Stop Complaining Say the Experts

but there has to be a better way

Is the glass half full or half empty?

Why don’t we just stop the extremists arguing, say a couple of moderates at The Free Press. Enough already with you populists, whether from the progressive left of Zohran Mamdani or the MAGA right of Donald Trump.

We are living in the best world ever for the most people ever.

And then they recite all the economic data that says we are living longer, living more prosperously than ever.

Good point. It’s 80 years since the last World War and nearly 100 years since the Great Depression. So what’s the problem?

Well, I’d say that if you are an educated-class Mamdani supporter, trying to live the creative life in a shared apartment in New York City or the Bay Area, something seems to have gone wrong. You were told by your college teachers that you could and should live a creative life. Only here you are sweating it out in a cubicle job, going nowhere.

And if you are a Trump supporter you have been oppressed by conceited liberals for what seems like forever and you seem to live a life prodded every day by insufferable liberal bureaucrats and activists. And try and build a house or get a mortgage that doesn’t eat you for lunch.

I’d say that our educated elite is getting its just deserts. It told us, in no uncertain terms over a century ago, that if we’d just stay out of the way they would plan and create a just and affordable world for all. Only I’d say that the way you create a just and affordable world is to get the bossy intellectuals and administrators and politicians and activists and government programs out of the way, and let ordinary people get on with their lives.

George Eliot had the right idea when she ended Middlemarch saying

that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Her heroine was all pumped up about making a difference in the world. But in the end it’s just ordinary life that matters.

Our big problem today is what to do now, after a century of big government, big income transfers, big public debt, and the imposition of the culture of the educated class upon the ordinary middle class. I’d say it is time for Reform. Only my reform agenda mostly involved unwinding the follies of the last century.

First, let’s critique the major heads of government spending.

Pensions. I believe we should wind up most government pensions, from Social Security to government employee pensions and replace them with private savings. In other words, instead of people paying FICA tax they would be contributing to their IRAs. But obviously it would take a generation to do this.

Health Care. I believe that Medicare should be replaced as much a possible by private helath savings accounts and catastrophic insurance coverage. I think that health care for seniors like me should be mostly palliative rather than heroic. Yes, we should help the poor with health care, but I think we should have the tech billionaires figure out how to do it. But it would take a generation to do this.

Education. I think that government education should be abolished and child labor reinstituted. I suspect that the best way forward is with homeschooling and microschoooling run mostly by neighborhood mothers. I believe children should be exposed to the working world no later than age 13, and that apprenticeships and internships should be spread around so that all young people get introduced, early and often, to the working world and get to understand the skills they need to thrive. We have already got started on the homeschooling and microschool front.

Housing. The big problem, in my view, is the 30-year fixed rate mortgages with low down payments that were introduced in the 1930s with the Federal National Mortgage Association. These mortgage subsidies tend to force up home prices and force people to borrow to the limit of their income. There has to be a better way. But it will take time. Then there’s all the regulation of housing by people that know what is good for us.

Welfare. The big problem with government welfare, in my opinion, is that it lets ordinary citizens like you and me ignore the poor and figure that the government has it covered. But poverty is not so much a lack of income as a lack of family, a lack of skill, of not getting out into the world and making things happen. Helping the poor is our business, not the government’s business.

Culture. I believe in the nuclear demolition of the helpless victim narrative, the idea that the ruling class is the Ally of the Oppressed Peoples in their fight against the White Male Oppressors. This notion has been the political formula of the educated class for the last 150 years. You can see the point. It is a way for the educated class to bid for political support from low-income people. But what could replace it? What kind of culture would the ordinary middle class support? Simply, I’d say, a culture that values work and marriage and children and a life engaged in local associations and organizations where people get together as equals to help each other.

Bottom line: We humans are social animals; we live by working and associating and helping and interacting with each other. But politics encourages us to divide and blame each other. And government programs are anti-social. They force some people to contribute; they allow other people not to contribute.

There has to be a better way.