Kenneth Anderson at the Volokh Conspiracy makes the observation that Occupy Wall Street is really about the return of the aristocratic problem of primogeniture, though he calls it the problem of “trendy supply meets trendy demand”. “My point … was to observe that the Occupy movement was in large part about elite intra-class struggle, between an upper tier elite that was (and is) doing pretty well, and a lower tier elite that faces serious pressures and downward mobility.”
Back in the days of the landed aristocracy, when the size of the family wealth pie was fixed to the acreage of the desmain, every aristocrat had the credential but only the first-born actually had the money. “In Western Europe, most younger sons of the nobility had no prospect of inheriting property, and were obliged to seek careers in the Church, in military service, or in government.” The same phenomenon may apply to Occupy, where people in possession of academic credentials find themselves flipping burgers or working as housekeepers. Angry and unwilling to seek careers in the Church or the military, these princelings naturally prefer an expansion of government jobs to keep them in suitable employment.
But it’s a trap.
The problem is that the existence of the elite system itself implies limited room at the top. For what is the sense of having an elite if anyone can join? An elite system is by definition one in which many are called but few are chosen. Anderson argues that by overprinting degrees, the academic gatekeepers have created a whole generation of risk averse elites, where those who have it will fight tooth and nail to keep it; while those who want it but don’t have it, will grovel to whatever extent is necessary to get it.
Glenn’s [Reynolds] piece points toward something that needs much more study and discussion, and impact on policy: the linkage between the crisis in higher education and its business model, on the one hand, and elite formation and reproduction, on the other. That includes the tendencies reinforced by that selection process – not all of which are obvious, but which have large consequences for the way in which our current elites operate …
The system of high school college placement and higher education itself induces fantastic risk aversion, and that is accelerating, in large part on account of grade inflation that leave students in high school (applying to college) and in the university compressed against a top grade – in which there is mostly room to fall and fail. When the median grade in the liberal arts is an A-, you mostly have only to go down and given the cost of the credential and its consequences – well in excess of any educational value in the liberal arts – you will act in the most risk averse, strategic way and take only classes in which you already know you will do at least that well. The analogue of risk aversion in higher education in real life is downward mobility. As the Occupy movement demonstrates, downward mobility is a serious prospect.
To the Marxian idea of the “reserve army of the unemployed” is added the notion of the “reserve army of wannabee elites”. Ironically, calls by the OWS to expand tertiary education — to make it a “right” — and the Presidents stated intention to increase the percentage of college degreed students will have the effect of making the competition even more desperate; and just as those who would fight inflation by printing more money unintentionally make their plight worse, so would the preferred strategy of the current credentialed elites. But it wasn’t always like that. I noted in the previous thread’s comment section on Jeremy Lin that:
Recently I came across the River of Doubt, which tells the story of what Theodore Roosevelt did after the White House.
The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron.
After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.
Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. …
It’s hard to imagine people doing that today. It would be as if a former US President took off in an experimental spacecraft and went to Mars. He nearly died, and indeed his son believed his father’s time had come. That attitude, I think, represents what an Ivy League education ought to give you: an indomitable amateurism, a kind of duty to yourself and your nation; a Cross you have to carry — as opposed to the airs it often depicted giving those who don’t understand what the Right Stuff is.
Maybe it’s an attitude that’s been lost and perhaps the biggest damage that the modern cult of the elite has inflicted on American culture is to turn it into some kind of Third World class culture where certain endeavors are reserved only for the right people.
The conclusion that, “maybe it’s an attitude that’s been lost and perhaps the biggest damage that the modern cult of the elite has inflicted on American culture is to turn it into some kind of Third World class culture where certain endeavors are reserved only for the right people” was written before reading Andersen’s post, yet on reflection it was making a similar point.
All elitisms run the risk of inbreeding and sterility. The real benefit of a perceived equality among citizens, as driven by the rough and tumble of economic competition, is not only that it expands the wealth pie but also continuously changes the diners at the table. That means that some at the head table may never have the proper politically correct manners, but that is the price of vitality. The problem with socialism and its near cousins is that it places the selection of winners and losers (even if called “industrial policy”) in the hands of the status quo, who quite naturally will put their friends and family first in line.
The actual cost of “fairness” may ultimately be stagnation. The elite cocoon becomes a prison and the path towards a “degree” is transformed into another type of servitude and feudal relation. Is there any way out? Perhaps not without shaking up the elite system. It may be part of the problem, not part of the solution.
How to Publish on Amazon’s Kindle for $2.99
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $3.99, print $9.99
And TR was a progressive. Even progressive were more psychologically muscular back then. Ironically Progressivism’s first iteration also laid down an additional layer of what has become accepted as cherished American “ideals.” The progressive era gave us the pledge of allegiance, for one.
Today’s progressives are malignant limpnoodles, like gossipy, ill-tempered old ladies in their venom and reactionary behavior and world view.
“There is such a thing as manners. When it is likely that one is giving offense the usual course is to make some changes if you want to stay. It’s not a good or bad thing.”
Wretchard, I found the claim that you’re a La Raza-ista hilarious, just about as funny as the notion that somehow I’m a blood brother with Johnny Reb who claims to be from Switzerland or this Matt (Catholic theocracy fan?) fellow.
Like Subotai I happen to think the status quo is about to be broken in very nasty ways by our Ruling Class, the likes of which a Hannity or a Rush won’t discuss. I do sympathize with the Pauls and think the banning of ‘Paulbots’ over at other PJM forums and their tacit endorsement of ‘irregularities’ aka throwing out various county results in Iowa and Maine to reduce the votes for (if not rob) the hated Paul is rather cowardly. That’s all.
