The Danger Of A Successful Society: Absurdity

I spend a lot of time talking about how western civilization – in particular as driven by the United States – is easily the greatest that mankind has yet created.  If one looks at it objectively, it’s not even close.  The list of things that are part of the everyday life of people around the world is basically a list of things that were invented or developed in the west.  From cars to planes to advanced agriculture to elevators to plastic and mobile phones and computers and DNA and much, much more. 

But every now and then something happens that makes me question that.  A couple of years ago I watched Matt Walsh’s “What is a Woman” where he spends most of the movie talking to leftists and doctors trying to get a definitive answer to the question of the title.  Most of the time he’s unsuccessful.  The most interesting part of the movie however didn’t take place at a feminist conference or in a studio, but rather in Africa when he was speaking with Maasai tribesmen.  When asked a simple question about whether a man can become a woman, he was quickly given a definitive “No”.  Straightforward, no debate, no hedging. Essentially 180 degrees from the insanity that Matt encountered in the United States.

This was brought back to me last week when reading about Justice Thomas’ destruction of the “expert class” in Skrmetti.  The Justice took direct aim at the notion that Americans must ignore their common sense, relinquish their lives and give up their Constitutional rights to those the elites have pronounced as “experts”.  As we all learned during COVID, with the Hunter Biden letter, and have been seeing with climate scares for decades, “experts” are rarely that, and often are simply shills for this or that monied interest. 

Justice Thomas stated clearly that the government can no longer use such “experts” to manipulate and control the lives of citizens.  Although the specific case had to do with the butchering or harming confused or coerced minors, it applies everywhere else as well.

Which is a very good thing. Because there’s a danger in success – as in a successful civilization.  It breeds complacency, entitlement and most importantly, the loss of a functional memory of how things work and how they became successful in the first place… which leads to an over reliance on “experts”. 

I frequently mention Cyrus McCormick as the man most responsible for the rapid advance of western civilization.  Of course people can argue that others, like Isaac Newton, Jethro Tull, James Watt, J.D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford or any number of others could wear that badge.  I choose to award it to McCormick because he almost single handedly helped 85% of Americans and substantial numbers of others around the world, escape the farm.  Not that there’s anything wrong with farming, obviously, but because of the efficiencies McCormick brought about, 95% of Americans work at something other than farming while in his day that number was in the mid-teens.

So basically he freed up 80% of the nation to go out and be everything from baseball players to scientists to doctors to entrepreneurs to inventors to, sadly, social media “influencers”.  It’s basically division of labor on steroids, where people focus on what they want to do, are good at, or can make a living at, while paying others do the things they can’t or don’t want to do.

That works well when the choices of options are shoemaker, baker, blacksmith, farmer, soldier, etc., i.e. things society actually needs.  It even works when options include things that society wants, like literature or sport or art.  Baseball may not be as critical to the continuation of society as say, electricity generation or infrastructure maintenance, but there’s a demand and people are willing to work for money to pay for it out of their own pockets.

Where it breaks down is when options include things that no one actually wants or needs, yet they get produced nonetheless, or get produced in quantities that make no sense. Things like gender studies graduates, therapists and lawyers. Shakespeare talked about lawyers (as a bulwark against the masses) so we don’t need to.

The fact that gender studies even exist in the first place tells you how far America has moved from the fundamentals of a successful society.  In a normal, functioning universe such things wouldn’t even exist.  While one can at least make an argument that being gay is at least theoretically natural – if still deviant – a universe where men are women, women are men and the difference between the two is “fluid” is a fiction created by people who have too much time on their hands and no connection to how the real world functions.  We’ve strayed so far from the time when 85% of the people worked on farms and did things that actually helped society that we now have people who create an illusion and then set about trying to force society to accept it as normal. 

Another example of this a disconnect between actual demand and supply is therapists. Before the late 19^th century therapists didn’t exist. (Well, they sort of did, but they were your friends.) Today tens of millions of Americans go to “therapists”, mostly women, and white women at that.   Essentially 40% of white women receive mental health treatment in the form of anti-depressants and or therapy.  If you look deeper you’ll see that the numbers skew towards college educated, as in liberal, white women.  Has our ostensibly successful society somehow become so bad that fully 40% of the women of the majority population are now sufficiently damaged that they need mental health treatment? Or are they suffering from a mass psychosis of grievance and guilt created by people being too prosperous and having too much time and money on their hands?  They say that idleness is the devil’s workshop and there is perhaps no better example of the truth than that. While there are certainly people who are in need of mental help, the fact that 40% of any ostensibly normal demographic needs either anti-depressants or therapy is absurd. 

