The C-Word is not ‘capitalism’ or ‘conservatism’… or ‘cancer’…

I elsewhere speak of both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who are often portrayed as opposites. Only, the latter deeply respected the former, writing of Smith’s vital role in ‘bourgeois revolution’ - a necessary intermediate stage on the road from feudalism and monarchic despotism to final-stage worker paradise. 

Mind you, it’s a pity 99% of moderns know next to nothing about these two thinkers, beyond inaccurate clichés. (See: Adam Smith – Liberals must reclaim him.) Smith was brilliant, helping set in motion many of the positive sum processes I’ll speak of below.

Alas, though the younger Marx offered cogent insights into economics and historiography, he was an utter failure at predicting future events. Eventually, he became a quasi-religious figure, a tool of neo-feudal lords, who made him the iconic saint of a state religion, excusing murderous tyranny. 

But his biggest mistake was assuming that human beings are too stupid to read Karl Marx! And thereupon draw lessons, taking actions that render his scenarios obsolete.

That's exactly what FDR and others of the 30s thru 50s did, performing reforms that Marx never imagined possible, sharing significant power with the working classes and  luring them into a prosperous middle class. Indeed, for a while there, our Rooseveltean Reforms seemed to toss Old Karl into the dustbin… 

...till a new generation of oligarchist fools set to work obeying almost to the letter his predicted patterns of dimwitted, self-flattering greed, restoring vast disparities to French Revolution levels. Thus they have resurrected Marx, his books now fizzing again across all the world’s campuses and ghettos.

Elsewhere I talk about the worst of these would-be lords and their sycophant lackeys, the so-called neo-monarchists, who now openly call for a return to rule by ‘unitary executive” kings, claiming that “freedom and democracy are incompatible.”  

At all levels and in all ways, they are the very best friends the Marxists ever had.

But here I want to talk about the vast majority of those on the right. Not the neo-monarchist extrema, but a far larger number whose core hypocrisy – continuing to claim fealty to free-enterprise – is easily exposed as two-faced pretense.

== What is the ‘C-Word’? ==

What chafes me about 'capitalism' ravings from all sides - from far right to far left - is how almost no one ever defines the term or shows even a clue of understanding its meaning or implications. 

Worse, almost no one nowadays mentions the other c-word... competition. Even though – unlike ‘capitalism’ -- we can actually agree (a bit) what competition means!

For one thing, it’s blatantly obvious from both evolution and history that humans are deeply competitive creatures. 

We are at our most creative and productive when most of us have the freedom, confidence, fairness and wherewithal to compete in areas we choose, on a relatively even playing field. 

(Those of you who denounce me for saying this; aren't you thereby vigorously competing with me?)

All of that might make me sound like a right winger... 

...though the truth is diametric opposite! 

Across the last 50 years, every measure or action that has lessened effective competition in the U.S. has been perpetrated by hypocrites of a sellout Republican Party -- a cabal devoted to replacing flat-fair-open-creative competition with privileged oligarchy and monopoly.

In contrast, the Rooseveltean social contract - which Republicans strive to demolish - enhanced creative competition, including entrepreneurship, small business startups, inventiveness and the most vigorous era of new products and services, ever. 

(I invite cash wagers on all of those assertions, which are overwhelmingly proved.)

Liberals did all that (if imperfectly) by:

- Using regulations to limit the power of mighty corporations and oligarchs to quash upstart competitors.

- Using tax policies to keep wealth disparities low enough so that - while getting-rich remained an incentive-allure for creative enterprise - the rich could not tower outrageously above us all, like lords. Or gods. 

(Example: there was a time when you’d see a rich or famous person flying First Class, now and then. They mostly rode the same airplanes, sipping mimosas in seats only 2x as large as ours. Alas, no longer. And note that all modes of transportation decline when the rich abandon them.)

- Using tax laws to encourage R&D, productive capital and hiring workers, rather than Supply Side parasitism.

- Encouraging unions (who were vigorously anti-Leninist) so that the working class joined the middle class, a feat Karl Marx never expected and that tossed all his predictions into history's dustbin. For a while.

- Creating a vast ecosystem of community colleges and universities that allowed many children of field hands and factory workers to transform into professionals and entrepreneurs.

