Coyote Blog

An important goal of Marxist thought is the proletarianization of the middle class -- to convince great numbers of people in the office worker and shopkeeper classes that they are not beneficiaries of a rising tide of success but are no better than coal shovelers in a boiler room, victims of capitalist oppression that need to join the revolution. It is impossible to view the recent mayoral election in NYC as anything but a sign of their success.  People in NYC wail about how dehumanizing it is to sit in an office for 8 hours a day.

Socialists have been brilliantly successful at creating bad outcomes via institutions they control or policies they promote, and then blaming those bad outcomes on capitalism.  Probably the most brilliant success has been the shittification of higher education.  Socialist-controlled universities create sky-high expectations for their degrees, and reinforce these expectations with rampant grade inflation that makes every student feel like a success -- even when they do almost no work.  Academics on the Left route students into degrees and classes with absolutely no economic value (e.g. Paraguayan Feminist Poetry) and then dump them into the world -- after loading them down with $250,000 or more of debt -- with no possible path to reaching the promised expectations or even paying off the debt.  And when all this inevitably fails, the academic apparatchiks who live high on tuition money are quick to blame the failure on "capitalism."  And since these schools no longer teach students much about reasoned engagement with difficult and complex ideas -- and in fact encourage emotional reasoning, virtue-signaling, and just wailing in anger on TikTok over logical argument -- voters respond that "yeah, it must be capitalism's fault."

Anyway, in the context of all the turgid articles about the shrinking of the middle class and the failures of capitalism for the middle class, consider this which is all in 2024 $ (source):

Yes the middle class is shrinking -- because people in it are becoming richer.  They are not (on average, certainly there are individuals who go up and down) getting poorer because the poorest band on this chart is shrinking even faster than the middle class.  This is an enormous freaking victory for most everyone, but yet we are electing radical communists to tear down capitalism.  Incredible.

Postscript:  About a dozen years ago when my son was looking at colleges, like many parents I sat in a number of college admissions department presentations about the school.  All these presentations were remarkably similar -- my kids and I started calling them the "how we are unique in the exact same ways every other school is unique" speeches.

But another thing I noticed quickly was all the encouragement of students that if they go to their school, they will all go out and change the world the moment they graduate.  I guess it is good to be encouraging but this is a ridiculous expectation.  Except for perhaps a half dozen kids a year across the whole country, no one changes the world at 22 with an expensive degree and little life experience.  I have great respect for my son but at 22 he was happy to get a job with a beer company managing complex pricing lists and evaluating channel profitability.  It was work that was of value to the company but it was certainly not changing the world.  But he gained some great experience with data analysis, how to work in an organization, how to manage his time, etc. that were building blocks for better jobs or perhaps a future entrepreneurial excursion.  He learned what he was interested in doing, which focused his future learning plan.

For myself, I eventually helped shape a new industry but I didn't even get started on that path until my forties.  I had the opportunity to get fairly useful degrees at two renowned schools (Princeton engineer, Harvard MBA), but what I learned there was like 5%, at most, of the knowledge I used to eventually be successful.

Perhaps I am just old now and every older generation thinks this same thing, but haven't you noticed that many 22-year-olds that enter an organization today in an entry-level position seem to think they are in charge?  I have been asked to speak to young people about school and careers and one of the things I tell them is that at 22 they are not going to be advising presidents, they are going to be updating pricing lists.  And that is OK.  Deliver value to the company and learn from it what you can.  I think a lot of young people would be happier and in a better position to manage their learning and career if someone had just told them "your entry-level job is probably going to suck -- do a good job and work for something better."

There is generally no good way to run large scale A/B political experiments.  Which is why, at least until the current college generation, we all thought the study of history was so important.  What happens when we slam on high new tariffs?  There is a lot of theory, but we don't have to entirely rely on theory because we have hundreds of years of adding and subtracting tariffs that we can study.  In the same way, we can discuss in theory why socialism does not work (incentives, knowledge limitations on central planning, the free rider problem, the incentives for fraud and abuses, etc) -- but we don't have to trust that.  We can look at history and see what happened when Communism or hard-core socialism was tried in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Venezuela, Eastern Europe, Argentina, and most of the countries in Africa at one time or another.

Incredibly the historical experience is absolutely clear -- communism leads to poverty and loss of individual liberty.  Every time.  It's like 0 for 65.  It's failure is the greatest betting lock in the world.

But here we go again in NYC, the home of all the people who consider themselves more sophisticated than you and I, with yet another love affair with communism.  The blindness on display is really disheartening.  Polls show that a number of groups including Blacks and young people have a very positive view of socialism.  It would be fascinating to get a few in a room for a focus group to see how they even understand that term, or how much they know about socialism over history.   And don't even get me started on the "Queers for Gaza" crowd -- these are people with $60,000 a year educations who know absolutely nothing.

Today on social media I saw a lot of posts from NYC folks telling the world happily they were proudly voting for Mamdani.   So much so someone was circulating a picture of two women celebrating Khomeini's revolution in Iran who ended up respectively killed and exiled [I cannot vouch for the authenticity].  There certainly were many celebrating in those early days of the Iranian Revolution.  Unfortunately, as it turned out, as bad as the Shah may have been he was also the single greatest friend of women of the time in the Middle East (which had a lot to do with why the Islamic groups hated him) and his flawed but fairly western nation would be replaced by the gender apartheid they have today.  Today there are folks on the Left who seem ready to uncritically support any revolution as long as it gets rid of Trump, a flawed man but also one who is miles short of the Shah (or Hitler of course, or Syngman Rhee).

Somehow, people cannot put this all together from numerous historical examples, but have to find out for themselves by dragging all of us yet again into the abyss.  I am pretty sure if you went in a year later you would find a lot of people devastated by the transition and their participation in it, but by then of course it is too late -- these folks have no voices any more.

Eventually people and nations sometime emerge and re-enter the free world.  Eastern Europe did in the early 1990s.  The Vietnamese people eventually became exhausted with the worst excesses of communism and have opened up some, as have China and Russia.  But in many of these cases two generations had passed, or in the case of Russia even more.  Folks who emerged from Communism and finally had a voice were not hesitant to describe the horrors.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, it became fashionable among American academics (who else?) to downplay the problems with communism in general and with Stalin and the Soviet Union in specific.  A consensus of sort had developed in these academic circles that the Soviet Union was not that bad.  This consensus was at least temporarily blown apart after 1989, when intellectuals of the newly freed Eastern European states joined the academic conversation and made it very clear just how bad things were on any number of dimensions.

But there is actually one historical exception where a nation whose people originally ranged from communism-curious to overtly communist actually experienced hard core totalitarian communism for 3-4 months, and then were freed -- South Korea in the second half of 1950.  What we call the Korean War started when Kim Il-Sung's totalitarian communist regime in North Korea invaded South Korea in mid-1950.  The initial assault was wildly successful, and eventually the US-backed (technically UN-backed but let's be real) South Korean army was clobbered, giving up the capital Seoul in days and retreated until they were holding just a tiny sliver of the country.  Late in the year a US amphibious invasion at Inchon caught the North Koreans totally by surprise and quickly liberated the South (though the war would go on for much longer due mostly to McArthur's antics.

Many South Koreans initially welcomed, even celebrated, the North Korean invasion.  The US in its 1945-1950 occupation had been even more ham-handed than usual in Korea, and blew up many formative democratic institutions out of fear that they were somehow communist puppets (and employed a lot of really bad Koreans who had collaborated with and tortured for the Japanese).  Koreans were tired of their leader Syngman Rhee, a strong man and US puppet in the mold of the Iranian Shah, who abused, imprisoned, and even killed opponents.  In a move that will surprise few today, the teachers and professors of Seoul almost 100% enthusiastically welcomed the North Koreans and pledged loyalty to their cause.

But as in Iran after the Shah, people looking for change were not very careful in evaluating exactly what that "change" was going to be.  Very quickly Kim Il-Sung and his forces initiated efforts that would be very familiar later in Maoist China or the Khmer Rouge's Cambodia -- struggle sessions and endless interrogations where enormous classes of people were outright executed for the crime of, say, having a father who was a landholder.  Soon, even passionate folks on the South Korean Left started to see that the communists were far worse than what they had before.

And then, unlike Russia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, etc -- the people of South Korea were liberated after four or five months.  The survivors of this period thus had a unique perspective that few in the free world would possess -- they survived a brief sample of communism from the inside.  The result was complicated -- a country that became a bastion of anti-communism for decades but also was probably all too accepting of dictatorial leaders who would promise to be strongly anti-communist.  I will summarize it this way -- I am not an expert on Korea but both the books I have read on this period came to the same conclusion -- it is impossible to overstate the importance of this five month period on the subsequent history and outlook of the South Korean people.  Today, the two Koreas offer perhaps the best A/B test ever for communism vs (sort of) capitalism.

Fortunately, New Yorkers can still move to Florida. Though this is by no means guaranteed.  California on several occasions has proposed a steep exit tax on the assets of rich people trying to escape the state.

Postscript #1:  A small bit of historical irony:  Many progressives see abortion availability as the single most important litmus test of a free society.  Ask them why they don't vote for a more reasonable candidate of the other party, they are likely going to say "because Republicans all enslave women by banning abortion."   While I hold a pretty centrist position on abortion (legal and easy at conception+1 day, highly restricted at birth-1 day), this litmus test is pretty ironic as you could not get a car or a TV or enough food but the one thing you could get in the Soviet Union was an abortion -- in fact the Soviet Union may have had the highest abortion rate in history, driven by the miserable conditions their citizens lived in.

Postscript #2: I could paste in about 200 memes here but here are some of the most relevant:

Gato Malo had a piece the other day that fit in with some of my recent thinking on AI and changes in the workforce.  Most of hispost is about how the market values and pays for labor, and I mostly skimmed it because this way of thinking about value is as natural as breathing to me**.

But it was something he wrote near the end of the article that caught my attention (the lack of caps is gato's long-time style)

over the next 5 years, doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, and money managers are all going to come into crosshairs and see industries and payscales demolished. there will be a fearsome rear guard fight from guild systems (the bar, medical boards, CPA association etc) but it’s doomed to fail as they are just more unions trying to keep wages too high and prevent progress and increased access. taking humans out of medicine and breaking the cost spiral is the only possible way for the west to survive the already arriving wave of unfunded entitlement, and in the end, needs must will out and fiscal reality will trump guild control.

this is actually going to be amazing for consumers, a drop in price and expansion of availability in professional services that will rival the gains of the industrial revolution. once, making a pair of shoes consumed so many skilled resources as to cost months of wages. a good shirt was so valuable that people willed them to their children. now shirts are so cheap as to constitute less than an hour of most people’s labor. but the cost of “healthcare” has not worked like this despite being a technology product. law and accounting-services remain domains priced like rare gems.

they are about to be disrupted.

many are lamenting this forthcoming employment apocalypse for the over-educated, but we really should not. it will be amazing for the consumer and just like the tractor and the plow and the combine it will allow all manner of new and better innovation increasing standards of living through productivity gains as resources free up and move to profitable application.