But that’s what happens when society veers so far from the fundamentals of society and common sense that many see a future in pursuing nonsensical fields like gender studies, political science (my major…) and countless others where there is no real demand in society beyond that generated by government fiat. More importantly, without the individual feeling of accomplishment that goes with doing something that actually benefits society, not the least of which is raising good children, people create the absurd in order to fill the void, and then demand society congratulate them for their “courage”.   

Thankfully, we may slowly be coming to the point where the larger society recognizes that absurdity is no longer acceptable, or worse, compelled.  Justice Thomas and Matt Walsh are actually addressing the same thing. Common sense should have to be discarded just because “experts” say it must.

The world is a challenging place with dangers of all sorts around every corner, the sooner America gets back to being a place ruled by common sense rather than absurdity, the better we will be prepared to deal with them…

The Downside of Prosperity - Too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious

I’ve always been a fan of the prosperity created by Western civilization in general and the United States in particular. Indeed, I even created a website called Gratitude for America, where I write about American entrepreneurs who invented things like barbed wire and standardized shipping containers. But maybe there’s a downside to this prosperity because we’ve created a class of people (especially in government) completely disconnected from how the world actually works.

Cyrus McCormick, who invented the mechanical reaper, is the most important entrepreneur in human history. He basically untethered mankind from farming, one of the most dangerous occupations on earth. In 1831, when he invented the mechanical reaper, approximately 80% of the American population was involved in agriculture, and, in most places in the world, it was higher—in some cases, 95%.

Back then, farming’s efficiency hadn’t changed much since the time of the pyramids. A man, using a scythe, could harvest approximately one acre of grain a day. Fifty years later, McCormick guaranteed that, by using his machine, a farmer could harvest 15 acres a day. With today’s machines, a farmer can harvest up to 100 acres in a day. Small wonder that only 3% of the US population today farms.

The reason McCormick is so important is not because of farming, per se, but because he freed up most of the population to go out and do other, less dangerous things. With that shift, work-life expectancies began to skyrocket in the latter half of the 19th century. In 1800, the average life expectancy was approximately 30 years, with Europe averaging 33 and the US close behind. By 1900, the world average had increased to 32, but in Europe it had jumped to 43 and in the US to 47.

Since they didn’t have to be on farms, people became inventors, entrepreneurs, and innovators. During the late 19th century, countless inventions (e.g., usable electricity, automobiles, and the telegraph) and innovations (e.g., drilling for oil, railroad expansion, and the widespread adoption of the assembly line) changed the Western world. Food became more abundant, transportation became easier and safer, housing became cheaper, and medicine began to improve.

In the 20th century, things really took off. Today, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, world life expectancy is 72 years, while in the US, it’s 78, and in Western Europe, it’s above 80.

Not only are we living longer, but we’re also prosperous beyond anything in human history. Our food is more varied, dependable, and plentiful than ever. We have transportation, hospitalization, housing, employment, clothing, education, sanitation, entertainment, and leisure opportunities exponentially beyond anything in all of human history.

Contrast all of that with what humanity endured through most of our history. Poverty and scarcity were the norm. Food availability was always an issue. War was almost constant. Work was dangerous. Slavery was everywhere. Many worked seven days a week, changing clothes was rare if at all, people rarely bathed, virtually everyone was illiterate, plumbing didn’t exist, disease was rampant, shelter was overcrowded, heating in the winter was from burning wood or dung if either could be found, infant mortality was stratospheric, and leisure was a luxury only the elites could afford.

The average Westerner’s life is far superior to any experienced by 99.999% of the people who ever lived, but, somehow, everyone today is a victim—and we know that everyone is a victim because the elites tell us so. Through schools, media, and government, we’re told that Western culture is racist, sexist, fascist, or somehow otherwise oppressive. Basically, the better things get, the worse they get.

America today reminds me of a Jetsons episode I saw as a child. George Jetson, the father of the “Space-aged family,” came home one day exhausted from working at Spacely Sprockets and said, “Jane, these one-hour-a-week workweeks are brutal.” No doubt we’d be told he’s still a victim.