- Liberal social programs and justice reforms that reduced the nasty, unjustified, though all-too human practice of prejudice. And thus (only partially, so far) achieving Adam Smith's top recommendation to stop wasting talent! ...

...Because, as Friedrich Hayek said (before the mad right perverted his memory), any competitive system will function best when it involves the largest number of knowledgeable, empowered, confident and eager competitors, unencumbered by insipid bigotries.

All of those endeavors – which define liberalism at its core - had great effects at many levels: fighting injustice, improving lives, preserving freedom - but with an added benefit that (alas) no democratic politician or liberal philosopher has had the savvy to explain... 

…that all of those endeavors also enhanced flat-fair-creative competition! And hence our creative inventiveness. 

(I exclude mutant-liberalism - the so-called far-left - whose arrogant demands to equalize outcomes, rather than opportunities is almost as jibbering loony as the entire-right's devotion to restored feudalism.)

And that’s my capsule argument about the C-Word that is no longer spoken aloud by ‘conservative’ writers or pundits. 

== C-Words ... all words... merit scrutiny! ==

Alas, no liberal pundit or politician ever points to this hypocrisy, or that the Founders and the original Tea Party rebelled primarily against cheater oligarchy. 

Moreover, anyone who actually reads Adam Smith knows that - were he alive today – Smith would be a flaming Democrat.

That hypocrisy – betraying and almost never even mentioning the most important c-word – competition - spans the entirety of today’s conservatism, with that one exception that I describe elsewhere... 

...those neo-monarchists who thus have one virture... evading hypocrisy. They are totally open about their hatred of fair competition! They openly espouse completing the antipodal migration of conservatism, from once-upon-a-time extolling competition all the way to openly justifying its utter suppression. 

 From Adam Smith to Louis XIV.

Again, unlike every other kind of contemporary conservative, at least members of that extremum – while nauseatingly evil imbeciles – are no longer hypocrites! I'll grant them that.

----------

 See my posting: The Return of Neomonarchy.

Supply Side 'economics' without a single success -- except a rising oligarchy

Philstockworld has republished my most devastating evisceration of the Thatcherite insanity called "Supply Side" (voodoo) economics, a cult incantation that has not one... even one... ever even one... successful prediction or outcome to its credit - an unrelenting record of devastating failures and trillion dollar ripoffs.  

Alas, almost none of my eviscerations is used currently by those public figures who oppose the madness!

Wretched-stupid evil on one side... vs. goodguys who are too dumb to offer effective persuasion on the other. I'd say we were doomed except... science will likely rescue us. And relentless/ingenious innovation. And goodwill. (And possibly machines of loving grace?)

We'll get back to this topic. But first... in "Planetary Politics when the Nation-State Falters," in the next Noema Magazine, Nathan Gardels talks about power devolution from the "westphalian" stasis.  

== Supply Side did supply… a rising oligarchy ==

"Fifty years of tax cuts for the rich failed to trickle down even once:" David Hope of the London School of Economics examined 18 developed countries over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015 -- countries that slashed taxes on the wealthy vs. those that didn’t. Per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn’t, the study found. The analysis discovered one major change: The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered without trickling down to the middle class… 

...exactly as I have told you repeatedly Adam Smith himself both observed and predicted. (In the historical extreme case, the 1780s, the rich in France refused to let themselves be taxed, not even in order to save the nation that protected them… so it stopped protecting them and they rode tumbrels.) 

 “In fact, if we look back into history, the period with the highest taxes on the rich — the postwar period — was also a period with high economic growth and low unemployment.” Also vast infrastructure development and the best era, ever, for business startups and entrepreneurship.

The Capitalism vocabulary trap.

One of the worst aspects of today's absurd polemical wars is vocabulary. By attacking all "capitalism" the left destroys their cred, since highly regulated market enterprise has harnessed human creative competition vastly better than all other allocation systems from kingships to socialist/communist systems. Marx described how such market competitive systems CAN be destroyed by cheating, as described in Das Kapital. But Marx blithely assumed that failure mode was inevitable and the Rooseveltean era proved it's not. 

