Cities And The Decline Of Nations

Some years ago, individualist writer Jane Jacobs penned an insightful tome on the centrality of cities in the economic development of a society. For its time, it was a breakthrough: a genuine revelation about the processes by which the nations of the West had moved from sustenance economies to widespread prosperity. It was also a cautionary tract, in that it summarized, quite accurately, the ways in which cities could engineer their own degradation and decay.

Miss Jacobs was as insightful, and as foresightful, as she was because she focused on incentives and the processes they govern. Nevertheless, she was an optimist of sorts, in that she believed that some incentives could be resisted by those with sufficient perception, understanding, and will power. Among the tragedies of our age is the shortage of such persons in the governments of the cities of our time.

***

A successful city, like any other successful entity, will attract certain sorts of persons:

1. The ambitious;
2. The criminal;
3. The parasite;
4. The politician.

The future of a city is determined by the balance of power among those four groups.

The ambitious man sees the wealth of a successful city as a launching pad for his own visions of enterprise. He must, of course, believe he "has what it takes." He must also feel he's equal to the competition he'll face. Not least, he must accept that only a few of his sort will succeed as he hopes to succeed...and that he might not be numbered among the winners.

The criminal, the parasite, and the politician all see the city in essentially the same way: as a source of nourishment upon which to feed. They are not allies, except in some incidental cross-couplings that are not guaranteed to persist. But in their pursuit of their aspirations, they work toward a common end: the deterioration of the city.

I hope I need not elaborate on why groups 2, 3, and 4 gravitate toward a successful city. If it isn't clear that the predatory and the parasitic among men will always seek out concentrations of wealth and opportunities for power, I can't imagine how to make it so. My question this morning is whether they are guaranteed to prevail over the enterprising and energetic by the dynamics inherent in urban environments. In these years of the Internet and its effects on the tendencies of our time, the question strikes me as an important one.

***

One could say many things about the American city of the year of Our Lord 2012. Most of those would be open to dispute, as in nearly all discussions of demographics and socio-economics. However, among the contentions that would be difficult to refute is that, compared to the suburban, exurban, and rural regions of the United States, they are less safe.

A city is nearly always the densest concentration of persons for some miles around. An increase in density does entail an increase in certain hazards, above and apart from those that arise from criminality. However, it is significant to observe that from about the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the New Deal, American cities were widely regarded as safer overall than the less dense regions around them:

• The supports of life were more easily available and less likely to run out;
• Emergency services were more plentiful and quicker to reach (or to get to where they were needed);
• A certain measure of protection, whether from assault, accident, or illness, arises from being surrounded by persons of good will.

There are still some American cities about which all those statements remain true. With only a few exceptions, the larger cities -- the megalopolises, with populations of a million or more -- are not among them. Density effects and the convergence of the three predator groups enumerated in the segment above have undone them. This is part of the reason such cities are no longer attractive to the ambitious and the energetic.

What is unattractive to new energy will also dishearten old energy. Those whose enterprise and insight have helped to make a city glitter will feel an intensifying impulse to abandon it when it turns hostile to them and their sort. If they succeed in relocating on acceptable terms, their departure will leave the city poorer, less dynamic, and less able to resist further incursions by the predators. The process is difficult to retard or reverse, though, as we have seen with the fortunes of New York City under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, exceptions have occurred. However, there may be a "point of no return," after which the only thing that can be done for a city involves wholesale demolition. Detroit compels us to admit that possibility.

***

The great Phyllis Dorothy James, in her masterpiece The Children of Men, noted another effect to which we must give attention. As a people ages, it becomes ever more urgent that it be concentrated, so that the needs of the elderly can be met in a timely fashion and at a bearable cost. Of course, in Baroness James's novel, the population of the world was aging at exactly one year per year, as there were no children being born anywhere on Earth. Our lot in America isn't nearly that extreme, but it is trending that way, at least in certain demographic cohorts.

This has particular import for Middle-Class America, which is experiencing both net negative population growth and increasing individual longevity. The number of septuagenarians and octogenarians among us is rising steadily. Such persons, with rare exceptions, need to be looked after, which is far harder and more costly when they're dispersed than when they're concentrated. There will be both economic and political pressures to compel such a concentration: to pull the elderly into urban and quasi-urban centers "for their own good." Considering both the pre-existent hazards of our contemporary cities and the new attractions to predation manifested by large concentrations of oldsters -- for some decades now, the richest cohort of Americans by a considerable margin -- the "invitees" aren't likely to like it much.

***

Science fiction writer and futurist Robert A. Heinlein opined that a planet that had developed cities of more than one million persons was "approaching critical mass." He foresaw rampant civil unrest and the common political responses to it as pervasive characteristics of such a world. Given the dynamics outlined here, and the concentration of so great a fraction of the world's population into large, dense, dangerous cities, it appears he was correct.

Note that this is not an argument that Earth is "overpopulated." The notion that Mankind has reached or exceeded Earth's biophysical "carrying capacity" is entirely a fantasy of the Left, which sees population control as a convenient avenue toward totalitarian control of all of human life. However, we might have reached Terra's political carrying capacity: the point at which the proportion of predatory types among us makes it imperative that we disperse, whether to the less populated parts of our own planet, or to other worlds entirely.

Getting any significant fraction of Mankind off this ball of rock remains technologically extremely challenging. Getting them to a place where there's air they can breathe and soil that will produce food they can eat is an even tougher problem. For the near term, dispersal here on Earth is the only approach available, but it will be opposed by the political class for all the reasons examined here. If political machinations succeed in discouraging dispersal or advancing hyper-urbanization, the decline of our cities and the fortunes of those who live in them will deepen. More cities will approach the "point of no return." Some will pass it.

Food for thought.

Obamunism In One Paragraph

Every now and then, I feel a modest twinge of regret over my decision to remove National Review Online from the right sidebar. Today, Peter Kirsanow provides the impetus:

If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen because you’ve been a little lazy over the last couple of decades and you’ve lost your ambition, your imagination and your willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge, causing you to become bitter and cling to guns and religion and antipathy toward people who aren’t like you, and to act stupidly, just like a typical white person or our troops who are just air-raiding villages and killing civilians. Frankly, that’s why I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism, and that’s why it’s necessary for me to fundamentally transform America and spread the wealth around — just as soon as I get more flexibility in a second term.

Absolutely brilliant. It's a pity the site, and the parent magazine, should be so cowardly and mealy-mouthed about other worthy persons and organizations.

A Trifle Naive

If there's anything the more fair-minded journalists of the world simply must learn, it's not to take politicians' overt statements of intention as sincere:

UNITED NATIONS – American Second Amendment rights and U.S. foreign policy interests could be directly threatened by the latest wording of a United Nations draft treaty seeking control over international trade in conventional weapons, FoxNews.com has learned....

The latest draft bars weapons transfers to “non-state actors” – which, by definition, include private citizens.

While treaty supporters say the provision speaks to a long-stated goal of denying weapons to terrorists, many experts warn of wider consequences.

“The ATT will not limit the ability of terrorists to acquire arms. The reason for this is simple: The UN has never defined terrorism, because some member states insist that terrorist groups like Hamas are struggling against so-called foreign occupation,” Ted Bromund, senior research fellow with the Washington-based Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, told the conference last week.

Is it really necessary to point out that the United Nations is dominated by anti-libertarian regimes? That those regimes have an obvious interest in preventing their subjects from acquiring the means of resistance or revolt? That anti-firearms initiatives such as the ATT are perennial at the UN? That when a similar resolution was introduced there in 2002, President George W. Bush immediately rejected it as a device to "freeze the last regime in place" -- ?

Isn't it completely obvious that they who wield political power would prefer that it not be checked by citizen power -- the ability to rise up and dethrone the political class willy-nilly? Are we really so detached from history that we don't remember that immediately upon rising to power, Hitler disarmed the civilian population of Germany?

Has the government-controlled education system made us that numb to the consequences of public policy? Is that the explanation for Barack Obama's continued near-majority support?

