A minor matter of usage.

Some news sources report that Queen Elizabeth met with every U.S. president since Harry Truman, with the exception of Lyndon Johnson.

Inasmuch as Elizabeth met with Truman, it should be said that she met with every U.S. president since FDR, with the exception of LBJ. That’s because since refers to the period of time after a specified event.

But it takes too much thought on the part of history-challenged Americans to conjure the meaning of the Queen’s having met with every U.S. president since FDR, with the exception of LBJ.

Therefore, one of these correct and computable statements will have to do:

• The Queen met with every U.S. president since FDR, with the exception of LBJ.

• The Queen met with Truman and every subsequent president, with the exception of LBJ.

• The Queen met with 13 U.S. presidents, from Truman to Biden, with the exception of LBJ.

Why didn’t the Queen meet with LBJ? There’s a lot of speculation about that. My guess is that she didn’t especially want to meet the man, and rightly considered Princess Margaret to have been an adequate surrogate.

In “Ghosts of Christmases Past” I recall family gatherings of long ago. “The Passing of Red Brick Schoolhouses and a Way of Life” laments the passing of the schoolhouses of my childhood, along with the innocence that was once a hallmark of non-urban America.

I was reminded of those trips into the past by a post at The Federalist by Nathaniel Blake, “What Good Is Cheaper Stuff If It Comes At The Expense Of Community?”. It prompted me to recall the long-vanished locally-owned businesses that provided groceries, meat, sundries, haircuts, baked goods, hobby supplies, and more. The owners worked in their stores. They knew you, and you knew them. Many of them were neighbors. Their livelihoods depended not only on providing products and services at prices that saved you a trip to the big city — but on their friendliness and reputation for honesty.

Of the many stores of that ilk that I remember from kindergarten until I went to college — 64 to 77 years ago — only one is still in business. It’s even at the same location, though in a new building, and it doesn’t carry the range of hobby supplies (e.g., model kits and collectible stamps) that it did when I shopped there in the 1950s.

Here are the sites as they look now (or looked recently), arrayed roughly in the order in which I first saw them (* indicates original building):

Grocery store and gas station*

Dairy store

Grocery store

Bakery

Grocery store and news stand

Grocery store with ice house in back

Meat market*

Meat market

Grocery store

Barber shop (left)* – Grocery store (right)*

Bakery (and owners’ residence)*

Grocery store (and owners’ residence)*

Grocery store

Hobby store*

Hobby store

Grocery store

Grocery store*

Barber shop – Drugstore (two separate buildings)

Grocery store

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From Cerdic to Charles III

I have updated the post (here) in which I trace the succession of the monarchs of Wessex, England, and the United Kingdom from Cerdic (r. 519-534) to Charles III (r. 2022- ).

The masses aren’t revolting.

Biden’s infamous speech on September 1, in which he derided and defamed half of the electorate, was received poorly by Republicans and independents. It was even given bad marks by a significant minority of Democrats. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that Biden’s standing in the Rasmussen Reports Presidential Tracking Poll hasn’t budged since the morning of the day on which Biden spoke. I am unaware of any development that might have offset the reaction to Biden’s speech.

I can only conclude that most voters are really indifferent to the aim of the speech: to endorse and encourage the shaming, shunning, and suppression of anyone who utters any kind of disagreement with leftist wokeism.

Indifference to fascism enables the tightening of its grip on nation.

For the victims of Cleotha Abston and his ilk.

Cleotha Abston, as you must know by now, is the “suspected” murdere of Eliza Fletcher. It is a sign of the times that as I publish this post neither name appears in a search of Wikipedia, that leftist propaganda outlet. Eventually, Wikipedia will publish something about Abston’s abominable record and heinous crimes, but with due reference to his “underprivileged” background, or some such horse***.

Paul Compos, writing at The New Republic some years ago, celebrated “The American Justice System at Its Best“:

[I]t’s reasonable to argue that the acquittal of Casey Anthony … represent[s] … the system working as it should. But accepting that argument requires acknowledging deep imperfections that our legal system must tolerate, even when it does exactly what it’s supposed to do.

The most disturbing of these inevitable imperfections is a product of our supposed commitment to the principle that we prefer a large number—whether it’s 10, 50, or 100, the precise number is never clearly stated—of guilty people going free to the conviction of an innocent defendant. That is the practical significance of requiring the state to prove guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt”—a standard that, interestingly, the system always avoids defining in any but the most general, non-statistical terms….

[In Anthony’s case] The state proved beyond a reasonable doubt that a two-year-old child was murdered, and that her mother was, at the least, a deeply irresponsible parent with a propensity to lie to authorities. The prosecution also demonstrated, in my view, that it is far more likely than not that Anthony committed the crime. But I also believe the jury’s verdict was correct….

The case against Anthony was largely circumstantial, buttressed by arguably—yet only arguably—strong forensic evidence. But the prosecution was hampered by its inability to provide a compelling narrative explaining either how Caylee Anthony was killed or why her mother purportedly murdered her. This failure was not, as far as we know, a product of prosecutorial incompetence. The hard truth is that it is extremely difficult to successfully prosecute a murder under these kinds of circumstances—and the harder truth is that we are supposedly committed to the principle that this is, on the whole, a good thing.

“We”, if you include me and millions of others, are certainly not committed to the principle to which Compos refers. That principle is stated in the dictum of the influential English jurist, William Blackstone:

Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

“n” — the number of guilty persons — has increased since the late 1700s, when Blackstone wrote.

Alexander “Sasha” Volokh offers some useful perspective:

Charles Dickens generously endorsed a value of n = “hundreds” for capital cases, and not just “that hundreds of guilty persons should escape,” but that they should escape “scot-free.” 99 Dickens was, in fact, so generous that hundreds of guilty persons escaping scot-free was not only better than one innocent person suffering — it was even better “than that the possibility of any innocent man or woman having been sacrificed, should present itself, with the least appearance of reason, to the minds of any class of men!” 100….

Of course, such blithe invocation could easily lead too far down the road to “inconsiderate folly” and “pestiferous nonsense.” As one author noted, there is “nothing so dangerous as a maxim”: 107

Better that any number of savings-banks be robbed than that one innocent person be condemned as a burglar! Better that any number of innocent men, women, and children should be waylaid, robbed, ravished, and murdered by wicked, wilful, and depraved malefactors, than that one innocent person should be convicted and punished for the perpetration of one of this infinite multitude of crimes, by an intelligent and well-meaning though mistaken court and jury! Better any amount of crime than one mistake in well-meant endeavors to suppress or prevent it! 108….

Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism, warned against the warm fuzzy feeling that comes from large values of n:

We must be on guard against those sentimental exaggerations which tend to give crime impunity, under the pretext of insuring the safety of innocence. Public applause has been, so to speak, set up to auction. At first it was said to be better to save several guilty men, than to condemn a single innocent man; others, to make the maxim more striking, fix the number ten; a third made this ten a hundred, and a fourth made it a thousand. All these candidates for the prize of humanity have been outstripped by I know not how many writers, who hold, that, in no case, ought an accused person to be condemned, unless evidence amount to mathematical or absolute certainty. According to this maxim, nobody ought to be punished, lest an innocent man be punished. 128 ….

James Fitzjames Stephen suggested that Blackstone’s maxim

resembles a suggestion that soldiers should be armed with bad guns because it is better that they should miss ten enemies than that they should hit one friend. . . . Everything depends on what the guilty men have been doing, and something depends on the way in which the innocent man came to be suspected. 134….

The story is told of a Chinese law professor, who was listening to a British lawyer explain that Britons were so enlightened, they believed it was better that ninety-nine guilty men go free than that one innocent man be executed. The Chinese professor thought for a second and asked, “Better for whom?” 238

That is the question: Better for whom?

It is certainly better for the guilty, who may go on to claim more victims. But it certainly is not better for those new victims.

A pox on Blackstone and his modern descedants.

Be careful what you wish for.

William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is quoted often these days, especially the line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. And with good reason, given the maelstrom of strife and lunacy in which the nation and the world seem to be swirling.

Science and mathematics are in the grip of irrational forces — the academic-media-information technology-corporate élites who have swallowed “wokeness” hook, line, and sinker. The same élites are responsible for the wholesale violation of immigration laws; the advancement of shiftless, violent, and less-intelligent citizens (and non-citizens) at the expense of blameless others; the risible belief that one’s sex is “assigned at birth”, to justify self-destructive and child-destructive gender-shifting; the repudiation of America’s past (the great with the inglorious); the suppression or destruction of the religious, social, and economic freedoms that have served all Americans well; the blatant theft of a presidential election; and much more that is equally distressing to contemplate.

Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, in the aftermath of what was then the world’s most destructive war and in the midst of the pandemic known as the Spanish flu, which was far more lethal than the one of recent years that was prolonged and made more destructive by government actors in league with the information-media comples. It was a time of moral and physical exhaustion.

What is most remarkable about Yeats’s poem is its prescient second stanza:

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And thus did those “rough beasts” Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese warlords — all “men on horseback” — emerge to take advantage of the moral and physical exhaustion of the time.

No such person is now on the horizon in America, though the élites feared that Trump might be that man. But if the maelstrom continues to swirl, a man on horseback will emerge, either from within or from without. In the latter case, given the feckless leadership in America, the man on horseback is likely to ride out of China, perhaps accompanied by a Russian.

And given a choice between a man or horseback and the élites who have corrupted America and who pamper the rabble, the man on horseback will be welcomed with open arms by those who are suffering at the hands of the élites. And the élites themselves will accept the inevitable, in the vain hope of surviving the whirlwind that they have sown.