Please escape the vocabulary trap. The word you are looking for are oliogarchy, cheat-aristocracy and feudalism, all of which Adam Smith and the US founders denounced as the mortal enemies of enterprise.

Only back to the key point. GOPpers yammering about spendthrift Democrats 'breaking the bank' or 'sending deficits skyrocketing' are, of course, hypocrites whose party is always less fiscally responsible than Democrats, and I mean always* and can prove it in a large stakes wager. 

One noted economist-pundit apologist for that monstrous movement said: "...let the implications sink in. Then remember this year’s recovery depended heavily on massive fiscal spending—stimulus payments, unemployment benefits, etc...."

Well... yeah... um wasn't that the point? As usual, neither he nor his rightist peers ever mention that the Dems' Keynesian stimulus measures are still smaller, in total, than the Republican's "supply side" attempts at stimulus! (Though tsunami tax gifts to the rich.)

With this difference:

Those Supply Side lamprey-sucks realized zero predicted outcomes - (in science, or any non-cult, that outcome is disqualifying) - while plummeting money velocity and sending wealth disparities and deficits skyrocketing. At French-Revolution levels of disparity, the rich soak up all real estate and flaunt purchases of nonexistent art.

Keynesian stimuli simply work, especially when enacted by sincere Keynesians who pay down debt in good times, like Jerry Brown, Bill Clinton and Gavin Newsom. Working class wealth, well-being and spending have risen, manufacturing is in-shoring, money velocity rising, tax revenues climbing. More will do more. There certainly is some risk of inflation, but not post-Vietnam-style stagflation.

Only here's the key point that no rightist pundit has the honesty to mention... and those poor-dumb-schlump democrats are to stupid to mention. The amounts of 'stimulus' done across recent decades by Republican Supply Side cultists and now by liberal Keynesians are roughly the same!

I repeat -- The amounts of 'stimulus are roughly the same. With spectacularly different outcomes.

Any 'pundit' who neglects to point this out is stunningly dishonest. Or... as I've said... a sincere and honest and politically stoopid Democrat.

On privacy and Surveillance Capitalism

I stored up for a bigger one, this time, in a topic wherein I actually know something! Though yes, in background we have worries about a looming U.S.-Iran war, which I've warned about since November 2017... and more recently... asking you to make sure your neighbors know terms like "Saddam's WMDs," "Tokin Gulf Incident," "Gleiwitz," and "Reichstag fire." (And see what Navy vet Jim Wright says about this recently, here.)   

Over the long haul, our way out of these messes will almost always be more light. Exposing the wicked. Which brings us to...

== Fear of exposure ==

Harvard Prof. Shoshana Zuboff’s new book - The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power - is a massive overview of the major quandary of our age. It's reviewed by Noah Smith at Bloomberg, who begins by citing a simplified view of my own Transparent Society. (In fact, a world awash in light won't end privacy. It is (I assert) the only possible way that citizens will be able to preserve some privacy.)

Zuboff's book is also reviewed in the Guardian – and yes, I’ve been asked my reaction. Here's a substantial and worthwhile extract from that review:

“Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later."

Zuboff thus  connects to the recent works of Yuval Harari, who foresees a future society driven and propelled by "dataism." Back to the Guardian review. 

"Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.”

  

Reviewer John Naughton continues: 
“While the general modus operandi of Google, Facebook et al has been known and understood (at least by some people) for a while, what has been missing – and what Zuboff provides – is the insight and scholarship to situate them in a wider context. She points out that while most of us think that we are dealing merely with algorithmic inscrutability, in fact what confronts us is the latest phase in capitalism’s long evolution – from the making of products, to mass production, to managerial capitalism, to services, to financial capitalism, and now to the exploitation of behavioural predictions covertly derived from the surveillance of users. In that sense, her vast (660-page) book is a continuation of a tradition that includes Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and – dare I say it – Karl Marx.” 

(An aside: on a recent flight from DC, I sat across from a teenager who was reading Das Kapital. Old Karl has been re-awakened and is flying off the shelves, worldwide. And this resurrection was achieved by the gluttonous outrages of an oligarchy that seems bent on behaving exactly as KM described.)

