, used not to inquire into the truth of things, but rather to conjure up justifications that allow us to do whatever the will desires.

The will always wants what it perceives to be good, but the problem is that the criteria for judging what is good and what is bad does not reside within the will itself.  It is found in what is.   It is found in the natural order of things.  An alcoholic may view his next drink as something good, but in reality it is something destructive of his being.  This is rather self-evident, but in the Leftist Outlook, the will has been inflated to such an extent that the Leftist denies there is a natural order of things.  Rather it affirms that any order of any significance is a product of social construction. The Left refuses to recognize what is and substitutes what I want in its place.  Man makes his own reality.

2. The State Exists To Give Every Individual Whatever They Want.

The next step in our analysis has to do with the role of the state.  Leftists see state as a kind of a creative power, a friendly mediator whose job is to intercede in the life of society to enable people to fully develop their potentialities.  Thus, a Leftist would say it is the proper function of the state to remove obstacles that frustrate any citizen’s striving to pursue happiness as he or she sees fit.  A summary of this view can be found in the opinion written by former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood v Casey, the Court’s 1992 decision that upheld abortion “rights.”

’”At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.”

That piece of folderol was mocked by the late Justice Antonin Scalia who called it the “sweet mystery-of-life passage” that “ate the rule of law.”  But it does bring into focus our first two aspects of the Leftist Outlook — the idea that liberty entails allowing the citizen “to define one’s own concept of existence” — whatever that means — and the idea that the state ought not interfere with that process.  In transgender ideology this worldview means there is no objective “human nature” apart from any individual’s definition of who he or she is.  It further means that if any person identifies as transgender it is not up to society or the state to question that decision; rather both are expected to help such persons make the transition to their new identity.

3. The Law Is Changeable, Depending On What We Choose To Believe Today.

Finally, if the state is to nurture and advance a radical understanding of personal autonomy, the ground of law then becomes based on the shifting desires and movements of the human will alone.  This is an unstable situation, because with no fixed Polaris to guide human action, a law tomorrow can be the opposite of what it is today.  An advocate of abortion “rights” or of “same-sex marriage” should have little difficulty in agreeing with that statement because public policy on these issues today is the opposite of what it was in the not distant past.  Thus, the only way the Leftist project can secure its purported advances and protect itself from counter-attack must be with a constant show of hands and a flexing of muscle.

Today the rigid orthodoxy of Progressive Leftism prevails in the land.  It is a noxious compound of several related tendencies and opinions, including the application of radical doubt about the nature of reality, the widespread acceptance of moral relativism, and the imposition of political correctness.  The Left emphasizes will over reason and ends over means.  It scorns tradition and mocks the good.  It stifles and bullies and silences unfashionable ideas.  Its internal logic is to expand into every aspect of social life, for to come to rest would be the start of its undoing.  The Leftist Outlook expands either subtly, by co-opting individual and institution alike, or aggressively, by denouncing or ridiculing any idea that does not conform to itself.

This behavioral pattern is not elective.  It is not idiosyncratic to any particular person on the Left or any allied group.  It is foreordained and necessary.  That is because if you start your politics from the primacy of the will over reason, then you inevitably wind up with no grounding for ethics or law apart from raw power itself.

 

James Soriano is a retired Foreign Service Officer.  He has previously written for AT on monetary affairs and the Federal Reserve Bank.

 

Since We All Believe In Different Values, Are we Still A United Nation And One People?

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“My religion defines who I am. And I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life,” said Vice President Joe Biden in 2012. “I accept my church’s position on abortion as … doctrine. Life begins at conception. … I just refuse to impose that on others.”

For four decades, Biden backed the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of the tax dollars of Joe’s fellow Catholics to pay for what they view as the killing of the innocent unborn.

Last week, Joe flipped. He now backs the repeal of the Hyde Amendment.

Ilyse Hogue of NARAL Pro-Choice America welcomed home the prodigal son: “We’re pleased that Joe Biden has joined the rest of the 2020 Democratic field in coalescing around the Party’s core values — support for abortion rights.” Nixonu2019s White Hous…Patrick J. BuchananBest Price: $10.90Buy New $10.20(as of 10:40 EDT – Details)

But when did the right to an abortion — a crime in many states before 1973 — become a “core value” of the Democratic Party?