And of course, there's this to consider:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. [Article VI, Section 2; emphasis added]

A treaty duly ratified by the Senate and signed by the president effectively becomes an article of the Constitution. Though jurists have argued for decades over whether a Constitutional provision can legitimately (NB: that's not the same as legally) bind the private citizen, the ATT would provide an immediate rationale for the registration (and ultimately, for the confiscation) of all firearms owned by private citizens (i.e., persons not under arms in any branch of the military, nor employed as law enforcement officers by any level of government).

Under the Vienna Convention, to which the United States is a signatory, all that's required for the ATT to have binding force is that the president or his delegate sign it. It need not ever be brought to the Senate for ratification -- and you can bet the mortgage money that, with the Democrats in control of as many as forty votes there, it would never have even a chance to be voted down.

This is a last-stand sort of gambit. With Barack Obama in the Oval Office, the overwhelming probability is that some form of this monstrosity will be signed, and that it will not protect the rights of the private citizen under the Second Amendment.

We will hear about how the treaty is merely "a stroke against terrorism."
We will be told that Americans' right to keep and bear arms will be respected..."within reason," of course.
When some patriot asks about the intent behind newly passed federal registration laws for all firearms, required by the treaty, and whether such laws don't presage confiscation, we will be told "Oh, you know we would never use it for that!"
When another Columbine-like, Aurora-like, or Fort Hood-like atrocity occurs, we will be told -- in tones of deepest regret, of course -- that private firearms possession has become just too dangerous to permit it to continue.
And we will regret not having risen up to prevent this unconscionable infringement of the rights of a free, self-governing people.

Don't be a naive. Prepare!

A Need And A Plea

If I am correct, the most pressing need of our time is education: in particular, a rectification of the many fallacies Americans hold about the power of governments to control the economy. Needless to say, such an education will not come from any government-run or government-subsidized institution of education. This is a job for free men in a free market.

26 years ago, a man writing under the pseudonym of "John Galt" addressed this need. His book, Dreams Come Due: Government and Economics As If Freedom Mattered, was a peculiar sort of masterpiece. It was organized as a selection of essays, each no longer than ten minutes' reading, and each full to overflowing with hard data and easily checked references. Any American who took the book seriously reached the back cover with whatever illusions he might have had about government's benignity, or its power to improve on national economy, ripped to shreds.

I've been rereading that book, and I find myself freshly overwhelmed by the concision, the accuracy, and the power of its arguments. It's not for the faint of heart, nor will any ideologically committed liberal read it with pleasure. Atop that, it has one other shortcoming: it's 26 years old.

If "John Galt" is out there listening, I beseech him to update his book, and most critically, to make it available in low cost formats: mass-market paperback and electronic-reader-compatible. Robert Ringer's book Restoring The American Dream was too personal a polemic to be sufficiently educational to a broad market. Dreams Come Due, if updated for our day, distributed widely, and taken seriously, has what it takes.

The original edition was published by Simon and Schuster. To the best of my knowledge, it's only available used. I exhort all freedom lovers with an interest in effective polemics to track down a copy and read it. If you're as impressed with it as I was and am, your next step is to petition Simon and Schuster to contact "John Galt" and encourage him to update his magnum opus.

In the interim, have a brief quote from his introduction:

This book was written because not one person in 50 understands what has happened and is happening to the United States and the world in day to day political and economic affairs. In the words of Emerson they do not understand that you cannot do wrong without suffering wrong....

Washington politicians, economists, and other government-worshippers, whose only concern is for the next election, have increasingly victimized and polarized our country through their envy-motivated dreams. They have sown the seeds of disaster with idiotic legislation that unceasingly robs the people of their freedom by placing more and more law above the rights of property. Now that these dreams are coming due at an ever increasing rate, they are pointing the finger at the victims, blaming them for the results, while continuing to pass new laws (i.e., compounding their crimes) that only assure us worse disasters in the future....

To overcome this confusion, we must have and understand an objective set of laws that are as unchanging as the laws of physics. Read and grasp the following economic laws...the Ten Pillars Of Economic Wisdom from the American Economic Foundation, and you will never again be confused or unknowingly cheated by government. When you have finished the economic laws, I suggest you read the sections money, currency, and inflation before continuing the book....

And here are:

THE TEN PILLARS OF ECONOMIC WISDOM:

1. Nothing in our material world can come from nowhere or go nowhere, nor can it be free: everything in our economic life has a source, a destination, and a cost that must be paid.
2. Government is never a source of goods. Everything produced is produced by the people, and everything that government gives to the people, it must first take from the people.
3. The only valuable money that government has to spend is that money taxed or borrowed out of the people’s earnings. When government decides to spend more than it has thus received, that extra unearned money is created out of thin air, through the banks, and, when spent, takes on value only by reducing the value of all money, savings, and insurance.
4. In our modern exchange economy, all payroll and employment come from customers, and the only worthwhile job security is customer security; if there are no customers, there can be no payroll and no jobs.
5. Customer security can be achieved by the worker only when he cooperates with management in doing the things that win and hold customers. Job security, therefore, is a partnership problem that can be solved only in a spirit of understanding and cooperation.
6. Because wages are the principal cost of everything, widespread wage increases, without corresponding increase in production, simply increase the cost of everybody’s living.
7. The greatest good for the greatest number means, in its material sense, the greatest goods for the greatest number which, in turn, means the greatest productivity per worker.
8. All productivity is based on three factors: 1) natural resources, whose form, place and condition are changed by the expenditure of 2) human energy (both muscular and mental), with the aid of 3) tools.
9. Tools are the only one of these three factors that man can increase without limit, and tools come into being in a free society only when there is a reward for the temporary self-denial that people must practice in order to channel part of their earnings away from purchases that produce immediate comfort and pleasure, and into new tools of production. Proper payment for the use of tools is essential to their creation.
10. The productivity of the tools--that is, the efficiency of the human energy applied in connection with their use--has always been highest in a competitive society in which the economic decisions are made by millions of progress-seeking individuals, rather than in a state-planned society in which those decisions are made by a handful of all-powerful people, regardless of how well-meaning, unselfish, sincere and intelligent those people may be.

[Dictated using Windows 7 Speech Recognition.]

"You Didn't Build That"

Your achievements are not yours. Your prosperity is not your doing. Your property is only yours so long as the State doesn't want it. None of it is due to you, your skills, your strengths, or your insight. It all just happened...like each and every one of Barack Hussein Obama's steps toward the presidency of these United States.

Whittle nails it:

I no longer care whether the miscreant is a natural born U.S. citizen. I want to see him impeached, tried, convicted, and removed from office for being an asshole. Surely that's enough to disqualify him for the highest executive office in the land.

Assorted

I have a battery of MRIs and other tests to endure in an hour or so, so for today I'm reverting to grab-bag style.

***

First up, a bit of brilliance from Canada's crown prince of commentary, Michael Coren:

This badly needs to be said over and over, until the Muslims we've unwisely admitted to North America get the message, pack up, and return to the hellholes they left behind. Just as much as America, Canada is a nation founded by heroes; its blood is quite as good as ours. There are strong indications that Canadians -- outside their political class, anyway -- are throwing off the multiculturalist / moral relativist virus and recovering their principles. Just in the nick of time, too: it's a beautiful country that deserves a much longer run in freedom than the emissaries of sharia would allow it.

***

Second, from DailyPundit (via InstaPundit), we have "The Coming Republican Depression:"

What these numbers describe is an ongoing depression. We may not technically be in a recession (although who knows, given how thoroughly the statistics get cooked these days), but we are most certainly in a depression.

It probably won’t be actually identified as such until it is long over, though. Well, unless the GOP takes congress and the White House this fall. Then the fellating tools and hack propagandists of the DNC media will line up to wail about the “Republican Depression” we are enduring.