== Simplistic, but with cause ==

Summarized in this interview, Zuboff correlates past episodes of rapacious colonialism with the way major data corporations treat us. Good line: Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us. Once we thought of digital services as free, but now surveillance capitalists think of us as free.

“Demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists,” says Zuboff, “or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the internet is like asking old Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand. It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck, or a cow to give up chewing. These demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival.”

"At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx's image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human experience."  She examines several major organizations -- notably Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft -- that are in various stages of developing a "technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction-operation." In the end, "surveillance capitalism operates through unprecedented asymmetries in knowledge and the power that accrues to knowledge." 

== And just like Marx... this model has fatal weaknesses ==

While describing valid complaits about info-greed by capitalists, Zuboff misses the key point that all elite accumulations of power will do this, trying to arrange for information to flow upwards, as it did into the manors, castles and cathedrals of old. This is monkey behavior; you see it in chimps. Hence, when she reflexively shouts "They're looking at you!" she and almost every other privacy paladin ignores the only possible conclusion from this tome:  that being seen is inevitable. 

Seriously, what is it she aims to accomplish with her book, with all its alarums, if failure of all constraints and freedom is unavoidable?

Time to step back. Maybe take a whiff of how our ancestors were treated when past elites similarly knew everything of any importance about those toiling below them in the villages and fields, when the aim of collecting "data" about the peasants (via priests and local gossips and by torture) was not about "selling them stuff." It was about life and death. About eviction from your hovel, or being levied into a hopeless war. It was about starvation.

Sure, elites always had imbalanced advantages when it came to surveillance  and it's worrisome, as it always was! But it's what they can do to you that matters. And right now what they can do - the plaint of Zuboff and most privacy paladins - is intrusively try to sell you stuff. 

Now, there are reasons why that business model is doomed, but that's beside the point. The way to limit what the mighty can do to you with your information is not to limit what elites know. There is not a scintilla of a chance that can happen and no example across the history of our species when it ever actually occurre.

The solution is not to (impossibly) blind elites, but to strip them naked, so that - no matter what they know about you, they hare severely hampered at using it against you.

That remedy has actually been used effectively, across the last 200 years. I give example after example, in The Transparent Society. 

== The reflex is addictive ==

Alas, Our earnest and sincere paladins of progress and freedom keep issuing hysterical screams "They're LOOKING at you!" without ever offering even a glimpse at the only remedy that can possibly work.

“This power to shape behaviour for others’ profit or power is entirely self-authorising. It has no foundation in democratic or moral legitimacy, as it usurps decision rights and erodes the processes of individual autonomy that are essential to the function of a democratic society. The message here is simple: Once I was mine. Now I am theirs.”

Yet the author displays stunning contempt for the masses: “There can be no exit from processes that are intentionally designed to bypass individual awareness and produce ignorance, especially when these are the very same processes upon which we must depend for effective daily life. So our participation is best explained in terms of necessity, dependency, the foreclosure of alternatives, and enforced ignorance.”

Mind you, I agree with the overall call to action: “Our societies have tamed the dangerous excesses of raw capitalism before, and we must do it again….  We need new paradigms born of a close understanding of surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives and foundational mechanisms.” 

Um sure. But doesn’t that imply that the solution is either state paternalism or else leveling the playing field?

Alas, the inevitable tilt is toward the former:  “GDPR [a recent EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the EU] is a good start, and time will tell if we can build on that sufficiently to help found and enforce a new paradigm of information capitalism.”

Except… does she point to a single paternalistic privacy protection or restriction that has ever effectively limited the data-aggrandizement processes that she decries?

In spurning other suggestions, Prof. Zuboff commands that the tide go out: “For example, the idea of “data ownership” is often championed as a solution. But what is the point of owning data that should not exist in the first place?” 

“So what is to be done? In any confrontation with the unprecedented, the first work begins with naming. Speaking for myself, this is why I’ve devoted the past seven years to this work… to move forward the project of naming as the first necessary step toward taming. My hope is that careful naming will give us all a better understanding of the true nature of this rogue mutation of capitalism and contribute to a sea change in public opinion, most of all among the young.”