All the more reason for a national divorce, to separate at least part of the country from élite control, to give predators within their just desserts, and to raise arms against predators without.

It can be complex and arcane, but so is astrology.

“Science” is a daunting concept to the uninitiated, which is to say, almost everyone. Because scientific illiteracy is rampant, advocates of policy positions — scientists and non-scientists alike — often are able to invoke “science” wantonly, thus lending unwarranted authority to their positions.

WHAT IS SCIENCE?

Science is knowledge, but not all knowledge is science. A scientific body of knowledge is systematic; that is, the granular facts or phenomena which comprise the body of knowledge are connected in patterned ways. Those patterns should extend to as yet unobserved phenomena, and if they do not, they should be re-examined and re-tested.

Science is not a matter of “consensus”. Science is a matter of rigorously testing hypotheses against facts, and doing it openly so that every can inspect the facts and the methods used to derive conclusions from them.

Imagine the state of physics today if Galileo had not questioned Aristotle’s theory of gravitation, if Newton had been not extended and generalized Galileo’s work, if Einstein had deferred to Newton, and if Einstein’s work on gravitation had not been openly tested.

The effort to “deny” a prevailing or popular theory is as old as science. There have been “deniers” in the thousands, each of them responsible for advancing some aspect of knowledge. Not all “deniers” have been as prominent as Einstein (consider Dan Schectman, for example), but each is potentially as important as Einstein.

It is hard for scientists to rise above their human impulses. Einstein, for example, so much wanted quantum physics to be deterministic rather than probabilistic that he said “God does not play dice with the universe.” To which Nils Bohr replied, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.” But the human urge to be “right” or to be on the “right side” of an issue does not excuse anti-scientific behavior, such as that of so-called scientists who have become invested in the hypothesis that human activity has been the main cause of warmin since 1850, and that it will drive temperatures to destructive heights (a.k.a. anthropogenic global warming, or AGW).

There are many so-called scientists who subscribe to AGW without having done relevant research. Why? Because AGW is the “in” thing, and they do not wish to be left out. This is the stuff of which “scientific consensus” is made. If you would not buy a make of automobile just because it is endorsed by a celebrity who knows nothing about automotive engineering, why would you “buy” AGW just because it is endorsed by a herd of so-called scientists who have never done research that bears directly on it? Why would you “buy” AGW from a “team” of so-called scientists who specialize in hiding their data and methods and adjusting (F the temperature record to fit their hypothesis about AGW? And why would you “buy” AGW at all, given the fact (conveniently unknown to or hidden by the media), that the models which predict dire climatic consequence have been disproved? Continued belief in such models isn’t science, it’s an emotional attachment to a totemic object. (For much more, see this and this.)

There are two lessons to take from this. The first is  that no scientific hypothesis is ever proven, though if tested stringently enough it may rise to the status of theory. All that means is that the theory is the best explanation of phenomon (or set of related phenomena) until a better theory comes along.

The second lesson is that scientists are human and therefore fallible. It is in the best tradition of science to question their claims. Here’s a stark example of why that is so:

The universe shouldn’t exist — at least according to a new theory.

Modeling of conditions soon after the Big Bang suggests the universe should have collapsed just microseconds after its explosive birth, the new study suggests.

“During the early universe, we expected cosmic inflation — this is a rapid expansion of the universe right after the Big Bang,” said study co-author Robert Hogan, a doctoral candidate in physics at King’s College in London. “This expansion causes lots of stuff to shake around, and if we shake it too much, we could go into this new energy space, which could cause the universe to collapse.”

Physicists draw that conclusion from a model that accounts for the properties of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle, which is thought to explain how other particles get their mass; faint traces of gravitational waves formed at the universe’s origin also inform the conclusion.

Of course, there must be something missing from these calculations.

“We are here talking about it,” Hogan told Live Science. “That means we have to extend our theories to explain why this didn’t happen.” [Christian Science Monitor, June 24, 2014, dead link]

No kidding!

If you think “the science is settled” about anything, think again, long and hard.

THE ROLE OF MATHEMATICS AND STATISTICS IN SCIENCE

Mathematics and statistics are not sciences, despite their vast and organized complexity. They offer ways of thinking about and expressing knowledge, but they are not knowledge. They are languages that enable scientists to converse with each other and with outsiders who are fluent in the same languages.

Expressing a hypothesis in mathematical terms may lend the hypothesis a scientific aura. But a hypothesis couched in mathematics (or its verbal equivalent) is not a scientific one unless (a) it can be tested against observable facts by rigorous statistical methods, (b) it is found, consistently, to accord with those facts, and (c) the introduction of new facts does not require adjustment or outright rejection of the hypothesis. If the introduction of new facts requires the adjustment of a hypothesis, then it is a new hypothesis, which must be tested against new facts, and so on.

This “inconvenient fact” — that an adjusted hypothesis is a new hypothesis —  is ignored routinely, especially in the application of regression analysis to a data set for the purpose of quantifying relationships among variables. If a “model” thus derived does a poor job when applied to data outside the original set, it is not an uncommon practice to combine the original and new data and derive a new “model” based on the combined set. This practice (sometimes called data-mining) does not yield scientific theories with predictive power; it yields information (of dubious value) about the the data employed in the regression analysis. Regression is a way of predicting what is already known with great certainty.

A science may be descriptive rather than mathematical. In a descriptive science (e.g., plant taxonomy), particular phenomena sometimes are described numerically (e.g., the number of leaves on the stem of a species), but the relations among various phenomena are not reducible to mathematics. Nevertheless, a predominantly descriptive discipline will be scientific if the phenomena within its compass are connected in patterned ways.

NON-SCIENCE, SCIENCE, AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE

Non-scientific disciplines can be useful, whereas some purportedly scientific disciplines verge on charlatanism. Thus, for example:

• History, by my reckoning, is not a science. But a knowledge of history is valuable, nevertheless, for the insights it offers into the influence of human nature on the outcomes of economic and political processes. I call the lessons of history “insights”, not scientific relationships, because history is influenced by so many factors that it does not allow for the rigorous testing of hypotheses.

• Physics is a science in most of its sub-disciplines, but there are some (e.g., cosmology and certain interpretations of quantum mechanics) where it passes into the realm of speculation. It is informed, fascinating speculation to be sure, but speculation all the same. It avoids being pseudo-scientific only because it might give rise to testable hypotheses.

• Economics is a science only to the extent that it yields valid, statistical insights about specific microeconomic issues (e.g., the effects of laws and regulations on the prices and outputs of goods and services). The postulates of macroeconomics, except to the extent that they are truisms, have no demonstrable validity. (See, for example, my treatment of the Keynesian multiplier.) Macroeconomics is a pseudo-science.

• If there is an ultimate pseudo-science it is exemplified in Marxism, the so-called science of human development in which the “science” (a cobbled-together set of hypotheses) conveniently predicts what the author wished it to predict.

CONCLUSION

There is no such thing as “science” writ large; that is, no one may appeal, legitimately, to “science” in the abstract. A particular discipline may be a science, but it is a science only to the extent that it comprises a factual body of knowledge and testable hypothoses, some of which may graduate to the status of theories while remaining fair game for further testing.

For the reasons adduced in this post (and given fuller treatment here), scientists who claim to “know” that there is no God are not practicing science when they make that claim. They are practicing the religion that is known as atheism. The existence or non-existence of God is beyond testing, at least by any means yet known to man.

Control freaks are always with us.

“The socialist calculation debate” is a provocative post by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. Cowen links to a review he wrote of G.C. Archibald’s Information, Incentives and the Economics of Control: A Reexamination of the Socialist Calculation Debate. The jacket flap says:

This book examines methods for controlling or guiding a sector of the economy that do not require all the apparatus of economic planning or rely on the vain hope of sufficiently “perfect” competition, but instead rely entirely on the self-interest of economic agents and voluntary contract. The methods involved require trial-and-error steps in real time, with the target adjusted as the results of each step become known. The author shows that the methods are equally applicable to industries that are wholly privately owned, wholly nationalized, mixed or labor-managed.

The suggestion seems to be that one can emulate the outcomes that would be produced by competitive markets — if not something “better” — by writing rules that, if followed, would mimic the behavior of competitive markets. The problem with that suggestion — as I understand it — is that someone outside the system must make the rules to be followed by those inside the system.

And that’s precisely where socialist planning and regulation always fail. At some point not very far down the road, the rules will not yield the outcomes that spontaneous behavior would yield. Why? Because better rules cannot emerge spontaneously from rule-driven behavior. (It’s notable that the book’s index lists neither Hayek nor spontaneous order.)

Where, for instance, is there room in the socialist or regulatory calculus for a rule that allows for unregulated monopoly? Yet such an “undesirable” phenomenon can yield desirable results by creating “exorbitant” profits that invite competition (sometimes from substitutes) and entice innovation. (By “unregulated” I don’t mean that a monopoly should be immune from laws against force and fraud, which must apply to all economic actors.)

I suppose exogenous rules are all right if you want economic outcomes that accord with those rules. But such rules aren’t all right if you want economic outcomes that actually reflect the wants of consumers.

It reminds me of the Turing test:

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine’s capability to perform human-like conversation. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper “Computing machinery and intelligence“, it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. It is assumed that both the human and the machine try to appear human. In order to keep the test setting simple and universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of some machine), the conversation is usually limited to a text-only channel.

And so, the machine might — sometimes — emulate human behavior, but only then if it can engage in an interaction that’s limited to textual conversation. And that’s as far as it goes. The machine cannot be human, nor can it emulate the many, many other aspects of human behavior.