This is indeed foreseeable, even from much farther away than the half a year we must wait for a "regime change." But what struck me even more forcefully is the description of our economic condition as a depression. A classical depression is characterized by very tight credit -- "money's hard to come by" -- usually in consequence of a contraction of the supply of currency and extensible credit. That's not exactly the case today: the supply of currency and extensible credit is far greater than it was before conditions trended to this point. Nevertheless, credit in the sense of the availability of loans for any purpose is very tight, because the conditions for establishing creditworthiness have been tightened considerably.

The old saw runs that to get a bank to grant him a loan, the prospective borrower must prove that he doesn't need it. Well, today, he has to prove not only that he doesn't need it, but that he's never needed it, never will need it, and could painlessly lend the bank an even greater amount should the bank approach him. There's a moral in there, somewhere.

***

One of my favorites in the DextroSphere, Nice Deb,, has produced an important assembly of deductions, inferences, and reactions to the tactics of harassment, threat, and occasional outright violence the Left has adopted in our time. I can't usefully excerpt this critical piece, except for this stirring bit:

Wombat says that those jerks have messed with the WRONG people and now it’s Game ON.

Stacy holds Neal Rauhauser personally responsible, and invokes the dreaded War Oath of Clan Cameron: How’s Your Gaelic, Neal Rauhauser? Also be sure to read the following related posts at The Other McCain: Because Liars Hate Truth, Poison Pen E-Mail and the Harassment of The Lonely Conservative, and of course, The Kimberlin Files.

WJ Hoge correctly calls those responsible for this wickedness Cowardly Thugs.

To which I will add my favorite quote from Victor Marguerite: "The Fascists cannot argue, so they kill."

However -- and this is critical -- the plague will not abate in any slightest degree until events have proved two things:

• That it is not effective at silencing its targets;
• That decent persons of all political alignments have leagued against it: to expose it, to counter it, and to punish it with the mechanisms of the law.

Perhaps that moment is truly at hand.

Take notice, thugs of the Left, you who adopt the foulest of tactics to gain your ends while simultaneously accusing us of being evil: You are craven and contemptible. More: you will fail -- and you will suffer the just consequences of the tactics you've employed. I pray only that God will spare me long enough to witness it...and perhaps to participate.

Where do you stand, Gentle Reader?

***

My thanks to everyone who's written to offer sympathy and prayers for my recovery from this...this...whatever it is. (That's the most irritating part of this whole saga: no one knows. These past three weeks I've seen more doctors than can typically be found in a Northeastern hospital at Happy Hour. The diagnoses have never been better than "Well, maybe it will go away.") Bearing up has been hard. Remaining productive has been even harder. Remaining stoic has been harder still.

Quoth Seneca: "Scorn pain. Either it will go away or you will." Easier said than done, I fear. But I'm trying. Really and truly. And I'll keep posting as long as I have at least one hand to type with. (Maurice Ravel, where are you when I need you?)

A Necessary Calibration

Measurement is impossible without the designation of a fixed unit. More, others can only use one's measurements if there's agreement on the unit on which they're based.

The last three times I took this BLEEP!ing shoulder ailment to a doctor or a gaggle thereof, I was asked: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how much does it hurt?" Never before having been asked such a question, nor having considered the utility of such a metric, I was unable to answer.

This cannot continue. Too many people are being confronted by this question -- I heard it asked of several others during a recent hospital visit -- to permit the uncertainties surrounding it to persist. Accordingly, I am pleased, after much hard thought and research, to offer the world:

The FWP Pain Measurement Scale

I've tried for a roughly linear distribution of the agonies, but of course, some will surely disagree. Anyway, the scale itself:

• 0: Feeling fine.
• 1: A slight ache or moderate itch (scratchable).
• 2: A moderate, persistent ache or painful itch (possibly not scratchable). The sufferer might or might not go to the medicine cabinet for aspirin or ibuprofen. In about half of cases, he'll go to the liquor cabinet in preference.
• 3: A severe ache or shooting pain. Definitely analgesics time, but save the hoarded Vicodin for something serious.
• 4: The pain has affected the sufferer's movement; it might have disturbed his coordination and fine motor skills. Grouchiness is almost guaranteed. Yard work will be deferred to better days.
• 5: It's getting serious now. The pain has altered the sufferer's breathing patterns. Eating and drinking have become problematic.
• 6: The sufferer's locomotion and concentration are beginning to deteriorate. If he hasn't yet gone for the Vicodin, he will soon. No point in going to work.
• 7: Vision and hearing are degrading. One Vicodin hasn't quite done the trick, but the little tube says to wait four hours before repeating. Most definitely, "do not drive or operate heavy machinery."
• 8: Cognitive functions are seriously impeded; coordination is poor to nonexistent. A visit to the emergency room receives serious consideration. Leave the tax returns for later!
• 9: Complete incapacitation. No remaining coordination or cognitive capacity. Possible wailing. Probable profanity. Get the keys to the gun cabinet away from him!
• 10: "Where did you file the will, dear?"

Now, how would we apply this scale to agonies that arise from political events?

Not Exactly A Religious Post...

...but not exactly not, either:

If you're a Christian who has voted for the Socialists Democrats in the past because you "want to help the poor," reflect on this brave priest's words.
The right of private property is not a human invention.
It is a part of the laws of Nature.
In other words, it was ordained by God.
If you disbelieve in natural law, ask yourself where whatever rights you think you possess come from. When you have an answer for yourself -- and for me -- maybe we'll talk.

Trials

When a man dies, he does not just die of the disease he has: he dies of his whole life. -- Charles Peguy

Everyone knows times of trial. Indeed, over the course of our lives, most of us will know several flavors thereof: health, money, marital, family, and occupational troubles. That knowledge doesn't make them any easier to bear, but it can reassure us, to some extent, that we're not being burdened unfairly.

The source of instruction most relevant to bearing up under your trials is someone who has already endured them. He'll know what you're going through. He'll have a survivor's perspective on its scope and severity. He might even know how to prevail against it. But there's a catch: You have to know him, and listen to him.

That catch has quite a lot of us caught in it just now.

***

It's an old saw that a child, upon entering adolescence, concludes (if he hasn't already) that his parents are stupid. It's all too clear that they don't have the slightest clue about "What's Happenin' Now," and therefore can't possibly have anything of importance to tell him. Thereafter, he watches them "get smarter and smarter," until at about age 26 he realizes that they really did know a few things about Life, the Universe, and Everything. The pattern repeats as the young adult produces his own spratlings and spends twenty years or so resolutely resisting the urge to murder them in their sleep.

There are a couple of new hitches to the progression today. One is that parents appear to be more eager to exile their ungrateful brats than ever before. The other is the huge number of "new voices" attempting to sway young people this way or that, and which is capable of deflecting listeners away from more reliable sources of wisdom and guidance.

Those "new voices" have an agenda. They're not terribly open about it. And they're quite willing to lie to advance it. This is especially important in politics and matters of public policy.

In 2008, the "new voices" exhorted young Americans to throw their support to Barack Hussein Obama. His public-speaker's gifts, though considerable, weren't enough to close the deal, and he and his strategists knew it. So he promised them everything but water from the Moon, without ever making an explicit commitment to which he could be held after his inauguration. It was all airy generalities -- "hope and change" -- right up to the first Tuesday in November.

But they bought it. They didn't have the perspective that drives older Americans to see past the pretty words to the core of the speaker. Obama's promises of a fairer, cleaner, more just and better liked America hypnotized them. The contrary evidence, both against Obama's claims and against Obama himself, failed to register with them. So they helped to propel him into the Oval Office.

I think it's fairly obvious that young Americans' experiences in the Obama Era don't testify to the godlike powers The Won implicitly claimed on the campaign trail. My fear is that they'll fail to draw the moral from them...and that the widening gulf between them and the prior generations will thwart any other source of instruction.

***

Today, we have this from Dennis Prager:

...ask any adults you respect whether they have more wisdom and insight into life now than they did ten years ago, let alone when they were your age. The answer will always be yes. (And any adult who has not gained wisdom over the course of a lifetime is not worth listening to.)