Vague, vague, vague arm-wavings after a 900 page, well-documented call for resignation and despair, avoiding any look at the one thing that ever worked. The only thing that can.

== A fictional perspective ==

  

Someone report back on this new novel - Golden State, by Ben H. Winters, author of the alternate history, Underground Airlines. As reviewed on NPR: “The world as we know it has been destroyed, and though we never find out exactly how, it appears it had something to do with a pandemic of lies. In the Golden State, lies are against the law, and the main enforcers of the truth are known as Speculators. If it's against the law to lie, it must also be against the law "to hypothesize, to imagine versions of what might have happened. But when you are trying to solve, for example, a suspicious death, sometimes it is necessary to hypothesize so we can try to follow the leads and crack this case. So to do that there are individuals within the Golden State, a special sort of law enforcement officer who has license to speculate."

It doesn’t sound remotely human or plausible – like those absurd films and tales abut dystopias that ban emotion – but perhaps an interesting thought experiment about a type of transparency.

And finally...

The object of the videogame DietDash is to travel through the aisles of a supermarket and avoid sugary foods. While it’s not an exciting game, overweight people who play it win in real life by losing up to 3.1 percent of their bodyweight after 8 weeks. The game was developed at Drexel University and researchers there are seeking recruits for a newer, highly gamified version of the shopping simulation.  Huh.

The core dilemma of our economics

Let's dive into some of the most fundamental aspects of the economics you rely upon. And this won't be dry! We'll get to the very heart of it.

First though, a couple of political riffs. Like could Amy McGrath unseat Mitch McConnell?  Look, I touted her to the sky. But like Beto, she did not win her intermediate goal. Still, I am inclined to say – you go grl. Love then money.

This guts a core confederate incantation. States that voted Democrat in 2016 generally rely less on federal funding than Republican states. Thirteen out of the top 15 states found to be most dependent on the federal government voted for President Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Ten out of the 15 least dependent states voted Democratic.

Yes, poverty-wracked New Mexico and Mormon Utah are outliers, with Mormons giving serious thought to dropping their loyalty to a party of mafiosi, sexual perverts and traitors. Kansas doubled down on Supply Side insanity and crashed every part of their state’s health.

We'll add a few more political riffs at the end. But for sure you really must read this from the LA Times, listing all the many ways the GOP is trying to crush the power of voters in red and purple states, openly defying citizen rebellions against gerrymandering and concocting truly blatant cheats to prevent citizen empowerment. Seriously, you won't believe the long list of outrages. 

Their justification? Suppression of "mob rule." As opposed to their agenda. Rule by the Mob.

== The core dilemma of our economics ==

Probably the most clear and cogent explainer of economics issues is Robert Reich. This video shows clearly what's happened to wealth disparity in America.* Watch it, if you do nothing else. 

Joseph Stiglitz - Nobel laureate in economics - shows how "capitalism" can be defined the way the Greatest Generation did, under the FDR era social contract, as entrepreneurship where genuine wealth rewards come from delivery of ever-better goods/services under flat-fair-competitive-open conditions while a regulatory system prevents most cheating or evasion of externalities (like labor conditions or environmental impact), while society invests in children and justice and infrastructure to maximize (as F.Hayek recommended) the number of skilled, eager, creative competitors. 

This capitalism of Adam Smith thrived during the Greatest Generation, achieving unequaled rates of growth and opportunity and justice. It was hated by (guess who?) the oligarchy.

Or else capitalism can be defined the way Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and (ironically) Karl Marx and today's youths do - a system of unregulated rapacious feeding off the commonwealth and the future, with secret connivings, self-dealings and unbridled cheating leading to devastation of the middle class and wild market swings in which the predatory consolidate into a new, feudal oligarchy of the kind Smith denounced, while Marx rubs his hands, predicting inevitable (and it is) revolution.

These two experiments, 1935-1980 and 1981-2019 -- were both "capitalist." One showed steady rises in every metric of societal health and social justice and middle class strength. 

The other featured endless demands for experiments in handing over wealth to be managed by aristocrats. Supply Side tax gushers into their maws... and Federal Reserve policies that encouraged binges of unprecedented borrowing. Both were meant to spur the rich to invest in factories, productive capacity ("supply"), jobs, workers and R&D, resulting in ever-higher growth and deficit-erasing tax revenues.