If you want to interact with a human, don’t talk to a rule-based computer. If you want an economy that produces outcomes desired by humans, don’t rely on an economy that’s run by the equivalent of rule-based computer. Why settle for a machine when you can have the real thing?

Of course, the whole point of socialist planning is to produce outcomes that are desired by planners. Those desires reflect planners’ preferences, as influenced by their perceptions of the outcomes desired by certain subsets of the populace. The immediate result may be to make some of those subsets happier, but at a great cost to everyone else and, in the end, to the favored subsets as well. A hampered economy produces less for everyone.

Spiked and The Wall Street Journal have the answer.

My answer to the question posed by the title is Biden (and his puppeteers, enablers, sycophants, and far too many Democrats).

Tom Slater, editor of Spiked, agrees with me:

Since [Biden] came to power he has made tackling ‘domestic terrorism’ a priority. In June 2021, his administration published the first-ever national strategy for tackling domestic terrorism, pledging new resources to fight this ill-defined threat…. [I]t is striking that this Democratic-led clampdown on extremism was sparked not by, say, the racist Charleston church shooting at the tailend of the Obama years, but by a big, dumb riot at which the only person shot was a Trump supporter….

… Some have criticised Biden for not introducing a full-blown domestic-terror law, an idea he floated at the beginning of his presidency. Perhaps in response to these criticisms, a new Justice Department unit to counter domestic terrorism was announced in January. Still, the atmosphere this has all created has had a chilling effect – not just on the activities of certifiable extremists, but also on dissenters more broadly. Contrary to various denials by attorney general Merrick Garland, FBI agents were reportedly even sent to investigate parents who were protesting against school boards over critical race theory and mask mandates being pushed on their kids.

The shock of Trump’s election, and with it the revelation that millions of Americans don’t agree with or much like the DC set, seems to have legitimised censorship in the minds of the Democratic elites…. Even before Biden came to power, the spurned elites were pushing for Trumpist voices to be silenced, often piling pressure on private actors to do their bidding. The prime example was Trump himself, who was kicked off the main social-media platforms after ‘January 6’. While the Capitol riot was the excuse, the mass deplatforming of Trump followed years of the Democratic elites demanding he be censored. And of course there was the Hunter Biden laptop story, an explosive New York Post scoop published in the run-up to the 2020 election, alleging corruption on the part of both Joe Biden and his crack-smoking son, Hunter. Twitter and Facebook suppressed the story as ‘intelligence experts’ reflexively dubbed it Russian misinformation. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed last week that Facebook’s suppression of the story followed a visit from FBI officers, who warned the company that a dump of Russian misinfo was on its way. When it arrived, the Hunter laptop story seemed to fit the bill, Zuckerberg said.

This revelation is worth dwelling on for a moment, particularly in light of Biden’s latest comments about the MAGA threat to freedom and democracy. Here we had agents of the American security state essentially leaning on Big Tech firms to censor certain content. As a consequence, a story that could well have influenced the 2020 election result was expunged from much of the digital public square, while Democratic politicians and former intelligence chiefs egged Big Tech on. If that’s not an authoritarian threat to democracy, I don’t know what is. In Twitter’s case, users were banned from sharing the link at all and the Post, America’s oldest daily newspaper, was locked out of its account. All of this utterly explodes the old deflection about Big Tech censorship – that it is just private companies doing as they please – and shows us how destructive this fusion of the security state, sections of the political class and big business is in American life today. Dissent can be crushed with incredible speed and efficiency, while the feds and the politicians can keep their hands clean.

The electoral demise of Trump has not sated this appetite for censorship one bit. Democrats continue to use the power of their offices and allied corporate media to try to limit the scope of debate. Tech CEOs continue to be hauled before Congress every year or so to be berated by Democrats, upset at the slow progress in silencing people they dislike. Leading House Democrats have even taken to writing to cable providers, demanding to know why they are still carrying right-wing channels like Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN – a move condemned by Brendan Carr, commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, as ‘legislating by letterhead’.

This is a recurring story of the Trump years. The Donald says or does something authoritarian or anti-democratic and then his infuriated opponents show him how it’s really done. Where he is showy and incompetent, they are brutally effective. And while he might have some bands of conspiratorial protesters on his side, his opponents have broad swathes of Big Tech, the corporate media and the US security state. They also have the White House, which makes Joe Biden’s fearmongering the other night about the threat posed to the republic by the MAGA-hatted hordes even more paranoid and ridiculous. America feels like it is caught between competing authoritarianisms. But right now, one is infinitely more threatening than the other.

Infnitely is the right word, given the combined power of the Democrat-controlled federal government and its allies in Big Tech, the corporate world generally, the governments of most major urban and suburban areas, the media, universities, and the public education indoctrination industry.

The Wall Street Journal, courtesy of Tom Smith, is also in fine form:

If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy. The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Or against the party. (People forget, if they ever knew it, that both Hitler and Mussolini began as socialists). The state and the Democratic Party must speak and act as one, suppressing all dissent. America must conform to the orthodoxy—to the Chinese finger-traps of diversity-or-else and open borders—and rejoice in mandatory drag shows and all such theater of “gender.” Meantime, their man in the White House invokes emergency powers to forgive student debt and their thinkers wonder whether the Constitution and the separation of powers are all they’re cracked up to be.

Adolf Hitler, 1935:

Joe Biden, 2022:

What happened to summer vacation?

In days of yore, school stayed in session until mid-June and didn’t resume until after Labor Day. In fact, my college was on the quarter system, and classes didn’t resume until late September.

Does anyone know why, in most of the country, school now ends in early May and resumes in August, sometimes early August? It doesn’t make sense to me because (1) there’s still cool, rainy weather in May, (2) there’s still a lot of summer left after school resumes.

There are explanations for this idiocy (e.g., here), but I find them circular, unpersuasive, and rather like explanations of how the tail wags the dog. The only one that seems plausible is the avoidance of semester-ending exams after Christmas break. That’s easily avoided by doing why my college did: break the school year into quarters instead of semester.

But “educators” are herd-like in their behavior. Denying kids a real summer is just another “thing” that has become de rigeur, like indoctrinating kids in Marxism and gender-fluidity.

It’s an ugly sight.

Going back to 1946, the first year of peace after the end of World War II, the history of the consumer price index looks like this:

Year-over-year inflation looks like this:

Year-over-year inflation in 1946-48, 1973-75, and 1979-81 was higher than the recent rate of inflation. But the recent rate of change in inflation is higher than it has been since the end of World War II. (See the slope of the curve in the first graph.)

From January 1946 to January 2021, the annualized rate of inflation was 3.6 — a rate that includes the aforementioned periods of high inflation (reaching 19.7 percent, year-over-year). From July 1983 (the end of the Fed-induced recession that tamed inflation) to January 2021, the annualized rate of inflation was 2.6 percent.

From that low-inflation base, the rate of inflation jumped to 8.7 percent (annualized) for the period from January 2021 to July 2022. The rate may be lower than it was in earlier high-inflation periods, but it is high enough to throw the economy for a loop.

First, according to the equation that I derived here, a sustained increase of 6 percentage points would reduce the rate of growth in real GDP by 1 percentage point a year. That would be quite a blow to an economy that has slowed to a real growth rate of about 2 percent a year:

Then, throw in the lingering effects of futile and economically devastating government-imposed measures to combat COVID and to restrict the production and use of fossil fuels. Mix those ingredients with renewed enthusiasm for regulation and higher corporate and individual income taxes and you have a perfect setup for continued stagnation if not a prolonged recession.

That’s on top of the mega-depression in which America has been mired for more than a century.

Feeling better now that Trump has been replaced by an anti-business, anti-growth president?

Cheaper gas is evidently more important than liberty.

For many years I have measured the popularity of presidents, beginning with Obama and continuing with Trump and Biden. My yardstick is a tracking poll of likely voters conducted by Rasmussen Reports*. I derive from the published statistics a number that I call the enthusiasm ratio. It is the percentage of likely voters expressing strong approval of the incumbent president as a fraction of the percentage of likely voters expressing either approval or disapproval. That is, the ratio omits likely voters who express neither approval nor disapproval, and focuses on strong approval rather than mere approval.

Here’s the record of enthusiasm ratios for Obama (first term), Trump, and Biden:

Two observations (among many possible ones):

• Trump overcame the Russia hoax and left Obama in the dust. But the Marxist media will never admit it.

• Biden was headed in the right direction (toward zero) until June 2022, when the price of gasoline began to recede. That’s on a par with praise for Hitler because he liked dogs and children.

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* I use this poll because of the strong record of Rasmussen Reports, which has been accused of pro-Republican bias because its polls are less biased toward Democrats than most other polls, and therefore generally more accurate.

Revolutionaries don’t need no rights.

Pierre Lemieux of Econlib says that “[a]n individual right of revolution follows from the primacy of the individual over the collective”….

To which I say this:

Lemiuex’s statement is too general. An individual may not violate group norms with impunity. Which norms, you may ask? Let’s start with the obvious one: the prohibition of killing that isn’t in self-defense. There are many more in the same category, that is, norms which work to the advantage of all members of the group (except, obviously, the renegades who wish to violate them). In the case of unjustified killing (murder), the murderer has committed an act of rebellion against a group norm, an act for which he will be punished unless he can flee to a safe haven.

What if a norm is a religious one, like praying at certain times of the day in a group setting, where absence or obvious abstention will be noted? Repeated violations of the norm, despite warnings, would be a kind of rebellion. It might even be on a par with murder in the traditions of the group.