Which directly leads to my point: Did you ever wonder why people are far more likely to become conservative in their views and values as they get older?

When this rather devastating question is posed to liberals, leftists, progressives, Democrats -- you choose the label or group -- they answer that people get more selfish as they get older.

Progressives have to give this answer. There is no other response that enables them to avoid confronting the quite embarrassing fact that just about every adult, at every age of life, thinks he/she is wiser than when younger -- and as they accumulate wisdom they become more conservative.

So the liberal explanation -- that people get more selfish as they get older -- is not only insulting but also nonsense.

Now, one's age might be an arguable metric to apply to "wisdom and insight into life." But one's age does connote a certain degree of endurance. He who has endured forty, fifty, or sixty years on this tectonic plate, and is still upright and capable of meeting his own obligations, has confronted and defeated a proportional number of challenges, obstacles, and vicissitudes. He will know more about what life demands from an American adult, and what resources and degree of perseverance it demands, than any twenty-year-old could possibly know. As the saying goes, experience gives the test first and the lesson afterward.

It would be immensely beneficial to the political, social, and economic health of this country if young Americans were to sip from the springs of their elders' practical experiences.

Never mind our political postures, young folks; just ask us what we've had to do to meet the bills, keep the house from falling down, and stay out of jail. If you do enough of that, and supplement it with a bit of historical reading, it should tell you enough to allow your native intelligence to converge on a sensible political stance.

It's the array of trials we've endured, and what we've had to do to prevail over them, that will tell you all you need to know.

Shamans Redux

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

A Brief Respite

This morning finds me in Watkins Glen, New York. It's at the southern tip of Seneca Lake, one of the largest of the Finger Lakes. From here, the C.S.O. and I intend to sweep around both forks of the Seneca Wine Trail, to discover what new vintages and blends the vintners of New York State have concocted these two years past.

Our interest is purely as citizen-journalists and amateur historians, of course.

(What's that I hear? "You'll drink anything with alcohol in it, you old Irish-Italian reprobate, you" -- ? Well, yes...but so what?)

But seriously, if you enjoy wine, there's no better vantage point from which to start a vineyard / winery tour. Some of the best wines in the world are made here -- and that's not just a lifelong New Yorker's chauvinism speaking; international awards have been landing on New York State wines for decades now.

But I'm not here to talk about that (or about the draft). I wanted to reflect, briefly, on a trend in New York enterprise.

***

New York, outside the Metro district, has been a dairy-farming state for many years. Indeed, in its heyday the state was barely behind Wisconsin for milk products. But New York dairymen haven't been doing so well in recent years, despite a battery of state and federal subsidy programs that strove to counter the national trends in dairy consumption and marketing.

What has been doing well are the vineyards and the wineries. There are perhaps twice as many around Seneca Lake today as there were two years ago, when we last undertook such a survey. And they're raking it in, Gentle Reader; even the humblest of them are virtually overrun with patronage.

The dairy farms are visibly idle. I don't recall seeing any activity at any of the ones we passed on our drive up here yesterday.

There are no subsidies for New York vineyards or wineries. Indeed, if memory serves, it's still illegal to ship New York wines out of state; only a retail purchaser is permitted to do so. But "retail purchasers" have been coming here from all points of the compass, at least if I can judge by the variety of the license plates I've seen. And yes, a couple of the out-of-state plates parked at the larger wineries have been affixed to rather large trucks.

I think this is called "the free market at work." It's been a long time since I've seen it so vividly.

Continental New York is one of the poorer regions in the Northeast. You'd never mistake Watkins Glen for Westchester. Despite that, there's a sense of optimism around us, an unmistakable feeling that things are moving in a good direction. Owing to the unique culture of the Five Boroughs, New Yorkers have an unfortunate reputation for being excessively brisk and got-to-hustle. You wouldn't get that impression from the folks around Seneca Lake.

Yet things are moving, and I can't help but feel that continental New Yorkers are generally pleased with recent developments.

Which suggests that D.C.'s minions will shortly arrive with intent to intrude concealed beneath offers of munificent help.

***

I fear for these people. Not are they improving their own lot without anyone else's help; they're as friendly and accommodating a crowd as you'll meet anywhere, and more than pro forma hospitable toward a couple of drunks from Long Island. (You wouldn't believe the amount of free stuff we've already been offered, after just one evening here -- and not all of it is wine.) But they're doing too well; they're going to attract the wrong sort of attention...or perhaps, the attention of the wrong sort of people. Statists detest persons who manage their own affairs to their own satisfaction. They tend to step on such manifestations of individualism as soon as they pop their heads above the prevailing sewage level.

But for now, it's a respite from the relentless statism and the beggar-thy-neighbor wars that ravage the rest of the United States. A little reminder of the sort of country we were once, and could be again, with the application of about half a megaton each of farewell wishes on the District of Columbia and the various state capitals.

In Florida, the tourism marketers use the slogan "Come on down!" Today, I'm chanting "Come on up!" See what people responding to marketplace incentives can do for themselves when not hobbled by busybodies and looters. But leave your bureaucrat brother-in law at home. Please.

A Little History

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. Justice is not postponed... Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Compensation"

Among the great failings of the present is its essentially complete relegation of the past to...well, to the past. We know so little about what has gone before us that we cannot know where we stand today...nor can we confidently estimate, present trends continuing, where we're likely to stand tomorrow.

My memory sometimes acts unbidden. It tosses tidbits from long ago into my present-day consciousness, at which point something in my psyche demands that I reflect on the wherefores thereof. This morning, as I attempt to ready myself for a three hundred mile drive in the face of continuing agony in my upper back, is such an occasion.

***

A little earlier, I found myself remembering a phenomenon from my undergraduate days, the "monkey wrenching" protests against retailers that sold produce grown and harvested by the "oppressed" migrant farm workers of the West and Southwest. If you've ever heard the name of Cesar Chavez uttered in a tone of reverence by some sanctimonious leftist, you've encountered the roots of the thing.

The migrant farm workers were overwhelmingly Hispanic immigrants to the United States. A high proportion of them were here illegally. Farm operators paid them low wages for their labors -- mainly tending and harvesting various food crops -- because so many of them were eager for the work. It was an early manifestation of the "jobs Americans won't do" effect that's drawn so many low-skill workers over our southern border. In the Sixties and early Seventies, Cesar Chavez and others attempted to organize them into a nationwide union, the United Farm Workers, for the usual reason: to limit the supply of farm labor, and thus to drive up the average wage paid to those fortunate enough to be admitted to the union.

American college students, ever ready to award themselves a mantle of moral superiority founded on no more than flattery and propaganda, "assisted" in this effort by obstructing trade and traffic at markets that sold produce from the West and Southwest that lacked UFW approval.

It was, of course, moronic. It was a low-grade form of vandalism: it interfered with peaceable others attempting to conduct trade in an orderly manner while producing nothing of value for anyone else. Neither is it recorded anywhere that this activity, predominantly a Northeastern phenomenon, had any effect beyond irritating other shoppers and bestowing a spurious glow of righteousness on the college kids who undertook it. But it took a brave youngster to say any of that explicitly to his self-righteous coevals during those years. One might as well speak favorably of Richard Nixon, or come out in support of the War in Vietnam.

I don't remember any such occasions of courage among my classmates. Certainly I didn't express myself in such a fashion. But the larger point is more important: I knew that several of my classmates felt as I did -- i.e., that the whole oppressed-migrant-workers scam was nothing but a gambit to advance old style unionism, even then well recognized as a serious brake on the fortunes of manual and other low-skill workers. We knew better but we said nothing.

My point, if I have one -- and at this hour of the morning that's always open to dispute -- is that moral courage was a scarce commodity. The courage-in-numbers provided by standing among hundreds or thousands of fellow dupes, some of them with bullhorns, routinely dwarfed the resolve of those of us who saw more clearly and reasoned from a better moral basis.

