To paraphrase Marx, it is high time that the ordinary middle class sets forth an indictment of the current ruling class, and enumerate the vile oppressions and dominations and injustices it has created during its rule of about 100 years.

So I have discussed its injustice committed with respect to socialism, big government, the war on the middle class, the war on religion, education, welfare, government pensions, housing, the homeless, transportation, money and finance. Now let's look at:

Women’s Liberation. One of the base notes of the modern culture is the idea of liberating women from their age-old subordination to the patriarchy. A central idea of progressive culture is to free women to live a life just like men: to work outside the home in a career, to be free to love how she pleases, to emerge from domestic shelter into the public square. This, in my view reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of women: their natural instincts and the culture they choose for themselves.

My views are based, first of all, on the nature of honor for men and for women as described by James Bowman in Honor: a History. Bowman proposes that honor in men is courage and honor in women is chastity. I interpret chastity in a general way to mean that a good woman conducts here life so that it is blameless.

I develop this by arguing that men have a Culture of Insult, where men rehearse each other’s lack of courage, and women have a Culture of Complaint, where women rehearse each other’s failings.

Moreover, I suggest that the nature of courage require that

Men know they are expendable.

And the expectation of a women whose behavior is spotless?

Women expect to be protected.

Transgenderism. Yesterday, June 29, 2021, the US Supreme Court voted not to review a transgender bathroom case in which a transgender high-school student (girl turned boy) had sued and won in federal court to be allowed to use the boys' bathroom. MSNBC :

Grimm’s right to use a boys bathroom was upheld in rulings by lower federal courts, which had ruled that he was protected by a federal law that bars school programs from discriminating against students on the basis of their sex.

No kidding!

But I would suggest to my liberal friends that this development runs afoul of two principles that, in my opinion, trump the holy writ of non-discrimination.

The first is the Mrs. Patrick Campbell principle. It is is said to be in answer to a young actress that complained to Mrs. Pat about two male actors being a bit too friendly with each other. Said Mrs. Pat:

Does it really matter what these affectionate people do — so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses!

I would say that the whole point of current LGBT politics and activism is precisely to frighten the horses in the street: and not in the sense of frightening them into stampeding, but to frighten them into shutting up or else they will lose their jobs. Which suggests one of my main maxims:

There is no such thing as justice. Only injustice.

In other words, when you have climbed into the ruling class power seat and you start to have the power to reverse decades, or centuries, or eons of injustice, I tell you that the people on the receiving end of your "justice" will experience it as "injustice."

The other important point is that gender specific bathrooms are not there in order to discriminate against transgenders. They are there to protect women from male harassment. Why in the world should we worry about that, you may ask? Because of Freud's famous remark (which I had thought was made by Oscar Wilde):

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'

I say, Siggie, that you are asking the wrong question, you silly boy. It is not what women want, it is what women expect. And what women expect is:

Women expect to be protected.

So, you LBGTs and liberals and wokies and judges and nice liberal ladies and all the ships at sea. With this bathroom thingy you are heading right into Trouble, with a capital T, right here in River City. Because biological women really don't like biological men in the women's bathroom. I mean that women really don't like men in the girls' bathroom!

You will notice that the LGBT activists chose a biological woman acting as a man in order to demand the right of transgenders to use the bathroom of their choice. Of course they did. Because when you want access to the other guys' bathroom you certainly don't want to go to the court system on behalf of a biological male wanting to use the girls bathroom. Whatever the civil-rights laws may say about discrimination, you wouldn't want to be persuading judges to permit biological males in the women's bathroom. Not yet. Not this week.

On this subject I am a true Leninist: The worse the better.

The fun thing about this is that, back in the day, liberals were bellowing from the rooftops about "legislating morality" and protecting women from the male gaze, and liberating women. Today, everything that liberals do amounts to legislating their morality and forcing it upon the rest of the world.

And also parading a battalion of fake victims before the world.

And this issue also attaches to my concept on women in the public square. The public square, according to German sociologist Georg Simmel, was created by men for men. So women coming into the public square a century ago could be expected to transform it to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

What women in the public square do not like — do not like — is the idea of men coming into the women's bathroom. Because "women expect to be protected."