A couple of weeks ago, for our anniversary, my wife took me to a very nice restaurant in a 5-star resort somewhere around Newport Beach in CA.  At the table of 8 next to us were apparently several generations and branches of a single family who talked fairly loudly and included several people who mentioned Yale two or three or twenty times during the evening.  It was a small random sample from the closest thing the US has to a governing nobility, the Ivy-League-educated elite.  And much of the discussion through the evening seemed to focus on the family's fears of AI and its threats to their children's future job prospects.

I agree with Gato that AI has a huge potential to disrupt current work patterns, in the same way that the industrial revolution did.   The 19th century disruptions were severe, and many people suffered as their experience and skill set no longer matched the new economy.  But eventually everyone, from the poorest to the rich, were better off for letting the industrial revolution run its course.

But in the 19th century, the disrupted were essentially powerless.  What happens this time around, though, when the disrupted are the ruling elite themselves?  These potentially disrupted professions include lawyers and doctors who already have shown themselves very willing to organize to block innovation, squash competition, and protect their high pay. Just look at the history of the attempts by Congress to reduce Medicare reimbursements to doctors.  And that was minor compared to the potential AI disruption.  Let me give you another example of the powerful resisting a technological change that should have disrupted their businesses.

When TV first was being rolled out, the industry coalesced around a network of local broadcast stations, many of whom became affiliates of a network like NBC or CBS.  Why this model?  Mainly it was driven by technology -- the farthest a TV signal could reasonably be broadcast was about 50-75 miles.  Thus everyone by necessity got their TV through three or four TV stations in their metropolitan area, each its own small business.

Now fast forward to today.  There are multiple ways to broadcast a TV signal nationwide -- there are several satellite options and many streaming internet approaches.  So now when we watch DirecTV or Youtube TV, we just watch the national NBC or ABC feed, right?  Nope.  Federal law requires that whatever service you use MUST serve up NBC, for example, via the local affiliate.  That is why your streaming TV service harasses you when you travel, because it is worried about violating the law by showing you the Phoenix CBS affiliate when you are staying overnight in Atlanta (gasp).

This is hugely costly.  In order to be able to provide NBC among its stations, Youtube TV must gather the feeds from 235 different stations.  In the Internet streaming era this is costly but in the satellite era it was insane.  DirecTV, with its limited bandwidth, had to simultaneously broadcast 235 stations, most showing identical content, just to legally provide you with NBC.  So why this crazy, expensive, insane effort?  I am sure you have guessed -- pound for pound local TV stations are among the most powerful lobbyists in the country.  First, they have money and a massive incentive to defend their local geographic monopoly -- Car dealers and alcohol distributors are much the same, which is why every potential innovation is resisted in those markets.  But TV stations have one extra card to play -- nearly every Congressman in the House likely depends on the three or four TV stations in one major metropolitan area for a huge part of their publicity and coverage.  No politician is going to screw with that.  At the end of the day, local stations did not get disrupted, they actually became more valuable with this government-enforced distribution of their product.

This is a small example of the fight that is coming in AI.  Congressmen will couch their arguments in fear-charged terminology as if their real fear is some Terminator-like AI apocalypse.  But the real concern will be from the influential elite who are being disrupted.  What would have happed to the Industrial Revolution if the hand-loom weavers were the children of the nobility?  Would the government have allowed the revolution to proceed?   We are about to find out.

** footnote: The only thing I would add to Gato's discussion of labor and value is that I think a lot of our conversations are hamstrung by the multiple meanings of "value" and "worth".  Gato correctly makes the point that one's own self-worth and how one values his or her own labor has nothing to do with how the market pays for one's labor.  But the reverse is true too -- how the market pays for your labor should not necessarily have any bearing on how one values oneself or one's labor.    I saw a beautiful production by the ABT of the ballet Giselle last night.  Most of the ballerinas in the show don't get paid as much as a good plumber, but their labor is worthy and beautiful and -- despite the low pay -- many professional ballerinas love their (often short) life as a dancer.  Most professional athletes before perhaps 1960 were the same, doing the thing they loved and finding fulfillment in excellence even when the market did not see fit to pay them much for what they did.

When I see stuff like this taken seriously, I know it is time to replace capitalism's marketing team

Capitalism loves to paint prehistory as savage chaos, where only the ‘fittest’ thrived. But hunter-gatherers lived in deeply cooperative bands, sharing food, shelter, and care. The system erases that truth because it exposes capitalism as the real outlier in human history.

— borkedsys (@borkedsys) July 5, 2025

In the first part of this post I will discuss why this quote misses the heart of capitalism, and then I will come back to why this represents a level of historical ignorance that only a modern $200,000 college education could achieve.

The core of capitalism is cooperation

Virtually every task that human beings need to perform both to survive and to thrive (which I define as making one's life more fulfilling) requires both cooperation and coordination.  For the smallest of survival tasks, like say a 5 person group stalking a mammoth, it is possible to imagine that cooperation can occur entirely among peers using direct communication.

At some point it does not take long for this loose cooperation approach to get complicated.  Did everyone make their own spear?  Did it make any sense for the best hunters to waste their time chiseling spearheads, or could there be one expert?  If there is an expert, what share of the food would he get?  What if everyone wanted to be the spear maker?  What about that guy who always had some excuse not to go on the hunt with the team, should he still get food?  If the lazy guy (called a free rider in economics) got food, why would anyone face the dangers of hunting?

One can see all these problems in the history of the communes formed in the 1960s and 1970s in the US.  These communes were formed under a theory of pure cooperation, where the group would share all the labor as well as the product of the labor.  Most of these communes broke down because participants had not realized just how much freaking work subsistence farming entailed and the group broke apart in rancor over the free rider problem (if you are getting a share of the food anyway, why work?).

As the goods or services produced get more complicated than subsistence hunting or farming  -- ie if one wants things like vaccines or iphones -- then the cooperation problem gets harder because it requires the cooperation of people who may never even meet face-to-face or be able to communicate with the whole group to coordinate actions.  How do those of us in the Eastern Mediterranean felling giant cedar trees know how much wood the folks on the Upper Nile need, and when?  Such coordination is easy in a hunting team of four people, who know each other and their skills and can divvy up roles in an attack by just talking to each other directly.  But it becomes exponentially harder as the production task gets more complex.

These problems of coordination and cooperation have been solved throughout history just two ways:  By voluntary action driven by prices and profit or by bosses (called chief, king, premier, Caeser, fuhrer, etc) using force.

Emergent behavior in a boss-free society is for people to voluntarily trade their products or labor to others for what they need  -- this is the simple core of what we call capitalism.  This is not a system imposed on people, but the natural state into which free people evolve.  The hunting party gladly trades part of the catch to the best spear-maker whose efforts make them more successful and increase the time they can focus on hunting. Folks who can't or won't hunt must find other ways to be valuable to the group to get a share of the food.  Some inevitably innovate, discovering new food sources or hunting approaches.  As production and transactions get more complex, people move from barter to money, with prices for goods and services single-handedly performing the coordination function in a completely distributed and emergent manner (see I Pencil).

Capitalism is the only approach in all of history to solving the cooperation and coordination problem without the use or threat of force (though beware than many have availed themselves of force while still inaccurately calling it capitalism -- another example of poor brand control by the marketers of capitalism).  Capitalism is the un-system, the default emergent behavior of rational self-interested humans allowed to transact freely.  Every other system is founded on force under the auspices of a Boss.  It does not matter how the boss was selected (or self-selected) or if they work through some council or bureaucracy, the Boss is ultimately forcing the cooperation and performing the coordination.  He (and it has almost always been a he) decides who is making the spears, who is going on the hunting party, and who gets how much of the catch.  If you don't want to be the spear maker, tough sh*t you probably aren't getting any food.

And you may soon find that the boss gets a special triple helping of all the food and that any female who denies the boss her sexual favors will soon see their family starving.  Feudal, fascist, royal, and communist bosses all shared in common that they were exponentially wealthier than their citizens and in most cases effectively the wealthiest person in their country with the most and best of everything.  Capitalist countries tend to be the exception, with elected leaders at best making upper middle class salaries (at least from legitimate public sources).

As production gets more complex, the boss model gets worse and worse because it not just hard, but impossible for any central authority to solve the coordination problem  On the funny end of this is the Soviet Union producing in one year, say, a million pencil erasers but only 100 pencils.  On the horrible and tediously repetitious side of this is the tens of millions of people who died in Mao's Great Leap Forward.  Happy-clappy modern Ivy League socialists will argue that this is just socialism done wrong, that well-intentioned people would never end up with this sort of outcome.  But it never works out that way.  In part because the folks leading these Marxist efforts are not as well-intentioned as they pretend, but even more so because super nice people who create a system where leaders have power over life and death (as must be the case in a socialist economy) are eventually displaced by the Hitlers and Stalins and Maos and Pol Pots.  Ho Chi Minh seemed to begin as a smart, well-intentioned guy, but Lê Duẩn who took power from him was a brutal dictator who impoverished the Vietnamese people.

Unfortunately, over time, even nominally capitalist countries like the United States seem to devolve to the force end of the scale**. As markets become larger and more complicated, helpful rules emerge for the markets and transactions -- being emergent does not necessarily mean it is without structure.  However, when these rules get adopted or coopted by governments, the rules can be modified in a messy political process to create abuses and corruption.  More and more force enters the equation, eg we will arrest you if try to sell your wine out of state or try to build too many housing units on your plot of land.  A surprising number of the defects in capitalism often cited by its detractors result from these flawed government rules, and not from capitalism itself.  Michael Moore's "Capitalism A Love Story" turns out to be almost 100% an indictment of government interventions in the market to favor certain cronies, rather than of true free markets (yet more poor brand control for those marketers of capitalism).

So if one wants pure cooperation in a voluntary system without the use of force, capitalism is the one and only choice.  But what about all this stuff about competition?  Through sh*tty marketing, capitalism is often portrayed as fundamentally about competition rather than cooperation, and occasionally competition is even fetishized by certain defenders of capitalism who seem about a half step away from Spencerian social Darwinism.   The role of competition in markets is not to cull the weak -- in fact, Ricardo showed 200 years ago that with free markets, even the weakest producers still can contribute to the group's well-being.  The reason that competition exists, and the benefits that flow from competition, are based on the fact that almost all resources (land, iron ore, oil, and most importantly human time) are scarce.