And what are these “values” of which politicians incessantly talk?

Are they immutable? Or do they change with the changing times?

Last month, Disney CEO Bob Iger said his company may cease filming in Georgia if its new anti-abortion law takes effect: “If (the bill) becomes law, I don’t see how it’s practical for us to continue to shoot there.”

The Georgia law outlaws almost all abortions, once a heartbeat is detected, some six to eight weeks into pregnancy. It reflects the Christian conservative values of millions of Georgians.

To Iger and Hollywood, however, Georgia’s law radically restricts the “reproductive rights” of women, and is a moral outrage.

What we have here is a clash of values.

What one side believes is preserving the God-given right to life for the unborn, the other regards as an assault on the rights of women.

The clash raises questions that go beyond our culture war to what America should stand for in the world.

“American interests and American values are inseparable,” Pete Buttigieg told Rachel Maddow. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the Claremont Institute: “We have had too little courage to confront regimes squarely opposed to our interests and our values.”

Are Pompeo and Mayor Pete talking about the same values?

The mayor is proudly gay and in a same-sex marriage. Yet the right to same-sex marriage did not even exist in this country until the Supreme Court discovered it a few years ago.

In a 2011 speech to the U.N., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “Gay rights are human rights,” and she approved of U.S. embassies flying the rainbow flag during Pride Month.

This year, Mike Pompeo told the U.S. embassy in Brazil not to fly the rainbow flag. He explained his concept of his moral duty to the Christian Broadcasting Network, “The task I have is informed by my understanding of my faith, my belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior.”

The Christian values Pompeo espouses on abortion and gay rights are in conflict with what progressives now call human rights.

And the world mirrors the American divide.

There are gay pride parades in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but none in Riyadh and Mecca. In Brunei, homosexuality can get you killed.

To many Americans, diversity — racial, ethnic, cultural, religious — is our greatest strength.

Yet Poland and Hungary are proudly ethnonationalist. South Korea and Japan fiercely resist the racial and ethnic diversity immigration would bring. Catalans and Scots in this century, like Quebecois in the last, seek to secede from nations to which they have belonged for centuries.

Are ethnonationalist nations less righteous than diverse nations likes ours? And if diversity is an American value, is it really a universal value? The Greatest Comeback:…Patrick J. BuchananBest Price: $4.67Buy New $6.00(as of 09:55 EDT – Details)

Consider the treasured rights of our First Amendment — freedom of speech, religion and the press.

Saudi Arabia does not permit Christian preachers. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, converts to Christianity face savage reprisals. In Buddhist Myanmar, Muslims are ethnically cleansed.

These nations reject an equality of all faiths, believing instead in the primacy of their own majority faith. They reject our wall of separation between religion and state. Our values and their values conflict.

What makes ours right and theirs wrong? Why should our views and values prevail in what are, after all, their countries?

Under our Constitution, many practices are protected — abortion, blasphemy, pornography, flag-burning, trashing religious beliefs — that other nations regard as symptoms of a disintegrating society.

When Hillary Clinton said half of all Trump supporters could be put into a “basket of deplorables” for being “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” she was conceding that many Trump’s supporters detest many progressive values.

True, but in the era of Trump, why should her liberal values be the values America champions abroad?

With secularism’s triumph, we Americans have no common religion, no common faith, no common font of moral truth. We disagree on what is right and wrong, moral and immoral.

Without an agreed-upon higher authority, values become matters of opinion. And ours are in conflict and irreconcilable.

Understood. But how, then, do we remain one nation and one people?

Political Capitalism Is The Greater Threat To Economic Freedom. Big Business Is More Guilty Than The Socialists.

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At Center For Individualism, we are 100% pro-capitalism. But it is important to recognize that there are trends in democracy that encourage an unholy alliance between big business and government, which undermines the first principle of free markets.  Professor Randall Holcombe calls this phenomenon Political Capitalism.

In the 1940s, economist Friedrich Hayek said in his book, “The Road to Serfdom,” that the road to serfdom was socialism. Economist Joseph Schumpeter, in “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy,” feared that socialism would displace capitalism even though capitalism was a better system.

