A parallel case may be found in the “civil” services, regulating authorities, non-profits, &c. Jobs in these areas, which command high salaries and pensions, and present delicious opportunities for graft, are outwardly the opposite of productive. They parasitically consume, on a colossal scale, the resources of the productive.
Look into almost any kind of “charitable” activity, such as social work, and one will find that only a tiny proportion of the cash “trickles down” to the characteristically desperate “clients”. And when it does, they use it to buy not only drugs and licker, but truly useless things, such as lottery tickets.
“Education” systems, in the modern West, exist chiefly to enrich semi-literate, unionized schoolteachers. In many parts of Ontario, for instance, a teacher will make at least double what the average parents make, and therefore feel justified in sneering. The teachers naturally consider that the little ones belong to them, for they are the necessary source of their income. What rights should parents have to interfere in their upbringing?
My best argument for the parasite class (always granting that some may be sincere), is that they protect society from gathering excessive wealth, or living lives of too much ease. Without them, we might easily suffer from the vices associated with too much freedom.
How I preferred the deadbeat, layabout, very English London of the Labour Party, when I lived there in the ‘seventies — to the cosmopolitan, rich, over-swept London of the Thatcher years. There are some advantages to socialism.
And there are other arguments, too, for putting depraved Leftists in power, though on examination they reveal special pleading. For instance, teachers may claim to offer child-minding services, so that mothers, especially, can go to work. But it is because heavy taxation requires the dual income, or women to do horrible and demeaning paid work when their husbands run away, that these services were ever made necessary.
The government does, arguably, “create” employment. Among the most farcical examples are the tax lawyers and consultants. Taxpayers need these to navigate incredibly elaborate tax codes, for their own protection. Only a professional can find the loopholes. Whereas, a comprehensible, flat tax system would put all these “experts” out of business. It would shrink revenue departments spectacularly, and by extension, threaten to shrink taxes. To a professional politician, this would never do. It would shrink his power.
David Warren, “Answering to a ‘need'”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-06-18.
July 21, 2025
July 5, 2025
NYC selects its own Justin Trudeau clone
The winner of the Democratic primary is almost always subsequently elected as the mayor of New York City, so it’s fair to assume that Zohran Mamdani is going to be NYC’s next mayor. And he’s an American version of ultra-progressive former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:
New York State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani photographed in Assembly District 36, 10 February 2024.
Photo by Kara McCurdy via Wikimedia Commons.
American politics often seem to balance themselves out in the worst possible way. Even as the GOP sheds its last vestiges of affection for limited government and free markets, the opposition Democrats openly embrace bigotry and crazy economic nostrums. Case in point: the rise in New York City of Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist who flirts with antisemitism, to represent the Democratic Party in this year’s mayoral election.
The primary race in New York was a snapshot of the Democratic Party’s woes. Despite the presence of other candidates seeking the mayoral nomination, the race ultimately came down to two candidates: Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor of New York.
Before resigning over allegations of sexual harassment, Cuomo, the 67-year-old son of another former governor, was best known for a “controversial directive that told nursing homes they couldn’t deny patients coming from hospitals admission based on a COVID-19 diagnosis”, according to StatNews. He then covered up the large number of ensuing deaths. He was the favoured candidate of the Democratic establishment and the early front-runner for the nomination.
Standing out from the pack of political hopefuls facing Cuomo was Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old son of an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and a Columbia University political science professor. Before being elected to the state legislature as a Democrat and a socialist, Mamdani tried his hand as a government employee and a rapper. His musical output included the song “Salaam”, which, as The Independent put it, “praised the ‘Holy Land Five’ — five men convicted in 2008 of donating over $12 million to Hamas”.
To say that New Yorkers are tired of Cuomo is a wild understatement. Like most Americans, New Yorkers are deeply sick of the old party establishment that rallied around Cuomo as well as the man himself. Yet, he was expected to walk away with the nomination and then cruise to victory in a largely one-party city.
But Mamdani sweetened the pot in the expensive metropolis with promises to freeze rent, make buses free, offer no-cost childcare, lower grocery prices with city-owned grocery stores, and use “public dollars” to build 200,000 apartments. He swears that he “knows exactly how to pay for it, too” with higher taxes on those making more than $1 million per year. Not explicitly part of his campaign, but on the record as his intention, is “the end goal of seizing the means of production”.