None of that happened. Ever. Even once. At all. (In science that record refutes a theory.) 

Instead, the gushers were spent as Adam Smith said they'd be - on passive, rentier asset bubble inflation and on cheating -- electoral, financial, monopolistic and propaganda. With intermittent bubble-pops and a skyrocketing accumulation of debt. And yes, Adam Smith predicted all of those, and every predicted outcome happened.

One RASR (Residually Adult-Sane Republican) economist I know sees all this, but blames the Fed and only the Fed for low interest rates. But no one held a gun to the oligarchy, demanding they borrow, then put none of it to real economic work. 

Let's put it in terms even a RASR can understand. When it comes to skyrocketing debt there are three parties to this crime:

- the Fed, who offered easy borrowing.

- Republican Congresses who gave the rich gift-gushers of Supply Side voodoo rape.

- the Rentier-CEO-oligarchy recipients of all this, who bribed to twist policy and reaped both rewards.

Today's RASR conservatives blame just one of the three. Arguably the least-guilty. Let's paraphrase the excuse:

“Oh, no! The Fed made money so cheap I just HAD to borrow it to pump trillions into rentier asset bubbles and never productive capital or R&D! It’s not my fault! Those Fed whores wore short skirts and plunging necklines and seemed cheap! It’s all her fault for tempting me‼ Tempting me into.... borrowing! And gambling it all.”

Stiglitz puts it differently than my stark portrayal of looming class warfare. His prescription "begins by recognizing the vital role that the state plays in making markets serve society. We need regulations that ensure strong competition without abusive exploitation, realigning the relationship between corporations and the workers they employ and the customers they are supposed to serve. We must be as resolute in combating market power as the corporate sector is in increasing it."

In contrast I say it as "regulations are needed to reduce the natural human tendency to cheat, plus raising up the max number of competitors, both of them entirely justifiable under Smithian capitalism."

But read his missive. It overlaps with my summary, though without my own (patented) referrals to historical seers like Smith & Marx.

== Politics Redux ==

Lest you run out of examples of Two Scoops’ pettiness and mafia tendencies (as if you ever could; where do you think I got his nickname?) Remember former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe? He spent his adult life chasing badguys for us, but Fox calls him — and hundreds of thousands of other skilled professionals — “Deep State” villains, because they dare to notice today’s cesspool. A consummate pro.

And Trump fired McCabe from the FBI just 26 hours before his retirement was set to take effect, denying him his full pension. And Fox & Foxzoids chortled with glee over this, as when they deny aid to disaster victims in blue states. These may be our countrymen (and we should not behave likewise toward such jerks). But they are not ‘citizens.’ 

Consider the members of Trump's circle who apparently ignored his orders - according to the Mueller Report. Again and again I despair over any Democrat realizing what a political judo-jugular strike can be. In this case, setting aside the details of any particular case, anyone from Biden to AOC could say: 

Across all of U.S. history, no twenty presidents were ever "betrayed" by so many former "great guys." Whatever your politics, one truth shines through -- Donald Trump is a terrible judge of character.

== lagniappes ==

First: Watch 19 vivid seconds as the puppet enters behind them... Remind your RASRs this happened right after MBS and Putin each ordered enemies whacked on the soil of NATO allies.

Amid our Putin obsession remember that the Bush family is a cadet branch of the Saudi Royal House and did their bidding as much as Trump does Russia's. 

This round of the civil war, the confederacy finally got its 1860s dream -- foreign help... and masters. And lest we forget who has benefitted from the deliberate destruction of our alliances... recall this image of Trump greeting Putin.  Good doggy.

Wiley Miller's April 18 Non-Sequitur comic nailed the problem of 60,000 years and the fundamental flaw of capitalism... or feudalism or communism. Those who reach the top - even if they competed fairly to get there - will tend to cheat in order to stay there, and give their sons unearned power over the children of others. 

This - along with our human propensity for delusion - explains nearly all of the horrid litany called "history." It is why geniuses finally innovated methods to divide power enough to force elites to keep competing fairly. Constitutional division. Breaking up monopolies. scientific debate, etc. 