Just sayin'.

To paraphrase Marx, it is high time that the ordinary middle class sets forth an indictment of the current ruling class, and enumerate the vile oppressions and dominations and injustices it has created during its rule of about 100 years.

So I have discussed its injustice committed with respect to socialism, big government, the war on the middle class, the war on religion, education, welfare, government pensions, the homeless, transportation. Now let's look at:

Money. Back in the day money was basically gold and silver and copper coins. The value of the money reflected the value of the coins. This notion was inflated into a glorious principle in the era of the Gold Standard, that all paper money and bank accounts should be convertible on demand into gold.

This system works pretty well as long as there aren’t any wars. In a war, the warring parties usually appropriate as much of the wealth of the people as is possible: through the issuance of debt and also the printing of paper money. The result would be that the nation’s currency, the pound or the dollar, would decline in value relative to gold: inflation. In the long 19th century governments tended to attempt to revalue the currency upward in a policy called “resumption,” resuming the pre-war gold price. The result is “deflation” which is experienced by debtors and wage-workers as a monstrous oppression: debtors because they are forced to repay more than they borrowed and experience this as injustice, and workers because their employers tried to reduce their money wages, and the workers experience this as injustice.

After the Napoleonic Wars the Brits restored the pre-war value of the pound sterling, and the result was the Captain Swing riots and the Tolpuddle Martyrs. After the Civil War the Yanks restored the pre-war value of the dollar and the result was the Crash of 1873 and the Long Depression. After World War I both Brits and Yanks restored the pre-war value of their currencies and the result was the 1926 General Strike in Britain and the Crash of 1929 in the US.

After World War II the Yanks pretended to keep their pre-war gold price at $35 per ounce. But ordinary people were not allowed to exchange their dollars for gold: only central banks coud do that, and not too much. Eventually this scam broke up in the financial crisis of 1971 when the US officially went off gold. But the result was inflation. Gold that was priced at $20 per ounce before World War I is now priced in late 2022 at about $1,600 per ounce. So the dollar is worth one percent of its 19th century value.

I maintain that this inflation is unjust because it hurts middle and low income people — and especially women — that do not own assets like real-estate and stocks.

Finance. Now for a quick lesson in finance, from Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market published in 1872 after a major financial panic. Bagehot argued that to avoid panics the credit system needed two things to work. First of all, loans must be properly collateralized, so that if the loan is liquidated the lender will recover his investment by acquiring the collateral for the loan. Secondly, the borrower must have the means to service the loan. If either of these notions are ignored then, in a financial downturn, people in the money market will be afraid to buy loans, because they will worry about the quality of the loans out there and the ability of borrowers to service their loans. This worry is called a "loss of confidence" and you will hear a lot about it during any bear market.

Now back in 1913 the US passed the Federal Reserve Act to provide the United States with a central bank so that the panic of 1907 could never happen again. It was unconscionable that the United States should have to rely on a "money trust" headed by private banker J.P. Morgan when threatened by a financial panic. It needed a public "lender of last resort."

Only in the next two financial crashes the bureaucrat in charge of the Federal Reserve Board did not act as lender of last resort. In 1929, the Chairman of the Fed was Roy A. Young. In September 2008, when Lehman Brothers failed, Fed Chairman little Ben Bernanke said that he didn't have the legal power to act as lender of last resort and bail out Lehman Brothers. The Dow Industrials started losing 500 points a day, every day. Can you spell "loss of confidence?"

Is Ben Bernanke a coward and a poltroon? I think so.

You can see what this is all about. In its efforts to help would-be homeowners the government has raised housing prices, engineered at least one bone-shattering financial crash, and almost certainly made things worse.

There is a word for this sort of thing. Injustice.

Next up: Transgenderism.

To paraphrase Marx, it is high time that the ordinary middle class sets forth an indictment of the current ruling class, and enumerate the vile oppressions and dominations and injustices it has created during its rule of about 100 years.

So I have discussed its injustice committed with respect to socialism, big government, the war on the middle class, the war on religion, education, welfare, and government pensions, the homeless. Now let's look at:

Transportation. For years I've been quoting the Duke of Wellington and his opposition to railways. My quote has been that "railways would encourage the poor to travel around needlessly."