***

I've recently been in touch with local and regional representatives of the John Birch Society. Recent encounters with some of Robert Welch's speeches, and with G. Edward Griffin's biography of Welch, got me wondering how an organization so well grounded in American history, that promulgates principles so wholesome and so authentically American, could have been so brutally slandered for so long. I've concluded, tentatively, that the degree of moral courage required to condemn dishonesty in political rhetoric, in the face of the snarls, denunciations, and implied threats of the Left, has become so rare as to approach extinction.

If my memory of my college days is accurate, our moral courage has been dwindling for a long time. It's a different sort of courage from that required to face live fire, but it's just as critical to the survival of our Republic. Ask Patrick Frey, Stacy McCain, or Aaron Walker.

What might we do to resuscitate it? As Robert A. Heinlein once wrote, who are the heirs of Patrick Henry? Are there any left among us? If we can nurture a fresh crop, isn't a proper acquaintance with our own history, as an individualistic, fiercely independent people, the best imaginable place to start?

Thoughts?

Why Texas Has Cheap Housing

Hint -- it's probably not for the reason you might think, namely, that Texas has generally freer markets than other states.

I have just finished Murray Rothbard's behemoth Man, Economy and State.  It was a very difficult but rewarding book -- it took me six months to finish -- and I'll have plenty to say about it in the near future, but for now I thought I'd just share one little insight it has given me.

In the section on taxation in Power and Markets, he discusses the different effects of taxation on market behavior, especially as it relates to the actual incidence of taxation.  This is a subject that one commonly sees butchered in financial and political news, as politicians and commentators opine that increasing such-and-such a tax by some amount will increase revenues by so much and reduce deficits by this percent, or that the implementation of some tax will be a burden this or that group.  They are almost always basing their analysis on a static picture of the economy -- one that will be basically the same tomorrow as it is today, except with a new tax.

Anybody with two brain cells to rub together knows that a tax will change behavior within the economy, but even most people who realize this will have a difficult time working out in their minds just exactly how it all will play out in the end.  Rothbard attempts to do just this with a number of different types of taxes, and though I disagree with him on some of them (which you'll hear about in the future) nonetheless, I think he got them mostly right.

Of particular note were property taxes and a sort of 'net-worth' tax.  While income and sales taxes take a slice out of incomes in both cases (at least by his analysis), property and especially net-worth taxes are positively devastating to the economy.  The reason is that they tax the capital base in such a way as to radically change market valuations and discourage capital accumulation, which radically alters behavior and the potential for growth.

He provides a good example of a rent house.  Suppose a house is worth $100,000.  Further suppose that the natural rate of interest is 5%, which I take to be a fairly accurate estimate.

Now, the key to this analysis, as with practically the entire study of the free-market, is to recognize the tendency of competition to push every valuation towards equilibrium.  The natural rate of interest happens to be the return to capital which will theoretically be uniform throughout the economy because of the effects of competition.  Any investment opportunity which will afford a return above the natural rate will tend to attract investment by entrepreneurs, either pushing up its price, or introducing competition with it, such that the rate returns to the natural rate.  Likewise, any investment which affords a return below the natural rate will fall in price until the return comes to the natural rate.  This is most easily observed in the bond market.  A rise in interest rates will cause bond prices to fall, while a fall in rates will cause prices to rise, so that all rates throughout the market are roughly uniform (and neglecting dates of redemption and risk premiums/discounts).

Back to the example of the house.  After maintenance and insurance costs, the house is expected to return $5000 in income to its owner per year.  This is considered interest income on a capital investment, such that it is in competition with, say, a $100,000 bond, which would yield exactly the same income to the holder of the bond.  Now, suppose a local government slaps a 1% property tax on the house.  That $1000 must now be paid out of the $5000 income, such that the return from the house is now only $4000.

The house can no longer compete for investment dollars with the bond.  Its price falls.  How much?  To about $83,300.  This corresponds to a property tax of $833 per year and yields an income of $4165, or about 5%.  A 1% property tax knocked a whopping 17% off the market valuation of the house!

What is the rate here in Texas?  Where I live, it varies between about 2.7% and 2.9%!  Anyone still interested in Texas real estate?

I had always known that a property tax would tend to depress the value of a house, but I had no idea how much because I had no idea how to calculate it.  This operation had not occurred to me.  On the other hand, it is also true that the fall in the value of the house only occurs at the time the tax is levied, or if it is later raised.  Once it is in place, of course, existing houses become cheap, so if you are a buyer, you can get a 'good deal,' so long as one doesn't mind paying out that discount over time to the government.  (Think about it -- $833 corresponds to the interest on the value that the house fell, as if you'd taken out a permanent loan for the remainder of the original price of the house...)  So, it is the holder of the house at the time the tax is levied who absorbs the entirety of the loss.  Later owners are only paying the discounted value of the difference in valuation.

But there is another sort of loser in this game -- new homebuilders.  These people will have to be careful to keep the cost of building the house well below the free-market valuation of the house, because upon completion government will implicitly be seizing a sizable portion of this value for tax purposes.  If you are someone who would like to build a rather unusual house of higher quality than normal, such that costs are a bit more than normal, you must be prepared to eat a rather enormous loss well above and beyond your expenditures on materials.  As you can see, as time goes on, the tendency will be to produce ever cheaper -- and presumably lower quality -- housing due to the overwhelming pressure imposed by the tax.

Thus, if you buy a house in Texas, you can probably get one cheap.  But you'll probably be getting a cheap house.  Lots of people say that Texas is a great place for business, especially because of the absence of an income tax, but to the degree that the tax is shifted towards property, I'm not sure that this is necessarily a good trade-off.  Especially if 'property' includes commercial property, a.k.a. business capital, a.k.a. one of the more important sources of economic growth.

Tis "The Season"...

...and it's guaranteed to wear your nerves to shreds:

Closure of Border Patrol stations across four states triggers alarm
Dems push hot-button social issues in campaign attack ads
Holder tells NAACP Texas voter ID law "harmful to minorities"
Rep. West: Government handouts world's "most insidious form of slavery"
House GOP poised to hold vote on repeal of ObamaCare after Supreme Court ruling
Romney: Obama tax plan adding "insult to injury" after weak jobs report

Yes, Gentle Readers, it's all-politics-all-the-time season here in the United States of America. Every move made by anyone in office, anyone campaigning for office, and any partisan figure with a soapbox to stand on will be more a maneuver than a substantive statement of principles or policy. Neither of the contenders for the presidency will so much as belch without having the utterance "vetted" by his chief strategists and poll-watchers.

The candidates and spokesmen will be groomed for maximum appeal to their audiences.
The audiences will be carefully seined and post-polled for their reactions.
The rhetoric will be dialed to 11.
The media will be ubiquitous.
Your television will be inundated by it.
And it will not stop until the morning of Wednesday, November 7.

Doesn't it make you all warm and fuzzy inside?

***

For me, the worst aspect is something I've already written about. (It's not exclusively a sin of the Democrats'; but among Democrats it's prescribed behavior -- and quite possibly enforced under pain of expulsion from the ranks.) In particular, whenever a candidate is asked a question about a topic he disfavors, he'll change the subject so fast it'll give you whiplash.

I yearn for a candidate who speaks candidly of himself, his principles, and his intentions, and who never departs from the truth in even the slightest degree. Better still would be a candidate who meets all those requirements and treats Americans as intelligent enough to grasp the difference between law and a ruler's whim. But such men seldom go into politics. It's "a dirty game," and men of high standards veer away from it automatically. Which explains quite a bit about the political deterioration of the United States, doesn't it?

But wouldn't you like to greet a candidate of that sort?

Lean close; I'll show you one -- then it will be up to you to find his like.