But being a patient man I’m looking forward to the suddenly soft on Obama Fox News crowd getting theirs in 2016 when Rand is on the ticket after their preferred vessels lose to Obama this autumn.
And as for the rest, somehow I almost managed to comment without mentioning that Russians like Filipinos defy racial categorization, having plenty of blonde-haired blue eyed descendants of Ghenghis Khan among their ranks.
See BCers, no mention of Misha the…you know the rest.
Cheers.
2. Viktor (not that Victor)
“. . . the likes of which a Hannity or a Rush won’t discuss.”
They do indeed discuss this topic, and others related to it, on occasion.
Question: why don’t you start your own blog? You spend so much time posting at other blogs. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to consolidate your comments on your very own site, where others could come to read them?
And, yes, we do know the rest. As you said.
THOSE WERE THE DAYS
It isn’t primogeniture
Whose absence I do mind
And if I may so veniture
A comment of some kind
I’ll say seigniorage was the best
Thing elites ever had
The castle lord put to the test
Each lass who wed a lad
The lord called to his castle then
The girl on day she wed
And was the first to rassle then
The young thing to the bed
I just want to add a comment about the “River of doubt.” It’s a very fascinating book. Of the three people who died, one drowned, one was murdered, and one [the murderer] was left to his fate in the jungle. The only thing that saved the Roosevelt expedition from attach by the natives, was they moved too fast and by the time that a tribe agreed to attach them, they were already down river. A subsequent expedition, which tried to duplicate the trip, was wiped out.
Roughcoat in fairness to El Rushbo I did find three mentions of the TSA in a Google search. But not attack of the drones.
Don’t get me wrong, I still respect what he’s accomplished in his twenty year career. I just think once you get big the urge to favor the status quo no matter how broken it is for other people gets hard to resist.
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2010/11/17/a_revolt_over_tsa_screenings3
And no, I’m too busy to start my own blog.
I think this is relevant: The Secret to Raising Smart Kids
“Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.”
Sabotaged by one of the Progressive own fundamental doctrines. “We are the smart ones.”
This would account for the narcissism and risk-adversity, they are afraid of putting their intellect to the test, for fear of failure. Which would blow away their self-esteem and claim to elite status.
“…I’m too busy to start my own blog.”
What a shame.
One can claim that the major success story of the American political, economic, and social culture has been that it has found ways to replace its elites without bloodshed (the Revolution and Civil War excluded.) The French revolution cut off the heads of many of the former elite. The Russian worked them to death, the Cuban had them either flee to the US or shot in one of Che’s prisons.
Today’s American elite finds itself lost, failing, and losing respect yet it’s internal successors clamor for an expanded scope and reverance of its elite advantages.
The crisis in this generation of American elites is coming to a head. Who is thinking of what we need from our new elites and how we plan on easing the old ones out and the new ones in?
I can think of three approaches right off the top of my head.
First, the big foundations were established by people who shook things up in their time yet after they are gone, the boards of directors use the banked resources of the founder to solidify and grow the established elites. I;m thinking the Ford Foundation, Packard Foundation, etc. Wanna bet what the Gates Foundation will be trying to do once Bill passes?
Second, big media is withering, to be replaced, we hope, with a free internet and “citizen-journalists.” The battle has been joined already,with SOPA and other internet control proposals that must be fought.
Third, the reining in of academia, at least through their credentialing gatekeeping and the government subsidies and price supports they receive via student loans.
A fourth, of course, is voting.
My old friend of 64 years has a daughter who is an attorney. A while back when she was still in law school I asked him what field of law she was thinking of. He replied she was uncertain so far but ”maybe public policy or something like that.”
”Public policy”? That was strange to me, didn’t quite know what it meant. When he explained, I said, ”You mean she’s going to be a government bureaucrat or something like that?” When I questioned it he replied that (1) she was interested in stuff like that and (2) it seemed there were lots of lawyers out there (and this was a while back!!) and competition in the private sector was stiff (and she was graduating from a state university in the Rockies).
I should mention that, despite having been born and raised in Texas, my friend squandered all that and went to Dartmouth, Harvard, and retired after a career as a liberal-arts professor with politics to match.
To me this illustrates two things frequently mentioned here: first, the point made in this post, ie that the lesser ”elite” don’t really have anywhere to go, ergo the government is the refuge of first choice. Second, my friend saw that as a worthy career for her–having spent his whole life since age 18 on one campus or another–and wasn’t the least disappointed. Me, I’d rather have root canal than see my kids choose a life like that.
Along this same line, it’s often been mentioned here that conservatives see a career as a job, profession, or some kind of work and don’t pay much attention to government in ordinary times. Liberals see government itself as a career and approach it that way. Recently somebody said something about all the Repubs leaving the building at 5:00 and the Dems staying until after dark.
Perhaps it is even simpler than that. Those in the wealthy elite have more than they would care to lose by taking unnecessary risk, especially as they get older and can’t see themselves starting again. Even those of us not in the club can easily be in that position.
Of course such an elite is a broad church, there are those who, even today, will take enormous risk and if they fail we sit back in schadenfreude and say “Why on earth did they do that, weren’t they well enough off anyway?”
The elites are a long time “dying,” and the MSM and the leftist narrative have been “collapsing” for a very long time. It’s starting to remind me of the old SNL/Chevy Chase routines about Generalissimo Franco “still being dead.”
Solidly conservative papers like the Washington Times and the Washington Examiner are infested with AP dispatches out of economic necessity, and while Fox News is by far the most watched cable news network, a majority of American watch no cable news at all. Some “demise” for MSM and elites!
“Collapse” and “Death” need to be helped along at an accellerated pace.
Posts like Whitehall’s @9 are why I will continue lurking here, just not posting for a while. Perhaps I’ll ‘see’ you BCers again for Victory Day in May.