In the 21st century, self-proclaimed socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are keeping the fears of Hayek and Schumpeter alive. Those fears are misplaced. The biggest threats to capitalism aren’t socialists, they are capitalists.

While socialists float aspirational ideas for a better society, capitalists conspire with the political class to enact policies that benefit the political and economic elite at the expense of the masses.

The result is that business profitability increasingly comes from political connections rather than by satisfying the demands of consumers, undermining free markets and the capitalist system.

This is widely recognized, if not widely understood. People talk about cronyism, corporatism, the division between the 1 percent and the 99 percent and the threats of the military-industrial complex. In my recent book, I call this phenomenon “political capitalism” and explain how it undermines the market system and threatens capitalism.

When capitalists tout pro-business policies, they inevitably are talking about policies that use trade barriers and regulatory impediments to give themselves advantages over competitors.

They work the political process to get subsidies and tax breaks that benefit themselves but impose costs on everyone else. Policies advertised as “pro-business” are almost always anti-free market and anti-capitalism.

Political capitalism encroaches upon free-market capitalism because public policy is made by an elite few who have an incentive to use the policy-making process for their benefit. Think about the Occupy Wall Street language in which public policy benefits the 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent.

But critics of our current system, including socialists, too often want more government programs and more government oversight to remedy that problem. These critics should recognize that an elite few create public policy; giving the government more oversight power means giving more power to the 1 percent.

Political capitalism is enabled by the ideology of progressive democracy. Progressivism has, from its beginning, advocated the use of government power to impose costs on some for the benefit of others.

Originally, it was designed to redistribute the wealth of those with concentrated economic power — the so-called “robber barons” like Rockefeller, Carnegie and Vanderbilt — for the benefit of those who claimed to be victims of that power.

21st-century progressivism retains its “share the wealth” ideology, which justifies imposing costs on some for the benefit of others.

Democracy is a great mechanism for peacefully determining who exercises political power, but the ideology of democracy goes beyond this, to depict democracy as a mechanism for identifying the public interest, as determined through a democratic decision-making process.

The ideology of progressive democracy enables political capitalism because it justifies policies that impose costs on some for the benefit of others. Public policy is designed by an elite few. When those elite few design policies that benefit themselves, the ideology of progressive democracy justifies those policies as furthering the will of the people.

Protective tariffs? Regulatory barriers to thwart competitors? Tax breaks? Pro-business subsidies? These are the hallmarks of political capitalism, enabled by the ideology of progressive democracy, that undermine free markets and a capitalist economy.

To echo Ronald Reagan, government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem. The way to preserve the prosperity that has come with free markets is to limit government and sever the connections between the economic and political elite — to return to a system in which cronyism and political connections do not enhance business profitability.

Capitalists — the beneficiaries of free markets — lobby government for tax breaks, subsidies and protectionist policies rather than supporting competitive markets and a level economic playing field. They don’t defend the free-market system that has made everyone more prosperous.

Contrary to popular belief, the biggest threat to capitalism doesn’t come from socialists; it comes from capitalists.

Randall G. Holcombe is the DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics at Florida State University. He is the author of “Political Capitalism: How Economic and Political Power is Made and Maintained.”

The Medieval Inventor and Entrepreneur Who Sparked the Motor of the World

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In Medieval Europe, economic mobility was determined by heredity, and since no one chooses their parents, opportunities were limited and pathways for improving one’s lot in life were pre-determined. The feudal system favored the nobility who extracted rents and taxes from the peasants and craftsmen. To limit the abuse and keep more of what they earned, merchants and craftsmen formed guilds, meaning labor unions, to negotiate prices, manage quality, and enforce rules of conduct among guild members.

The only language used for communication across Europe was Latin, and all printed material was manufactured by hand, so illiteracy was nearly everyone’s lot in life. The most literate were the monks who transcribed Bibles. Such was the power of the Church, which was safeguarded by illiteracy, until the year 1522. Over a two year period, 300,000 printed copies of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses were distributed throughout Germany and Europe. Luther’s goal was to kneecap the power of church leaders in their selling of indulgences, which they did in order to enrich themselves further. This was the first shot fired in the Protestant Reformation, and the first widespread distribution of mass produced pamphlets and ideas. And the gun that fired the shot was the recently developed printing press, the one created by the entrepreneur, inventor, and Poetic Justice Warrior Johannes Gutenberg.