***

    The Sumner for President campaign was in Albuquerque, New Mexico when the Republican National Convention voted to nominate Charles Lowry, United States Senator from Texas, as its standard-bearer. He immediately announced that his running mate would be Congressman Allan Lorimer of Massachusetts, as he'd decreed several weeks previously. The news blanketed the nation within minutes of the announcements, but other than in Texas and the Sun Belt states, the reaction was considerably more muted than Lowry and the GOP would have liked.
    Sumner was in the lobby of the Albuquerque Crown Royal hotel, fielding questions from a gathering of New Mexicans. So many had followed him from his open-air appearance that a sizable fraction had to stand outside the hotel entrance and prop the doors open to hear the exchanges. A young man in a chambray work shirt and jeans, a radio earpiece conspicuous in his ear, shouted the news over a woman of late middle age who'd asked for Sumner's views on Social Security and had gotten them, to her intense consternation. The questioner immediately changed her tack.
    "Mr. Sumner," she said, "will the GOP's nomination of Senator Lowry cause you to change your style of campaigning or any of the positions you've taken so far?"
    Sumner frowned. "Why should it?"
    The lobby of the hotel had gone impressively silent.
    "Well," she said, "he's pretty popular around here."
    "Should a presidential campaign be a popularity contest?" Sumner said. "Strike that, I just said something foolish, didn't I?"
    The crowd tittered.
    "In some sense," Sumner said as he rose to his feet, "any election, for any office, is a popularity contest. We all know that. I suppose the question I was thinking of is why one candidate is more popular than another." He gestured at the campaign bus, visible through the lobby doors. "I wasn't terribly well known beyond the Northeast before I boarded that bus and started touring the country, was I? So in that sense, we'd have to say that at that time I wasn't yet popular."
    There were a few scattered murmurs, to no particular effect.
    "I'd like to think I've changed that. But I don't think I did it with my witty routines, or by handing out free ice cream. And I'm sure I didn't do it with my dashing good looks."
    That drew general laughter and smiles.
    "I've allowed myself to assume," he said, "that you, and those before you, have rallied to my campaign because you like what you've heard and are inclined to believe that I mean it. As it happens, I do mean it. I was ready to retire from public life before Senator Lowry's representatives approached me about becoming his running mate. It was that visit that put the bug in my ear. So now you know who to blame.
    "Now as it happens, Senator Lowry and I agree on a number of things. However, we're pretty far apart on a key principle. Senator Lowry believes we should quietly retain certain extra-Constitutional features of the status quo and not say anything more about them. He has a fairly long list of features he thinks are too popular to be called into question. I believe otherwise. I believe that what matters most is a return to the principle that if the Constitution doesn't authorize it, then the federal government can't do it, even if it's already been doing it for a long time.
    "I'm willing to go this far: if a given extra-Constitutional activity is popular enough to be approved by the legislatures of three-quarters of the states within one year of my inauguration, then I'll agree to a declaration of nunc pro tunc -- that means now for then -- that would retroactively amend the Constitution to authorize the activity from its inception. And I think we can be pretty sure that the Hoover Dam, the Air Force, and the space program will win the required number of assents.
    "But a difference on principle is much more important than any other sort. To me, at least. And so that's what I want to emphasize to you. Do you want a president who says that the Constitution is all very well in theory, but we've got to be practical, or do you want one who says, the supreme law is the supreme law and there shall be no exceptions to it?"     He crossed his arms over his chest and panned the crowd. Hundreds of pairs of eyes were rapt upon him.
    "Sir," another New Mexican woman said, "what will your...companion's role be?"
    All eyes, Sumner's included, immediately settled on Christine. She stood perfectly still, hands clasped behind her.
    Sumner nodded. "I wondered how long it would take for someone to ask about her. Christine, would you come over here, please?"
    The young woman moved to stand beside Sumner, looking at him with a puzzled frown.
    "Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like you all to meet Christine D'Alessandro. She's been with me since the start of the campaign. She's my personal bodyguard, nothing else. In fact, she's the reason I'm alive today. There was an attack on us in New York City, an attack that we believe was meant to kill me. Christine defeated it single-handedly. You might want to tell her how you feel about that." Before anyone could respond, he added, "If you think she did a good thing, that is."
    Applause rocked the lobby. Those who'd been sitting had risen; all were clapping and cheering loudly. It went on for a full minute before Sumner raised a hand to halt it.
    "In political jargon, a revelation such as that is called waving the bloody shirt," Sumner said. "It's a proven tactic for eliciting sympathy from a crowd. I wouldn't have told you, or anyone, if you hadn't asked about my companion. I'd rather you evaluated me on my positions, and on how sincere you think I am about them. But you asked, and I have to admit, I'm glad you gave me the excuse. I think it's only right that you know how deep I am in Christine's debt."
    "She's not your mistress?" someone shouted from the rear of the crowd.
    Sumner snorted and shook his head. He turned to face Christine, beautifully garbed as usual in a closely tailored beige skirt suit and matching high-heeled pumps. The young woman was blushing brightly. "Look at her and look at me, and tell me how anyone could possibly think that!"
    The applause and cheers broke forth again. They seemed twice as loud.
    "Before we leave this subject," Sumner said as the clapping died down, "I'd like to mention one other thing. Christine is with me by courtesy of Integral Security Services of Onteora, New York. The owner-operator of that company, Kevin Conway, is a friend of mine, so when I decided to do this, I went to him to ask about protection for myself and my wife Adrienne, who chose to remain in Onteora. Adrienne's currently living at Integral headquarters, in Kevin's own apartment. That's at my request; I wanted her to have Integral's trained, heavily armed staff around her at all times. Would you like to know what Kevin is charging me for these services?"
    All eyes were fixed upon Christine, who remained still and silent. No one spoke.
    "Nothing," Sumner said. "Kevin Conway has assigned his best operative to me gratis, full time, for the duration of the campaign. The same is true for Adrienne's protection. You see, Kevin feels as strongly about my message as I do. So he's made me a gift of security services worth more than a quarter of a million dollars, without asking a thing for himself or his company.
    "As much as I appreciate that gift," he said, "it's pained me ever since that a good man, a man who works hard for his living and employs a lot of others as well, has put himself to such great expense for my sake. But over the seven weeks behind us, you good people and others like you have responded beyond all expectation. You've justified my faith, and Kevin's faith, in Americans everywhere. So when all this is behind us, I intend to pay Kevin what he's declined to charge me -- what this ought to have cost me -- and not from your contributions, but from my own pocket.
    "I pledge this today before you so you'll remember it, and hold it against me should I renege or forget. Consider it one more item of evidence you can use to make up your minds about whether I can be trusted...whether I mean what I say and have said." He paused and breathed deeply. "If only there were a yardstick like that to hold against every politician. The country would be far better off for it."
    He swept the gathering with his gaze, smiling gently.
    "If there are no further questions, may I and my bodyguard go upstairs and catch a few hours' sleep before we have to depart for Phoenix?"
    The third explosion of applause threatened to burst the hotel at the seams. It rattled ashtrays against the tables and wobbled the many standing pots of flowers. Even the bellmen and the clerks at the convenience counters joined in. It had come near to shattering Sumner's eardrums when the clapping converged on a rhythm and the chant swelled above it:
    "Sumner! Sumner! Sumner! Sumner! Sumner!..."

[From Shadow Of A Sword]

***

Stephen Graham Sumner is a fictional character. I wrote him because he's the sort of man I'd want in the Oval Office, and to show my readers what sort of man they should be alert for in their travels. Getting him to run for high office is, of course, a separate and very challenging undertaking.

Such a candidate would not change the subject when asked a hostile question.
He would be unflinching about his own conduct, whether private or public.
His ads, in whatever medium, would be entirely consistent with his spoken and written positions and statements of intention.
He would refrain from vilifying his opponents, and would speak of them only with reference to their actions in office.
And he would give you yardsticks by which to judge whether it would be wise to trust him.

A season of campaigning from such a candidate would be a refreshment for the American spirit. But I doubt we'll find him in office today -- or, for that matter, as a partisan of either of the two major parties.

We should be searching for him.
The search should have started long ago.
For now, it's back to "the season."

Leftists' Repetepetepetition Explained!

Once in a great while, some leftist luminary will make it all terribly clear to us in the Right.