In the 2021 recording in which he advocated seizing the means of production, Mamdani endorsed BDS as an issue “that we firmly believe in”. The BDS movement — shorthand for “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” — aims to economically pressure Israel into withdrawing from so-called “occupied territories” and allowing Palestinians to settle throughout Israel. At its extremes, BDS seeks to eliminate the world’s only Jewish-majority state. It’s inspired by the movement against South Africa’s old apartheid regime.
July 2, 2025
QotD: The bane of socialism — boredom
Most “bad” dogs aren’t actually bad. They’re not misbehaving because they’re willful, or mean, or whatever. They’re just bored out of their fucking skulls, because the kind of bugman who gets a dog these days has no idea that you actually have to play with it, and pet it, and interact with it, in much the same way you have to interact with a young human. Given a dog’s limited intellect, the only thing it can think of to do to alleviate its boredom is chew on things, or dig in the yard, or piss on the rug, or, if all else fails, chew its own fur off.
Being slightly more complex critters, humans have more options, but bore a human enough — overfill his material needs, so that he’s stuffed to somnolence, but take his sense of purpose away — and you’ll see the exact same dog behaviors. Why do you think they shove all that metal shit in their faces? And no, I am absolutely not joking. Why all the huge, gaudy, gross tattoos? The constant changes of hair color and style?
Have you ever asked them?
Again, I’m 100% not joking. I know most of y’all avoid SJWs like the plague, and that’s a smart move, can’t blame you for it, but if you do, you’ll just have to trust me: I was in academia for a long time, so I was around not just SJWs, but bleeding-edge lunatic SJWs, and I asked them about it. One must be discreet about this, of course — hey, I’m thinking of getting a roll of toilet paper tattooed on my bicep, to remind me that We’re In This Together, what do you think? — but it’s fairly easy to do. And every time, they’d spin me some elaborate tale of how deep and meaningful it all is.
No, really. By some mental process I can’t begin to reproduce, getting Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s face tattooed on your calf is, to them, striking a blow at ambient civilization. That is the literal truth of their motivation. It’s the same reason the dog digs in the backyard, or pisses on the rug, or chews its own fur off: That’s the only agency it has, the only purpose it can find.
Severian, “Purpose”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-06.
June 26, 2025
NYC doubles down on Luxury Beliefs
New York City voters appear to have selected the ultimate “luxury beliefs” candidate as the presumptive next mayor of NYC in Zohran Mamdani:
The luxury belief class has just done the equivalent of plucking a random grad student from an Ivy League Hamas encampment and nominating them for mayor.
Take the New York City subway early in the morning from the outer boroughs and you’ll find it packed with cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel workers and construction workers coming off the night shift. Some are heading home. Some are just starting their day. It’s “the help” arriving and departing.
Like many other large cities, New York runs on a two-tier system. There’s the professional class clustered in the centre, and there are the people who keep the centre running but can’t afford to live in it.
And so they must endure long rides on public transportation to get to work. They keep their heads down and ignore the trash, the smell, the homeless men passed out across the seats. Working-class commuters see the sprawled-out bodies and try to make it through the ride without being harassed or stepping in puddles of urine.
Many politicians and media outlets act like the public disorder problem is overblown. But fare evasion, open drug use and serious mental illness on the subway are still part of daily life.
It’s in this polarised environment that the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has gained traction among the city’s richest voters. At only 33, Mamdani is one of the youngest people ever to run for mayor of America’s largest city. Mamdani, a self-proclaimed nepo baby who has spent four years as an Albany assemblyman and is described by The New York Times as a “a TikTok savant”, has virtually no experience for the job.
And yet, what’s really worrying about this candidate is that he’s a poster child for luxury beliefs.
“Luxury beliefs” — a term I coined years ago — means opinions that confer status on the upper class at little to no cost for them, while inflicting serious cost on the lower classes. And the very people who back Mamdani are the ones who most resemble him: affluent, overeducated, and eager to prove their virtue at someone else’s expense.
As is often true of those who embrace luxury beliefs, Mamdani purports to care most about the working class. He says he wants free buses, government-run grocery stores, and a freeze on rent increases.
But his platform would hurt the working classes a lot more than it would help them.