The Invention That Changed Everything

While its not clear when Gutenberg came up with the idea for mass printing using moveable type, most likely it was around the year 1440. At the same time, it is believed that Dutchman Laurens Jansz Koster also built a printing press. While it is not rare that two independent minds come up with the same groundbreaking discovery simultaneously, the preponderance of evidence suggests the honor rightfully belongs to Gutenberg.

While the records are sparse, it seems Gutenberg was testing prototype presses while living in Strasbourg, and then in Mainz, while he was experimenting with copper engraved printing. In 1448 Gutenberg took out a loan, presumably to begin construction of a fully working press with all the necessary tools. In 1450, he took out another loan from a wealthy investor, Johann Fust, who along with his son in law Peter Schoffer, joined Gutenberg’s printing enterprise. It makes sense that Schoffer, who had experience as a scribe, created the first typefaces.

In 1452, after taking out a third loan, production began on Gutenberg’s Bible project, and in 1455 they printed 180 copies of the infamous 42 line Gutenberg Bible. During this period Gutenberg accepted commissions for much more profitable printing projects, and as poetic justice would have it, the Church ordered thousands of indulgences to bestow upon their wealthy sinners, er, generous donors.

The Modern Period

The Gutenberg press is a singularity in human history, which means dramatic and irreversible change, and ushered in the modern era. Besides the Reformation, it included the grand achievements of the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. But at the personal level, it meant growing literacy and the rise of vernacular language, meaning that people could read and learn in the language of their local population. This led to new cultural cohesion among people of the same language and borders, and the emergence of the middle class.

The late modern period was also one of grand achievements. It was the Age of Reason which inspired the Shot Heard Round the World – the American Revolution – and the Industrial Revolution. It was the dawning of the knowledge economy. Literacy soared, ideas and information were mass distributed, and the premodern hierarchies of nobility, church, and guilds were leveled. The power of the human mind was unleashed for the first time in history. The difference between Modernism and the Classicism of ancient Greece and Rome is that they didn’t share our reverence for natural law and natural rights.

What is essential to understand is that in the millennia that preceded the knowledge economy, human life routinely meant disease and despair, only to be interrupted by horrid cruelty. Human life was cheap. As historian Jay Winik explains in his book The Great Upheaval:

Torture was universally employed for all manner of crimes. Rarely was there mercy. One might be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Ordinary criminals and political dissidents alike were routinely beheaded, burned, or broken alive on a wheel. Counterfeiters were punished by pouring molten metal down their throats.

This did not end until mass literacy begat the knowledge economy, the Age of Reason, individualism, the consent of the governed, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution. Roughly in that order. The Industrial Revolution was central to the end of slavery in the Western world, and unimaginable global prosperity.

The Knowledge Problem

Johannes Gutenberg was patient and peaceful, and had an unusually low time preference, meaning a long-term vision, but not even he could have predicted the amazing consequences of two phenomena: the mass dispersion of all human knowledge, and the massive increase in all human knowledge. As economist Friedrich Hayek explained, “The mind cannot foresee its own advance.”

However, Gutenberg did solve the knowledge problem. Like the creation of money was the catalyst for humanity to escape the tribal, hunter-gatherer mode of living, and provided the tool for mutual, peaceful exchange, the creation of the printing press was the catalyst for organically derived knowledge at the local level, and the universality of knowledge for individual self-creation.

Hayek described the impossibility of any group of people to possess sufficient knowledge for managing human resources more efficiently and peacefully than free markets. In the most cited article in the second half of the 20th century, The Use of Knowledge in Society:

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.

One of the greatest achievements of Gutenberg’s ingenuity was that economic mobility was liberalized. Anyone engaged in self-creation, who live lives of reason, purpose, and pride, can work their way into any economic strata they aspire to. Such is the legacy of Poetic Justice Warrior Johannes Gutenberg.

 

 

 

 

 

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