Because there is nothing worse than ordinary people traveling around needlessly and distracting from the vital importance of important people traveling around importantly on important affairs of state.

But I could never find the original quote, and I worried that maybe I was imagining things. Now I understand why. Because in a piece by Will Lloyd at UnHerd.com about the decline and fall of the English eccentric there was mentioned a Col. Sibthorp who, as soon as railways were invented,

began a fruitless war against the railway, complaining that they “encourage the working class to move about.”

Only, when I Googled the quote, I found Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know by Karl Shaw, and he writes something a bit different.

[Sibthorp] particularly hated railways — 'the Steam Humbug' — which he predicted would bring an array of disasters ranging from moral ruin to wholesale slaughter. Sibthorp enjoyed the support of at least one important supporter, the old Duke of Wellington, who was also suspicious of railways because "they encourage lower classes to move about."

Hmm. It just shows how things can get all bollixed up. Bit of a cock-up on the quoting front

The funny thing is that, today, the Col. Sibthorps and Dukes of Wellington worrying about "moral ruin to wholesale slaughter" are our liberal friends that want to keep the deplorables in high-speed trains and light rail and TGVs and not in their evil SUVs on the nation's highways where they are emitting CO2 and pitching the Earth into runaway global warming and the end of the world as we know it.

Never mind that the cities with mass transit — along with women and minorities — were hardest hit by the COVID epidemic.

Here's an interesting factoid. In the book North and South by Mrs. Gaskell, about the textile industry in the north of England in the 19th century, the climactic scene between hero Mr. Thornton and heroine Margaret Hale takes place in a house in London. But in the 2004 BBC TV serial they meet at a train station somewhere between London and Milton where their trains, going in opposite directions, have stopped. So, back in the day, Mrs. Gaskell never thought of a climactic train rendezvous. But in the modern BBC adaption brought to you by North London luvvies, what could be more romantic!

What appeared to be a horror back in the nineteenth century to the high and mighty seems like a walk in the park to today's haughty ruling class. And don't get me started on the eevils of unrestricted airplane travel! Why, I was to Denver last weekend and, let me tell you, the hoi-polloi are back to traveling around needlessly. The concourses are full, the planes are full, and the carbon emissions are outtasight.

Just wait till the cruise industry starts up again. The Horror!

Earth to liberals. Humans are a nomadic species. We like to go walkabout. You liberal swells "fly private" from one vitally important global conclave to another to plan your next "Reset." We lesser mortals fly the commercial airlines, because that's all we can afford. And the average deplorable drives his F-350 crew-cab truck.

Now go back to your regularly scheduled activism and don't let me hear from you again until next time.

Meanwhile, I'll tell you what I think. I think that planes, trains, and automobiles are the best thing since sliced bread. There is nothing I like better than driving north from Seattle on I-5 and looking at all the folk driving who-knows-where in their personal transportation, unless it is walking down an airport concourse looking at all the average folks waiting for their flight. As far as I am concerned there is a clear penumbra and emanation in the US Constitution that makes personal transportation a basic human right, and I like to see American citizens exercising that right.

And, frankly, I can't wait for the chance to fly to Mars. On vacation.

Next up: Money and Finance.

To paraphrase Marx, it is high time that the ordinary middle class sets forth an indictment of the current ruling class, and enumerate the vile oppressions and dominations and injustices it has created during its rule of about 100 years.

We all know that any ruling class is bound to commit injustice, because as a well-known philosopher said: there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. And who are the people empowered to commit injustice? You got it: the ruling class.

So it stands to reason that the ruling class in the West of the last 100 years and more, the educated class, will have committed injustice upon injustice, most likely in the implementation of its own vision of justice with the help of government force. 'Twas ever thus.

Previously I have discussed injustice committed with respect to socialism, big government, the war on the middle class, the war on religion, education, welfare, government pensions, and housing. Now let's look at:

The Homeless. The homeless began as an issue during the Reagan administration, no doubt as a way for liberals to do Activism. It was only to be expected that, in the aftermath of the cruel Reagan budget cuts — courtesy of Budget Director David Stockman — that there should be a tragic consequence. That consequence was "the homeless."