The reason those elites, the ones who seek to manipulate the public, get away with it is because a significant portion of the population believes them. And they believe them because of the division of labor-driven prosperity that McCormick unleashed.

Virtually the entire left in this country has zero connection with anything having to do with creating anything, growing anything, building anything, or risking anything. They spend their days pushing paper in offices or selling cappuccinos, if they work at all. Not only are few of them farmers, but few are truckers, lumberjacks, steel workers, plumbers, electricians, or entrepreneurs. Few have ever had to balance paying a credit card bill versus making payroll. Few ever risked their money and invested sweat equity to start a business.

The left today is largely government employees, students, college-educated white women working inside large corporations, Wall Street, academia, the cabal of NGOs, the media, the 40 million who suckle on the government teat through programs like SNAP, and the 47% of the country who either pay no tax or get “refundable tax credits”.

Few of those people do anything remotely productive for the economy. Few understand that the government doesn’t have money beyond what it takes from taxpayers or prints via taxpayer IOUs. They have no appreciation for Capitalism, the thing that gave us our prosperity. They flush the toilets and expect them to work, flip the light switch and expect the room to illuminate, and go to the store to pick up a pound of beef without knowing how it gets there. Few of them have any real connection to the basic functionality of life.

The result of this societal bifurcation is that half of our population has little understanding of or vested interest in the country’s or the economy’s continued functioning. More regulations and higher taxes are always the answer because none of them are affected. Regulations make it harder to open a business or keep one running, but they’re easy promises for politicians to offer as the solution to every problem because their voters never pay the price for the consequences.

We’re living in the world Ayn Rand envisioned in Atlas Shrugged. Everything we see going on in our cities, on our streets, and on our border is so because the division of labor has allowed so many people to bask in prosperity without having a clue about how it’s actually created or what’s necessary to maintain it. Their checks come, their jobs are secure, and they don’t have to deal with the government’s suffocating regulations, so everything is good.

Of course, it’s not good, and things are getting worse. Thomas Jefferson understood the problem, saying in 1824: “I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” That is 2024 incarnate.

This needs to be fixed. How we do that, I’m not quite sure, but, at a minimum, we need to slash government spending and regulations at every level. Perhaps only those who pay taxes should vote. Perhaps government employees should not be allowed to vote. Maybe we make election day the day after Tax Day. Whatever the solution, until those voting have some vested interest in a well-run government and a functioning economy, things will only get worse, and they’re already pretty bad.  

 

Barack Obama cracks the foundation of American success: Trust

One of the beauties of a free society, particularly one built on the rule of law, free markets and individual liberty is that people are often free to pursue things that are simply not possible elsewhere. Entrepreneurship in the United States thrives like it does in no other place. From restaurants that let you choose how you want your food cooked to more cable channels than your cable box can handle to the frivolity of branded apparel and Christmas antlers, the United States is a study in the science of the division of labor.

Over the course of our American history, the division of labor has grown ever more important. While 150 years ago most people would have hunted or grown their own food, built their own houses and made their own clothes, today virtually none of us do any of those things. That’s because of the division of labor. We have come to depend on one another to do what we do best. Whether as individuals or as cogs in the wheel of a corporate machine, the division of labor allows us to live far richer lives than we ever could if we had to do everything for ourselves.

A key element of that reliance on the division of labor is trust. I will only purchase food from a vendor if I am confident they are not going to poison me. I will only fly with an airline if I’m confident they are sufficiently attending to safety that the plane will not crash. I will only allow a doctor to operate on me if I trust him not to come to work drunk and kill me.

So too it is with the government of free nations. The United States is one of, if not the most free country in the world when it comes to speech – except for college campuses of course. Citizens have put their trust in the Constitution and the government it created. It is that trust that allows them to go about that making widgets or doing whatever they do. They trust and expect – perhaps foolishly – that their elected officials will at least run the government with objectivity and honesty if not with competency and efficiency. Because the citizens trust the public servants to enforce laws and do so with detachment, the citizens themselves don’t have to enforce them or scrutinize official’s every move.

A complementary element of that trust in government is the First Amendment’s protection of the Freedom of Speech. A trust that you can speak your mind and the government will not penalize you for it. Nowhere else in the world is freedom of speech protected like it is here. Try standing on a street corner in Saudi Arabia and badmouthing the Koran. Try speaking out against the government in Russia or Venezuela. Insult some protected group in Canada or Europe and you’ll likely find yourself in court or shackles.