Primogeniture? Is that anything like droit du seigneur? Not exactly? Oh, OK.
The problem is that the existence of the elite system itself implies limited room at the top.
And yet, the American tradition is to *have* an elite of sorts, but to have the membership open by meritocracy or chance (or community chest, Monopoly reference!), not to mention trapdoors so you fall back out by demerit or bad luck. We do have a president, and for four years he/she/it is in the elite, and maybe in the honorary emeritus by courtesy elite for the rest of their lives. So you can be elected elite, or buy your way in, though in practice I think it’s found that that has generally been true of other elite peerage systems around the world, as well.
Still, the primogeniture observation is somewhat on-target in that the similarity is that we seem to now have a surplus of generally well-qualified citizens who, well, are just not really needed, qualified or not. Even the traditional meritocracy was never that precise, that if you had 2% better qualifications that some other guy, you could take his place. Back in the day, there was always the frontier. Or in another culture, jihad. Away you go, with poor odds of success, but probably serving some benefit to your base society, and you might just luck out somehow. Today we seem to discourage even such outlets – actually, serving in the US military supplies some of that outlet, we learn from jihad. We should let our troops grab some booty, issue some billion-dollar letters of marque to Haliburton and turn them loose on Iran.
I would note something else in this meandering screed, which is that the system of elites and primogeniture avoid a certain problem that we also have right now, and that is the deflation of value of even those few qualified persons who *do* find work. With hordes of equally qualified pressing against the glass, salaries tend to fall, and conditions for even the employed tend toward the exploitive in other ways as well. Productivity falls accordingly, EVEN WHILE THERE IS AN EXCESS OF QUALIFIED WORKERS, and I’m pointing out it is actually BECAUSE there is an excess of qualified workers. This has been seen in STEM jobs for twenty years, and now is true in all, it seems.
(There, got it around to my favorite hobby-horse after all, isn’t that nice.)
Maybe this is in some way “optimal”, as more people get to split the pie, even while the effective price of getting X done right stays about the same? Perhaps, but it’s still pernicious, it seems to me.
That is the essential problem with Statism, its just a river that runs to the Sea of Aristocracy. No matter what the core of the ideology is that drives it what results is an aristocracy where if you are born into it then there you are no matter how low your moral or intellectual abilities. A place of importance will be made for you, even if its a no-show job that gets you a six or seven figure income. The idea that merit rather than family or social connections will always win the day in any kind of group endeavor is a joke. Sometimes it does. Usually it doesn’t. And the older the group, the less the less orthodox can ever have in terms of influence.
How many corporations that were great in their time have fallen because of such a process of decay? And how many governments?
When it comes to corporations I have little pity. When they become too stupid to live they deserve to die. But when it comes to governments? Then I pity the poor bastards who were their subjects, for they have to suffer the consequences of the actions of pompous idiots who — when disaster comes, sail away on their platinum parachutes.
Josh, the appearance of an excess of qualified workers is just a symptom of a larger problem; we have abandoned and stifled our free market economy to the point that it no longer gives the necessary job market feedback to those workers looking for work or no longer provides the opportunities for gain full employment that those qualified workers would created out of nothing as they did in the past.
W: “All elitisms run the risk of inbreeding and sterility. ”
My daughter last year went through the college application mill. Upon review of where her many friends and classmates got in, my appreciation was only strongly reinforced of how our elite Universities are only interested in pliant, politically correct, socially awkward bookworms with high grades and SAT scores but little common sense and almost no skills outside strong writing/reading skills.
Potential students with strong aptitude in non-English related fields, but poor in English, like many boys need not apply.
Sterility indeed.
Working in the Pentagon, it was sometimes interesting and often frustrating to see people trying to break into the DC Elite Business.
Policy wonks have most of the power in DC. Most politicians are policy wonks, and becoming a policy wonk is very popular. If you can do it without being elected, so much the better, and thus there is much competition in the business. Aside from whatever power you may accumulate from being the only expert in a field you yourself invented, there is also the possibility that you may be asked to be the Deputy Assistant Undersecretary for Kumquats on Alternate Wednesdays. Even if this does not lead to greater things, you will be of value to the Kumquat industry for decades thereafter.
But there are now so many policy wonks that getting anything done is damn near impossible, even simply coordinating a policy. A great many will weigh in with opinions just because they can. Many of these people are effectively in the position of being the equivalent of the man in charge of Volkswagon production for Ford Motor Co. Just because Ford does make Volkswagons does not matter; if they ever start he’ll be ready. And a major consequence of this is that by the time you weave your way through all of the policy wonks – and by the way, telling one or a dozen of them to buzz off simply is not done – well, you can’t be bothered with pointless little issues such as budgets and manpower. Bringing up such minor details is not appreciated by the policy wonks, who immediately assume you are trying to become policy wonk yourself.
And thus, for any given set of circumstances on any issue, the Federal Government has to be presumed to be utterly incompetent.
Respectfully, reverentially, and with all due deference to the sensitive nature of the subject, not to mention the worthiness of those who take the opposite view, I would argue against this.
What we have here is a statement in favor of the new bimetallism. The Free Internet is to many of us circa 2012 what Free Silver was to William Jennings Bryan and the Democrats of 1896. There is the same populist tone, the same anti-elitism, the same notion (heartfelt or not) of empowering those who have been apparently disenfranchised by the current order of things, and both ideas would be equally ruinous to the functioning of society if they were to become the law of the land.
Just like Free Silver, the Free Internet attempts to get something for nothing. It would have unfettered access to all intellectual material—in a word anything that can be digitized—without little thought paid to the compensation of those whose hard work generated the material. It would like to have reliable sources of news and information without the funding of bureaus, the building up of trust, the development of contacts, the training of journalists, or the investment in infrastructure.