To put this in perspective, I suspect that after every major economic downturn there is a swelling in the ranks of people that got spat out of jobs and that never got their stuff back together again. The iconic example is the Skid Row bum that was the consequence of the Great Depression. The Reagan 1980s took place after the serious recession of 1980-81 when the Fed started wringing out the 1970s inflation. So you would expect a flux of men unmoored by the recession and cast upon the homeless shore. Then we have the aftermath of the Great Recession that started with the Crash of 2008. Now we have the aftermath of the COVID emergency that threw a bunch of people out of work.

Obviously we should expect, after each economic downturn, another wave of castaways landing on the beach.

The question is what to do about it. Should we have government programs to provide food and shelter to the homeless, or should we leave it to the charities and the charitable?

In this sense, we should remember the 19th century approach to poverty. The ABCDEFG system was advocated by outfits like the New York Charity Organization Society, and advertised by Marvin Olasky in The Tragedy of American Compassion in Chapter 6: The Seven Marks of Compassion thus:

1. Affliation: getting the poor back in touch with their families, i.e., people that can be persuaded they have an obligation to help a particular individual.

2. Bonding: charity volunteers were instructed to bond with their charity cases, and "maintain 'the greatest patience, the most decided firmness, and an inexhaustible kindness'" towards the people they helped.

3. Categorization: are applicants truly helpless?  Or are they "Needing Work Rather Than Relief," or "Unworthy, Not Entitled to Relief." Inquiring minds want to know.

4. Discernment: this is about smoking out the frauds and cheats.

5. Employment: as in "Labor is the life of society, and the beggar who will not work is a social cannibal feeding on that life."

6. Freedom: "the opportunity to work and worship without governmental restriction." Hello credentialism.

7. God: as in "True philanthropy must take into account spiritual as well as physical needs."

It is fairly obvious that the current bureaucratic response to homelessness does not use this wisdom of the ages. Today, we allow the homeless to violate laws against using public spaces as encampments, public intoxication, public begging, etc. And this is unjust.

This is just part of a larger problem that liberals and their clients are exempt from many laws, and this is unjust.

Of course, no problem handed to a government bureaucracy is ever solved, for it goes against the basic rule of bureaucracy, that it progressively does less and less, and eventually does nothing while collecting salaries and pensions. Indeed, to solve the problem would to be put the bureaucracy out of business, a prospect not to be endured. And this is unjust.

Here in Seattle we have had homeless programs for over a decade, and the problem has only gotten worse. In a way, you can't blame the politicians, who are merely responding to political activists whose meaning of life is bound up with finding oppressions and exploitations to protest against. Thus, opposition to homeless programs has only now emerged in response to the Seattle City Council enacting a "head tax" on medium-to-large businesses in Seattle in order to expand funding homeless programs that, in accordance with a law of bureaucratic nature, keep expanding.

Notice how my definition of government applies.

Government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

It really doesn't matter who those supporters are: activists, bureaucrats, welfare clients, entitlements recipients, contractors, investment firms. Everyone wants free money from the government. The only question is how to frame your wants into non-negotiable demands. Politicians are not fools; they can see that today's activists are tomorrow's supporters, and so every new entitlement and program creates a new activist group that will provide funds for reelection and fight like cats to keep its loot.

And this is unjust.

Next up: Transportation.

To paraphrase Marx, it is high time that the ordinary middle class sets forth an indictment of the current ruling class, and enumerate the vile oppressions and dominations and injustices it has created during its rule of about 100 years.

So I have discussed ruling-class injustice committed with respect to socialism, big government, the war on the middle class, the war on religion, education, welfare, and government pensions. Now let's look at:

Housing. All humans need shelter, but shelter is expensive, and so humans have expended extraordinary effort to obtain shelter. They have developed many ways in which to obtain shelter from the elements. One way is to live in the house of your liege lord. Another is to board in the house of a widow. Another is to rent a dwelling or a part of a dwelling from its owner, popularly called a "landlord." Finally, due to the modern western idea of private property in land, people can own a parcel of land and the dwelling that stands upon it.