Free speech, particularly as it relates to opposition of government officials is as American as apple pie. Despite the vile and contemptible things said about him with great regularity and impunity, George Bush was hardly the first president to feel the sting of slings and arrows – John Adams and Thomas Jefferson also withered viscous storms of opposition – but he may end up being one of the last. And America will be much worse off for it. Why? Because Barack Obama has succeeded in destroying the trust the American people have in their government.

President Obama’s use of the IRS to tilt the election playing field in his direction is repugnant to everything Americans hold dear. Americans don’t mind a spirited fight, and even expect minor examples of local irregularities, after all, you can’t expect an election where over 100 million people vote to come off without a hitch.

Barack Obama however has done something that no American can condone. As he was getting ready to have his rear end handed to him in 2010 Congressional elections, he decided to use the police power of the government to ensure that he would be victorious two years later.

Of course he was not so transparent as to send in New Black Panther party stormtroopers to “encourage” voters into pulling the Obama lever. No, instead he clandestinely used what is possibly the single most intimidating organization in the United States, the IRS. To be clear, the IRS is far from an efficient bureaucracy, but there is a difference between a dysfunctional tax code and a tax enforcement agency that is explicitly political. This is the latter: not only did his IRS delay or refuse tax exempt status for 500 tea party and conservative organizations across the country, the agency also targeted conservatives and Romney donors for intense scrutiny and public backlash.

Barack Obama won election by a total of over 6 million votes – 5 million of which came from California and New York alone. The election would have gone the other way however if just three states had changed from blue to red: Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Together they cast 19.7 million votes and Barack Obama won the three by a total of 550,000 votes. Not coincidentally, the epicenter of the IRS scandal was Cincinnati Ohio.

To put the magnitude of this malfeasance in perspective, had each of those 500 organizations swayed a mere 500 citizens each in either Florida, Ohio or Pennsylvania, Barack Obama would have lost the election. But they were not able to do so because the IRS violated the public trust by becoming an extension of the Obama campaign. How many other organizations never formed because conservatives could see the writing on the wall and were not willing to jump through hoops just to be stonewalled? How much money was not donated to these organizations and others because donors feared for their livelihoods?

Whether Obama directed this travesty himself, or he merely pointed out the targets for others to harass, he is responsible for the destruction of the American trust. By turning the IRS into the arm of a police state, where one’s associations, donations, speeches and friends are scrutinized in order to stifle dissent and harm your business, he has undermined the single most important element of American society: Trust.

Americans have always looked at the actions of government with a critical and often partisan eye, but for the most part they have bought into the idea that whether it’s the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Education or even the IRS, most of government is run in a largely objective, if often inept, fashion. By using the IRS to intimidate opponents and guarantee himself a second term, Barack Obama has opened a fissure in the American body politic. One wonders how big it will grow and whether the republic can survive. If citizens begin to see the IRS as a thought police, they will begin hiding income and cheating on their taxes, rationalizing that they will be unfairly targeted regardless. And it won’t be limited to the IRS. If citizens begin to believe that the Justice Department is but the enforcement arm of whoever is in power they may begin to react differently when targeted. If citizens believe that the EPA or the Department of Energy have become political vehicles for the reward of friends or the restraint of enemies of the regime in power, they are likely to begin to disregard their rules or edicts.

At the end of the day a free society depends on the willing trust and voluntary participation of the citizens. Barack Obama has broken that trust in a big way. The question is, can the fissure be repaired so that citizens remain willing to openly engage in political debate rather than scheme under the cover of darkness with designs on upending a system they feel is no longer fair? The country survived a relative vaudvillesque version of this scandal forty years ago that ended up in a president’s resignation. Before that FDR, JFK and LBJ were experts at using the agency to pressure opponents, but their misdeeds rarely saw the light of day thanks to a servile press happy to carry their water. Barack Obama isn’t so lucky however and thanks to the Internet and a conservative press his crimes are difficult to deny, even for the blindest of followers. Whether he serves out his term or not, Barack Obama should be seen as the pernicious narcissist he is who sacrificed the public trust for his own self-aggrandizement. For anyone who has been paying attention, none of this is a surprise.

A high IQ and a Harvard degree do not necessarily equal smart...