So, where does group primacy give way to individual primacy? With murder, with grievous bodily harm, with theft, with extra-marital sex, with non-observance of traditional rituals? Or, to put it another way, where is the dividing line between an anti-social act (murder, etc.) and a justifiable act of rebellion? Those are the hard questions.

Professor Lemieux, in a gracious reply to my comment on his post (a comment that is essentially the same as the three preceding paragraphs), notes that Hayek had answered my objection. According to Professor Lemieux, Hayek’s position was that the group norms “to be enforced by law are only those those on which the existence of the whole social order depends” (i.e., societally essential norms).

I agree, in principle (and have elsewhere made the same point), but that still leaves me with the view that societally essential norms aren’t necessarily the same across societies. And to the extent that there are different essential norms within the United States, which is far from being one society, there is good reason to consider seriously a national divorce. It would be a more constructive move than a rebellion. The idea of rebellion attracts too many foolish hot-heads and would be a good excuse for overt suppression of all who dare dissent from “wokeism”, and leftism generally.

Neither one nor the other.

Eugene Volokh, patriarch of The Volokh Conspiracy, repeats a pointless exercise that he imposes on his readers from time to time. It’s a lecture about whether the United States is a democracy or a republic. His pedantry is misdirected because he is writing about the superficial form of governance under which Americans suffer or delight, depending on their political preferences.

The United States is in fact a bureaucratic a-theocracy that operates under the aegis of an anti-democratic oligarchy to advance the harmful credo of that oligarchy and the purported interests of the constituencies that it must placate in order to retain power.

Further, this arrangement, being so far from the democratic republic envisioned by the Framers, is always on the cusp of collapse as long as it depends on actual democracy. The oligarchy therefore actively seeks ways in which to maintain the semblance of democracy while subverting so as to obtain power in perpetuity.

There is a train of evidence for the latter proposition in the events of the past several years — the attempt to rig the election of 2016 by the creation of a hoax that was supposed to cripple Trump’s candidacy; the attempt to reverse (“deny”) the outcome of that election by a sham investigation; the use of that investigation and other sham evidence to impeach the Trump; the rigging of the election of 2020 through a conspiracy to suppress information, the privatization of election processes, the virtual stuffing of ballot boxes, and other forms of chicanery; the continuing effort to discredit the Trump so that he can’t return to power; and the overarching effort to shame, shun, and suppress anyone who expresses support for Trump or opposition to the oligarchy’s credo.

Not into the sunset, unfortunately.

This is the seventh and final entry in a series of recycled posts about David Brooks (mostly) and Bret Stephens (once), house “conservatives” at The New York Times. The original posts were published from 2009 through 2019. But I have detected no change in the dynamic duo’s faux conservatism since I stopped wasting pixels on them.

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Brooks was unhinged by the election of Donald Trump. He just couldn’t understand it, even though he’s supposedly a conservative. But being a conservative on the payroll of The New York Times means being more polite to left-wingers than Paul Krugman is to conservatives and libertarians.

So here he was, in full flight:

If your social circles are like mine, you spent Tuesday night swapping miserable texts. Not all, but many of my friends and family members were outraged, stunned, disgusted and devastated….

I was on PBS trying to make sense of what was happening while trying to text various people off the ledge….

Populism of the Trump/Le Pen/Brexit variety has always been a warning sign, a warning sign that there is some deeper dysfunction in our economic, social and cultural systems….

Trump’s bigotry, dishonesty and promise-breaking will have to be denounced. We can’t go morally numb. But he needs to be replaced with a program that addresses the problems that fueled his ascent.

After all, the guy will probably resign or be impeached within a year. The future is closer than you think. [“The View from Trump Tower”, The New York Times, November 11, 2016]

Social circles? I ain’t got no frigging social circles. I’ve got family and friends. Only The Crust of Manhattan, Vail, and San Francisco have social circles. Where I grew up a social circle was several boys huddled around a game of marbles.

Which just goes to show you what a clueless twit David Brooks is.

Later —

It’s hard to resist a pot-shot at a sitting duck, which is what Brooks resembled in his encomium to the “liberal world order” (which is the subtext of this post and this one). Specifically, Brooks wrote tearfully that

Americans take a dark view of human nature and withdraw from the world. Wolves like Putin and Xi fill the void and make bad things happen, confirming the dark view and causing even more withdrawal.

Americans (conservatives, at least) rightly take a dark view of human nature, but what does that have to do with “withdrawing from the world”? What serious (conservative) Americans want isn’t withdrawal, it is two connected things: security from military blackmail and defense of legitimate overseas interests, the most important of which is trade with other countries (on legitimate terms).

Those things don’t require meddling in other people’s business, which is what most Americans rightly reject. They do require robust military forces, and a demonstrated willingness to apply them when Amercans’ vital interests are at stake.

Brooks, in his usual way, omitted the obvious and correct view of what (most) Americans want because he is “conservative” only by the standards of The New York Times.

Hitler and Stalin couldn’t have improved on it.

Scapegoat and suppress.

Make sure that the main scapegoat — the “dangerous” political enemy — is discredited by years of false stories, false testimony, baseless prosecutions, and a conspiracy between government officials and his political enemies.

Then scapegoat his supporters. Then scapegoat anyone who defends him or his supporters in any way. Then scapegoat anyone who defends his policies, especially the ones that were intended to make America stronger and more prosperous and less beholden to the fascistic regime that has slowly but surely taken over the central government.

Scapegoat everyone who makes a stand against the extreme policies of the current administration. Throw some of them in jail as an object lession. Call all of them fascists and domestic terrorists (classic acts of psychological projection). Conspire with Big Tech and the “woke” who have infiltrated big business, the academy, and public education to shun, shame, and silence anyone who doesn’t toe the party line.

It makes me sick. So sick that I’m going to keep on doing what little I can do to fight it, which is to glow like a candle in the darkness of the coming oppression.

Will there be a civil war? Biden is trying to stoke violence so that he has an excuse to crack down on those who oppose him with all of the considerable force at his disposal. Don’t fall for it. Stay calm, keep up the opposition, and keep it peaceful or you’ll walk right into Biden’s trap.

If we, the true lovers of liberty, can keep our heads and stay the course, there’s still a chance to realize the only hope for liberty: a national divorce.

A case for looking at the trees and the forest.

It’s well known that men are preponderantly stronger than women, that whites are preponderantly smarter than blacks, and that pre-pubescent girls are preponderanly closer to their final height than are pre-pubescent boys.

There are many exceptions, of course. And the exceptions in the first two cases have been seized upon to advance an egalitarian agenda: Women and blacks are “underrepresented” in military officer ranks, STEM disciplines, the executive positions, etc., so there should be discriminatory efforts to bring more women and blacks into those occupations and positions.

The data are those women and blacks who have been and are capable of performing on equal terms with their peers in the officer ranks, STEM disciplines, and so on. The statistical relationships are the facts cited in the opening paragraph.

Because of the statistical relationships, the discriminatory effort to recruit women and blacks into occupations and positions for which they are preponderantly underqualified means the standards of performance in those occupations and positions will fall (and in some cases already have fallen). And in some cases (e.g., police, firefighting, armed forces) the lowere standards of performance generally endanger the public.

Discrimination on the basis of measured and demonstrated aptitude and ability is good. Discrimination on the bases of sex and race (whether pro or con a particular sex or race) is bad.

If “activists” with an “inclusive” agenda would just recognize the facts of life and shut up, everyone would be better off — including those women and blacks who (too often) are being set up for failure because they don’t have what it takes to succeed in a particular occupation or position.

It’s Bret Stephens’s turn to be a target.

This is the sixth in a series of recycled posts about David Brooks (mostly) and Bret Stephens (once), house “conservatives” at The New York Times. The original posts were published from 2009 through 2019. But I have detected no change in the dynamic duo’s faux conservatism since I stopped wasting pixels on them.

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Bret Stephens, one of the tame “conservatives” at The New York Times, wasted ink and newsprint (as usual) on a column titled “Why Aren’t Democrats Walking Away With the Mid-Terms?“.

Stephens touched on a thesis that has been enunciated by many. I will come to it by way of Arnold Kling — an unusually sensible economist (e.g., he calls standard macroeconomics “hydraulic economics” and derides the implicit assumption that the economy is single unit — a big GDP factory). Kling has written a book (now in second edition) called The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divide. Here are some relevant passages:

In politics, I claim that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians are like tribes speaking different languages. The language that resonates with one tribe does not connect with the others. As a result, political discussions do not lead to agreement. Instead, most political commentary serves to increase polarization. The points that people make do not open the minds of people on the other side. They serve to close the minds of the people on one’s own side.

Which political language do you speak? Of course, your own views are carefully nuanced, and you would never limit yourself to speaking in a limited language. So think of one of your favorite political commentators, an insightful individual with whom you generally agree. Which of the following statements would that commentator most likely make?

(P) [Progressive] My heroes are people who have stood up for the underprivileged. The people I cannot stand are the people who are indifferent to the oppression of women, minorities, and the poor.

(C) [Conservative] My heroes are people who have stood up for Western values. The people I cannot stand are the people who are indifferent to the assault on the moral virtues and traditions that are the foundation for our civilization.

(L) [Libertarian] My heroes are people who have stood up for individual rights. The people I cannot stand are the people who are indifferent to government taking away people’s ability to make their own choices….