It seems to be the ambition of very many people to "own" their own home. Even the socialists appreciate this, as George Bernard Shaw writes of the first Adam seizing the most fertile and favorable patch of land he can find. But there is a problem. The time of life at which humans need to obtain shelter, in young adulthood, is also a time when they are hardly equipped with the financial means to do so. Thus, in the Middle Ages in Britain, young people could not get married unless they could obtain resources from both families, either by right of inheritance or by dowry or both.

In our time, young people can live in the house of their liege lord, as in public housing. They can rent space from a landlord. They can buy a house by borrowing a down payment from their parents and by pledging the house as collateral for a loan, a home mortgage. The culture of widows operating boarding houses seems to have gone out of fashion.

Now, we know from the rather young social science called economics that there are two ways to distribute things of value. You can do it with the price system, which basically balances the prices, purchase-wise or rent-wise, of houses against the amount of money that buyers and renters are willing to bid. Or you can resolve the matter by force, with government or liege lords establishing prices and rents by force. Government also has the option of meddling with the price system with subsidies and interventions in the credit system: semi-force.

The ruling class of the last 100 years has made many interventions in the housing market. It has devalued the currency; it has instituted rent control; it has subsidized mortgage credit with government-subsidized loans; it has instituted building codes to prevent the construction of "jerry-built" houses and latterly to require expensive "environmentally friendly" features; it has limited housing construction in environmentally sensitive areas. All these government actions are actually or potentially unjust, and simply enact the agenda of the ruling class without regard to the welfare of the nation.

But let us unpack the subsidization of home mortgages. As usual, a program advertised as creating "affordable housing" has achieved the opposite.

Let us start before the Great Depression. In the United States, you could borrow money to buy a house. Typically you had to put down about 50 percent of the purchase price and get a 10 year mortgage.

Do you see what this means? It means that the price of houses had to balance with the fact of buyers that could only borrow 50 percent of the purchase price and had to put down 50 percent of the purchase price as a down payment. It means that prices would tend to be low, low, low. It would, of course, privilege young people who could borrow down payments from their parents.

But after the Great Depression the FDR administration created the Federal National Mortgage Association to provide a secondary market in mortgages. Perfectly harmless, except that, with the government's backing, FNMA could buy 30-year fixed rate mortgages and sell them bundled to widows and orphans and pension funds.

Do you see what this means? It means that people are now able to bid more for houses, because 30-year mortgages mean lower monthly payments. This means that house prices will go up.

Is this a good thing? I don't think so.

After World War II the federal government enacted other housing programs, mortgage loans from the Federal Housing Administration with lower down-payments. And of course, the Veterans Administration created the zero-down VA loan for veterans. The result, you can see, is to raise housing prices because the government low-down-payment policies allow buyers to bid up prices for housing.

Is this a good idea? I don't think so.

In the 1970s the feminists discovered that the practice of banks to count only the income of the husband in qualifying home buyers for a loan was male chauvinism. And so lenders were now required to count the income of both partners to a housing loan. The result, you can see, was to raise housing prices because the non-chauvinist rule allowed buyers to bid up the price of houses by qualifying them for bigger loans.

Is this a good idea? I don't think so.

In the 1930s, after the creation of FNMA, the bureaucratic mindset invaded the home loan market and the regulators started grading neighborhoods for creditworthiness. You can see that this is an inevitable result of government intervention, because once you have government subsidies then you have an opportunity to scam the system and therefore you have to have regulations to stop the scam artists. Certain neighborhoods were "red-lined" and often enough these were black neighborhoods. So activism organizations like ACORN pushed to pass the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 to stop redlining and increase the availability of mortgages to minority borrowers. Good idea, you may say. And I'll agree, up to a point.

But activism never stops with its victory. And so the war against redlining kept escalating, through the 1990s and into the 2000s. The federal government kept lowering the down-payment on mortgage loans and started requiring lenders and FNMA to increase the proportion of loans to people with lower credit scores. You can see that this kind of policy increases the number of people who can bid for houses and increases the amount they can bid with. So it tends to increase housing prices.

Is this a good idea? I don't think so.