Courtesy of Zombie at PJ Media, we have the following:

The 10 Most Important Things Democrats Should Know
By George Lakoff and Elisbeth Wehling
Authors of THE LITTLE BLUE BOOK

1. Don't repeat conservative language or ideas, even when arguing against them.
2. All politics is moral, and morality trumps policy. Talk about the moral bases of your policy positions openly and regularly.
3. Facts have no meaning outside of frames, metaphors, and moral narratives. Always discuss facts within moral frames, because people do not reason outside of those moral frames.

That little list was sent out by George Lakoff's publicist. Lakoff, if you aren't already aware, is Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at U.C. Berkeley, and an important Democratic tactician. His recent book The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic, is one long argument for the points above. Indeed, he states the matter succinctly in the book itself:

To sum up:

• Use your own language; never use your opponent's language.
• Be aware of what you believe and repeat it out loud over and over; never repeat ideas that you don't believe in, even if you are arguing against them.

But wait just a moment: He who is absolutely unwilling to confront his opponents' arguments is not arguing. He's merely repeating his case endlessly, since he's forbidden himself to grapple with objections to it.

Lakoff's thesis, then, amounts to a prescription for "persuasion" through endless repetition -- essentially a mental bludgeon wielded at anyone who allows himself to be subjected to Lakoffian haranguing.

Now, given the behavior of leftists in the mass media, this might strike you as "a blinding flash of the obvious." What makes it significant isn't that the Left's talking heads are already using Lakoff's guidelines, but that they've been formalized and prescribed as such. The Democrat Party is rather hierarchical: the kingmakers and top strategists issue orders to the lower echelons of activists and spokesmen, who can be counted on to follow them...because if they don't, they'll lose access to inner Democrat circles and any possibility of patronage.

But the rhetorical tactic is now a matter of public record, with the signature of a respected Democrat strategist at the bottom. Therefore, it can be used against them: "Why, Mr. Democrat Spokesman, aren't you willing to confront the human cost of your policies? Why won't you admit that crime is worst in legally disarmed states and cities? Why won't you grapple with the lifelong dependency induced by luxuriant welfarism? Why won't you concede that the public schools are failing to educate our kids because they're overloaded with non-scholastic missions? Are you afraid of these facts?"

Of course, it helps if you can cut off Mr. Democrat Spokesman's microphone long enough to get all that out in an audible fashion. But the effort must be made, for a simple reason: When it's permitted to go unchallenged, sanctimonious repetition works.

Food for thought.

Giantism

(The following first appeared at the old Palace of Reason, in 1997.)

---

Part One: The Comedians.

Is Bigness to be distrusted? Well, yes, but not because of any difference of motives between the people who staff and run big organizations and the people who staff and run small ones. It's more a combination of two other effects, cited by two great American thinkers:

Scott Adams: "People are idiots." (The Dilbert Principle, from The Dilbert Principle)
Robert Anton Wilson: "A man with a loaded gun will never be told something that might cause him to pull the trigger." (The Snafu Principle, from Illuminatus!)

The Adams observation isn't really a denigration of human intelligence, as such. Properly set in its context, it highlights the tiny stock of competence and understanding each of us has, in comparison to the giant fund of knowledge that undergirds human existence -- a condensation of Leonard Read's famous "I, Pencil" essay, if you will. The Wilson observation is a simple statement of intuitively obvious fact, a survival property that helps to keep us alive.

Large organizations are inherently hierarchical, with authority, scope, and the assumption of expanding competence rising as one ascends the pyramid. If an organization does not possess this property, then it cannot proceed toward a coherent set of goals. If it cannot proceed toward a coherent set of goals, then it is not in any functional sense a unitary organization.

When you test this property of large organizations against the Dilbert and Snafu dicta, you find some glaring weaknesses in the whole notion of large organizations:

• The number of people who have a stake in deceiving or under-informing the people on top is such that the folks in the mahogany-paneled offices haven't got a prayer of knowing what's going on below them,
• Even if they knew it all down to the last detail, the mahogany-office guys would have to be considerably smarter than Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein rolled together to understand and direct what's going on below them.

I've been in the business world since 1968, and have passed through a variety of companies large and small. From my own experience, I can attest that no organization with more than four levels of management (group leader, director, vice-president, CEO) can operate as intended by its "guiding hands" as much as half the time. Even with a millennial genius as CEO, the incentive his underlings have to withhold information that might make him frown at them will prevent him from having more than 50% effective control. The situation deteriorates geometrically with each added layer of management.

Since it has been established empirically that no one can effectively manage the activities of more than ten people "below" him, this limits the size of a more-or-less efficient organization with coherent objectives to no more than 10,000 participants. In practice, even organizations of 2000 or 3000 people seldom function as intended.

Giantism in the private sector is only possible because of giantism in the public sector -- and so we move to Part Two.

Part Two: The Incubator.

So: Large organizations have inherent deficiencies that conduce toward a generalized condition of incoherence and failure. Why, then, is the world's commerce completely dominated by two or three thousand giant corporations?

Simply, because governments systematically tilt the field in their favor.

Ignore the propaganda about "monopoly" and "antitrust." Nothing favors Big Business like Big Government. The occasional forays against specific targets in the private sector -- mostly, companies that have been slow to bend the knee when the State commanded it -- are mere flea bites, compared to the many ways the legal environment has been biased toward giant businesses.

Complex tax and regulatory law is one example. The larger a company is, the smaller the percentage of its expenses that will go to its overhead functions, in particular legal counsel and accounting. (For all that accounts payable and receivable are important functions, their complexity and cost pales in comparison to that of tax accounting.)

Liability is another example, and an increasingly important one. With all the ways in which suits against the providers of goods and services have been encouraged in the past thirty years, the fraction of a typical company's expenses that go to legal representation, tort insurance, and payoffs has swollen to Brobdingnagian size. (A tiny example: Dr. Ron Paul, Congressman from Texas and former Libertarian Party presidential candidate, told me that the cost of his malpractice insurance in his last year as a practicing obstetrician came to more than a quarter of his annual revenue.)

Finally, but far from least, there's this: When governments seize and spend 45% of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, businesses that sell to governments are going to get really, really rich. And governments, for sociological and organizational reasons I'll delve into some other time, prefer to do business with the largest of corporations.

I can assure you that none of this is theory. As an engineer and project manager of more than three decades' experience, who worked in the defense sector for fourteen years, I had the chance to observe it all at unpleasantly close range.

There's no need for me to go into the pernicious effects corporate giantism has on consumers and the economy at large; anyone who's progressed past the stage of counting on his fingers can see that larger companies will always mean fewer of them, with a corresponding decrease in competitive incentives and accountability to the consumer. I suggest that those who are interested in the economic progression of the U.S. look at the history of the thing, and try to correlate the swelling of the biggest players with the many statist trends of the 20th Century. I did. It opened my eyes.

It Might Be A While...

...before I can return to posting regularly here. It appears that I've somehow seriously damaged my left shoulder, and can type only with severe pain.

I'll be seeing an orthopedist tomorrow. If you can spare the bandwidth, please pray for me.

UPDATE: Beware Oxycodone! That crap induces nausea, and makes you itch furiously. I'd rather be in pain.

FURTHER UPDATE: The orthopedist says it's tendonitis of the rotator cuff. Cortisone has been applied, but it takes two to three days to assuage the condition. I continue to await relief.

They Know Something You Don't Dept.

Relax, relax. This won't be about conspiracies.

My esteemed colleague Mark Alger makes some trenchant observations today about employment in these United States:

"Offshoring" is when multi-national companies set up plants in other countries -- such as China -- and hire workers there...

...because government, gratuitously meddling in the labor market, makes regulations which have made local labor in the company's home country uncompetitive. And multi-national companies have to compete in a global market, which includes large, developing countries, and labor costs, being an overwhelming majority of the costs of production, are practically the only place they can cut, and they can't use fewer people, so they have to use less-expensive people.