I call this the three-axes model of political communication. A progressive will communicate along the oppressor-oppressed axis, framing issues in terms of the (P) dichotomy. A conservative will communicate along the civilization-barbarism axis, framing issues in terms of the (C) dichotomy. A libertarian will communicate along the liberty-coercion axis, framing issues in terms of the (L) dichotomy….

I do not believe that the three-axes model serves to explain or to describe the different political ideologies. I am not trying to say that political beliefs are caused by one’s choice of axis. Nor am I saying that people think exclusively in terms of their preferred axis. What I am saying is that when we communicate about issues, we tend to fall back on one of the three axes. By doing so, we engage in political tribalism. We signal to members of our tribe that we agree with them, and we enhance our status in the tribe. However, even though it appears that we are arguing against people from other tribes, those people pay no heed to what we say. It is as if we are speaking a foreign language….

The three axes allow each tribe to assert moral superiority. The progressive asserts moral superiority by denouncing oppression and accusing others of failing to do so. The conservative asserts moral superiority by denouncing barbarism and accusing others of failing to do so. The libertarian asserts moral superiority by denouncing coercion and accusing others of failing to do so….

In 2016, Donald Trump surprised many people— including me— by emerging as a powerful political force and prevailing in the presidential election. Trump’s success confounded many analytical frameworks that had worked well in the past, and the three-axes model is not particularly helpful, either.

Progressives certainly viewed Trump through the oppressor-oppressed axis, seeing his pronouncements and his supporters as tinged with racism and threats toward other victim classes. Libertarians viewed Trump through the liberty-coercion axis, seeing him as authoritarian and a danger to liberty.

Conservatives, however, were divided. One faction, represented by a number of writers at the conservative publication National Review, viewed Trump negatively along the civilization-barbarism axis. They saw Trump as scornful of important traditional institutions, including civil discourse, the U.S. Constitution, the Republican Party, and the principle of free trade.

The other conservative faction saw Trump’s opponent in the general election, Hillary Clinton, as a greater threat to civilization. Writing under the pseudonym, Publius Decius Mus, an essayist on the Claremont Institute website described voting against Clinton as analogous to the passengers on one of the planes hijacked on 9/ 11 who managed to storm the cockpit and keep the hijackers from hitting their intended target.

In my view, Trump opened up a new axis. He accomplished that by appealing to people who differ from those with whom I am most acquainted. Some have termed this new axis populist versus elite, or outsider versus insider….

Perhaps the main dividing line is best described in terms of cosmopolitanism. The sections of the country that most strongly supported Hillary Clinton were large cities located along the coasts, where affluent people are used to engaging with foreign cultures, either locally or by traveling abroad. The sections of the country that most strongly supported Donald Trump were rural and small-town areas located away from the coast, where interaction with foreign cultures is much less frequent.

To describe the cosmopolitan outlook, recall the expression “bourgeois bohemians,” coined by journalist David Brooks almost two decades ago. Brooks was describing a cosmopolitan elite, one that enjoys foreign travel and celebrates cultural diversity. The Bobos, as Brooks dubbed them, probably feel more comfortable in Prague than in Peoria.

As I see it, Donald Trump’s supporters were the anti-Bobos. They distrusted foreign people and cultures. But above all, they distrusted and resented the Bobos, and the feeling was mutual. Thus, the axis that I believe best fits the Trump phenomenon is Bobo versus anti-Bobo.

I think this is right. Bret Stephens is a Bobo who believes that “the real threat of the Trump presidency [wasn’t] economic or political catastrophe. It [was] moral and institutional corrosion — the debasement of our discourse and the fracturing of our civic bonds.”

Stephens seems not to understand that — in the view of anti-Bobos — civic bonds were fractured long ago by the Bobos who championed school busing, affirmative action, and all that followed under the heading of identity politics, succeeded by “open borders”, gender fluidity, and Big-Tech censorship of conservative voices.

The anti-Bobos of the North were taken for granted as reliable Democrat voters, largely ignored (by both parties), and then sneered at by Democrats. Hillary Clinton’s characterization of the anti-Bobos (of all regions) as “deplorables” was merely confirmatory, and probably enabled Trump’s victory in 2016 by putting him over the top in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump’s genius was (and still is) the ability to speak the language of anti-Bobos and make them feel as if they are valued.

It is unclear to me what “deeper threat [Trump’s] presidency represents”, as Stephens puts it. Trump is not divisive; Bobo policies — shared by “establishment” politicians of both parties — are divisive. Stephens and his ilk (of all parties) simply want the anti-Bobos to shut up, get back in the fold, and accept the crumbs that fall from the Bobos’ table. The “deeper threat”, in other words, is an end to the Bobos’ long reign of error in Washington.

Stephens’s Bobo-ism is fully on display in the final paragraph of his op-ed, where he writes that “The tragedy of Pittsburgh [the synagogue shooting] illustrates, among other things, that the president cannot unite us, even in our grief.” What I saw was an immediate attack on Trump for having created an “atmosphere of hate” (shades of Dallas 1963). Trump’s personal behavior — which reflects his long-standing pro-Jewish sympathies — was exemplary, as was the behavior of Rabbi Myers, who welcomed Trump.

How, precisely, was Trump supposed to “unite us” when there are tens of millions of Americans — goaded on by the mainstream media — who despise him for the sheer enjoyment of it?

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If you’d like to comment on this post, you may address an email to the Germanic nickname for Friedrich followed by the surname of the 1974 Nobel laureate in economics followed by the 3rd and 4th digits of his birth year followed by the usual typographic symbol followed by gmail.com .

From its illegitimate birth to its approaching old-age crisis.

Throughout this post, when I refer to Social Security I mean the program of old-age benefits and tax “contributions” provided for in the Social Security Act of 1935. A key element of this discussion is the Social Security trust fund, which I render thus for consistency througout the post. Comments on this post may be sent to the following email address: the Germanic nickname for Friedrich followed by the last name of the 1974 Nobel laureate in economics followed by the 3rd and 4th digits of his birth year followed by the usual typographic symbol followed by gmail.com .

THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF SOCIAL SECURITY

The Social Security Administration tries to whitewash the unconstitutionality of the old-age provisions of the Social Security Act (links added):

Three Social Security cases made their way to the Supreme Court during its October 1936 term. One challenged the old-age insurance program (Helvering v. Davis)….

George P. Davis was a minor stockholder in the Edison Electric Illuminating Company. Edison, like every industrial employer in the nation, was readying itself to start paying the employers’ share of the payroll tax in January 1937. Mr. Davis objected to this arguing that by making this expenditure Edison was robbing him of part of his equity, so he sued Edison to prevent their compliance with the Social Security Act. The government intervened on Edison’s behalf and the Commissioner of the IRS ([Guy] Helvering) took on the lawsuit.

The attorneys for Davis argued that the payroll tax was a new type of tax not listed in the Constitution’s tally of taxes, and so it was unconstitutional….

On May 24, 1937 the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the three cases. Justice Cardozo wrote the majority opinion [Helvering v. Davis]….

Mirroring the situation in Congress when the legislation was considered, the old-age insurance program met relatively little disagreement. The Court ruled 7 to 2 in support of the old-age insurance program….

Justice Cardozo wrote the opinion[] in Helvering v. Davis…. [He] made clear the Court’s view on the scope of the government’s spending authority: “There have been statesman in our history who have stood for other views…. We will not resurrect the contest. It is now settled by decision. The conception of the spending power advocated by Hamilton … has prevailed over that of Madison….”

[He] extended the reasoning [in upholding the unemployment-insurance program] to the old-age insurance program: “The purge of nation-wide calamity that began in 1929 has taught us many lessons…. Spreading from state to state, unemployment is an ill not particular but general, which may be checked, if Congress so determines, by the resources of the nation…. But the ill is all one or at least not greatly different whether men are thrown out of work because there is no longer work to do or because the disabilities of age make them incapable of doing it. Rescue becomes necessary irrespective of the cause. The hope behind this statute is to save men and women from the rigors of the poor house as well as from the haunting fear that such a lot awaits them when journey’s end is near.”

It is no coincidence that the Supreme Court reversed its record of opposition to the New Deal when faced with the certainty that Congress would approve Roosevelt’s court-packing plan and dilute the authority of the sitting justices. As SSA tells it:

Despite the intense controversy the court-packing plan provoked, and the divided loyalties it produced even among the President’s supporters, the legislation appeared headed for passage, when the Court itself made a sudden shift that took the wind out of the President’s sails. In March 1937, in a pivotal case, Justice Roberts unexpectedly changed his allegiance from the conservatives to the liberals, shifting the balance on the Court from 5-4 against to 5-4 in favor of most New Deal legislation. In the March case Justice Roberts voted to uphold a minimum wage law in Washington state just like the one he had earlier found to be unconstitutional in New York state. Two weeks later he voted to uphold the National Labor Relations Act, and in May he voted to uphold the Social Security Act. This sudden change in the Court’s center of gravity meant that the pressure on the New Deal’s supporters lessened and they felt free to oppose the President’s plan. This sudden switch by Justice Roberts was forever after referred to as “the switch in time that saved nine.”

In the end, the Court decided wrongly to legalize Social Security by invoking Hamilton’s supposedly looser view of the powers vested in Congress, and by improperly interpreting the “general welfare” clause. In its slipperiness and lack of constitutional grounding, Justice Cardozo’s opinion foreshadowed Justice Blackmun’s opinion in Roe v. Wade.