You know what is coming next. By the 2000s the federal government was pressuring FNMA and Government National Mortgage Association to increase mortgages to "sub-prime" borrowers. And they were pushing 100 percent loans. What could go wrong? A couple of things. First of all, "liar loans." I can't imagine what that means. Also, because pension funds are often required to buy only the highest rated bonds, financial speculators figured out how to buy bundles of mortgages with high-risk loans and convert the high-risk bonds into lower-risk bonds with financial instruments called "derivatives."

That’s fine, except that the government’s subsidies to the housing market violated the foundations of a solid credit market: properly collateralized loans and borrowers able to service their loans. You can’t do that when the government is supporting low down payment loans and encouraging sub-prime borrowers. Thus, in the 2006-08 bear market people in the credit market started to stay away from outfits like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers that had invested heavily in housing-related derivatives that were trying to improve the ratings of low-down loans issued to sub-prime borrowers. Both financial houses failed.

Is this a good idea? I don't think so.

Next Up: The Homeless

To paraphrase Marx, it is high time that the ordinary middle class sets forth an indictment of the current ruling class, and enumerate the vile oppressions and dominations and injustices it has created during its rule of about 100 years.

Now let us continue with:

Education. The notion of child education — extending now into young adulthood — is so universally accepted and celebrated that you wonder what humans did before universal childhood education paid for by taxes. Clearly, the whole point of education is for adults to get a hold of children's minds. That is what is behind the alleged Jesuit claim: "Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man."

Charles Dickens famously represented the schools of his age as vile prisons of mental torture and physical abuse, for which the solution was... what, exactly?

The father of the "common school" in the United States, Horace Mann, predicted in the 1830s that the government school would reduce crime by 90 percent.

Well, we know how that worked out. In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting in Florida we discovered that, in order to reduce crime statistics, police and education bureaucrats determined, as recommended by the Obama administration, not to put criminal-suspect children into the criminal justice system. And then one day a kid shot up the school. Way to go, bureaucrats!

What we have, in modern government education, is the elite running a system to educate children according to the elite’s model of how children should be educated. But there is not the least effort to discover how the actual parents of the children want their children educated, least of all poor parents.

Or even a double-blind study to compare different models of education with outcomes by race, class, and gender.

So let me ask you: what do poor and minority parents want for their children? Frankly, I haven't a clue, except that I've heard tell that many charter schools are oversubscribed, and that many minority parents like the high-discipline KIPP academies.

Look, this is not surprising. The ruling class thinks of education from inside its liberal bubble as a preparation for a creative and well-connected life, culminating in college and a master's degree and entry into government administration and political activism. Anything else is not that interesting to the rulers.

Plus, of course, since education is a government monopoly, it is almost impossible to change it. To implement an education system that would respond to changing times and to parents you would need a fee-paying market-based education system. But any idea like that terrifies people.

My model for education would be mothers in the neighborhood getting together to teach their kids the basics in co-operative schools, and an end to child labor laws. Yep, why not get Junior running spreadsheets at age 7? However, I would draw the line at allowing children to operate power equipment: some fun things must be reserved for adults. For the poor? Billionaire-financed KIPP academies. Most kids would quit school at 12 or 13 and become interns and apprentices. Anyone wanting to go to college would have to crawl over broken glass to get there. And no student debt, because that just encourages colleges to jack up fees and hire administrators.

That is the only way to end the injustice of liberal-dominated education.

Welfare. The current welfare system is a pension scheme to reward supporters of the government; both the actual welfare clients and the bureaucrats and vendors that benefit from the system. That is all.

Otherwise we would have to come to the uncomfortable notion that the whole idea of government welfare is to break up the families of the poor, and make sure that the poor never rise up into the working class and get a job. And certainly never rise to compete with the middle class for jobs, housing, and good schools in the tonier suburbs.

In the good old days, welfare was run by charities and by mutual-aid associations. There was a strong notion that you only helped people that helped themselves. The charities had a ABCDEFG system. A is for Affliation: who is responsible for this person? EFG is Employment, Freedom, God.