Back to our hunting example, the obsidian from spear points might be extremely expensive for a tribe, requiring a lot of trade goods sent to far away tribes.  So imagine that there is one person who uses twice as much obsidian to make a spear point than another person,  Everyone in the group is better off if the spear-making job goes to the more productive person.  The wasteful guy needs to go find something else to do.  And that is the heart of competition right there -- achieving efficiency in a way that makes everyone richer.  By the way, I can easily picture this same situation in the Boss-force model where the wasteful spear-maker is the Boss's brother (or other crony) and keeps the job to the detriment of the whole tribe but increased wealth for the Boss's family.  Only the use of government force in markets allows this sort of crony outcome.

Historical Ignorance of Fetishizing Primitive Societies

A few thoughts about the realism of fantasy quoted above, because this is already too long

• The subsistence food production likely employed by any of the societies the author above is pining for is WAY more work than any modern American could imagine
• These societies were POOR, which is why unproductive members were frequently left to die.  It was a poverty so extreme it is almost beyond our modern Western imagining.
• Life would have been horribly uncomfortable -- no heating, no cooling, constant fleas and lice, slow travel
• Life would have been intellectually impoverished.  You would never have experienced any land, any people, any climate more than a few hundred miles (at most!) from your birthplace.  There were no writers or artists or intellectuals because everyone who could work had to work.
• Life would have been short.  The smallest cut could get infected and kill you.  You would be a ready host for any virus or bacteria that came along.  You would watch many or most of your kids die young.

There is no happy, cooperative, simple, small-scale life that also has leisure time, iphones, blogging jobs, or vaccines.  Capitalism is the exception in history, because it is the only way we have become rich and long-lived.  Most intellectual advancement is all traceable to capitalism -- the Renaissance occurred when it did due to proto forms of capitalism that created wealth in private hands that allowed for people to be, say, full-time painters.   Remember that the "victims" or losers in capitalist competition, the 10th percentile poorest people in the US, are still well-off enough to be counted among the very rich  in many countries outside the first world.

I will end with this meme:

**Postscript:  There is a parallel to this in communist countries, as countries like China and Vietnam exited from communist impoverishment to some economic improvement by allowing more openness to markets and private profit.

Who says universities don't teach anything useful?

The difference between mere authoritarianism and totalitarianism is often hard to explain to people, and some want to use the terms interchangeably.  But I think this distinction is particularly important today, as we see the American Progressive Left tilting over from authoritarianism to totalitarianism.  The University of Chicago is actually helping us to learn the difference.

For the long answer on this distinction, I recommend the work of Hannah Arendt.  She has done more than anyone in really defining the terms and nature of totalitarianism.  The history of her reception in this country is an interesting one.  During the 1950s, in the midst of the Cold War and with the Nazi plague still fresh in everyone's mind, her work resonated with a lot of people.  But as we moved into the 60's and Marxists began gaining power in many universities, academia turned against her in large part because they didn't like how she equated Nazism and communism.  Out of favor by the 1980s in colleges that still wanted to whitewash Stalin, something interesting happened.  As the Berlin Wall fell and eastern European intellectuals began looking for a framework to describe their experience under communism, they rediscovered Hannah Arendt as someone whose work resonated with their own observations.

Anyway, shortcutting a lot of complexity, the way I describe the difference simply is that authoritarians just want compliance, while totalitarians want enthusiastic belief -- belief that is ramified down from politics to the smallest elements of daily life.

So in the current context of COVID, authoritarians don't give a crap if you believe in masks or not, they are happy if you wear them when they demand.  But totalitarians....

For the second year in a row, the University of Chicago forced students to sign a “Required COVID-19 Attestation,” a lengthy document that demands students click “I agree” to a number of statements and rules regarding COVID-19.

UChicago, which last year was named America’s “No. 1 free speech campus,” is openly defying its commitment to academic freedom because the attestation goes far beyond forced compliance to inane COVID mandates — it actually thought-polices students.

Failure to sign my university’s attestation by last Monday meant your student ID was deactivated and you were banned from all university facilities, barring you from attending class.

In order to attend class, students are forced to “agree” in writing to the assertion that “COVID-19 poses a serious public health risk.” Students like me must also “agree” to the claim that “my failure to follow the [COVID-19] requirements,” like wearing a cloth over my mouth, “may endanger myself and/or others.”

Similarly, students who receive a religious exemption from UChicago’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate are forced to sign their names below a statement reading, “I acknowledge that I may be placing myself and others at risk of serious illness should I contract a disease that could have been prevented through proper vaccination.”

Authoritarians demand you wear the mask.  Totalitarians demand that you love the mask.

A while back I was having a back and forth on Twitter with a Tesla supporter.  They had said that Tesla was the poster child of sustainability, I presume because since Teslas are electric that they are presumed to use less energy and produce fewer emissions.  I learned a long time ago not to try to have discussions with Tesla supporters on energy consumption -- even if the fan in question understands that electricity is not magic pixie dust summoned for free out of nowhere, they seldom understand issues with geographic variability of electrical generation sources or the difference between electrical sources for the average vs. marginal incremental load.

So I just said the company can't be very sustainable because it spends far more than it earns, ie it consumes more valuable resources than it produces (a ratio made even worse if one factors in all the taxpayer subsidies the company consumes as revenue).  The person I was tweeting with replied that this fact had nothing to do with environmental sustainability.

I would argue that financial stability has everything to do with environmental sustainability (though I will admit that this comparison is a bit hard since environmentalists seem to bend over backwards to NOT define "sustainability" very precisely).  In fact, I think that sustainability is baked right into the heart of capitalism.

The reason for this comes back to the magic of prices.  Of all the amazing, wondrous things we celebrate in the world, prices may be the most overlooked.  Just think of it: with no governing structure or top down ruling board, a single number encapsulates everything most everyone in the world knows about a particular product: both its utility and relative scarcity, both now and as anticipated in the future.  It is a consensus derived voluntarily between millions of people who never meet with each other and likely never communicate with each other.

It is amazing to me that people who talk so much about their concern for scarcity tend to be the same folks who ignore prices and even eschew markets and capitalism.  But in prices we have a number that gives us a single metric telling us the world's consensus on the current and future scarcity of any commodity.

We do know that prices can miss some things.  Perhaps most relevant today, they can fail to include the cost of emissions (ground, water, air) associated with that commodities extraction, refining and processing, and use.  But compared to the effort of trying to create some alternate structure for managing product scarcity, this is a relatively simple problem to fix (simple technically, but not necessarily politically).  Estimates of these pollution costs can be added as a tax (e.g. a carbon tax on fossil fuels to take into account climate effects of CO2 emissions) and prices will continue to work their magic but with these new factors added.

Along these lines, Andres McAffee writes about some research work by environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel.  He writes in Reason:

In 2015, Ausubel published an essay titled "The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment." He had found substantial evidence not only that Americans were consuming fewer resources per capita but also that they were consuming less in total of some of the most important building blocks of an economy: things such as steel, copper, fertilizer, timber, and paper. Total annual U.S. consumption of all of these had been increasing rapidly prior to 1970. But since then, consumption had reached a peak and then declined.

This was unexpected, to put it mildly. "The reversal in use of some of the materials so surprised me that [a few colleagues] and I undertook a detailed study of the use of 100 commodities in the United States from 1900 to 2010," Ausubel wrote. "We found that 36 have peaked in absolute use…Another 53 commodities have peaked relative to the size of the economy, though not yet absolutely. Most of them now seem poised to fall."

The charts are great and I encourage you to read the whole thing:

Postscript:  Going back briefly to Tesla, if the company consistently spends more money that it takes in, then it means the resources it employs could be used elsewhere more productively.  Talented people who design cars could be using those talents more productively at another car company.  Or defined differently, talented people who are passionate about saving the environment could have more impact working on something else that helps the environment.  Scarce (and environmentally suspect) cobalt and other Lithium ion battery resources could be used to more impact in other applications (many of which also may be to transition the world's energy economy from fossil fuels but do it better or faster).

The full name of Adam Smith's great work is "An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations."  Even before we crack the spine of that book, we can learn a lot about that title.

Look at the title -- it might be a bit strange to modern eyes.  Because when we have inquiries today, it's generally on the opposite topic -- why are people still poor?  Most of us look around and see the incredible advancement of the modern economy and if we wonder anything, we wonder why some folks are still poor.

But in Adam Smith's day, human experience was far different.  Basically, the history of humanity to the year 1776 was that pretty much everyone was poor -- grinding, dangerous, subsistence poverty despite backbreaking labor -- and they had been so in a nearly unchanging way for millenia.  In Adam Smith's day, in the early days of the industrial revolution and increasing market-based commerce, the question was why are ordinary people -- people who aren't in ruling classes that just seize the wealth they have -- becoming wealthy.  At the time, the existence of wealth that existed without just looting it was what needed to be explained.

The fact that AOC and other modern admirers of socialism can fret about poverty is, as they imagine, attributable to capitalism, but not in the way they think.  Capitalism did not cause the poverty, it created the situation in which poverty is an issue with but a minority of the population (rather than essentially everyone).  Before capitalism, fretting about poverty would just have been fretting about .. the way things are for everyone.

It is worth a final note here to remind everyone that what we call "poor" today has pretty much nothing in common with what would be considered poor in Adam Smith's day, or at any other time in history.  The poor in America today -- whose major health problem is obesity! -- would be fabulously wealthy in any other pre-capitalist era.  One can even argue that the poor in America are better off than the poor in other supposed socialist paradises like Denmark, Sweden, or France.

Readers have wondered why I have not really jumped on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal plan (which has since been endorsed by most major Democratic presidential candidates).  Well, one-reason is that we had no details, at least until a formal resolution was introduced in Congress and an FAQ went up and then back down on AOC's website.  The Ocasio-Cortez camp claims the FAQ went up by mistake (after previously claiming it was a Republican false flag operation), though I consider it more of a Kinsley Gaffe if it was a mistake at all.

The other reason I have ignored it to this point is the same reason I never enjoyed those American Idol episodes where they show all the people who can't sing but really think they are awesome embarrassing themselves.  It's weird enough seeing people who are incompetent think that they are capable.  It is even weirder seeing that person cheered on by a million other incompetent people on twitter.

But it appears that the entire Democratic Party has rapidly endorsed the plan, and every one of their Presidential candidates have said they are all for it, though site-unseen.  So I guess I have to wallow in a bit.  This may be the first of many posts, or maybe not.  It depends on how much I want to shoot at fish in a barrel.