What goes largely unappreciated is that the success of the New Media is very much dependent upon the functioning of the Old Media, and the digital economy is a derivative of the brick-and-morter economy. To say nothing of the actual means employed by “citizen-journalists”—it wasn’t a troop of individual bloggers who laid a world-wide network of fiber optic cable—there is the fact that the original information usually has to be gathered from another source. Bloggers are good at editorializing, not at investigating. A guy running a blog in New Jersey may be able to fact-check a government official who says something amiss about the escalating tensions in Argentina; but without a State Department, a foreign correspondent’s office, without some media organ devoted to gathering and publishing material from the remote corners of the world, we likely wouldn’t know there was anything going on in Argentina in the first place. The infrastructure we take for granted, as well as the assumed availability of information, is the legacy of a lot of other people’s hard work. It takes a lot of money and elbow grease, a lot of control and organization, to keep all that stuff functioning.
The internet will have to be controlled at some point; this is mere economic and social necessity. SOPA failed, but SOPA was just one (not very elegant) attempt at addressing a problem which isn’t going to go away. The eventual resolution is difficult to foresee at this point, but it will probably involve at least a general lessening of internet availability and content, as the cost of generating and conveying that content is shifted more and more on to the end user.
RWE…
More as: saturated, super-saturated, in noise over signal.
Further, MOST of that noise is an echo from some dated OODA loop now generations behind events.
I give you the MSM (D) take on islamism and islamists, the muslim brotherhood and all the rest.
U @ 16: the appearance of an excess of qualified workers is just a symptom of a larger problem; we have abandoned and stifled our free market economy to the point that it no longer gives the necessary job market feedback to those workers looking for work or no longer provides the opportunities for gain full employment that those qualified workers would created out of nothing as they did in the past.
I’d like to believe it. It seems to echo some of our mythos. But a lot of those old mythos are turning out to be myths. Is there really no limit to what more workers can produce? Even if it’s not a zero-sum game, does the sum rise linearly with the population? What of The Future when robots do all the work and we just play? Perhaps we’re there now, even if a lot of the robots speak Chinese. Note that this is basically the socialist paradise, where the working class has infinite leisure “like the rich” (hah), and a chance for personal enrichment following the fine arts.
What if it’s an infinite sum game but you’re not a player? That’s the scenario. You argue that everyone should *be* a player. Well, you and me, let’s do something about it. But what, exactly? Hmm. I’ve mentioned the bartender at a local restaurant, a newly graduated civil engineer from the state college, who can’t seem to get an engineering gig. I suggested he walk over to the adjacent city hall and promote a small civic improvement project, a path over the hillside in back of city hall directly to the gate of the Megabank offices, providing a new park and a scenic route and boosting restaurant business, that he could engineer for a couple of bucks and major resume enhancement. But that was all beyond his ken. Perhaps I should go back and promote it myself. Privatize public works, employing American yutes on smallish shovel-ready projects. Somehow avoiding competitive bidding. Ay, there’s the rub.
U @ 17: My daughter last year went through the college application mill. Upon review of where her many friends and classmates got in, my appreciation was only strongly reinforced of how our elite Universities are only interested in pliant, politically correct, socially awkward bookworms with high grades and SAT scores but little common sense and almost no skills outside strong writing/reading skills.
That’s odd. Back in the day when I was doing admissions work for mumble medical school, I was told that virtually any applicant with a 4.0 would be rejected as too wonky. Even way before it was “fashionable” admissions looked to diversity, or at least social skills, undergrad as well. Anyway, are there really that many kids today *with* strong reading/writing skills? Maybe they are wise to grab all they can find.
–
RWE @ 18: And thus, for any given set of circumstances on any issue, the Federal Government has to be presumed to be utterly incompetent.
What you describe is worse than incompetent, it’s actively obstructive, both directly and by consuming all available resources in advance.
Matt,
Let’s not confound “opinion setting” with copyright protection and the cost of news gathering.
Yes, MSM is a way of collecting revenue to pay for the eyes, ears, and editors necessary to bring news and facts into general circulation. Unfortunately, the internal workings of MSM have debased the product they proport to deliver. The “news” is getting more and more diluted with opinion and proproganda.
The US Constitution specifically calls out the need for creative works to be protected by copyrights and patents so to encourage more creative works. I can see the need for creators to have such protection but it has gone WAY beyond the balance point of the public’s needs vs the increasingly corporate ownership of copyrights as assets. What was once 25 years protection can now be over 100 years, far outliving the creative person who brought forth the public benefit.
There will be found a new compromise for copyright and a new way of funding news gathering. It is the current elites who have used their government protections to create empires for themselves that will have to give way.
How much would you pay someone to not do something? How much would you pay somebody to go away? In one of today’s Drudge links there’s a picture of President Obama touring the Boeing plant in South Carolina that he had tried to close.
A paper in economics describes the difference between racketeering and government.
Someone in the thread above expressed astonishment that “public policy” should be a career. It’s not just a career, it’s a gold mine, properly approached.
One of the interesting things about the American economy, perhaps the world economy, is how it keeps trying to grow in spite of all attempts to beat it down. Whether it is the Keystone pipeline or the NLRB standing in the way there is a substantial growth potential out there driven by opportunity and technological change.
Why so many extortionists? Because it is at present more profitable to be a racketeer than to be an entrepreneur. It makes more economic sense to invent some scam like Global Warming and then wait to be paid to go away than it is to frack for oil.