Kings, lords, chieftains and commissars never accomplished what this new method has... and so, all those varied types of mafiosi are now ganging up against the new way. If they win, they won't let it be tried again. And we'll lose the stars.

Wiley's cogent cartoon efficiently make a second point. That it's easy to convince romantics to love their tyrants. In 1861 a million poor white southerners fought and died for their plantation slave-lord class oppressors. As other confederates did in 1778, 1830, 1852 and other phases of the US Civil War. And as they do today, hating (at Fox-behest) the "elites" of fact and brains who gave them everything. Because smart people are the one force standing in the way of a return to feudalism.

And because we keep "stealing" their brightest children.

=====

* And this is one reason why I've already decided on one aspect of the race for the Democratic Party nomination in 2020. I have various ranked opinions about the top of the ticket. I'm hoping to learn more about Inslee, for example. And I am SO aboard for Buttigieg 2028!  But the one thing I've decided to be passionate about is Elizabeth Warren for Vice President! She would be unleashed to take that town with unconstrained ferocity... while getting the executive experience she now totally lacks. 

==== Housekeeping note! ====

I have been amazed for years how this blog, one of the oldest on the Web and a comment community that's among the best, has been able to maintain a mostly open comment policy, in an era rife with loonies and anonymous trolls. Every few years I am forced to shut down anonymous postings, when some obsessive jerk decides he has nothing better to do than poop where he's not wanted. You all can still post via your google accounts. If necessary, I will go to moderated posting. Tnaks for remaining among the brightest.

Capitalism, corruption, civil war...

Well, your RASR uncle (residually adult-sane Republican) has a week of gloating and joy. Let him wallow in Attorney Gen. Barr's summary no-collusion conclusion...even though its negative about Trump-Russia collusion specifically concerns only Russian 2016 election interference during the 2016 election (always the weakest link to Trump), and has nothing to do with the blatant collusion that's manifested since then, in demolishing our alliances, sciences, intel-services and every other U.S. fact based profession.

Consider: Six essential cons that Define Trump's success: This article by Jonah Greenberg (except for the last (silly) paragraph) cogently dissects six ways that Donald Trump has “succeeded” by cheating. 
By lying his net worth vastly upward to get loans…

…by lying it vastly downward to evade taxes…

…by ripping off contractors and lenders till only Deutsche bank would work with him, laundering Russian mobster money…

…by assaulting the very existence of things called (facts).
…by portraying perpetrators as victims.

Never mind all that. Right now, just one U.S. citizen matters. Chief Justice John Roberts. If he swing the decision to decide in favor of basic justice and the American Experiment, political gerrymandering will be banished. If he is a hack - or a blackmail victim - then we will have no easy path out of this phase of the American Civil War. It could wind up pretty harsh.

== Essences of Capitalism ==

As I’ve long predicted, some of the RASRs and saner libertarians are gradually realizing that oligarchy is no friend to open-accountable-competitive-creative market enterprise.  Investment guru John Mauldin is one I’ve long been urging to end his ostrich denial. Now, in his influential newsletter, Mauldin quotes from Jonathan Tepper’s new book The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

In industry after industry, (Americans) can only purchase from local monopolies or oligopolies that can tacitly collude. The US now has many industries with only three or four competitors controlling entire markets. Since the early 1980s, market concentration has increased severely. We’ve already described the airline industry. Here are other examples:

·       Two corporations control 90 percent of the beer Americans drink.
·       Five banks control about half of the nation’s banking assets.
·       Many states have health insurance markets where the top two insurers have an 80 percent to 90 percent market share. For example, in Alabama one company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, has an 84 percent market share and in Hawaii it has 65 percent market share.
·       When it comes to high-speed internet access, almost all markets are local monopolies; over 75 percent of households have no choice with only one provider.
·       Four players control the entire US beef market and have carved up the country.
·       After two mergers this year, three companies will control 70 percent of the world’s pesticide market and 80 percent of the US corn-seed market.

The list of industries with dominant players is endless. It gets even worse when you look at the world of technology….  The federal government has done little to prevent this concentration, and in fact has done much to encourage it. Broken markets create broken politics. Economic and political power is becoming concentrated in the hands of distant monopolists.