It's hard to know where to start.  My first overall reaction is that there is no science and no economics in the plan at all.  I find this ironic (though not surprising) given that it comes from the environmental community that has called me "anti-science" for years for doubting global warming forecast rates based on exceptionally high degrees of positive feedback built into computer models.  AOC's entire plan feels like the results of a late-night policy brainstorming by a group of vegan poetry majors who chip in every idea they have seen someone post on Facebook.

Readers know that despite my skepticism that manmade CO2 will cause a climate catastrophe, I have presented a CO2-reduction plan on these pages.  You can read it here, but the three most relevant planks were:

1. A revenue-neutral carbon tax that increased the price of producing CO2 and then let individuals and markets figure out how to do that most efficiently.  Since the point of the carbon tax is not to raise money for politicians but to send pricing signals to fuel users, the proceeds were netted against reductions in other regressive taxes, such as the payroll tax
2. Elimination of all the command and control government programs where politicians pretend they know they best solution to technical-industrial problems and then mandate that scarces resources flow to their preferred solutions.  These are counter-productive, and not necessary since the carbon tax does the work for us
3. Make regulatory changes to unleash a new generation of safe nuclear power, since this is the only high-production, reliable, not time-of-day dependent source of electrical power that we know about.

I did not think it was possible -- I presented the plan above as a transpartisan plan intended to bridge the gaps between Left and Right -- but the Green New Deal is EXACTLY opposite this plan

First, as with many on the Left, AOC does not understand much about economics, so she does not understand the carbon tax.  For the Left, the point of a carbon tax is not to send pricing signals in the marketplace but to raise money for politicians to spend on pet projects.  We saw this back in the Washington State carbon tax proposal, where environmentalists rejected a carbon tax because it was revenue neutral.  In her FAQ, AOC does exactly the opposite of my point 1 and 2.  She wants people just as smart and economically-savvy and scientific and stuff like herself at the top to redesign the US economy and to do this she needs a LOT more money than just a carbon tax:

The Green New Deal is a massive investment in the production of renewable energy industries and infrastructure. We cannot simply tax gas and expect workers to figure out another way to get to work unless we’ve first created a better, more affordable option. So we’re not ruling a carbon tax out, but a carbon tax would be a tiny part of a Green New Deal in the face of the gigantic expansion of our productive economy and would have to be preceded by first creating the solutions necessary so that workers and working class communities are not affected. While a carbon tax may be a part of the Green New Deal, it misses the point and would be off the table unless we create the clean, affordable options first.

Do you start to see the Great Leap Forward analogy?  Just to finish off the thought, AOC also goes the opposite direction of my nuclear point, proposing to ban nuclear power and dismantle  all that carbon-free electricity production.  Ask Germany how well that has worked out for them, as they have been forced into a rush of new coal-fired plants, or New York that is building three new large natural gas plants to replace the nuclear plants it is closing.  I will bet a thousand dollars that AOC has no real knowledge of nuclear safety nor has she spent probably 5 minutes studying the new generation of nuclear technologies.  Frankly, I bet as far as she has thought about it is that it is expected to be anti-nuclear on the Left so she is anti-nuclear like the other cool kids.

Every dumb, unscientific nostrum for energy-use reduction has at one time or another over the last several months been attached to the plan.  One example is the call for dismantling industrial agriculture and promoting local food production.  This is easily one of the silliest ideas (for fuel reduction) I can imagine and have written about it before.  I have no problem if you want to buy locally and don't want to buy from Kraft or Cargill.  Power to you.  But the conclusion that local food production will save energy is exactly the sort of conclusion that people with no experience rigorously analyzing scientific problems come up with.  They jump from the fact that Agriculture uses a lot of energy to "it must all be in transportation" and thus conclude "local agriculture will save lots of fuel."  But this is absurd.  First, fuel use in agriculture is not mostly transport to the end consumer.  The actual growing process consumes most of the fuel, and this fuel use is much more related to land productivity and economies of scale that would be destroyed by a local agriculture mandate.   And even if it did actually improve fuel use, think of the other environmental effects of growing food locally on land less-suited to its production -- you would greatly increase land and water use, just to start, both likely creating more environmental problems.

I am reminded of Mao's idea during the Great Leap Forward that China needed to produce all its steel locally in home-based backyard furnaces (I kid you not).  I think most of us can predict the obvious result - steel production crashed because you can't produce steel in any kind of amount or quality in the backyard.  But there were two less obvious results as well.  One, this contributed to the crash in agricultural output as skilled agricultural labor and resources was diverted to this silly steel-making scheme.  And two, whole forests were denuded as people sought out fuel for these furnaces.  China is still recovering from environmental messes this caused.  India barely avoided the same disaster as Ghandi wanted to eschew industrial production in favor of home spinning and weaving.  THIS is what you get when you let ignorant people command and control the economy.  Heck, this is what you get even when you let really, really smart people command and control the economy.

Update:  Since I have eschewed Twitter, mostly, of late, I missed the fact that #greenleapforward is the term folks are converging on.  Happy to go with that.

Readers will know that I have somehow been sucked into the Tesla vortex and spend too much time watching Tesla and Elon Musk's antics.  I tried to explain some of the reasons for this fascination here.  Every time I swear off following Musk, he does some new nutty thing, like his joke of a demonstration the other night of his Boring Company tunnel in LA  (as usual, Musk has come up with another idea that would look cool on the cover of a 1970's Popular Mechanics or Boys Life magazine but fails almost every engineering, physics, and business logic test).

Anyway, I am going to mostly resist writing about Tesla and discuss the strange bias many Americans (really, many Westerners) have against short-selling.  Here is a tweet from a random Tesla supporter that demonstrates what I see every day from Tesla fans:

In TSLA's case, SEC's purpose was the protect shortsellers - which aren't investors.

Bashing the SEC isn't illegal, they have no criminal authority.

— ThemeTeam (@ThemeTeamWP) December 21, 2018

lol no, shorts are not investors. They spread false information for profit and when proven wrong, they move to something else to stay relevant.

— ThemeTeam (@ThemeTeamWP) December 21, 2018

This notion that short sellers are not doing anything legitimate, that they do not deserve legal protections (or else should be banned entirely), and that they prosper only by spreading false information are not just a staple of hard core Musk fanbois, but are actually quite common attitudes.  I saw it just the other night watching the movie The Accountant again (a family favorite in part because a streak of OCD and Asperger's runs through my family).  In this scene, the guy talking is called Brax and he is a gangster and a mercenary, but for a variety of reasons the film-makers need to make him more sympathetic than the average thug.  Watch the justification he gives:

The movie-makers are expecting that the average viewer will discount his thuggery here because he is beating up a short-seller, and we all know those guys are unethical and destructive (by the way, I too would be tempted to short a company that has stuffed its workers' pension fund with its own stock, that is a big red flag to me).

Short selling, in which one is betting the value of an asset will go down in the future, is a perfectly legitimate and valuable way to participate in markets.  For those who are unsure what short selling is, here is how it works.  People who own large blocks of a stock, let's say Exxon-Mobil or XOM, can lend their stock, for a fee, to other people.  They do this as a way to generate extra income for their portfolio, particularly if they intend to hold the stock for the long term.  The people who borrow the stock then immediately sell it.  I know, this seems weird -- your neighbor who lent you his mower might be ticked off if you immediately sold it.  But folks who lend their shares know you are going to sell it.

So I borrow and sell 100 XOM shares for, say, $90.  If the price drops to $70, I can buy the stock back at that price and I make a $2,000 profit.  The risk, though, is that if the price keeps going up, I am going to have to buy back at a higher price and lose money.  If the price goes up too much, the broker is going to issue a margin call and likely force me to pony up more cash or buy back at the unfavorable price to cover my position.  If I had to sell at $110, I would lose $2000.

Note that short selling has a more dangerous risk profile than going long, or buying the stock.  If you buy 100 shares of XOM at $90, the most you can lose is $9,000 -- your losses are capped.  On the other hand your upside is unlimited -- if XOM goes up to $500, you make a fortune.  For short-selling, this is reversed.  The short-seller's gain is limited -- the most they can ever gain is $9,000 if the stock goes to zero.  But their losses are uncapped -- if XOM goes up to $500, they will have lost over $40,000.  And even if the stock shoots up to $500 and eventually falls to zero (as do many bubble companies that get shorted), it may be hard to ride the short position to the end, either due to margin calls or failure of intestinal fortitude.

Short selling makes a ton of economic sense in part because it HAS to improve markets.  First, it increases the liquidity of the market and the number and diversity of participants.  The more subtle reason is because markets and pricing are information discovery tools.  Short selling allows more people with information about a security to participate in this information exchange, which almost by definition improves the market.  As Don Boudreaux wrote years ago:

To ban short-selling of stocks is to short-circuit an important mechanism through which people share their knowledge and expectations with others.  Banning a mechanism that better allows share prices to reflect the expectation that the underlying assets are not worth as much as current market prices suggest does nothing to change the underlying reality.  Such a ban merely distorts knowledge of this reality

I like to think about economics and business issues but I am not an economist.  My layman's way of thinking about short selling was outlined in a post 10 years ago, written in reaction to a temporary ban in short selling during the market turmoil of 2008.

Someone noticed that just before certain stocks crash in value, there is a lot of short-selling.  So the US government has banned short-selling, at least temporarily.  Classic cargo-cult logic.

Boy this sure makes perfect sense in a time when we are concerned about speculative bubbles -- let's ban one of the most important tools that exist for bubbles to be shortened and made less, uh, bubbly.  Here is why (very briefly and non-technically) short-selling takes the edge off speculative excesses.

At the start of the bubble, a particular asset (be it an equity or a commodity like oil) is owned by a mix of people who have different expectations about future price movements.  For whatever reasons, in a bubble, a subset of the market develops rapidly rising expectations about the value of the asset.  They start buying the asset, and the price starts rising.  As the price rises, and these bulls buy in, folks who owned the asset previously and are less bullish about the future will sell to the new buyers.  The very fact of the rising price of the asset from this buying reinforces the bulls' feeling that the sky is the limit for prices, and bulls buy in even more.

Let's fast forward to a point where the price has risen to some stratospheric levels vs. the previous pricing as well as historical norms or ratios.  The ownership base for the asset is now disproportionately made up of those sky-is-the-limit bulls, while everyone who thought these guys were overly optimistic and a bit wonky have sold out. 99.9% of the world now thinks the asset is grossly overvalued.  But how does it come to earth?  After all, the only way the price can drop is if some owners sell, and all the owners are super-bulls who are unlikely to do so.  As a result, the bubble might continue and grow long after most of the world has seen the insanity of it.