Regarding the general welfare, Madison — the “Father of the Constitution” — had this to say in Federalist No. 41:

Some who have denied the necessity of the power of taxation [to the Federal government] have grounded a very fierce attack against the Constitution, on the language on which it is defined. It has been urged and echoed that the power to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States” amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare. No stronger proof could be given of the distress under which these writers labor for objections, than their stooping to such a misconstruction….

For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural or more common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify by an enumeration of the particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, and can have no other effect than to confound and mislead, is an absurdity … what would have been thought of that assembly, if, attaching themselves to these general expressions and disregarding the specifications which limit their import, they had exercised an unlimited power of providing for the general welfare?…

Was Hamilton of a different mind? Apparently not:

The Federalist Papers are one of our soundest guides to what the Constitution actually means. And in No. 84, Alexander Hamilton indirectly confirmed Madison’s point.

Hamilton argued that a bill of rights, which many were clamoring for, would be not only “unnecessary,” but “dangerous.” Since the federal government was given only a few specific powers, there was no need to add prohibitions: it was implicitly prohibited by the listed powers. If a proposed law — a relief act, for instance — wasn’t covered by any of these powers, it was ipso facto unconstitutional.

Adding a bill of rights, said Hamilton, would only confuse matters. It would imply, in many people’s minds, that the federal government was entitled to do anything it wasn’t positively forbidden to do, whereas the principle of the Constitution was that the federal government is forbidden to do anything it isn’t positively authorized to do.

Hamilton too posed some rhetorical questions: “For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said, that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?” Such a provision “would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretence for claiming that power” — that is, a power to regulate the press, short of actually shutting it down.

We now suffer from the sort of confusion Hamilton foresaw. But what interests me about his argument, for today’s purpose, is that he implicitly agreed with Madison about the narrow meaning of “general welfare.”

After all, if the phrase covered every power the federal government might choose to claim under it, the “general welfare” might be invoked to justify government control of the press for the sake of national security in time of war. For that matter, press control might be justified under “common defense.” Come to think of it, the broad reading of “general welfare” would logically include “common defense,” and to speak of “the common defense and general welfare of the United States” would be superfluous, since defense is presumably essential to the general welfare.

So Madison, Hamilton, and — more important — the people they were trying to persuade agreed: the Constitution conferred only a few specific powers on the federal government, all others being denied to it (as the Tenth Amendment would make plain).

(For more on the general welfare, see “The Constitution: Myths and Realities”.)

Unlike the “right” to an abortion, the Court’s decision upholding Social Security is so far in the past and has created so much dependency among the populace that it will never be undone. Nor is it likely that Social Security’s old-age benefit will ever be privatized, even in part. But hope springs eternal, and so I address privatization later in this post.

BUT ISN’T SOCIAL SECURITY A KIND OF “SOCIAL INSURANCE”?

I put quotation marks around “social insurance” because it isn’t insurance. What is it? Just another set of programs designed to redistribute income, mainly from those who’ve earned more to those who’ve earned less (or nothing). “Social insurance” is a trickle-down transfer-payment scheme, wherein some of the money reaches its intended targets after passing through the sticky fingers of the overpaid bureaucrats who live in and around Washington, D.C.

What’s the difference between “social insurance” and real insurance?

Consider Social Security. Unlike an automobile accident, retirement is not an undesirable event that might occur; it is a desirable event toward which almost everyone strives. Social Security is merely a government-imposed substitute for the prudent act of saving toward one’s retirement and then drawing on the accumulated nest-egg to finance that retirement. The usual excuse for Social Security is that a lot of people, especially low-income persons, can’t or won’t save enough to maintain some (arbitrary) standard of living during retirement. In other words, Social Security isn’t insurance against an unpredictable event, it’s a mechanism for subsidizing low-income and imprudent persons at the expense of their opposites.

The same analysis applies to Medicare, Medicaid, and other forms of federal and State “social insurance”. The risk pools are huge and ill-defined. The premiums are either nominal (Medicare) or non-existent (Medicaid and other programs). All such programs are nothing more than non-contractual “promises” to pay certain amounts for certain events, regardless of the probability of those events and their associated costs.

Even programs that mimic insurance — unemployment benefits and workers’ compensation, for example — are really subsidies because of their all-encompassing nature and the forcible extraction of “premiums” from employers (and, indirectly, employees). Those who are at risk for unemployment and on-the-job injuries have no say in the matter of how much insurance they wish to purchase and how much they are willing to pay for it. Unemployment “insurance” is an especially weird kind of “insurance,” in that the benefits expand and contract according to the whims of government actors.

Enough said about “social insurance” as insurance. It simply isn’t insurance.

Health insurance, despite heavy regulation and the distortions produced by tax breaks, retains some of the characteristics of true insurance. But the point of Medicare (as modified by Obamacare) isn’t insurance, it’s tantamount to universal, government-controlled health care for persons over 65. (And, combined with Medicaid the size of the program strongly affects the provision of and insurance coverage for persons under 65.) Medicare forces Americans to buy or subsidize “insurance” that covers events that aren’t health risks; for example: so-called preventive care, the use of contraceptives, abortion, various kinds of maternity and pediatric care, and the coverage of “children” up to the age of 26.

What about mandatory coverage of pre-existing conditions? Here’s Greg Mankiw on the subject:

A large part of the motivation of the Affordable Care Act [Obamacare]is to provide insurance to those with pre-existing conditions. Under the law, insurance is offered to everyone at a price based on overall community risk, not the risk estimated by the insurance company based on a person’s particular characteristics. That has been deemed “fair” by advocates of the law.

I wonder whether advocates of this view are concerned with other insurance markets.  Teenage drivers pay a lot more for auto insurance. The old pay a lot more for life insurance.  Life insurance companies require health screening before granting a policy. Is this a problem, or the natural and desirable functioning of markets?

The answer to Mankiw’s question is that advocates of Obamacare weren’t really trying to insure anyone, they were trying (with some success) to ram socialized medicine down the throats of Americans.

Scott Gallipo, writing at The American [Pseudo-] Conservative. In a patent attempt to defend Obamacare, Gallipo begs real conservatives to “Stop Comparing Health Insurance to Car Insurance”. Gallipo’s “argument” is fatally confused; for example:

It’s helpful to step back and remind ourselves why we ask doctors to perform “preventative maintenance” on our bodies. If diseases are caught early, they’re often cheaper to treat or cure. If we stay in good physical shape, we reduce the chances of developing many diseases in the first place. When we preventatively maintain our cars, however, we are merely forestalling problems that we would have to pay out-of-pocket for anyway. If you don’t change your oil, your car insurance plan isn’t going to cover the cost of fixing a seized engine.

Gallipo is trying to distinguish preventive health care from preventive auto care, but he fails to do so. For one thing, he wrongly asserts that preventive maintenance forestalls problems that would have to be paid for out-of-pocket. Not necessarily. That’s why warranties (insurance) and their costs are baked into the price of new autos. And that’s why many auto buyers obtain extended warranties. As it happens, I once bought a mechanical-breakdown insurance from GEICO instead of buying the manufacturer’s extended warranty. It was additional coverage under my auto policy, and it commanded an additional premium.

More fundamentally, Gallipo makes some heroic assumptions about preventive care. Yes, routine tests will sometimes result in the detection and treatment of conditions that would otherwise be detected at a later stage. But the cost of checkups and lab tests, when ordered wholesale by doctors because they’re “free”, far exceeds the benefits. (See this, for example.)

Most fundamentally, Gallipo begs the question. In his (incorrect) view, preventive “care” on a massive scale is a “good thing”. Therefore, it should be covered by insurance. But the massive overuse of “free” checkups and lab tests has nothing to do with insurance, and everything to do with the nationalization of health care. Those “free” checkups and tests will not be paid for by risk-related premiums; they will be paid for by taxpayers and the millions of Americans whose Medicare “premiums” are really taxes exacted to help support an open-ended national health-care plan.

THE PONZI SCHEME UNRAVELS

Social Security is now running in the red; that is, benefits and expenses exceed payroll taxes collected. It is being kept afloat by the Social Security trust fund, which holds U.S. government debt from which full benefits will continue to be paid until the trust fund is depleted around 2034. When the trust fund is depleted, benefits (by law) are supposed to be cut to a level supportable by current revneues. If nothing is done before 2034 to adjust benefits or payroll taxes Social Security beneficiaries would be facing a permanent drop of about 21 percent in their benefit checks.

In any event, like a Ponzi scheme, Social Security rewarded early entrants, who were paid artificially high “returns” from the “contributions” made by later entrants.

But the inevitable happened. The number of late entrants has become too few to pay the taxes required to support earlier entrants in the style to which they have become accustomed. Congress, as is its wont, is relying on the trust fund to cover the deficit, rather than face up to the difficult political choice of cutting benefits or raising taxes.

I quote from an op-ed piece in The Washington Post (July 31, 2001), by Olivia Mitchell and Thomas R. Saving:

When Social Security ran annual surpluses in the past, it enabled other parts of government to spend more. The trust fund measures how much the government has borrowed from Social Security over the years, just as your credit card balance indicates how much you have borrowed. The only way to get the money to pay off your credit balance is to earn more, spend less or take out a loan. Likewise, the only way for the government to redeem trust fund IOUs is to raise taxes, cut spending or borrow….

We are surprised that this perspective on the trust fund is controversial. The commission’s interim report quotes credible sources — the Congressional Budget Office, the General Accounting Office and the Congressional Research Service — supporting the view that the trust fund is an asset to Social Security but a liability to the rest of the government. The Clinton administration’s fiscal year 2000 budget indicated a similar perspective:

“These [trust fund] balances are available to finance future benefit payments and other trust fund expenditures — but only in a bookkeeping sense. . . . They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead, they are claims on the Treasury that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures. The existence of large trust fund balances, therefore, does not, by itself, have any impact on the Government’s ability to pay benefits.”…

[T]he nation has only three ways to redeem trust fund bonds: raising taxes, cutting spending or increasing government borrowing. If there is some alternative source of funds, no one has yet suggested it….