Mauldin avows that some industries require such massive scale that they can only support a small number of producers. Passenger aircraft, for instance. 

In turn, I have pointed out examples where capitalism is clearly working, when steered by enlightened regulation. One example is the burgeoning of solar and wind power. Another is surprising, till you think on it… automobiles. 

With twenty major players, worldwide, competition is fierce, with the result that every year auto showrooms feature better cars that last longer, are built sturdier, offer spectacular standard features and safety, all at declining inflation-adjusted prices. Spurred by regulations, auto-makers deliver vastly improved efficiency, saving consumers billions at the pump, and -- after prodding by some geniuses -- are shifting to electric at a rapid pace.

So the problem is not what young sophomores are reciting on campus, capitalism at its competitive, AdamSmithian basic. No, the problem is that markets have always been distorted by cheaters!  

It’s what humans do, when they get the power to do so. And hence, as Smith himself said, we need governments to transparently and carefully regulate, especially in ways that keep the playing field flat and fair.

And yes, that includes investing heavily in R&D that’s beyond any corporate ROI horizon. And it especially means investing in all children! Because what is a competitive playing field if it is biased to handicap most players, from the very start? 

Most liberal programs – those that aim to uplift all kids out of poverty – are defensible in strictly capitalist terms! And those who deny this aren’t actually Smithians at all. They are oligarchists. They are feudalists.

== Short takes ==

Right now, Democrats still retain a monopoly on expertise and evidence-based policy. They should not relinquish it easily.

Nearly 400 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers have faced sexual misconduct allegations in the past two decades, two newspapers found, with as many as 700 victims — some as young as 3. And this is just one section of the evangelical Baptist movement.  There are reports of over a thousand such cases among “independent” Baptist pastorages… among the most fire-breathing and radically anti-modernist. Oh, do preach to us.

Poseidon: Russia's New Doomsday Machine describes Moscow's unmanned automated drone submarine designed to deliver a 100-megaton warhead to inundate U.S. coasts with nuclear tsunamis, leaving the most populous parts of America drenched-radioactive wastelands. Author Dr. Peter Vincent Pry is one of the nation's foremost experts on nuclear weapons and strategy, director of two Congressional Advisory Boards.

There’s an aspect to this that’s scarier. Throughout the Cold War, we got a stream of defectors who blew the whistle on crazy Soviet plots. Kremlin muscovite craziness hasn’t gone away, but Putin (raised in the KGB) has made it his highest priority to make sure we get few defectors this round, despite planning such horrifically heinous weapons. 

How? Our inflow of defectors in the Cold War depended on our ability to: (1) protect them, (2) offer decent prospects living in the West, and (3) maintaining the moral high ground. Consider how Putin and his agents have undermined each of these systematically.

== Short takes ==

WODI = “What If Obama Did It?”  Latest example, emerging news that Donald Trump used threats and money and oligarchic favors to get not one, or two, but all of his high school, military academy, college and SAT records secured and hidden forever. Now why would he do that? “Former officials of the military academy that President Trump attended say wealthy alumni directed them in 2011 to remove and hide Trump’s academic records.”  

The same fellow who demanded Obama’s birth certificate, then refused to believe it (nor dozens of 1962 copies of the Honolulu Advertiser birth announcement, found in garages all over the islands) and has lied about the IRS audit of his tax returns, and who allows no US officials anywhere near his secret debriefings with communist and “ex” communist dictators, now want us to have no way to verify his “stable genius.”

WODI

And finally....

From the Axios China report: The ideological tightening inside China has contributed to a more rigid and shrill group of PRC diplomats. Earlier this week Bloomberg reported on this trend... “[F]oreign diplomats in Beijing say that the behavior of Chinese officials has become far more aggressive and assertive in private meetings in recent years. Their discussions have become more ideological, according to one senior foreign envoy, who described the behavior as a strong sense of grievance combined with increasing entitlement about China’s international role and rights.

If you want to understand how the top officials at the PRC rationalize their fierce determination to centralize power over their people and the world, I go into it here. They are very smart. Maybe a quarter as smart as they think they are. And therein lies danger for us all.