Some countries overseas are in the contrary position. While there is corruption in China, it is more lucrative right now to attract an American industry there than it is to shake it down. Hence, they let it in; and the consequence is that industries are exported and outsourced to China, fundamentally in line with economic incentives.
The structural problem with the American economy is that it is all too often more lucrative to shake industry down than to run it for profit. This habit developed in the fat days. But as the parasites run down the country, the equation will shift as the more and more buzzards compete for fewer and fewer carcasses. Pretty soon it becomes profitable to make something again, but only after things have hit the bottom and people become impoverished.
What makes it cheap to run protection is the political system and its handmaidens, political correctness and humbug. Without them people who produce negative value, guys like Jesse Jackson or the Greenies, would have fewer opportunities to be “important” or “leaders”.
Right now, selling bureaucratic protection is a land office business. Therefore it attracts the underemployed members of the minor aristocracy who see in it a potential source of income. What they fail to understand is that in the long run it cuts their throats too. The solution, it would seem, is to find ways to raise the costs in the extortion business so that it once again becomes better to make something than to sniff around for a rent-seeking opportunity. It is either that or wait for Darwin to work his cruel ways and pick up from the bottom.
19. Matt – Respectfully, reverentially, and with all due deference to the sensitive nature of the subject, not to mention the worthiness of those who take the opposite view, I would argue against this.
Lol. Perfect.
RE: …a reluctance to participate further because of [other posters]… (cont. from previous thread)
This could use a drill-down. One might be tempted to inquire about the nature of the complaints against the Whiskey v.3 set of commentariat. If the salient issue were manners, the list would arguably be longer.
@19: Respectfully, reverentially, and with all due deference to the sensitive nature of the subject, not to mention the worthiness of those who take the opposite view, I would argue against this.
Demonstrating street smarts in physically hostile territory, which is always a recommended course of behavior, isn’t the same thing as vigorous intellectual debate, although I have noticed that intellectuals tend towards the sensitive. “Jane (or John), you ignorant sl^t” doesn’t play well in that venue.
The complaints demand more specificity. (Which is not to imply that some comments don’t deserve a smack-down that is noticeable for its absence. Why is that?)
……
The West has a new demographic class – an educated non-elite. All h^ll is breaking loose. It also explains why the American public is leading the pols/polls – on certain issues.
Richard,
You comment 23 above should be a post. It is likely to be missed among the comments. Too good to waste.
When it was revealed that the food police hired to protect kids from turkey sandwiches packed by mom were funded from the Stimulus, I remarked that all command societies reach the point of diminishing returns, where the cost of each additional control rises not linearly, but but exponentially. The bureaucrats, like packets in a bad network, start to collide. Soon you will need police to watch the turkey sandwich police.
The Economist has a story about regulation in America. It says, “the home of laissez-faire is being suffocated by excessive and badly written regulation”.
But it is worse than that. As the Corzine incident showed, financial reform created a thicket in which new snakes could breed. It was crafted to exploit a loophole. As Richard Levick at Forbes writes, that leaves things right back where they started.
Undoubtedly the Liberals will say that the only problem with Dodd-Frank was that it was only 23 times longer than Glass-Seagall, clearly inadequate. Like the stimulus it has to be as big as a bazooka to work. Why not make it 230 times longer? Or 2,300 times longer — if that’s what it takes.
But at some point the diminishing returns kick in. Just how many hours will an attorney charge just to see if you are in basic compliance? And will it guarantee no more loopholes?
It’s a game you can’t win. And sooner or later, as night follows day, the system will complexify itself to death. There isn’t enough free energy on earth to regulate everything to the degree that statists think they should be regulated. But they’re going to try. Before the end, they are sure going to try.
I beg everyone’s indulgence when I once again quote Robert Conquest in “The Dragons of Expectation.”
”And an ever larger section of society is put through “higher’ education. One element of this is educated in scientific and other specialized disciplines, though often unaccompanied by much in the way of ‘education’ proper. The other element is given a (shrinking) slice of the ‘humanist’ training that used to be the crux of learning, but a growing proportion of them have no option afterwards but to go on into an increasing large and less educated academe or to seek jobs in the bureaucracy (or in the bureaucratic section of academe itself) or, of course, to enter the media or such spheres as advertising. At any rate, the state is to some extent creating a nonproductive class and creating nonproductive work for them.”
As for the situation in Europe relative to the primacy of the First Born, in my reading on the Thirty Years War I was surprised to learn that rather than religion it was spurred by the efforts of the innumerable minor barons and princes to seize and expand their personal fiefdoms. As a professional historian put it to me, “Of course people came to America from Europe. If you ever realized how many crappy little nobles there were that the common people had to deal with, getting out from that was a powerful incentive, aside from the armies riding through and devastating everything.”
And the crappy little nobles have followed us here.
I watched a few episodes of the Walton’s marathon today, it was hard to recognize those people as Americans. They were poor but proud, self reliant and free, God fearing and thankful, what has happened to us?
I seriously doubt that this highly successful TV show would even be produced today. If the Occupy crowd watched the Walton’s they would either be shamed or in total denial that such people could exist. Just look at some of the car commercials that are being broadcast, they are metro-sexual and embarrassing to people who actually have to work at manual labor. Anything beyond truck commercials advertise for men that are such in name only.
The Walton’s could fix things, carried guns (yes, shot guns), went WITHOUT, and relied on each other – imagine the novelty of that! I fear for males in today’s society as the jobs for actual men are being systematically destroyed. One of the last refuges is farming and the Gov is hellbent on micromanaging milk production, dust, farmer’s markets, and butchering.
Obama and the Left want to destroy; the Church, the family, energy production, gun rights, education, and freedom…Good night John Boy.
… as opposed to the airs it often depicted giving those who don’t understand what the Right Stuff is.