June 20, 2025
QotD: The innate appeal of socialism
And the material side of Socialism is technically feasible. Obviously so, and indeed it was obvious by 1865. Consider what the Union Army had to do to keep one million men in the field, simultaneously, spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles. This was not without its problems, of course — soldiers finally receiving their back pay spurred a minor economic boom in 1865-6 — but it was not just possible, but an everyday occurrence, for hundreds of thousands of men, dispersed over a huge geographic area, to receive their entire subsistence from the government. Clothes, shoes, food — the stuff Riis’s “street Arabs” would’ve killed for — all at public expense, delivered with clockwork efficiency.
If Socialism were just that, then indeed we could’ve “built Socialism”, as the Bolsheviks would have it, by the end of the 19th century. And cheaply, too — by the late 1880s, the US Treasury’s massive surplus was a major campaign issue for both parties. The “Yankee Leviathan“, as political historian Richard Bensel put it, was as close to actual Fascism as has ever been put into practice (alas, the term hadn’t been invented yet), and it was just aces at delivering the material goods. (It’s Alanis-level ironic that the Confederacy was even more actual capital-F Fascistic than the Union, given the whole “states’ rights” thing, but that’s what happens in totaler Krieg — win first, sort the theory out later).
Severian, “Purpose”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-06.
June 8, 2025
QotD: The ratchet effect
What ends up happening is a kind of “ratchet effect” on steroids. The “ratchet effect”, you’ll recall, was Margaret Thatcher’s explanation for how the Left kept winning on policy even though the Right kept winning at the polls (ah, God love ya, Maggie, and give you peace). When the Left is in power, they get whatever they want. When the Right is in power, they consolidate the Left’s gains, as this is now “the new normal”. Since The Right exists only to twiddle the knobs and levers of the Leviathan State in a more efficient, cost-effective, low-tax way, the “right-wing” “reformers” find jury-rigged quasi-solutions to the problems the Left’s insanity creates.
In a very real way, then, the “ratchet effect” means the so-called “Right” ends up doing the Left’s job for them, much better than they themselves could’ve.
Same deal inside the divisions of GloboHomoCorp. Same deal inside the Third Reich, which is why “working towards the Führer” turned so murderous, so fast. Since the only way to get noticed by the next higher-up level of “management” was to be more obnoxiously ruthless than everybody else at doing what the Führer seemed to be hinting that he wanted …
In the corporate world, then, I theorize, super-aggressive, ultra-obnoxious SJW-ism is a ground-up phenomenon. Does the Big Boss really want mandatory anti-Whiteness training across all divisions? Maybe … but maybe not. And though it’s tempting to say “He’s the Big Boss, he must know at least broadly what the big divisions are up to”, do I even have to ask if you’ve ever been in a situation where that’s true? Big Bosses the world over, in any field, be they CEOs or Generals or Chief Medical Officers or what have you, don’t have the slightest clue what’s happening structurally inside their commands.
All they know is what the next-lower level of management tells them is happening.
Severian, “On Selling Out”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-26.
June 3, 2025
QotD: Heinlein’s opinions on the right to bear arms
Between 1942 and 1966 Heinlein’s politics evolved from New Deal left-liberalism towards what after 1971 would come to be called libertarianism. But that way of putting it is actually misleading, because Heinlein did not merely approach libertarianism, he played a significant part in defining it. His 1966 novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress was formative of the movement, with the “rational anarchist” Bernardo de la Paz becoming a role model for later libertarians. By 1978, we have direct evidence (from an interview in Samuel Edward Konkin’s New Libertarian magazine, among other sources) that Heinlein self-identified as a libertarian and regretted his earlier statism.
But if Heinlein’s overall politics changed considerably and wandered down some odd byways during his lifetime, his uncompromising support of civilian firearms rights was a constant on display throughout his life. Brin observes that was already true in 1942, but attempts to attribute this position to John W. Campbell. Multiple lines of evidence refute this claim.
[…]
Heinlein, on the other hand, was a vocal and consistent advocate of civilian weapons ownership both during and after his association with Campbell. This is perhaps clearest in his 1949 novel Red Planet, written after their parting of the ways. In that novel, the bearing of personal weapons is explicitly connected to the assumption of adult responsibilities.