Thus, we have short-selling.  Short-selling allows the other 99.9% who are not owners to sell part of the asset anyway, casting their financial vote for the value of the company.  Short-selling shortens bubbles, hastens the reckoning, and in the process generally reduces the wreckage on the back end.

If you want to understand the volatility of a stock like Tesla ($tsla), the issue often is not short-selling but the extremely tiny float -- only a very small percentage of the equity in the company actively trades, while the rest sit in hands of folks who are not going to trade or even lend the stock (e.g. Elon Musk).  With such a tiny float, small changes in sentiment lead to huge price swings, making it a hair-raising investment for both longs and shorts.  This situation would likely be worse without the shorts.

As for the supposed false information spread by shorts, I am sure that happens.  But information gathering by shorts is one of the reasons we should treasure short-selling.  Here is my analogy -- one of the few good things about having Donald Trump as President is that the media actually is doing its job and is skeptical of everything he says and does.  It digs into the truth of his every single statement.  And sometimes what the media comes up with is fake or wrong.  But I would still argue we are better off with this sort of accountability than we were with the media as lapdogs to Obama.  Just look at the problems and potential rights violations at the border.  The media ignored most all of this same activity when it was happening under Obama, but is rightly (finally) highlighting it under Trump.

Trump supporters hate the media, and argue that it was "long" Obama and "short" Trump, but whatever the reason, we are learning things we did not know before and knowledge has value.  Shorts play this same role in the market.  For years everyone fawned over Elon Musk and Tesla.  The dedicated EV magazines were basically house organs of Tesla, a sort of Tesla Pravda.  The longs did not want to see or hear any criticism.  Essentially, no one wanted to be skeptical of the Tesla story except the shorts.   The shorts may turn out to be wrong, but they are finding holes in the Tesla love story and that is valuable.

Postscript:  If you do not invest and want a tiny taste of the hate short-sellers engender, go find the hottest, rowdiest craps table in a Vegas casino and start betting the Don't Come line.

Point (via the International Socialist Review)

This article examines the phenomenon of sexual assault from a Marxist perspective—that is, analyzed in the context of capitalist social relations. Like imperialism and war, oppression is a necessary byproduct of the rule of capital. Exploitation is the method by which the ruling class robs workers of surplus value; the various forms of oppression (such as sexism, racism, and homophobia) play a primary role in maintaining the rule of a tiny minority over the vast majority, on a global scale. This approach allows Marxists to understand not only the root causes of oppression but also which strategies can most effectively combat it.

To be sure, sexual assault is not inflicted by “the system” as a whole, but by individual people. Nevertheless, women’s oppression does not originate with individual people—it stems from institutional inequality that is organized from above, in the traditional family structure, the legal system, and other social structures that define women as second-class citizens. It therefore can be ended at the individual or personal level only if we do away with the capitalist system.

Counterpoint (via CNN)

Harrowing accounts of widespread sexual abuse allegedly carried out by North Korean officials against ordinary women have been laid out in a new report, that details evidence of a culture where officials commit acts with near total impunity.

The extensive 98-page report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), which was released Thursday and took more than two years to compile, is based on dozens of interviews with sexual abuse victims who have fled from North Korea. It reveals an oppressive world where officials -- from police officers and prison guards to market supervisors -- faced virtually no consequences for their routine abuse of women.

"Unwanted sexual contact and violence that is so common in North Korea it has come to be accepted as part of ordinary life," the report alleges....

"On the days they felt like it, market guards or police officials could ask me to follow them to an empty room outside the market, or some other place they'd pick," the report quoted a former trader in her 40s who fled North Korea in 2014 (HRW uses an alias). She says she had been sexually assaulted many times.

"They consider us (sex) toys. We are at the mercy of men." She said that the climate of sexual abuse was so pervasive that it had been normalized -- both by the perpetrators and their victims, but nonetheless, "sometimes, out of nowhere, you cry at night and don't know why."

Medical professionals who fled the repressive country said that "there are no protocols for medical treatment and examination of victims of sexual violence to provide therapeutic care or secure medical evidence," the report adds.

The news came out the other day that Porsche will stop making diesel-engine cars.  This is the beginning of the end of significant diesel car production in Europe, and is the ultimate proof that the diesel engine is a dead-end technology choice for Europeans concerned with the environment.

The story is a long one and I will leave you with some links in a moment, but the basic story flow is:

• European governments are concerned about CO2 production, want to "do something"
• European car-makers have a lead over the rest of the world in diesel technology, urge governments to choose diesel as the technology of the future, since at the time it was more efficient than gasoline engines.
• European governments, hot to "do something" and also keen to do it in a way that seems to advantage domestic producers in the high profile automobile trade, promote diesel in a number of ways (including lowering taxes on diesel fuel and diesel car purchases).
• As Europeans adopt diesel, problems emerge as air quality degrades -- diesels may be more efficient, but have a number of harmful emissions that are far worse than with gasoline engines.  There are tests and standards for these emissions but it is discovered that most manufacturers are cheating on emissions tests.
• Too late, it is realized that other technologies (electric hybrids, all electric) are pushing well past diesel in terms of efficiency.  Diesel is a dead-end in terms of CO2 reduction, and increases harmful emissions.
• Emissions tests are tightened, but it is clear manufacturers cheated because they do not have the technology to produce cars people will buy that meet the standards.  Companies like Porsche start to exit the business.

One of the best articles I have found about this history is actually at Vox, that bastion of free market economics and government non-interventionism.

The failure here is entirely predictable and is subsumed in the general criticism of "government picking winners."  As with many such failures, they boil down to information and incentives.  In terms of information, folks in government have no idea of the range of technology choices now and in the future, and how these technology choices might or might not make sense in a broad range of applications.  In terms of incentives, government officials usually have very different true incentives from their publicly stated ones (in this case CO2 reduction).  In the US, the Feds continue to support insanely stupid ethanol subsidies and mandates in part because the first Presidential primary is in corn state Iowa.  In Europe, it may well have been that officials were more ready to support diesel, which Europeans were good at, over hybrids, which Asian companies were good at, no matter what the relative merits were.

If you think that is cynical, even the folks at Vox noticed:

At the time, there were lots of different paths Europe's automakers could have taken to green itself. They could've pursued direct injection technology for gasoline vehicles, making those engines more fuel-efficient. They could've ramped up development of hybrid-electric cars, as Toyota was doing in Japan. But European companies like Peugeot and Volkswagen and BMW had already been making big investments in diesel, and they wanted a climate policy that would help those bets to pay off.

Europe's policymakers obliged. The EU agreed to a voluntary CO2 target for vehicles that was largely in line with what diesel technology could meet. As researcher Sarah Keay-Bright later noted, these standards were crafted so as not to force Europe's automakers to develop hybrids, electric vehicles, or other advanced powertrains.

The result?

Although overall pollution in Europe has gone down over time, diesel vehicle emissions remain stubbornly high. Today, Paris sometimes has smoggy days comparable to those in Beijing. London is struggling with unhealthy levels of nitrogen dioxide. Germany, Austria, and Ireland have NOx pollution well above the legal limits, with vehicles accounting for roughly 40 percent of that output.

The health toll is likely considerable. One recent study estimated that diesel pollution from cars, buses, and trucks in Britain caused 9,400 premature deaths in 2010 alone. It's difficult to pinpoint what fraction of those deaths might have been avoided if emission rules on cars had been strictly enforced all along, but that gives a sense of the stakes.

Even Vox is willing to call for some technocratic humility:

Which brings us to the third takeaway. The future is hard to predict. Diesel cars seemed like a reasonable idea in the 1990s and a disaster today. That suggests that policymakers should have a lot more humility when crafting energy policy. Maybe battery-electric cars will win out, or maybe it'll be hydrogen, or maybe it'll be something else entirely. (Heck, perhaps diesel cars that are genuinely clean could play a role in reducing CO2 emissions.) No one knows for sure.

So one approach here might be to pursue technology-neutral policies focused on preferred outcomes — say, tightly enforced standards that require lower emissions — rather than favoring specific industries and technologies just because they happen to seem promising at that moment in time.

This conundrum is likely to come up again and again. For years, governments have been laying down big bets on emerging clean energy technologies. France did it with nuclear power in the 1970s and '80s. Germany did it with wind and solar power in the 2000s, through feed-in tariffs. The United States has done it with corn ethanol in the past decade.

Done right, this sort of government support can be valuable, helping useful new energy options break into the mainstream against entrenched competition. But there's also a huge risk that governments will end up gambling on badly flawed technologies that then becomethe entrenched competition — and prove impossible to get rid of. The US arguably made that mistake with ethanol, which has had unintended ripple effects on the food supply and deforestation that are proving politically difficult to untangle. The drive for diesel looks like it belongs in that category, too. It's not a story we'd like to keep repeating.

Thus we get to my plan, which eliminates all these political interventions in favor of a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

Why use the language of Power and Privilege at all?

One of my favorite political books is Arnold Kling's Three Languages of Politics (free download here).  It is a great reference for understanding why so much of politics devolves into talking past one another, and is a great guide for those who want to be persuasive outside of one's own tribe.

As background, I am a life-in-the-real-world (LIRW) libertarian who is most comfortable arguing on the freedom-coercion axis and based on economic efficiency.  LIRW libertarian means that I don't answer every policy question with a knee-jerk anarcho-capitalist get-the-government-out-of-the-way policy prescription.  I accept that government coercion is not going away and I can accept some state coercion in support of certain policy goals.   However, in doing so I assign something I call the Cost of Coercion to policy proposals in balancing out the costs and benefits and the coercion cost I assign will be high.  As such, then, I tend to discuss policy in terms of meeting goals with maximum economic efficiency and minimum levels of coercion.

In this article I want to talk about my (and other libertarians') attempts to engage (or failures to engage) Progressives on their preferred Oppressor-Oppressed axis.  While I think everyone benefits from learning to engage with folks who speak different political languages, doing so is particularly important for libertarians in the United States because we are the odd man out in the current two-party system.  Half our issues (e.g. free markets, limited government) require common cause with Conservatives while the other half (e.g., open immigration, drug legalization, gay marriage) require making common cause with Progressives.  In this article I want to talk about my (and other libertarians') attempts to engage Progressives on the Oppressor-Oppressed axis.

To start, I feel like I am pretty good at understanding the Progressive point of view on many issues (e.g. my intellectual Turing test here on Progressive arguments for the minimum wage).