Really, what else would you expect? Government is an armed minority, using taxes to reward its supporters. What does government care of decency, responsibility, self-respect? As long as the punters are voting for our guy the system is working. That's how a politician thinks.

But here is the real injustice. Imagine what happens to the welfare recipient in a place like Venezuela, presently going down the tubes. What is life like for the welfare classes in Venezuela right now? For some reason I read nothing in the media about that. The fact is that if you repose upon your government benefices you are remarkably ill-prepared for life when the government runs out of money. And it is when the government runs out of money, dear lefties, that people turn to the Man on the White Horse, the evil fascist.

Government pensions. Half a century ago, Peter Drucker (I think) observed that defined benefit pensions (that define a pension from the salary earned over the years) could not work because it is impossible to predict 30 years in advance how much an employee should pay in order to enjoy a defined pension at age 65. Anyone that organizes a defined-benefit pension is allocating the risk of providing the future pension to somebody in the future. For instance just this week it was announced that in Seattle, the city employee pension funds made a series of mistakes in investing their funds. So who takes the loss? The city employees? The managers of the pension funds? The insurance companies providing liability insurance to the pension fund managers? The taxpayers?

In fact, while corporations have abandoned the defined-benefit pension plan for "defined-contribution" plans in which the employer just puts funds into an employee pension account the government is still going strong with the defined-benefit plan, all the way from Social Security to the notorious California government employee pension fund, CalPERS, that is likely to cause the State of California to go bankrupt. Actually the defined-benefit pension plan is the perfect fit for politics because it offers glorious vistas of wealth -- way off in the future when other people will have to deal with the fallout.

Obviously defined-benefit pension plans are a monstrous injustice, what I call "generational injustice." They promise a wonderful cornucopia for people now, but require somebody in the future to cough up real cash in order to make good on the promises.

Next up: Housing.

it is high time that the ordinary middle class sets forth an indictment of the current ruling class, and enumerate the vile oppressions and dominations and injustices it has created during its rule of about 100 years.

Why do I say this? Because, quite simply, government is force, and the current ruling class thinks that everything from saving for retirement to health care to the education of children should be determined by government: in other words, by force.

Thus I say that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice.

What? Go figure: If you are railing about justice, you are really complaining about the real or perceived injustice that you experience at the hands of the ruling class. But suppose that, as a result of your activism and peaceful protests that you actually acquire political power. I guarantee you that many people will experience your beneficial legislation to bend the arc of history towards justice as the very opposite, as injustice, straight up.

Now our liberal friends have been telling themselves for over a century that they are an insurgent movement from below that is nobly and sacrificially bending the arc of history towards justice by the use of political power, reversing the injustices of the ages. For instance the notion of Allyship experiences itself as Allies fighting with the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors. Would those Allies be members of the Anointed educated class, by any chance? And if not, how would they have got the power to fight the White Oppressors?

I believe the opposite is true. I believe that the progressive movement, the left, has been a top-down tyranny, using the excuse of injustice to impose an unjust order upon the people of the western world, to replace the partial tyranny of feudalism and the apparent tyranny of industrialism with a quasi-military mobilization of society into an administrative hierarchy that is tyrannous, totalitarian, oppressive, exploitative, and ultimately ruinous.

The left’s idea has been that the industrial era has thrown new and frightening monstrosities upon a hapless people, that the left are the chosen ones to fight these monsters and protect us all from their evil spawn. And the means appropriate is politics and government and administrative system.

Unfortunately, as I insist, government is force; politics is the art of unifying "Us" to fight against the dangerous "Them"; and system, administrative system, is domination. So you would expect that no good would come of the left's efforts. Let us demonstrate that in detail.