Red Planet is also interesting because, although we might consider the views of Heinlein’s characters an unreliable guide to Heinlein’s own, Heinlein’s letters about the novel reveal much more. His editor at Scribner attempted to delete the section of argument in which weapons-bearing is connected to adult responsibility; Heinlein rejected this, objecting that it eviscerated the book’s ethical core and making very clear that the views of the pro-gun mentor figures in the novel were his own.
Heinlein was to reiterate similar views not only in his later fiction but in the posthumous nonfiction collection Grumbles From The Grave – by which time they were no surprise to any Heinlein fan. And it would be difficult to overstate the influence they had on firearms-rights activists during the dark years between the Gun Control Act of 1968 and our vindication in the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller ruling.
Heinlein’s gift to firearms-rights activism during that bleak four decades was to be able to draw on the principled case for civilian firearms going back to the framers of the U.S. Constitution and English Republican sources and restate it in language appealing to the brightest children of post-WWII America. But he did more than that, because in Red Planet and elsewhere firearms rights were presented as an inextricable part of a philosophical whole, with the personal firearm both as instrument and defining symbol of personal liberty and responsibility.
Eric S. Raymond, “Brin on Heinlein on guns is dead wrong”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-07-18.
May 20, 2025
Gen Z is blaming Capitalism for the sins of Cronyism
Lika Kobeshavidze at the Foundation for Economic Education explains why angry Gen Z’ers are blaming capitalism but should instead be blaming crony capitalism for the economic plight they find themselves in:
Image Credit: Custom image by FEE
Across college campuses, on TikTok feeds, and in everyday conversations, a familiar narrative is gaining steam: capitalism is broken.
Rising rents and stagnant wages fuel the claim among some young people that free markets have failed an entire generation. According to a 2024 poll by the Institute of Economic Affairs, more than 60% of young Britons now view socialism favorably. In the United States, the trend is similar, with Generation Z increasingly skeptical of capitalism’s promises.
But much of this idealism is rooted in distance — many of the young people romanticizing socialism have never lived through the economic dysfunction or political repression it often brings. For those who experienced Soviet shortages, Venezuelan collapse, or East Germany’s surveillance, the word socialism doesn’t suggest fairness or opportunity — it suggests fear, failure, and control. There’s a reason so many fled those systems to come to freer countries. What sounds utopian in theory has too often turned dystopian in practice.
But blaming capitalism misses the mark. The real culprit is cronyism, the unholy alliance between big government and big business that twists markets, blocks competition, and rewards political connections over genuine innovation.
[…]
Cronyism is not limited to one country or one political party. Across the United States and Europe, the symptoms are the same.
In the US, Canada, and the UK, the dream of homeownership slips further away for young people. Sky-high housing prices are blamed on “market failure”, but the real cause lies in layers of government-imposed barriers: restrictive zoning laws, burdensome permitting requirements, and endless bureaucratic delays. Big developers who can afford to navigate or influence the system survive. Everyone else gets locked out.
In Europe, the pattern repeats. France’s labor laws, designed to protect workers, instead stifle opportunity. Hiring becomes risky and expensive, especially for young people. Large corporations, with the resources to manage compliance costs, consolidate their dominance. Small firms and startups never get off the ground.
There’s also a persistent myth that big business fears government intervention. In reality, the largest corporations often embrace it, because it keeps them on top. Tech giants like Facebook and Google now lobby for more regulation, knowing that complex new rules will strangle smaller competitors who can’t afford fleets of compliance officers. Green energy subsidies, meant to combat climate change, often end up showering billions on well-connected firms while locking out emerging innovators.
Cronyism doesn’t reward the best ideas. It rewards the best lobbyists.
May 16, 2025
QotD: Marxist and socialist revolutions
The collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, which he is happy to call revolutionary, also does not support his rough schema. It is not that the communist regime refused to reform, it is that it was incapable of reform for the same reason that a woman can’t be a little bit pregnant. If a regime makes the kind of claims for itself that the communist regime made, even if the leaders had themselves long since ceased to believe them, namely that it is the ineluctable denouement of all history, if not that of the universe itself, it cannot retreat, all the more so because its crimes, which one could and would have been claimed as a step in the march of history, would thereafter be seen for what they were: the choices of fanatical psychopaths avid for total power.
