An acquaintance sent me some thoughts about the aftermath of doubling the money supply since COVID. Minimum wage is halved. But “welfare and EBT cards do not support the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed.” Then there are the pick-up trucks lining up at food banks.
And it set me to thinking. Our ruling class rules by virtue of its political formula that it fights for the lower class. First it was the workers, then blacks, then women. And now “oppressed peoples” of all kinds.
Thomas Sowell laughs at this with this three-layer theory of Anointed, Benighted, and Mascots.
The idea, with Marx and the Fabian socialists and the American Progressives, was that the lower class — and indeed all citizens — would benefit because new, enlightened rulers would erase centuries-old injustices and tax the capitalists and exploiters for the benefit of the lower class. Plus laws to help labor unions and workers in their relationship with employers. With the inclusion of blacks and women as the clients of the rulers, the welfare state expanded to specifically benefit blacks and women with affirmative action and now DEI.
But what if the plans of the rulers went awry? What if the capitalists and exploiters learned how to game the system set up by the educated rulers? What if the folks paying for the benefits to the lower class came to include the ordinary middle class?
What if stock prices have tripled in real terms and real-estate prices have doubled in real terms in the last 50 years, but real wages have barely budged?
What if the whole package of government programs to assist the lower class actually makes things worse? Worse for the ordinary middle class, that experiences stagnation in its wages. Worse for the lower class that finds itself imprisoned in a suffocating world of government benefits that encourages anti-social behavior and economic stasis and family breakdown?
My theory is that, eventually, the lower class wakes up.
I say that the way to understand the Trump effect is that, fifty years after the ruling class abandoned the white working class, the white working class abandoned the Democratic Party.
I say that the way to understand the future is to wonder when the black underclass will realize that the ruling class doesn’t care about people like them, but only in its “woke” religion in which blacks are just another “mascot” displayed on the trophy shelf of the educated rulers.
Look, I don’t say that the rulers have deliberately screwed the ordinary middle class. I don’t say that they revel in the mess they have created with welfare and other government programs that has cratered the lower class. No indeed.
Our rulers are supremely confident that they are on the right side of history and saving civilization from a host of evils, not the least of which are climate change and systemic racism. But it is their religious devotion to righting the wrongs of history that have blinded them to the negative results of their programs.
I mean haven’t they read their Burns, as any educated person would?
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley.
I mean: if you are devoted to helping the worker, how could you be making things worse for the worker and enriching the already rich?
If you are devoted to fighting as an ally of all “oppressed peoples” how could your policies possibly be confining them in a walled garden from which it is really difficult to escape?
And how could you not be doing a review of all your plans on a regular schedule to make sure that they have not “gang aft a-gley?” It does not compute.
Actually, the current frenzy on transgender rights and “transitioning” illustrates the problem. The idea that gays should not be beaten up by police, as in Stonewall in 1969, progressed to the idea that gays should not be stigmatized for infecting each other as in HIV/AIDS to gay marriage to government schools helping children “transition” without informing the parents. I say that we should have stopped at letting gays whoop it up in their gay bars without interference. But that is not how politics and religion work. Politics and religion are wars: against the enemy and against evil. If things are not working out, then the sensible thing to do is to double down.
Hey, I know. If we can shut down the national economy because COVID, why not shut down the gay party scene because HIV/AIDS/monkeypox?
I say that if you want to understand the world right now, from the War against Trump to the transgender craziness to the pedal-to-the-metal government spending, it starts with the rulers knowing that something is going wrong.
Unfortunately, poor dears, our rulers have no idea what is going wrong, and thus no idea what to do about it. Except sicc the FBI on Trump.
In such situation, God has ordained, down the ages, for the benefit of mankind, a little bit of regime change. Butcher’s bill to be decided later.