College was supposed to inculcate the Right Stuff. We face two problems.
1. How to instill the values we need in our citizens and our leaders ASAP.
2. How to repair the primary secondary and college education systems that should be doing the job. This may well take a couple of generations of concentrated effort.
The best way to achieve goal #1 is through the Armed Forces. My proposal is to draft everyone for 6 months of universal military service after their 17th birthday. Send everyone through Basic and AIT, with a very unpleasant option available for COs after Basic. Include training in Civics, First Aid, and Disaster Preparedness. Make all government benefits including student loans contingent on further service.
@27: the home of laissez-faire is being suffocated by excessive and badly written regulation
From the author of The Economist piece, Richard Levick, CEO Levick Strategic Communications, on the TransCanda failure to ‘sell’ the Keystone XL pipeline:
There is no perceptible communications strategy to support the lobbying in which industry representatives are presumably engaged, or to convince legislators that the oil industry has the ear of voters on this issue.
We don’t even see compelling narratives of what Keystone would accomplish for the American public. A section on API’s website dedicated to Keystone offers a laundry list of speeches and documents with no hub inviting participation or action of any sort. We all use energy. So what’s the tangible benefit of the proposed pipeline?
Such flaccidity on the part of the industry offers a sharp contrast to the traditional image of oil companies and how they exercise power.
Oh my. Objective reality taking a backseat to ‘strategic communication.’ Bad regulation and poorly promoted pipeline.
Once again I am rewarded for going online. Most of the rest on the web (even at NRO, Weekly Standard, American Spectator, etc.) is old hat and tripe. Wretchard, you should be POTUS except you’re too wise to want the job (but just in case it’s a problem, we can gin up a birth certificate no problemo)!
Wretchard, ‘The River of Doubt’ chronicles the last vestiges of the American old West or the Victorian male. In ‘Queen Victoria’s Little Wars’ Byron Farwell tells some of the tales of the men that made the Empire.
http://www.amazon.com/Queen-Victorias-Little-Byron-Farwell/dp/0393302350
Great reading and the loss of these kind of men is a sad commentary on the decline of the West.
W @ 27: “And sooner or later, as night follows day, the system will complexify itself to death. There isn’t enough free energy on earth to regulate everything to the degree that statists think they should be regulated.”
Glad to see you start to focus on this, Wretchard. Excessive regulation is what is killing the economy. After all, the US had a booming economy in the 1950s with much higher tax rates than today — but no EPA, etc.
Look on the bright side. Every time the Big Govt lefties achieve another victory, we know they have actually moved themselves one step closer to defeat. We don’t have to beat them; leave them alone & they will beat themselves. And so I have learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, so to speak.
The big issue is how to preserve the lessons of this transient era for the Next Phase. After the coming inevitable collapse, will the survivors face a new Dark Ages or a bright new dawn? A lot will probably depend on how well we can transmit the important lessons across the coming turmoil.
Trust Fund Babies Unite!
A client of mine told me today a story of a client of his. Said client is a trust fund baby who has never worked a day in his life, but:
• The economy has cut his net worth in half and declining fast, perilously close to that of mere mortals.
• ZIRP has cut his income to near zero.
• The housing market has cut the value of his equity in his home to near zero.
• And bought and paid for trophy wife stills spends like there is no tomorrow.
Small income, Humongous expenses. By God, the World’s gone mad. How could this happen to one of God’s gifts to Humanity? This is just not the way it is supposed to be. What’s a Trust Fund Baby to do?
Trust Fund Baby has asked my client to have a little chat with bimbo wifey-poo about her spending habits. Good Luck with that.
My heart just bleeds. This was supposed to happen to only those riff-raff with real jobs, not one of our betters. And to think they both probably voted for Buraq.
wretchard – There is a big US semiconductor company that built a plant in China. Right donw the street is the identical building being built by the gov’t by the same people and companies working for the Americans. Guess what they are going to do with that building? All orders to tool suppliers interestingly doubled in that period – exactly – for tools in-bound to the region.
There are no IP laws there.
Draw your own conclusions.
@ 31 “The complaints demand more specificity.” Wretchard deserves the benefit of the doubt. He gets peanuts from this site compared to the amount of hours he puts into it, no matter how much of PJM’s traffic he and perhaps Spengler (though I doubt David gets as many hits here as at the older, more established internationally Asia Times) account for compared to the rest.
As for Bryan Preston in particular among the PJMers who gladly and peacefully co-existed with the ‘Ronulans’ in his previous job at the TX GOP in the early 2000s (Austin having long been a libertarian hot bed)…mmmm…not so much.
I saw a very orchestrated campaign, perhaps paid, to smear Ron Paul leading up to the Iowa caucuses, with the comments from certain favored commenters who have now been rewarded with their own PJM blogs hit fever pitch (the chap’s handle starts with a ‘c’ I believe).
Once the hated Ronulans were beaten back in Iowa things thankfully cooled off. But now I sense a general clampdown for the Right’s favorite forums i.e. Fox News Channel very quickly. Boss Murdoch’s cojones in particular seem caught in a vise with the UK phone/celebrity hacking scandal, hence the firing of Judge Napolitano and even Politico reporting on the new Fox tone (I’m sure the Judge will get a larger audience online, though earn less from it which was really the main point) here:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/72825.html
FNC criticize Obama yes, suggest that anything criminal meriting impeachment and jail time happened with Fast and Furious, bailouts, green energy subsidisies — increasingly, no. Crank up the usual celebrity-trash news – yes. Thus, it’s up to the likes of Wretchard, the L3s and others to keep shining the spotlight on such contempt for the rule of law when the compromised Establishment outlets no longer may.