Nevertheless, the trust fund has some true believers, among them Paul Krugman, who made this effort to rebut the commission’s position:

The Social Security system has been running surpluses since 1983, when the payroll tax was increased in order to build up a trust fund out of which future benefits could be paid. These surpluses could have been invested in stocks or corporate bonds, but it seemed safer and less problematic to buy U.S. government debt instead. The system now has $1.2 trillion in its rapidly growing trust fund. But the commission says that the government bonds in that trust fund aren’t real assets….

Every dollar that the Social Security system puts in government bonds — as opposed to investing in other assets, such as corporate bonds — is a dollar that the federal government doesn’t have to borrow from other sources. If the Social Security trust fund hadn’t used its accumulated surpluses to buy $1.2 trillion in government bonds, the government would have had to borrow those funds elsewhere. And instead of crediting the trust fund with $65 billion in interest this year, the government would have had to cough up at least that much extra in actual, cash interest payments to private bondholders. So the trust fund makes a real contribution to the federal budget. Doesn’t that make it a real asset?…

No. Here’s why: As Krugman admits, the government didn’t invest Social Security surpluses in stocks and corporate bonds, it squandered the surpluses. The surpluses simply fed Washington’s big-spending addiction. If the surpluses had been invested in real assets, even conservative ones like investment-grade corporate bonds, the trust fund would represent real claims on the economy. But it doesn’t represent such claims. It represents nothing more than government debt incurred for spending more than it received in taxes. The Social Security trust fund is exactly offset by indebtedness incurred by the rest of the federal government.

ANOTHER LOOK AT THE MYTHICAL TRUST FUND AND RELATED MATTERS

Notwithstanding what I have just said, many of those who wish to preserve Social Security as they know and love it will insist that the Social Security trust fund is real. The usual argument goes like this: Yes, the trust fund holds government bonds. But if government bonds are a real asset to private investors, they must be a real asset to the trust fund. Wrong.

If the Social Security Administration (SSA) had invested net Social Security receipts in stocks, corporate bonds, and private mortgages — or if it had stashed the receipts in many, many passbook savings accounts, à la W.C. Fields — the trust fund could be a real asset. Why? Because SSA would have simply done for individuals what they could have done for themselves, namely, held their savings in the form of claims on real assets (business equipment, homes, and automobiles, for instance) and the future income produced by those assets.

But the problem is bigger than SSA’s failure to invest forced savings in claims on real assets. SSA is just a branch of the U.S. government. Even if SSA had wanted to take its net receipts to the bank, it couldn’t have. A robber would have intercepted SSA on the way to the bank, taken the money, and blown it on booze. Actually, what happened was that the rest of the U.S. government grabbed SSA’s net receipts and blew them on this welfare program, that regulatory effort, and other “public services”. Unlike the typical thief, the U.S. government then handed SSA a bunch of IOUs.

Now, tell me where the real asset is. It’s not to be found in the creation of government programs or even in the physical assets employed by government in those programs. For, the economic benefits that sometimes flow from government activities are far more than offset by the economic disbenefits of government activities.

But what about all those private investors who hold government bonds? Aren’t they holding real assets? Well, they’re holding financial assets, which give them the ability to buy real things. Let’s take Citizen Kane as an example. Suppose he has scrimped and saved $1 million. He could place that amount in some combination of stocks, corporate bonds, mortgages, and savings accounts, but instead he chooses to buy government bonds. Now, Citizen Kane has already done his bit for the creation of real assets merely by saving $1 million in the first place. That is, through the magic of macroeconomics, the $1 million that he forbore to spend on this bauble, that bangle, and another bead enabled the creation of $1 million in real capital (plant, equipment, business software, etc.), which fosters economic growth.

Thus, in the first approximation, where Citizen Kane actually puts his $1 million is less important than the fact the he has saved (not consumed) $1 million, so that others (businesses, to be precise) can direct $1 million worth of resources into the creation of capital. If he chooses to put the $1 million in government bonds, that’s his lookout. Those bonds have a market value, which will fluctuate just like the market value of all financial assets. But the marketability of the bonds simply means that he can claim his share of the wealth that was created when he saved $1 million in the first place.

Government bonds held by government entities, on the other hand, can’t even pretend to be claims on real assets. They’re nothing but pieces of paper whose value can be realized only through taxation. Well, government can tax us without going through the charade of creating government bonds. Thus the bonds held by the SSA amount to nothing more than a superfluous excuse to raise our taxes. The power to tax is a real asset only to those who are net recipients of the taxes that are collected. By the same token, the power to tax is a real liability to those who are net payers of the taxes that are collected. Asset = liability = zero.

So much for those “real assets” in the Social Security trust fund.

But I’m not through discussing the shell game that goes by the exalted name of “public finance.” There’s a lot more to it than the mythical Social Security trust fund.

Government spending, however it is financed, is a way of commandeering resources that otherwise would flow to private consumption and investment (i.e., capital formation). To the extent that government activities fail to pay their own way by yielding goods and services of equivalent value — and they don’t (otherwise they would be provided by the private sector) — the resources used by government are simply wasted — thrown down a rat hole. And worse, they drag down the economy.

Government nevertheless goes through the charade of taxing and borrowing to finance its activities, instead of simply sending goon squads to impress those resources into government service. To the extent that it borrows and that borrowing is underwritten by the Fed, there is more money in circulation than there would be if the government financied its follies through taxation. At the same time, the total output of real goods and services (including capital assets) is reduced as government commandeers resources. The result, of course, is inflationary.

THE CASE FOR PRIVATIZATION

The trust fund is mythical and can’t be salvaged. Social Security is a drag on the economy, pure and simple. Complete privatization (i.e., abolition) of Social Security is a political non-starter but the only economically sensible option:

• It would increase incentives to work and invest, thus boosting employment in the short run and economic growth in the long run.

• Armed with greater prosperity, we could do a better job (privately and publicly) of helping the aged, their survivors, and the disabled who are truly in need.

But when the idea of privatization was floated by President G.W. Bush, the wagons were circled around the golden calf. E.J. Dionne Jr., writing in The Washington Post, opined that

The big cost of privatization comes from allowing individuals to keep a share of the Social Security taxes they now pay into the system and use it for private investment accounts. This reduces the amount of money available to pay current beneficiaries. Since Bush has promised the retired and those near retirement that their benefits won’t be cut, he needs to find cash somewhere. The only options are to raid the rest of the budget, to raise taxes or to borrow big time….

[During the 2000 presidential campaign] Gore … challenged Bush on his numbers. “He has promised a trillion dollars out of the Social Security trust fund for young working adults to invest and save on their own, but he’s promised seniors that their Social Security benefits will not be cut and he’s promised the same trillion dollars to them,” Gore said at that third presidential debate. “Which one of those promises will you keep and which will you break, Governor?”

… Bush is about to offer an easy answer to Gore’s challenge: More borrowing….

… Last week The Post’s Jonathan Weisman reported that Republicans were considering moving the costs of social security reform “off-budget” so that, on paper at least, they wouldn’t inflate the deficit. And Joshua B. Bolten, the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, let the cat out of the bag over the weekend in an interview with Richard W. Stevenson of the New York Times. “The president does support personal accounts, which need not add over all to the cost of the program but could in the short run require additional borrowing to finance the transition,” Bolten said. “I believe there’s a strong case that this approach not only makes sense as a matter of savings policy, but is also fiscally prudent.”

A huge new borrowing — “from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars over a decade,” as Stevenson notes — is suddenly “fiscally prudent” in the administration’s eyes….

Dionne betrays such stupendous misunderstanding of the issue that the only way to deal with his ignorance is to explain the whole megillah, step-by-step:

1. The cost of Social Security is the cost of the benefits paid out, not the payroll taxes or borrowing required to finance those benefits. There are two basic issues: how much to pay in benefits and how to finance those benefits.

2. Assuming, for the moment, that benefits will be paid to future retirees (today’s workers) in accordance with the present formula for computing benefits — which today’s workers believe is a “promise” they have been made — something must “give” when payroll taxes no longer cover benefits.

3. No matter how you slice it, someone will pay for those future benefits. The question is: who and when? There are three conventional ways to do it:

• Raise future workers’ payroll taxes by enough to cover benefits.

• Borrow enough to cover benefits, thus shifting the immediate burden from future workers to willing lenders, who are also the “future generations” that “bear the burden” of the debt. The cost of borrowing (i.e., interest) raises the cost of the program a bit, but interest is also income to those who lend money to the government. In other words, borrowing — on balance — doesn’t create a burden, it merely shifts it, voluntarily. (Unless the Fed monetizes government deficits, which involuntarily shifts the burden by contributing to inflation.)

• Raise taxes and borrow, in combination.

4. There’s an “unconventional” way to deal with the Social Security deficit: Invest payroll taxes in real assets (i.e., stocks, corporate bonds, mortgage-backed securities). Why? Because money invested in real assets yields a real return that’s far higher than the phony “return” today’s workers will receive on their payroll taxes (a tax on future workers isn’t a real return on investment). There are three ways to “privatize” Social Security by investing in real assets:

• Abolish Social Security and make individuals responsible for their retirement (perhaps with a minimal “safety net” funded by general revenues).