And it doesn't take MUCH of a difference. I'm told that, with only the slightest percentage change in regulatory overhead, American labor (for example), being far more productive than its overseas counterparts, can be competitive. IOW, it's not the high price of the wages, but of the government's meddling that loses the jobs offshore.

Which makes the whingeing from government sources on the issue both insulting AND injurious.

All true...but the carping from "government sources" doesn't flow from ignorance. They who have pushed for and contrived the circumstances that drive American companies to offshore substantial fractions of their activity are just as aware of the dynamics involved as are Mark, you, and I. They regard the effect as a regrettable but unavoidable consequence of a favored tactic for increasing their power and the loyalty of certain sectors of their "base."

If you think your heart can stand the agita at this unGodly hour, read on.

***

Probably the most common approach to the teaching of "political science" in our institutions of "higher learning" -- really now, you should know those are sneer quotes without having to ask -- is the authoritarian-allocation model. In this conception, the quest for political power is a contest over who shall be awarded the sovereign's privilege of licensure: the power to say who may do any given thing, who may use any particular resource, and who shall be exempt from all such laws. Underneath this model lies the assumption that there is no higher moral standard that would preclude the sovereign's arbitrary allocation of privileges. In other words, the sovereign is above all conceptions of absolute right and wrong.

The American postulates of inviolable individual rights and limited government are clearly incompatible with authoritarian-allocation thinking, but we'll return to that later.

Isabel Paterson, in her landmark work The God of the Machine, called a society founded on authoritarian-allocation thought a Society of Status. In such a society, one's personal identity, and the privileges conferred upon it, matter more than any other factor. Such a society will be rigidly hierarchical: stratified into classes with sharply defined privileges vis-a-vis one another. More, the goal of any ambitious subject will be to rise from his current class into some higher one.

(Science fiction writer Tom Kratman, in his Terra Nova series -- A Desert Called Peace, Carnifex, and The Lotus Eaters -- depicts the Society of Status that would arise on Earth if contemporary notions of "postmodern transnational progressivism" were to rise to unchecked power. His depiction is sharp and realistic. Persons who favor the "PoMo Tranzi" scheme of thought tend to be outraged by it. Makes a fine Christmas gift!)

Most members of our political class accept the authoritarian-allocation model as fully applicable to the United States. They dismiss Constitutional constraints as "obsolete;" many of them will admit it with the cameras rolling. Neither does the clash with our concept of individuals' rights bother them overmuch; they have a number of dodges with which to evade it, most prominent among them the notion of "compelling government interest." However they rationalize it, they see the proper sphere of government as the licensure of all things: decreeing who may do what, and with whom, and for how much, and under what circumstances, for any and every human activity under the Sun.

This immediately splits the subject populace into two groups: those who have permission (the "licensed"), and those who lack it (the "unlicensed"). (Permission to do what, you ask? Name it.) Thereafter, members of the unlicensed group will constantly seek to enter the licensed group, whose members will fight like bad-tempered dogs to keep them out.

Why? Because licensure is the key to both material gain and social status. As with a natural resource, its value arises from scarcity: the fewer persons are permitted to do some wealth-creating thing, the greater is each one's potential return, and the more sharply they can distinguish themselves from the unlicensed.

A Society of Status is a Society of Strife.

The ars politica in an authoritarian-allocation society consists of coalition formation and maintenance: the assembly and careful supervision of a group of allies sufficient to raise one to power and keep him there, but not so demanding in aggregate as to exhaust one's ability to repay the favor. You will immediately recognize this as the political strategy favored by the American Left in this year of Our Lord 2012.

***

The American economy is most frequently described as "mixed:" a combination of licensure-based and market-based practices. Over the century past, the fraction of our activity dominated by licensure has grown steadily. The members of our political class tend to see licensure as an unchallengeable good, a way to impose "order" on the "unruly" free market. But above and beyond that, they are conscious of licensure's ability to form and buttress a sustaining coalition, which will assist them in perpetuating their grip on power.

This is particularly important in matters of labor law. America uses democratic processes to choose its officials, in which the greater number of votes determines who shall rise to high office. Thus, a politician skilled at persuading large numbers of voters that he can and will serve their interests once in office will have a great advantage in electoral contests.

In decades past, the "labor bloc" to which politicians appealed for support was largely unionized, which elicited pandering to unions and their high officials. That tendency is much less today, owing to the greatly lessened power of unions in private enterprise. It has been replaced by a tactic of neo-sectionalism, in which a candidate will seek out critical regional or occupational voting blocs and pander to them.

(I call this neo-sectionalism out of recognition that the unprefixed term sectionalism is regularly used to refer to the geographically aligned economics and currents of sentiment that brought about the Civil War.)

Americans are already aware of this phenomenon. It surprises no one when a candidate for Congress from a rural New York district panders to the dairy industry, or when one from a northern California district panders to the high-technology companies that characterize that region. Indeed, the process of promising to use licensure and para-licensure -- the imposition of regulations on an industry that favor some at the expense of others -- to repay electoral support has made us supremely cynical about the matter.

Mark Alger's key observation:

... government, gratuitously meddling in the labor market, makes regulations which have made local labor in the company's home country uncompetitive.

...notes a consequence of para-licensure whose implications should be more widely discussed. Offshoring is not a "natural" phenomenon. It's difficult and expensive to manage an enterprise that's far away. Robert Townsend, author of Up the Organization, has proclaimed that the cost rises with the square of the distance (measured in time zones) from the home office. Add in language difficulties, the problems of dealing with foreign governments, and obstacles imposed by local customs and convictions, and one swiftly concludes that offshoring is an extreme measure, not to be adopted except in the direst of circumstances.

Politics has imposed those direst of circumstances upon us.

***

We currently labor under the weight of over 160,000 pages of federal regulations. No individual human being could honestly say he knows them all. Yet they have the force of law. More, in many cases persons deemed to have violated any of those regulations are punished with a hefty fine, or an expropriation, entirely without legal due process. Regulatory "law" lacks respect for the presumption of innocence and the right to a jury trial.

It would be foolish to imagine that those regulations were passed "to promote the general welfare." Vanishingly few of them are not aimed at privileging some identifiable special interest, albeit indirectly. Their combined weight has imposed a burden of compliance upon American enterprise that only the very largest companies can bear.

Combine that burden with minimum-wage laws, with "occupational safety" regulations, with "environmental protection" regulations, with our unprecedented litigiousness, with rising taxes at all levels, and with the steadily burgeoning resentment of "the rich" being fostered by the Left. How can we pretend surprise that captains of industry, particularly those disfavored by the political class, have sought more favorable climes for their enterprises? What other consequence could we reasonably expect? What would we have done in their place?

***

A Constitution-respecting regime would not and could not have done any of this. However, America has known no such regime since 1933. Nor can we expect to restore one any time soon: a century of divisive politics and para-licensure has thoroughly partitioned the nation into interest groups, each one willing to beggar the others for the smallest imaginable gain to itself.

The political class knows this. It would prefer that you not know it. Much of its effort goes to telling you otherwise.

We -- private American citizens -- are the problem. Almost every American is an allegiant of some group that seeks to violate others' fundamental right to be left alone to do as they please with what is rightfully theirs, to serve some notion of a "higher priority." Most are unaware of how they fit that description; their assumptions have caused them never to think about it.

But we are also the solution, if one exists. Not merely by voting out the current rascals and installing a fresh set, but by refusing to accept extra-Constitutional emissions, whether of Congress or of the "alphabet agencies," as valid and binding laws.

Congress was never given the power to delegate its legislative function. Indeed, it should be obvious that the regulatory agencies, being part of the Executive Branch, cannot and must not be conceded the power to make "rules" with the force of law; the very idea violates the separation-of-powers principle at the base of the Constitutional architecture.

Nationwide resistance to such decrees is the only way out.
But note how many regulatory agencies arm their field agents.
How much courage do we possess?
Is it enough to trump our allegiance to our special interests?
Our political class has formed its own estimate.
Is this one more thing that they know that we don't?