So yes, I’ll bow out defending Wretchard, and even Spengler (even if he’s wrong about attacking Iran, but merely being wrong is vastly preferable to being underhanded) with all sincerity.
The rest of PJM’s threads though are now blatantly neutered, complete with a few idiots clucking a few weeks back about how few Paulbot comments there are anymore. Of course, they deleted them! Which they are at the end of the day, free to do, but in that case, Mark Levin is a bigger joke for whining when the ‘Ronulans’ returned the favor on one measly station in Ohio.
I see the elites and the suffocating government they control being a scam. It started before the war of northern aggression, but really picked up steam with the sell out of the country by Wilson when he helped found the Fed.
The scam has grown larger for a century, and the bigger it got the more people wanted in on it. And they didn’t just want their first born feeding on the scam, they wanted the entire extended family. Well now this scam has gotten so big that the producing classes can no longer support it.
@2. Viktor (not that Victor)
“Johnny Reb who claims to be from Switzerland”
Et tu, Viktor! Do you think I am a “paulbot”? Do you have any reason to doubt my authenticity? Or does my calling certain minorities exceptionally racist make me a racist? But if calling other groups racist makes me one, doesn’t that also prove that I am right?
@19. Matt
I think you are wrong about the media, wrong about the internet and wrong about bi-metalism. Once the wall street banks in coordination with the london banks got the US off of bi-metal standard after the war of northern aggression, they were able to set into motion the series events that has lead to the current world ponzi. These bankers and their heirs have bankrupted the entire planet. Once Silver was no longer the money of merchants in 1873, then the bankers took all the chips. Free competition between currencies is the only way out of this, otherwise the bankers will use their power to force the people to use whatever currency they control, and they will thereby be able to continue their grip on power.
This post brings to mind a little ditty on Lowell George’s ‘Thanks, I’ll eat it here’ album. ‘Himmler’s Ring’, written by Jimmy Webb:
Himmler’s Ring, Himmler’s Ring, –
Ain’t that ring a wonderful thing!
Don’t that skull and crossbones shine!
Some day that ring’s gonna be all mine.
Looming economic crisis might force changes that the elite are unwilling to make. Up until now we have had an elite class whose activity was the learning, repeating and creating of shibboleths without contributing to society anything that people were willing to pay for, and this was financed through public spending and private (student) debt. As tax money dries up and faces expanding demands, and the realization hits that a debt-financed four-year vacation actually comes with consequences, it might be the end of the academic world as we know it.
I love the scene in the movie Defiance where one of the Jews who had escaped to the forest was trying unsuccessfully to use a hammer to help build a shelter. He was asked,
“What sort of work did you do?”
“I am …was… an… intellectual.”
“This is a job?”
the nobles interbred, cousins with cousins, so that a significant number could recover some wealth ! idem for the elite families, to a certain degree they married cousins too, at least until a few decades ago !
RWE, the “little” nobles that came to America were mostly Brits, french nobles had no taste for going abroad and work like a paysant while they had “serfs” for doing the job on their domain, big or small, they preferred courting in Versailles to get some tips, like a administrative position. Though their stay at the court wasn’t gratuitous, the king made them pay for their inhabitation.
Matt,
Sorry, go read Bobbitt and then get back to us.
Oh, and maybe a little reflection on the demise of Dan Rather™ before you state with such confidence that only Official Newspersons can do research.
looks to me like the law of diminishing returns is about to land, in force on our heads. less and less wanted by more and more, also known to be the prime cause of war. that is where our future lies. too many with the abilty to pull a trigger, yet incapable of producing a gun, or anything else of value.
in case no one has noticed, we now lead the world in some pretty creepy things, like level of incarceration of citizens. imho, we have far too many with no concept of actually creating anything useful; and, when chit contacts fan (very shortly) using a weapon to get ‘stuff’ is going to be the way of our world. we have gone so far down this road to doom that nothing short of a ‘purging’ will reset the balance.
i don’t really believe the left wanted the masses well educated, thus the dumbing down effect seen in our ‘halls of learning’. these ‘useful idiots’, as dubbed by past communist regimes, have grown to numbers unmanageable, and in physical size unknown before, with appetites that once no longer able to be quenched, will revolt and cause mayhem as to make our last Civil War look like a dress rehearsal for the coming event.
honestly, i hope all this is just me dreaming up a worse case scenario of what is to come. however, nobody i see is working to fix the problems we have. just spend more $$$ we don’t have on stupid ideas only an affirmative action educated moron getting constant handouts throughout life would believe had a chance in he!! of actually working.
maybe i am wrong, but what if i am right? do you have a plan? very few do.
Wretchard, I must disagree. The choice between entrepreneurship and apparatchik, of productivity and liberty against truckling membership in a Nomenklatura is perforce a moral one, not one of opportunity or circumstance. It is a matter of nature, character and principle. This is particularly true in the USA.
It is not some sort of “national” habit borne of “fat times”. The number of these parasites has grown in symmetry with the mean age of the Baby Boomer Cadre. It is in fact the burden of supporting this lazy, unproductive Nomenklatura that has put us in this pickle in the first place (that, and the said group’s destructive “polices”.) You have it just backward.
This so called “civil servants” could never be Entrepreneurs nor would they desire it. They literally can produce nothing. Nor do they really desire Liberty. This is why they seek a place in a near feudal system. It is rank they desire, and to warm their egos in a false notion of “distinction”. It is a demimonde. Morally, intellectually and physically they are cowards. That is why they are were they are and seek what they seek.
Conversely, those who truly will produce, who will create wealth and seek freedom rarely are apparts, or if they are it is merely happenstance and usually temporary. Such people truly want liberty and actually know what that means. The truly creative create and the less creative but decently productive support them.