• Let the government do it, through a “blind trust” run by an independent agency.

• Let individuals do it, through mandatory private accounts.

5. I assume that the first option is off the table, for now, even though Social Security (like so many other government programs and activities) is unconstitutional. Given the large sums of money involved, the second and third options would yield about the same result, on average. I’ll continue by outlining the third option, which is the proposal that drew the ire of E.J. Dionne and so many other anti-privatization leftists.

6. Workers would invest some (or all) of their payroll taxes in real assets (investments in the private sector). Those same workers would receive lower Social Security benefits when they retire. The precise tradeoff would depend on the age at which a worker opens a private account and how much the worker has already paid into Social Security. Workers who are over a certain age — say 50 or 55 — when privatization begins wouldn’t be allowed to drop out, but would receive the Social Security benefits they expect to receive.

That leads to a series of questions and answers:

• Q: What happens when the shift of payroll taxes to private accounts results in a deficit, that is, when payroll tax receipts are less than benefit payments? A: The government borrows to make up the difference, just as it does now but on a smaller scale.

• Q: What happens to the money invested in private accounts? A: It would belong to the workers who invested it. They’d receive smaller payments from “regular” Social Security, but those smaller payments would be more than made up for by the income they’d receive from their private accounts. (The mix of allowable investments would range from mostly stocks for younger workers to only investment-grade corporate bonds for older workers.)

• Q: When does it all end? A: It would depend on how much workers are allowed to invest in private accounts and how much those private accounts earn. If workers were allowed to invest all of their payroll taxes in private accounts, and if all workers elected to do so, Social Security — as we know it — would wither away. Every worker would have his or her own source of retirement income. That income would come from earnings on real assets, not from taxes paid by those who are then working. And that income would exceed what the retiree would have received in Social Security benefits — even for private accounts invested “safely” in investment-grade corporate bonds..

Nay-sayers like Dionne are simply unable to grasp the notion that by diverting payroll taxes to real investments, with real returns, no one would be made worse off, and many would be better off. They’re hung up on the borrowing that must take place in the initial stage of privatization, and they overlook the return on that borrowing, namely, higher income for future retirees and lower payroll taxes on future workers.

They also overlook (or fear) the fact that the money which flows to real investments wouldn’t flow to the U.S. Treasury. (Privatization should be privatization.) That change (amounting to trillions of dollars in lost government revenue) would make it harder for the government to do stupid things.

In sum, the privatization of Social Security, in whole or in part, would have five beneficial effects:

• Future retirees would be more self-sufficient, thus reducing the burden on future taxpayers.

• The economy would grow more rapidly because of the increase in investments in stocks, etc.

• Future taxpayers would therefore find it easier to bear the remaining burden of Social Security and other government programs.

• More Americans — perhaps the vast majority of them — would acquire a stake in a robust private sector.

• There would, accordingly, be less support for government programs and less money available to fund them.

CODA

Privatization is wishful thinking on my part. Timothy Taylor offers a more realistic view:

Congress is unlikely to take action before the Social Security funding crisis is upon us [around 2034]. After all, the previous time that the Social Security trust fund was about to run out of money, in the early 1980s, Congress waited until the last minute and then appointed a commission … to propose a solution. [Douglas] Arnold [in this book] points out that there are special rules in the federal budget process which require that any changes to Social Security will need to get 60 votes in the US Senate–that is, the changes cannot be made by a simple majority as part of the budget process. Thus, both parties will likely need to sign off.

When Congress decide[s] to show its bravery by appointing another commission in about 2034, what choices will at that point be on the table?

There is a subgroup in both parties that would like to make relatively substantive changes to Social Security. On the Republican side, there is a group that is eager to transform much or all of Social Security into a set of individual retirement accounts, where the federal government would top up the accounts for those with low incomes. For example, if a proposal along these lines had been implemented about 15 years ago, so that holders of these retirement accounts could have benefited from the long run-up in the stock market since about 2010, a lot of people would be feeling a lot better about their retirements just now. But individual accounts would also create a need for a snake’s nest of rules about how such accounts could be invested, if one could use them as collateral for loans, if people would be allowed to dip into them for “worthy” purposes like house down-payments or college tuition for their children or paying legal settlements–and so on and so on.

Most Democrats are resolutely against altering Social Security in this way, but a certain subset of Democrats would like to see the benefits of the system substantially expanded. Because Social Security payments are linked to the taxes a person (or a spouse) paid into a system during a working, those who didn’t pay much into the system can end up in deep poverty when they are older. Of course, when a system is already on a track for a financial crash, a substantial addition to the benefits it would pay out would make the financial crunch worse….

… What is likely to happen [when the trust fund is depleted around 2034]?

Well, it would presumably be political suicide for politicians if Social Security benefit rates declined. Thus, while one can imagine longer-term changes in benefits, like a slow phase-in of a later retirement age, or changes in the details of how benefits are calculated. Over a few decades, these can make a big difference. But in the moment of the crisis in 2034 it’s unlikely that current benefits will be cut in any meaningful way.

On the tax side, a number of current Republicans have staked out ground that they will not support an increase in payroll taxes. Again, one can imagine policies that might have the effect of a slow phase-in of higher taxes–say, increasing the income taxes that those with high incomes might pay on Social Security benefit–but in the moment of crisis in 2034, a jagged upward jump in taxes for the system also seems unlikely….

[A] plausible prediction for 2034 is that Social Security will be “fixed” by turning to general fund tax revenues–rather than the payroll tax–as a source of funding. I suspect this would be done with a lot of strong statements about how it was only a temporary change, but it’s the kind of temporary change that can easily become permanent. As Arnold points out, this outcome is plausible–and would also represent a major change to the operation of Social Security:

Policymakers have had good reasons for not using general funds to subsidize Social Security. President [Franklin]Roosevelt argued that a tight link between taxes and benefits served two important ends. It would protect Social Security from hostile actors — “No damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program” — but it would also protect the program from unreasonable expansion. Legislators could not expand the program unless they were also willing to increase taxes.

This tight link has worked for nearly a century. The program’s detractors have never found a way to dismantle Social Security because workers earn their benefits by paying a dedicated tax [which was never invested and no longer covers their benefits]. But neither have the program’s champions been able to expand benefits since 1972 because legislators have been unwilling to increase taxes.

Everyone would be better off if Social Security were abolished and replaced by means-tested welfare and self-reliance. But that’s no longer the American way.

From ashes to ashes.

American Revolution — 1775-1783. The Colonies became sovereign States, bound by a compact (the Articles of Confederation) in which each State clearly retained its sovereignty. Those sovereign States, bound by a common language and culture, successfully banded together to defeat a stronger enemy.

Drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution — 1787-1790. The States, relying on the hopes of the Framers, entered into a compact which created a national government that, inevitably, would subsume the power and authority of the States.

Nullification Crisis — 1832-1833. An attempt by South Carolina to reject an unconstitutional act of Congress was stifled by a threat of military intervention by the national government. This set the stage for…

Civil War and Texas v. White — 1861-1865 and 1869. Regardless of the motivation for secession, the Southern States acted legally in seceding. Mr. Lincoln’s romantic (if not power-hungry) quest for perpetual union led not only to the bloodiest conflict ever likely to be fought on American soil, but may have deterred any future attempt to secede. The majority opinion in Texas v. White essentially ruled that might makes right when it converted a military victory into an (invalid) holding against the constitutionality of secession.

The assassination of William McKinley — 1901. This elevated Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency. Roosevelt’s extra-constitutional activism    became the exemplar for most of the presidents who followed him — especially (though not exclusively) the Democrats.

Ratification of the 16th and 17th Amendments to the Constitution, and creation of the Federal Reserve system — 1913. The amendments enabled the national income tax and wrested control of U.S. Senate seats from State legislatures, thus ensuring the aggrandizement of the national government and the subjugation of the States. The creation of the Fed gave the national government yet another tool for exercising central control of the economy — a tool that has often been used with disastrous results for Americans.

The stock-market crash of 1929. The Fed’s policies contributed to the crash and helped turn what would have been a transitory financial crisis into the Great Depression. This one-off series of events set the stage for an unprecedented power grab by the national government — the New Deal — which was aided by several spineless Supreme Court rulings. Thus empowered, the national government has spent most of the past 80 years enlarging on the New Deal, with additional help from the Supreme Court along the way.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy — 1963. This assassination, like that of McKinley, led to the elevation of a hyper-active politician whose twin legacies were the expansion of the New Deal and the eventual demise of the ultimate guarantee of America’s security: military supremacy and the will to use it. Kennedy’s assassination also marked a cultural turning point that I have addressed elsewhere.

The Vietnam War — 1965-1973. The Korean War was a warmup for this one. The losing strategy of gradualism, and a (predictable) loss dictated by the media and academe was followed, as day follows night, by a wave of unilateral disarmament. Reagan’s rearmament and a quick (but incomplete) victory in the Gulf War merely set the stage for the next wave of unilateral disarmament, which was reversed, briefly, by the shock of 9/11. The wars that followed in Iraq and Afghanistan were fought with the same vacillation and vituperation (from media and academe) as the Vietnam War. Unilateral disarmament continues, even as Russia and China become militarily stronger and bolder in their international gestures.

The demise of economic and social liberty in the United States — 1901 to the present (and beyond). This is the predictable result of the growth of the national government’s power. But that power, which is focused on the suppression of the American people, will matter not one whit when the U.S. is surrounded by and effectively dictated to by the great powers to its east and west.

As the world turns: from Colonies to colonies.