As the American frontier was being settled, it was not uncommon for a man to be a jack of all trades and perhaps a master of none. Often a settler would have to clear his own land, build his house, hunt and grow his family’s food as well as provide protection of life and property. Frontiersmen (and their families) were, for the most part, self sufficient. That didn’t mean they were not part of a community that often provided support in times of need. Quite the contrary, but at the end of the day people understood that they were responsible for most of the things that needed to be done in their lives.

When the industrial revolution took hold and Cyrus McCormick freed the population from the yoke of the farm, the division of labor took off took off and with it the upward march of the American standard of living.

Today, division of labor is all around us. We have scientists, doctors, computer programmers, real estate agents, policemen, accountants, and hundreds if not thousands of other specialized occupations. And it’s not just occupations; it’s the basic parts of life: Someone else brings our food to the store or our order to our table, builds our cars, ensures we have clean water, generates our power, drycleans our suits, babysits our kids and invests our money.

Today we are the opposite of the frontiersmen, we are Jacks of few trades and (maybe) masters of one. Basically, Americans have outsourced much of their daily lives to others… and I don’t mean to China. They focus on what they do well, or at least what they do, and leave the rest to others. As a nation and as individuals, we are far more prosperous as a result.

The problem however, is that as Americans spend so much time focused on their siloed lives, they have outsourced their political fate to others. As a result the government has grown virtually unchecked for half a century and today the borg of government is the single most powerful player in the life of every American citizen. What’s worse, not only have they allowed the government to grow into a leviathan, but they have also outsourced the selection of that government to campaign managers who run slick campaigns showcasing vapid politicians who speak in platitudes and make empty promises. Or to a media that largely marches in lockstep as it challenges a hated conservative or deifies the candidate of its choice.

Today we have the logical conclusion of the American outsourcing of its political will. We have someone running the American government – and using it to try and micromanage the economy and the lives of every citizen – who is literally clueless on the most basic elements of economics. How is that possible?

Strangely, American voters have done in politics something they would never do in their own lives. Your uncle may be the best accountant in the world, but you’re unlikely to let him take out your child’s appendix. Your brother may be the best basketball coach on the planet, but you are not going to let him manage your 401K. Why then would Americans allow someone with few discernable skills beyond engaging an audience to run their government?

Barack Obama was a law professor, a rabble rousing community organizer and a 1/3 term US Senator. What in that CV indicates he is even remotely prepared to successfully navigate an organization that spends $3 trillion a year and impacts the life of every single American, every day? So he gets people excited at rallies and promises hope and change… Were Americans really that stupid? Yes. And it’s not just the average Joe. Most of Silicon Valley’s money goes to Democrats and went to Barack Obama. These guys, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergi Bren and the rest are pretty smart. What gives?

Because they mistake high IQ with smart, or in this case, a Harvard pedigree with someone equipped to run the country. While the two may overlap, they are not synonymous. Jimmy Carter may have had the highest IQ amongst modern presidents, and we all know how that turned out.

A voluntary division of labor is a compact. Everyone does what they do best and everyone wins. That compact only works if the civic framework that keeps it viable and voluntary survives. That framework is on its last legs. President Obama’s government wants to tell you who can provide your healthcare, where companies can locate their plants, how property owners can use their land and how much you can earn before the government confiscates most of your income. How far a stretch would it be for them to decide what job you are best qualified for and then streamline (or steamroll) you into it?

Americans need to step back from their televisions and for the first time in two generations remember the basic notion of what a presidential election is about. It’s about two things: Who will run the federal government and what should that government do.

A vote for a president is not like a vote for homecoming king. It’s not a popularity contest. It’s a vote for how much they want the federal government messing around in their lives.

At the end of the day a voter should concern themselves with a candidate’s philosophy – how he or she sees the role government in the lives of its citizens – and their track record of leading an organization. Throw in a candidate’s integrity and those two things will tell a voter everything they need to know about a presidential hopeful. They will tell a voter what a candidate wants to do and how likely they are to accomplish it.

If Americans want to continue enjoying the economic and social benefits provided by a division of labor, where they have the luxury of focusing on things they love or are skilled at, they had better figure out how to rein in government. In 2012 they will have that opportunity. Between Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich they have three candidates who are less than perfect, but who philosophically all share the goal of shrinking the government and promoting individual responsibility. That’s half the battle right there.