Everyone understands that we got a problem, right here in River City.
If you are a US member of the educated class, the problem is Donald Trump and his reckless, lying racist-sexist-homophobic nationalist populism. Everyone, from nice liberal ladies with their #WeBelieve yard signs to the DOJ-FBI high command, understands, at a deep existential level, that Trump must be stopped.
But if you are an ordinary US commoner, the problem is that an economy that doesn’t work for you, and a ruling class that doesn’t seem to believe in America any more.
If you are in the educated class in Europe you are concerned about climate change and realize that there is no alternative to reducing the nitrogen released into the atmosphere by modern farming.
But if you are an ordinary Brit or Dutch guy you wonder if you are going to be able to afford to heat your home this winter, what with the interruption of natural gas from Russia.
If you are a Chinese Communist Party official you know that there is no alternative to lockdowns whenever a COVID variant appears in a Chinese city.
If you are an ordinary Chinese you live in constant fear that suddenly, at any time, you might get locked down and shipped off to a government quarantine facility. And then there is the money you lost on the apartment you were going to buy with Evergrande.
What’s the problem?
The problem is, I believe, that government is our human solution to the need, on occasion, to fight for survival against a threatening enemy. Down through the ages, this has usually involved protecting our food-growing land against raiders and plunderers. Because land was life, as Gone with the Wind’s Gerald O’Hara told us.
The story of the last 200 years, starting not later than the Napoleonic Wars, is that almost nothing in the modern world needs an existential fight to the death.
What was the Napoleonic Wars about, exactly? It ended pretty much as it began, with the nations of Europe still the nations of Europe.
What was the Civil War about, exactly? Fighting about slavery about ten minutes before it would have been scandalous to continue it, even in the US South.
What was the point of the millions killed in World War I and World War II, exactly?
What was the point of the Bolshevik and Maoist Revolutions, that ended in 100 million dead? For what, exactly? The economies of Russia and China are now cap-it-al-ist-ic.
And what is the point of the western nations’ welfare states where the government takes over what could be done by banks, insurance companies, mutual-aid societies, and charity? And does it very badly, at 40 percent of GDP extracted from the market economy.
I say that politics and government have always been about a fight with the enemy. The government extracts as much as possible from the economy to fight the war and also rewards its supporters, as required.
This used to mean funding the army, rewarding nobles with army commands, looting the lands conquered by the army, and distributing the spoils among the deserving supporters of the regime.
Today, it means jobs for the educated gentry in government and education, an existential peril to fight — like climate change or systemic racism — and distribution of spoils as necessary to drum up support to win the next election. When routine activities like saving for old age, getting an education for the kids, provision of health care, relief of the poor, are all mixed up with the fight against an existential peril, it is not surprising that government does it all very badly. A prime example is the response of administrative government to the COVID pandemic. It is pretty clear in retrospect that the lockdown policy and money printer go brrrr policy was a mistake. Surely there is a better way to fight a pandemic.
But what sort of social organization would recognize its mistakes and correct them as quickly and sensibly as possible? Because there are always mistakes.
What kind of organization would organize old age pensions to our benefit? I say that we should replace the income-transfer program of Social Security with a genuine savings program through Fidelity and Vanguard. When do people retire? When they can afford to. So, if there is a war or a depression, people have to keep working a few years longer.
What kind of organization would organize health care to our benefit? I suspect a multi-tier system, where the poor get free care, and the rest of us pay insurance, with big deductibles, and with premiums adjusted to lifestyle choices. For senior citizens, I propose a multi-tier approach that reflect different choices as to end-of-life care. If you want to pay for heroic care, no problem. If you are a cheapskate that doesn’t want to pay for heroic care, you got it. And then we need to blow up the current medical education and credentials system.
Then there is education. I think we can see where education is going. Away from one-size-fits-all government schools towards various choices from homeschooling to charter schools and micro-schools run by the neighborhood mothers. Plus drastic reform of child-labor laws to permit all post-pubertal kids to work, preferably as apprentices.
As much as possible, all this should be done outside the financing and administration of government. Why? Because of Chantrill’s Law, that government programs cannot work because you can never reform them. In real life, things are always going wrong, and the people involved need to get together to fix the problem. That doesn’t happen with government because, in part, the government leader is the heroic symbol of his country and cannot be wrong, and in part because a government program is not primarily about providing services to customers but distributing loot to freeloaders.
How do we do this? Not under some new glorious leader, but a slow stumbling bumbling correction of mistakes: fixin’ things as we go along.
Unfortunately, there won’t be much status and power for the educated elite.