However, on the airplane yesterday I was looking back at my proposed trans-partisan plan on climate action and found I did little in it to excite Progressives.  I still think that this is a very fair plan that could appeal to both Progressives and Conservatives, but I realize in retrospect that it does almost nothing to sell the plan to Progressives.  The article is mostly economic efficiency arguments that can sway Conservatives (at times) but seldom have a lot of power with Progressives.  Sure, the plan gives Progressives what they are asking for (a carbon tax) but I acknowledge in the article that there is evidence from the Washington State carbon tax vote that Progressives don't actually understand the benefits of a carbon tax very well.  Here, for example, is how I discussed the shift from a myriad of scattershot government interventions to the carbon tax:

Point 1: Impose a Federal carbon tax on fuel....So what is the best way to reduce CO2 -- by substituting gas for coal?   By more conservation?  By solar, or wind?  With biofuels?  With a carbon tax, we don't have to figure it out or have politicians picking winners.  This is why a Pigovian tax on carbon in fuels is going to be the most efficient possible way to reduce CO2 production.   Different approaches will be tested in the marketplace....

Point 3:  Eliminate all the stupid stuff...[in turn] I propose that we eliminate all the current Federal subsidies, mandates, and prohibitions that have been justified by climate change. Ethanol rules and mandates, solar subsidies, wind subsidies, EV subsidies, targeted technology investments, coal plant bans, pipeline bans, drilling bans -- it all should go.  The carbon tax does the work.

Picture the social justice warriors at some college today -- are they going to be excited by this?  I doubt it.  But what if I said this instead:

We should shift climate efforts from all the disparate, scattershot efforts today to a neutral carbon tax that is impossible for the powerful and privileged to game to their advantage. Current climate programs are all more likely to benefit Wall Street bankers and crony political interests than they are to help the climate.  For example, the Koch brothers have publicly admitted that their company is one of the largest beneficiaries of the current ethanol program, which was meant to benefit the climate but instead just pumps profits into a few well-connected multi-billion dollar corporations, while taking food from the poor and feeding it into people's gas tanks.

This second version, while it needs some polish, is clearly more compelling to a Progressive, and all of it is something I believe -- It's just not the first way I naturally defend the plan.  I need to get better on this.

Power and Privilege are a Useful Framework (among others) for Analyzing History and Public Policy

I have studied a lot of history in my life, mostly as a hobby.  When I first started studying history in secondary school in the 1980's, it was almost all presented as "great man" history -- i.e. history can be described as driven primarily by the actions of prominent individuals.  Julius Caesar did this and Henry the VIII did this other thing, etc.   Really, this approach to history was being overtaken even 100 years earlier than this, but I didn't really get exposed to other approaches until college.  There, I began to learn that Marxist historians in the 20th century brought a different view, that most of history was driven by big social and economic and demographic changes rather than individuals -- think Hari Seldon if you know that reference.

But the Marxists had a familiar problem (other than the obvious one where they explain every event in history as a class struggle and proto-Marxist revolution): They brought a great new tool to the analysis of history but then declared that it was the ONLY correct tool.  But there are plenty of historical turns where individuals mattered.  The revolution in Rome from the Republic to the Empire was probably inevitable from the large forces at work, but was the end of the civil wars in favor of decades of peace inevitable without the acumen of Augustus?

Other groups have contributed yet more lenses for looking at history.  I remember when it became de rigueur that history courses include lectures on life of the common person, the experience of women, and on other groups that don't have a big presence in the traditional historic record.  I initially rolled my eyes thinking that this all was a politically correct placeholder, but I eventually found it fascinating -- to the extent that I have since taken whole courses solely on the experience of common people in the Middle Ages and the Roman Empire.

To this same end, power and privilege is yet another useful framework for analyzing history.  The problem in my mind comes in the fact that so many students go through college, even graduate from college in history, looking at the world ONLY through this one lens.  To me this is madness.  It is like trying to play golf with just a 2-iron or to do math with just cosines.

Libertarians and the Power & Privilege Language

As demonstrated in my climate example earlier, there is no reason libertarians cannot engage progressives on the power and privilege or oppressor/oppressed axis.  Libertarians care a lot about the ability of the individual to be able to make decisions and live their life without coercion.  Many of the same things that upset progressives -- racism, sexism, various sorts of sexual prohibition, narcotics prohibition, fraud, migration restrictions, military interventionism -- also upset libertarians.  Libertarians and progressives both talk a lot about power and abuse of power, though granted they fear different sorts of power: libertarians tend to have more fear of government power, while progressives tend to fear any sort of economic power.  But even getting that far is at least a basis for meaningful discussion.  If you want to have an interesting discussion with a progressive, do what I did with one of my progressive in-laws and watch Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story together.  The progressive will gladly watch it with you because they will think you are about to get schooled.  But watch as the movie unfolds -- failure after failure that Moore wants to describe to capitalism are in fact mostly due to crony government interventions to which libertarians are strongly opposed.  There is a surprising amount of common libertarian-progressive ground in the movie if you look past Moore's interpretation of these failures and pay attention to their actual causes.

This is what I had in mind when I wrote my recent article in Regulation Magazine, "How Labor Regulation Harms Unskilled Workers", to try to write something about labor regulation that was pitched more to progressives than to libertarians and conservatives.  Too often articles on the minimum wage focus solely on economic efficiency, or worse, on how labor market interventions negatively impact businesses.  When progressives see that something negatively impacts businesses, their first reaction is "awesome, let's do more of it!"  Not a great sales approach.   In my article, I was never going to convince progressives to give up on regulation of the terms and conditions of labor altogether -- it is simply too deeply ingrained in their philosophy that workers are powerless in the face of employers and need external protection.  But it might be possible to show progressives why something like the minimum wage can be a bad anti-poverty program that it actually tends to hurt the poorest and most vulnerable and least skilled.

The absolute best example I can think of how libertarian attempts to engage progressives have been terrible is the book by Nancy MacLean called Democracy in Chains.   The book makes the weird and not very well substantiated claim that James Buchanan, who won a Nobel Prize for his work in public choice theory, was heavily influenced by southern slavery supporters like John Calhoun, and thus, uh, public choice is racist or evil or something.  The book tends to get lauded by people who mostly like its thesis but did not read it and torn apart by academics who are hugely skeptical about its logic and factual basis.  The most amazing thing about the book is just how incurious Ms. MacLean is about public choice theory itself -- the head of the national organization of public choice economists is a professor on her own campus, with an office just a short walk away, yet she never consulted anyone in the field.

Here is why I highlight it, and not to beat up on a progressive who in turn beat up on a libertarian icon.  Public choice theory -- as I and most people who have studied it understand it -- should be tremendously interesting to progressives, so much so I think it could be a core text they study.  Not because I want to make them not-progressives (I will send them to Hayek for that) but because public choice theory says so much about how power and privilege are created and sustained.  Want to understand why Wall Street makes so much money and is so seemingly immune to accountability, check out public choice theory.  Want to know why you and I spend billions to subsidize profitable corporations like Boeing or Koch Industries, check out public choice theory.  Want to understand why public interventions often fail so you can make better interventions in the future, check out public choice theory.

The reason progressives don't look at public choice theory this way is in large part because libertarians have adopted public choice theory as their own and use it most often to push back on nearly every government intervention.  In particular, the Koch Brothers and Cato love public choice theory and use it to argue for small government, so in the tribal politics of the day, this means that progressives have to hate it.  I would argue that the best description of Nancy MacLean's approach to James Buchanan and public choice theory in her book (and her  more-than-apparent lack of desire to learn anything about it) is the fact that public choice theory is associated with the Koch Brothers and thus she wanted to bring it down to help bring down the Koch siblings who have become a progressive bete noire (despite their actually supporting a lot of progressive causes like gay marriage).  Ironically, from my limited reading, James Buchanan appears to have treated public choice more as a guide to good government than a trump card to be played against any government intervention.

This is why the book I would most like to write, if I had the academic chops and time to write it, would be "Public Choice for Progressives:  What James Buchanan can teach good government and equalizing power and privilege."  There are a lot of things libertarians and progressives are never going to agree on, but there are enough that we can agree on to make it worthwhile to learn their language.

This same failure has happened over and over, at one time or another in Russia and Mexico and now in Venezuela.  Some tried to make it happen in the 1970's in the US, and Elizabeth Warren would still like to try, I bet.  Socialists take over the oil industry and revel in the first months about all they money they are able to divert to "social" expenditures.  Then, in a few year, it all comes crashing down.  This tweet from Michael Moore five years ago gives you a good idea of the thinking.

Socialists have always seen production and wealth creation as some sort of magic, a fountain in the desert where piggy rich people push to the front and take more than their fair share.  Oil looks to them as the ultimate example of this -- wealth just flows out of the ground and evil rich people at Exxon grab it all for themselves.

But in fact, oil is just the opposite of the magic fountain.  It takes a huge quantity of money and brains to get even one drop of it in usable form to your car.  Imagine trying to figure out where even to look for oil when it is hiding far under ground.  Or having to poke holes a mile into the ground from structures standing in 1000 foot deep water in the Gulf of Mexico.  And then transporting the oil hundreds or thousands of miles by pipeline and ship and train and truck.  And then carefully refining the oil almost molecule by molecule in multi-billion dollar facilities.  And then getting the usable parts to the right people, including distribution outlets for you and I on almost every corner of town.

Right now gasoline in Phoenix goes for about $2.85 a gallon, which is about $2.40 before taxes.  This is 60 cents a quart, which compares to the retail price of a bottle of water of about $2.00-$2.50 a quart.  It's a freaking miracle of modernity that you can fill your car this inexpensively.

Anyway, it turns out that oil is the ultimate "you have to spend money to make money" kind of business.  And once you spend all that money, you investment immediately starts dying.  Oil companies have to completely rebuild retail gas stations every 20-30 years.  Refineries have to be constantly updated with really expensive improvements to take advantage of new technologies, to adjust to changing markets and regulations, and to handle different types of crude oil.  And then there is oil production.  Drill a well today and the moment you open it up, the production starts to fall off.  The flow will drop, the percentage of water might increase-- a million things can happen and all of them bad.  To keep wells flowing companies constantly have to reinvest their profits in reworking the wells (fracking and such) and adding enhanced recovery systems.  As fields deplete, new wells have to be drilled in new locations or at new depths, or else whole new fields have to be developed to replace them.

The "greedy and short-term-focused" oil companies reinvest much of their earnings to make sure the supply of oil is sustained.  The "enlightened" socialists harvest all the cash they can and hand it to their cronies, allowing the production assets to fall apart and, eventually, their economy to collapse.