Caught in between are those who merely seek a job; here there is a mixture of of the moral and the immoral, of character bad and good, or at least bad and mediocre.
It may or may not be that power corrupts, but it is certainly true that the corrupt seek power. Always in history these sort of parasites come and go.
I fear that you slip into moral relativism here: The two case are not equivalent. In almost all human aspects they are as different as night and day.
It is also not true that we are at some cyclical, natural crossroads where “elites” are somehow “replaced”, violently or otherwise.
First, our current “elites” are not truly an “elite” in any meaningful sense but rather a sort of criminal political gang. It is risible to even call this woeful crew a “meritocracy”. Here we have an absolutely ineducable nincompoop such asMichelle Obama graduate from Princeton and get paid 300k a year to “advise” a hospital about “policy”. Unlike all prior elites in our history, they have done absolutely nothing positive to attain their status. Not prowess in war, deftness in commerce or shrewdness in diplomacy; Not skill in arts or knowledge. All is a strange, bizarre and gimcrack parody of the old Wasp Ascendancy, the last real elite of America and the one that the Democrats destroyed with their near Soviet aggression.
In fact there have been only three true elites ousted in our history: the old Tories at the Revolution, the Southern Slave holders at the Civil War and the aforementioned WASP Ascendancy at the New Deal and WW2. All involved violence, though in the last case the violence of war was only an indirect weapon.
Moreover, what we see today is unique certainly in our history, and perhaps even unique in World history. Here we have this bizarre cliche of mostly ill-educated, dull witted and wholly corrupt self appointed “elites”, quite full to the eyebrows of the most preposterously foolish and irrational notions, who not only have done absolutely nothing to merit their place but who hold to a complete and total inversion of all civilized values. Worse, their nihilism and mad narcissism is at such a pitch that they literally seek to overturn civilization itself. It is true that we have had periods before rife with narcissism and arrogance in our elites, but never were they so willfully destructive, so morally depraved. It is not the they have “outlived their usefulness”, for they were never useful, but rather that their own destructiveness destroys all about them, including themselves. The bunco artist have run out of marks.
This is a new menace to this nation whatever its cause, and, I suspect, new to our civilization.
It maybe that they are so destructive precisely because they are not a true elite. They may have such contempt for all that is good, for all that is high precisely because deeply inside they know that they are frauds–thus the nihilism.
We must rid ourselves of them. It may be too late already.
@45 — “It is in fact the burden of supporting this lazy, unproductive Nomenklatura that has put us in this pickle in the first place (that, and the said group’s destructive “polices”.)”
Sounds just like Obama whining about Bush. What matters most is what we are prepared to do about it. Are we going to focus on a single cohort, the innocent and guilty alike, and extract our revenge so that we might soothe our raging souls?
Cargo Cult.
No, that’s an insult to the sophistication of neolithic peoples everywhere.
MF: you refer to the current lot as a parody of the WASPs?
Mongoose at 46,
I’ll accept your historical analysis of only three elite replacement episodes in US history IF we note that these were the CENTRAL, NATIONAL elites.
For most of US history, LOCAL elites dominated the local scene and the daily life of citizens. Even today, centralized elites are displacing local elites. We see this with the penetration of big box stores into markets where a local commercial elite dominated. Eugene O’Neill supposedly used this theme of local elite displacement in his plays. Another example was the history of Utah – the early impact of the transcontinental railroad on Joseph Smith’s colony shows some of the process although it seems, from the outside, that the Mormon local elite retains some autonomy even today.
Our current bunch have centralized control – federal inspectors of school lunch boxes for 4 year olds???? And yes, they seem to believe in either nothing except power or in the hazy New Age mythologies that they pedal.
But I’m a practical man at heart – WHAT DO WE DO? That is the question of our age, of our times as holders of the treasure of freedom and the glories of Western Civilization. In my post at #9 I parroted some basic answers already adrift. What we have so far is the core of the intellectual team to illuminate the path ahead. What we’re looking for in the primary season are the practical political actors who will illuminate the issues and the choices we citizens face, and use the vision of American freedom to regain control of our institutions and our government.
We have a power over us that is forcing us down a path alien to our intentions and values as Americans. We must create countervailing power in some group of individuals to achieve our ends. This is dangerous – George Washington held such power as commanding general of the Continental Army. His choice of retaining power as proclaimed monarch or of standing aside and foregoing that power is the reason he is justly the father of our country.
In other words, less griping and more constructive suggestions. That is our duty!
An element usually missing from the discussion of education and elitism is the distinction between people “to the manor born” and others who are only trying to attain to it. A hundred years ago, one did not go to Harvard in order to become a member of a certain class; one went there because one already belonged to that class. Professors were not members of that elite; they were its servants. If Junior studied and learned something while there, it was his harmless eccentricity, but it made no difference when he came to inherit his place in Papa’s business or the family. To this day I venture to say it remains true, at a certain stratospheric level.
On the other hand, Bill Gates went to Harvard alright–and dropped out promptly, because he had something better to do. The Wright Brothers were high school dropouts. In their day we had not yet made the weird jurisdictional decision, that universities were in charge of sorting out the classes, or deciding whose innovations deserved development, or even of ‘education,’ which can still be acquired in a number of ways.
“The actual cost of “fairness” may ultimately be stagnation.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnVm_F46_vs
Ayn Rand addressed this in her essays.
Indeed. George Will once wrote something along the lines of this (and of course I’m paraphrasing from memory, and for all I know he was quoting someone else): “It used to be that who was mayor mattered much more in your daily life than who was president; and much of what’s wrong with America today can be traced to the process by which that statement became less and less true.”
Read a line of Thomas Paine’s that summarizes today’s challenge:
““If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.”