Socialism, the ownership of the means of production and distribution in common. This notion is a nostalgic dream to return humans to the alleged community of the tribe, where nothing is owned and everything is shared. And indeed you can see the survival advantage of sharing food in the hunter-gatherer band. But in today's world of cities far from the production of food, socialism does not work because there is no survival advantage in sharing food with the neighbors. And there is the little problem that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices. So what? Well, the purpose of prices is to tell people what to do next, in other words, change their behavior in accordance with the scarcity of goods and services. That is the point of the market economy: every moment people are adapting their contributions to the economy based upon their experience of prices. And the point of government is to prevent change, particularly the kind of change introduced at the point of a spear by rapers and pillagers. The problem with socialism is that when prices and individual ownership are forbidden then there is no way to adjust production in response to developing problems; the socialist managers at the top of the administrative hierarchy are not going to see developing problems until they have become disasters. So socialism at the scale of the nation state is not a survival advantage but a road to ruin. Hello Venezuela. But the bigger problem with socialism is that it can only operate by force. The natural thing for humans to do is to barter and trade, and then produce a little on the side, and then improve the product and then borrow from a neighbor and then expand production and then start selling to folks in the next village. All this is forbidden because it trespasses on the power of the government's socialist managers. And that is unjust.

The Neo-Slavery of Big Government. All across the west, governments spend about 30 to 50 percent of GDP. This means that about half of the economy is directed not by market forces but by government force. This is unjust, for it forces every individual to fund his master's political project, which has ever been to tax the people to reward his supporters. In effect, people are forced to support a vast political project as the price of earning a living. But it gets worse. It is clear that every government is eager to invent new spending to reward new supporters, but every government quails before the prospect of ever reducing spending. Indeed the only way that governments tend to reduce spending is through the trickery of inflation and devaluation of the currency. If slavery is unjust, then Big Government is unjust.

The War on Middle-Class Culture. It seems likely that the bourgeois culture, of companionate marriage, of the nuclear family with married parents living with their children, of distance from the extended family, is a recent phenomenon. It is founded on the notion of individual responsibility and it is hard, because young men move out from under their father's domination (and experience), and young women are free of the influence of their mother-in-law. It means, to a great extent, that young people starting out a family are on their own. It is obviously harder to make a success of this when government is getting you into debt for college and sequestering up to 50 percent of your income. More than that it is clear that the sexual revolution, that stigmatizes female modesty and normalizes abortion, that empowers male sexual appetite and non-binary genders, that makes a zoo out of sexuality, all combine to confuse and demoralize ordinary middle-class people. That is the whole idea of war, to confuse and disorient the adversary.

You can read that this war on the middle class is a Jewish conspiracy, or the natural program of the ruling class to make the people dependent. But I rather prefer the verdict of my Three Peoples theory. Our ruling class, the People of the Creative Self, believes in creativity à outrance. That's French for creativity to the max. So you get existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir advertising a life of creativity in everything, including sexuality. They seem to believe in complete personal reinvention without any credit for tradition or the way it used to be. The only problem is that if you try that you will probably ruin your life as, arguably, Sartre and Beauvoir ruined theirs. Indeed, the whole story of the universe is that it does not wipe the slate clean with every generation, but it builds upon itself. It may break out in a new direction, but almost always it will build on previous knowledge (encoded in DNA) and practice (encoded in culture). Anyway, it is cruel and unjust to make war upon a people's culture, whether the culture is hunter-gatherer or 20th century bourgeois.

The War on Religion. The reason that "God is Dead" is that the People of the Creative Self do not believe in the God of the People of the Responsible Self. They believe instead in... well I would say that the People of the Creative Self have not yet really found a new God, beyond a faith in their own creativity. But they know that the God of Christianity is sick and wrong. And bigoted, and superstitious, and racist and sexist and homophobic. So it must be driven out of the public square. And that is unjust. As I develop in my book The Road to the Middle Class, the Axial Age religions are an irreducible part of the journey from rural idiocy to urban competence. The point is made clearly by a minister from back in the days of the Great Awakening in the 1700s:

When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to use the means appointed was a damning sin.

See what I mean? When people make the journey from countryside to cityscape they discover that they need a new religion.  And the religion they seem to choose is the local derivative of the Axial Age religions, with creator Gods that set  up an understandable world book-ended by divine law that calls humans to be responsible.

So when liberals make war on Christianity they are building roadblocks and barricades on the Road to the Middle Class. And that is unjust. But that is the way of the world. We humans are pretty good at figuring out what we want and need. But we are a lot less competent at figuring out what other people want and need. And that is the beginning of injustice.

Next Up: Education, Welfare, and Pensions.