There was a funny sideshow to the recent Supreme Court Janus v. AFSCME decision.  That decision essentially made it impossible for local or state governments to require that all employees pay support to certain public employee unions, even if they are not a member of that union and/or don't support that union's activities and, particularly, that union's political speech.  Progressives, many of whom feel increasingly confident to admit that they are socialists, rushed to point out that this was a death knell for these unions because of the free rider problem.  If workers who benefitted from the union's collective bargaining activities were not forced to pay, then what incentive exists for any one employee to pay the union if they still will enjoy the benefits without paying.  Soon, everyone will become a free rider and the union will die.  America's most famous socialist Bernie Sanders demonstrates that he understands the free rider problem completely in this

Sanders’ bill, called the Workplace Democracy Act, would remove several of the major barriers to organized labor’s growth.

It would ban “right to work” laws, which allow employees to opt out of paying union dues even though the union must still bargain on their behalf, leading to what unions call “free-riding.”

Trump vs. Hawaii More Interesting Than I Thought

The Conservative and Progressive responses to the Supreme Court's Trump vs. Hawaii decision that upheld v3.0 of the travel ban are pretty predictable -- Progressive writers have argued that of course it violated the first amendment because Trump made clear any number of times that he was animated by distrust of Muslims, while Conservatives said it was clearly not just aimed at Muslims (he included Chad!) but anyway it was a bad precedent to infer intent from campaign speeches even before he was President.

What I didn't know until I read Eugene Volokh was that there are some really interesting precedents that make immigration law one of the few areas effectively outside the Bill of Rights.  I don't really like what I see in this, but it is an issue I never understood before.  You really need to read the whole thing to get the gist, but here is his summary:

The U.S. has nearly unlimited power to decide when foreigners are admitted to the country, even based on factors (such as ideology, religion, and likely race and sex) that would be unconstitutional as to people already in the country.

Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 In An Alternate Universe

In this case, a state worker was suing to prevent a public employee union from deducting an "agency fee" from his paycheck despite the fact that he did not want to join the union.  The union argued that the employee benefited from their collective bargaining and should have to pay something for it.  Apparently the case turned on First Amendment issues -- while technically the union could not spend these agency fees on political speech, the reality is that money is fungible and at some level almost everything a public union does is political.

As a quick background, I totally support private union bargaining as a fundamental right under the First Amendment, though we could argue whether current law overly tips the power balance toward or away from unions vs. a free market.  On the other hand, I have deep, deep doubts about public sector unions, largely because there is no real bargaining going on.  In most cases, the public sector unions and the officials they are nominally bargaining with are on the same side and opposed to taxpayer interests.

So I am not unhappy to see public unions take a hit here, but addressing my concerns should be a legislative issue (as exemplified by a number of "right to work" states that have banned this practice).  But this is a judicial case and should not be dealing with legislative issues but issues of the law, and the case confuses me because I could easily see the Right and the Left arguing opposite sides on legal issues of this case given a slightly different world.  After all, requiring employees to pay these fees is a condition of employment -- wouldn't we expect Conservatives to support the right of employers to freely set the conditions of employment?  If these are too onerous, Conservatives would argue people would just not work there.  In this world, wouldn't we expect, then, Progressives to argue against such open-ended freedom for employers to set work conditions on the argument that there is a power imbalance between employer and worker -- exacerbated because the employer is the state in this case -- and they can't easily fight these onerous conditions?  Huge swaths of employment law, written mainly from the Left, are dedicated to circumscribing allowed employment conditions.

Milton Friedman once wrote, "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."

Today Simon Constable writes that Venezuela "which has the largest oil reserves in the world, is now considering the idea of importing the stuff."

Every time one points out a historic failure of communism (most recently, for example, in Venezuela), Marxists will argue "well, that is not true communism."  Somehow they think that communism without heavy-handed exercise of state power is possible.  It is not.

Here is the latest example, from our own peoples' republic in California.  For reasons that are simply beyond me, no one in California wants to use market mechanisms and the power of prices to match supply and demand for water.  We use these market tools successfully in pretty much every other market, but not in water.  The result is that increasingly heavy-handed exercise of government power is necessary to match supply and demand.

Senate Bill 606 establishes a “governing body” to oversee all water suppliers, both private and public and will require extensive paperwork from those utility companies.

Assembly Bill 1668 is where it gets personal.  This establishes limits on indoor water usage for every person in California and the amount allowed will decrease even further over the next 12 years.

The bill, until January 1, 2025, would establish 55 gallons per capita daily as the standard for indoor residential water use, beginning January 1, 2025, would establish the greater of 52.5 gallons per capita daily or a standard recommended by the department and the board as the standard for indoor residential water use, and beginning January 1, 2030, would establish the greater of 50 gallons per capita daily or a standard recommended by the department and the board as the standard for indoor residential water use. The bill would impose civil liability for a violation of an order or regulation issued pursuant to these provisions, as specified.

If you’re wondering how the government would know how much water your family is using, the utility providers will be obligated to rat you out of face massive fines. And they’re encouraged to spy in all sorts of creative ways. They “shall use satellite imagery, site visits, or other best available technology to develop an accurate estimate of landscaped areas.”...

If you don’t plan to comply it’s going to be way cheaper to move. Here are the fines Californians will be looking at – and it’s not a typo – these fines are PER DAY.

(1) If the violation occurs in a critically dry year immediately preceded by two or more consecutive below normal, dry, or critically dry years or during a period for which the Governor has issued a proclamation of a state of emergency under the California Emergency Services Act (Chapter 7 (commencing with Section 8550) of Division 1 of Title 2 of the Government Code) based on drought conditions, ten thousand dollars ($10,000) for each day in which the violation occurs.

(2) For all violations other than those described in paragraph (1), one thousand dollars ($1,000) for each day in which the violation occurs.

All of this could easily be replaced with the simple expedient of allowing the price of water to rise until supply and demand matched, a solution that works for everything else and would provide the added benefit of giving financial incentives to seek out new sources of water.  If they are worried about prices for the poor, then they can have a subsidized rate for the first X gallons and then a market rate above that.  There are at least two reasons I think politicians don't do this, beyond just their socialist assumptions and distrust in markets

1. The people who would most be hurt by market pricing for water -- farmers, golf course/resort owners, etc -- have a lot of political pull in the state and would prefer a regime where high-value uses are curtailed to save water for their potentially lower-value uses.  Just look at the carve-outs in the law for swimming pools, water features, and golf courses.
2. Politicians like rationing, or more accurately they like being the rationers.  You can't generate political contributions from market pricing of water. But if you are the person doing rationing, then everyone is going to come to you and try to curry favor.

The simplest way to explain why Marxism fails is "incentives and information" -- planned economies shift economic decision-making from individuals who have the information and incentives to make the proper tradeoffs for their own set of circumstances and preferences and on to politicians whose main incentive is to see who is willing to do the most to curry favor with them.

On the Dell web site, at the head of a no-export agreement I had to sign:

The U.S. government views exporting as a privilege, not a right.

Of course, my home state of Arizona considers every commercial transaction to be a privilege, not a right.

About 15 years ago, I wrote something I wanted to repeat here just because I keep looking for it and a lot of my old Typepad blog era stuff is hard to find.  The original post is gone but I quoted from it in 2005.

Since 1700, the GDP per capita in places like the US has risen, in real terms, over 40 fold.  This is a real increase in total wealth, created by the human mind.  And it was unleashed because the world began to change in some fundamental ways around 1700 that allowed the human mind to truly flourish.  Among these changes, I will focus on two:

1. There was a philosophical and intellectual change where questioning established beliefs and social patterns went from being heresy and unthinkable to being acceptable, and even in vogue.  In other words, men, at first just the elite but soon everyone, were urged to use their mind rather than just relying on established beliefs
2. There were social and political changes that greatly increased the number of people capable of entrepreneurship.  Before this time, the vast vast majority of people were locked into social positions that allowed them no flexibility to act on a good idea, even if they had one.  By starting to create a large and free middle class, first in the Netherlands and England and then in the US, more people had the ability to use their mind to create new wealth.  Whereas before, perhaps 1% or less of any population really had the freedom to truly act on their ideas, after 1700 many more people began to have this freedom. 

So today's wealth, and everything that goes with it (from shorter work hours to longer life spans) is the result of more people using their minds more freely.

At the time, perhaps to my shame, I had never even heard of Deirdre McCloskey nor her work that has been published in three volumes called the Bourgeois Era explaining what she calls the "great enrichening" (which I am slowly plowing through).  My thinking when I wrote this seems reasonably consistent with her conclusions, though she has obviously been a lot more systematic in thinking about it.  This exchange with Gregory Waymire is a short but quite readable window on her thinking.  She writes in part:

You're adopting a conventional and somewhat silly view that the bourgeoisie were especially diligent, when it is not true as fact and is anyway not the character of the bourgeoisie that
mattered to the Great Enrichment (which by the way was a factor of 30 per capita in countries that fully adopted economic liberalism, not the factor of 10 you quote: look at the passage again, and read slower and longer). Weber sometimes got this right, sometimes wrong. But people tend to read him as saying that higher savings and more diligence, Ben Franklin style (and even Ben did not actually do it), is what made us rich.

One trouble which such a conventional argument is an economic one that Solow-type models (and Smith- and Marx- and Weber- type models) that reduce growth to savings and labor effort are radically mistaken. What matters is human creativity released from ancient trammels....

What made us rich, I argue at no doubt tedious and unreadable length in the Bourgeois Era trilogy, is imagination, ingenuity, radical ideas released. They were released in turn by liberalism, Smith's "liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and legal [justice]."

Despite having a lot of respect for the intellect and the insane eclecticism of its author Tyler Cowen, I have never read the Complacent Class.  The title really did not intrigue me, and frankly from that title probably had the wrong vision of what the book was about.  That is, until I read George Will's recent review, in which he said in part:

In 1800, McCloskey says, the world’s economy was where Bangladesh’s economy now is, with no expectation of change. Today, most of the jobs that existed just a century ago are gone. And we are delighted that this protracted disruption occurred. Now, however, the Great Enrichment is being superseded by the Great Flinch, a recoil against the frictions and uncertainties — the permanent revolution — of economic dynamism. If this continues, the consequences, from increased distributional conflicts to decreased social mobility, are going to be unpleasant.

Although America is said to be — and many Americans are — seething about economic grievances, Tyler Cowen thinks a bigger problem is complacency. In his latest book, “The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream,” Cowen, professor of almost everything (economics, law, literature) at George Mason University and co-author of the Marginal Revolution blog, argues that the complacent class, although a minority, is skillful at entrenching itself in ways detrimental to the majority....

For complacent Americans, a less dynamic, growth-oriented nation seems less like an alarming prospect than a soothing promise of restfulness. In a great testimonial to capitalism’s power, “The Communist Manifesto,” Karl Marx wrote: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.” Complacent, because comfortable, Americans have had enough of that.

Hmm, I suppose I should read it.  I don't want to judge the premise of the book from a few lines of a 3rd party review, but the themes here are strikingly similar to something I wrote 13 years ago (!) on this blog in a post titled "Progressives are too Conservative to Like Capitalism".  I still agree with much, though not all, of what I wrote there so I will pare it down a bit:

Most "progressives" (meaning those on the left to far left who prefer that term) would freak if they were called conservative, but what I mean by conservative in this context is not donate-to-Jesse-Helms capital-C Conservative but fearful of change and uncomfortable with uncertainty conservative.

OK, most of you are looking at this askance - aren't progressives always trying to overthrow the government or something?  Aren't they out starting riots at G7 talks?  The answer is yes, sure, but what motivates many of them, at least where it comes to capitalism, is a deep-seated conservatism.

Before I continue to support this argument, I must say that on a number of issues, particularly related to civil liberties and social issues, I call progressives my allies.  On social issues, progressives, like I do, generally support an individual's right to make decisions for themselves, as long as those decisions don't harm others.

However, when we move to fields such as commerce, progressives stop trusting individual decision-making.  Progressives who support the right to a person making unfettered choices in sexual partners don't trust people to make their own choice on seat belt use.  Progressives who support the right of fifteen year old girls to make decisions about abortion without parental notification do not trust these same girls later in life to make their own investment choices with their Social Security funds.  ... [this would also make a good example:  Progressives oppose school choice because they don't think the poor capable of making good education decisions]

Beyond just the concept of individual decision-making, progressives are hugely uncomfortable with capitalism.  Ironically, though progressives want to posture as being "dynamic", the fact is that capitalism is in fact too dynamic for them.  Industries rise and fall, jobs are won and lost, recessions give way to booms.  Progressives want comfort and certainty.  They want to lock things down the way they are. They want to know that such and such job will be there tomorrow and next decade, and will always pay at least X amount.  That is why, in the end, progressives are all statists, because, to paraphrase Hayek, only a government with totalitarian powers can bring the order and certainty and control of individual decision-making that they crave.

Progressive elements in this country have always tried to freeze commerce, to lock this country's economy down in its then-current patterns.  Progressives in the late 19th century were terrified the American economy was shifting from agriculture to industry.  They wanted to stop this, to cement in place patterns where 80-90% of Americans worked on farms.  I, for one, am glad they failed, since for all of the soft glow we have in this country around our description of the family farmer, farming was and can still be a brutal, dawn to dusk endeavor that never really rewards the work people put into it.

This story of progressives trying to stop history has continued to repeat itself through the generations.  In the seventies and eighties, progressives tried to maintain the traditional dominance of heavy industry like steel and automotive, and to prevent the shift of these industries overseas in favor of more service-oriented industries.  Just like the passing of agriculture to industry a century ago inflamed progressives, so too does the current passing of heavy industry to services.

In fact, here is a sure fire test for a progressive.  If given a choice between two worlds:

1. A capitalist society where the overall levels of wealth and technology continue to increase, though in a pattern that is dynamic, chaotic, generally unpredictable, and whose rewards are unevenly distributed, or...
2. A "progressive" society where everyone is poorer, but income is generally more evenly distributed.  In this society, jobs and pay and industries change only very slowly, and people have good assurances that they will continue to have what they have today, with little downside but also with very little upside.

Progressives will choose #2.  Even if it means everyone is poorer.  Even if it cuts off any future improvements we might gain in technology or wealth or lifespan or whatever.  They want to take what we have today, divide it up more equally, and then live to eternity with just that.   Progressives want #2 today, and they wanted it just as much in 1900 (just think about if they had been successful -- as just one example, if you are over 44, you would have a 50/50 chance of being dead now).

Don't believe that this is what they would answer?  Well, first, this question has been asked and answered a number of times in surveys, and it always comes out this way.  Second, just look at any policy issue today.  Take prescription drugs in the US - isn't it pretty clear that the progressive position is that they would be willing to pretty much gut incentives for any future drug innovations in trade for having a system in place that guaranteed everyone minimum access to what exists today?  Or take the welfare state in Continental Europe -- isn't it clear that a generation of workers/voters chose certainty over growth and improvement?  That workers 30 years ago voted themselves jobs for life, but at the cost of tremendous unemployment amongst the succeeding generations?

Today, we spend a lot of time trying to understand the roots of poverty.  This was not so 200 years ago.  When Adam Smith wrote "The Wealth of Nations" his task was to explain why a very few nations at the time seemed to be getting wealthier.  Poverty at the time and through most of history was accepted as the norm.  Only the advent of free inquiry and (relatively) free markets has changed that norm.

I have disputed the meme in the post's title on many occasions.  For example:

• No person running any government agency has access to the same information that millions of individuals might have in making decisions for themselves
• No person running any government agency can create an optimal solution, because millions of citizens all have different values and make different tradeoffs, so an optimum for one is not going to be an optimum for many others
• No person running any government agency has the right incentives to make good decisions.  They will always optimize for increasing the size and scope of their organization and signaling virtue over actually being virtuous.

But researchers have found yet another reason:  power causes brain damage

A spate of recent articles corroborate what I already suspected, that holding elected office is the neurological equivalent of getting kicked in the head by a donkey.

"Subjects under the influence of power," Dacher Keltner, a professor atUniversity of California, Berkeleyfound, "acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people's point of view."

In other words, power turns people into sociopaths.

This isn't a huge surprise to the vast majority of us who rant about power on election day and every day afterward. Republicans and Democrats want power and scramble for it, like a football. Classical liberals see power more like Frodo's ring—a corrupting influence better chucked into a volcano. In light of recent studies we ought to consider it a bit more like a concussion.

Keltner, brought into the public spotlight through a recent piece in The Atlantic, likens the accruing of power to actual brain trauma: "My own research has found that people with power tend to behave like patients who have damaged their brain's orbitofrontal lobes (the region of the frontal lobes right behind the eye sockets), a condition that seems to cause overly impulsive and insensitive behavior. Thus the experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially-appropriate behavior."

One of the themes of Nancy Maclean's new book on James Buchanan as the evil genius behind a conspiracy to unravel democracy in this county.  In critiquing her critique, I meant to also make it clear that whatever Buchanan may have believed on the subject, I am certainly skeptical of pure majoritarian democracy.  For me, protection of individual rights is the role of government, and populist majoritarianism can easily conflict with this goal (this is not a new finding, we pretty much figured this out after Julius Caesar, if not before.  Here was a piece I wrote years ago I will repeat here:

Every Memorial Day, I am assaulted with various quotes from people thanking the military for fighting and dying for our right to vote.  I would bet that a depressing number of people in this country, when asked what their most important freedom was, or what made America great, would answer "the right to vote."

Now, don't get me wrong, the right to vote in a representative democracy is great and has proven a moderately effective (but not perfect) check on creeping statism.  A democracy, however, in and of itself can still be tyrannical.  After all, Hitler was voted into power in Germany, and without checks, majorities in a democracy would be free to vote away anything it wanted from the minority - their property, their liberty, even their life.   Even in the US, majorities vote to curtail the rights of minorities all the time, even when those minorities are not impinging on anyone else.  In the US today, 51% of the population have voted to take money and property of the other 49%.

In my mind, there are at least three founding principles of the United States that are far more important than the right to vote:

• The Rule of Law. For about 99% of human history, political power has been exercised at the unchecked capricious whim of a few individuals.  The great innovation of western countries like the US, and before it England and the Netherlands, has been to subjugate the power of individuals to the rule of law.  Criminal justice, adjudication of disputes, contracts, etc. all operate based on a set of laws known to all in advance.

Today the rule of law actually faces a number of threats in this country.  One of the most important aspects of the rule of law is that legality (and illegality) can be objectively determined in a repeatable manner from written and well-understood rules.  Unfortunately, the massive regulatory and tax code structure in this country have created a set of rules that are subject to change and interpretation constantly at the whim of the regulatory body.  Every day, hundreds of people and companies find themselves facing penalties due to an arbitrary interpretation of obscure regulations (examples I have seen personally here).

• Sanctity and Protection of Individual Rights.  Laws, though, can be changed.  In a democracy, with a strong rule of law, we could still legally pass a law that said, say, that no one is allowed to criticize or hurt the feelings of a white person.  What prevents such laws from getting passed (except at major universities) is a protection of freedom of speech, or, more broadly, a recognition that individuals have certain rights that no law or vote may take away.  These rights are typically outlined in a Constitution, but are not worth the paper they are written on unless a society has the desire and will, not to mention the political processes in place, to protect these rights and make the Constitution real.

Today, even in the US, we do a pretty mixed job of protecting individual rights, strongly protecting some (like free speech) while letting others, such as property rights or freedom of association, slide.

• Government is our servant.  The central, really very new concept on which this country was founded is that an individual's rights do not flow from government, but are inherent to man.  That government in fact only makes sense to the extent that it is our servant in the defense of our rights, rather than as the vessel from which these rights grudgingly flow.

Statists of all stripes have tried to challenge this assumption over the last 100 years.   While their exact details have varied, every statist has tried to create some larger entity to which the individual should be subjugated:  the Proletariat, the common good, God, the master race.  They all hold in common that the government's job is to sacrifice one group to another.  A common approach among modern statists is to create a myriad of new non-rights to dilute and replace our fundamental rights as individuals.  These new non-rights, such as the "right" to health care, a job, education, or even recreation, for god sakes, are meaningless in a free society, as they can't exist unless one person is harnessed involuntarily to provide them to another person. These non-rights are the exact opposite of freedom, and in fact require enslavement and sacrifice of one group to another.

I will add that pretty much everyone, including likely Ms. Maclean, opposes majoritarian rule on many issues.  People's fear of dis-empowering the majority tends to be situational on individual issues.

Sent to me by a long-time reader.

A reader sends me this (I never can remember which folks say its OK to use names -- if you want me to credit you, please say its OK in your email).

"The politician creates a powerful, huge, heavy, and unstoppable Monster Truck of a government," P.J. O'Rourke writes in his new book, How the Hell Did This Happen? (Atlantic Monthly Press). "Then supporters of that politician become shocked and weepy when another politician, whom they detest, gets behind the wheel, turns the truck around, and runs them over."

Which sounds like what I have written for years, eg here

Technocratic idealists ALWAYS lose control of the game.  It may feel good at first when the trains start running on time, but the technocrats are soon swept away by the thugs, and the patina of idealism is swept away, and only fascism is left.  Interestingly, the technocrats always cry "our only mistake was letting those other guys take control".  No, the mistake was accepting the right to use force on another man.  Everything after that was inevitable.