Professor Chirot seems to have a slight soft spot (admittedly only implicit) for socialism, that is to say for something more than mere social democracy. In his discussion of the case of Angola, in which a revolutionary movement emerged triumphant, but whose post-revolutionary regime was a pure kleptocracy under cover of Marxist rhetoric, he says: “Much more could have been done through either a market-friendly or a genuinely more socialist approach to economic development”.
This surely implies that somewhere, at some time, there was a socialist regime that would have handled Angola’s oil bonanza better, in which case one would have liked an example that it might have followed. Norway, perhaps? But Norway is not socialist, it is social democratic. Besides, Norwegians and Angolans are scarcely the same in a very large number of ways. I would have thought that the chances of Angola following the Norwegian model were, and are, approximately, and perhaps even exactly, zero.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Longing for Revolution”, New English Review, 2020-05-13.
March 8, 2025
QotD: India’s post-independence economic mistake
Strong and centralised control is something that only a rich country can afford because only a rich economy can weather the costs – the inefficiencies, the politically directed nonsenses – that such control insists upon.
Of course, rich countries shouldn’t make themselves poorer in this manner either but an already poor place can’t afford to have them – because if it does then people die.
India’s poor because of that attempt at socialist development. Something we can prove by the manner in which development sped up when even some portion of the socialism was dropped. Sure, the Webbs set up the LSE, the place I started to learn my economics but they were responsible for far greater evils than my views as well.
Tim Worstall, “A Sad Lesson About India’s History”, Continental Telegraph, 2020-05-01.
January 4, 2025
October 10, 2024
The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek
David Warren recommends one of the first economics books I ever read and I fully concur with his appreciation of Friedrich Hayek’s most famous work:
For those who have an interest in politics, who also wish to have some knowledge of this subject, I can recommend a book published in 1944. It is by Friedrich Hayek, and is dedicated “To the socialists of all parties”. The title is, The Road to Serfdom.
It is extraordinarily well-written, for an academic whose native language wasn’t English, in less than two hundred exhilarating pages. The book predicts, correctly, that while they will lose the War, German ideological notions that began to prevail before the War in e.g. Germany, Russia, Italy, and throughout the West, would continue to do so, in Britain and America. They were plausible and were thought to have been proved in wartime. In the coming peacetime, all the intellectuals would be on board.
Yet they were wrong, and had always been wrong. The professor, Hayek, shows why neither a little nor a lot of socialism will ever work; why it invariably makes everyone poorer, except for an ideological elite; and why it traps whole societies in the condition of serfdom. Oddly enough, almost no one wants to be a serf, but some wish to have power over serfs. Hence the popularity of socialism among the power-hungry.
Too, ambiguous and poorly understood political terms fool people. (My father explained this as the Triple-B principle: “Bullshit Baffles Brains”.)
The idle reader should still be captivated by this book, which hasn’t dated, even slightly. Re-reading it, as I have been doing since high school, I find the arguments irresistible and compelling. Other members of the “Austrian School” out of which Hayek sprang (it was originally a Catholic movement, incidentally) are also informative, but none are so articulate.
The “Chicago School”, of Milton Friedman et alia, was the nearest American equivalent. But that was based on numbers, more than upon the ironical ideas, which old Austro-Hungaria had the leisure to mull.
September 15, 2024
QotD: “Primordial” Marxism
Inconveniently, the only place this ever actually happened was in a Communist country – Poland – in 1981. I’m not going to get into the complicated historiography of how the Soviet Revolution itself failed to fit the causal sequence Marx expected; consult any decent history. What’s interesting for our purposes is that capitalism accidentally solved the immiseration problem well before then, by abolishing Marx’s proletariat through rising standards of living – reverse immiseration.
The most forward-thinking Marxists had already figured out this was going to be a problem by around 1910. This began a century-long struggle to find a theoretical basis for socialism decoupled from Marxian class analysis.
Early on, Lenin developed the theory of the revolutionary vanguard. In this telling, the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously respond to immiseration with socialist revolution but needed to be led to it by a vanguard of intellectuals and men of action which would, naturally, take a leading role in crafting the post-revolutionary paradise.
Only a few years later came one of the most virulent discoveries in this quest – Fascism. It is not simplifying much to say that Communists invented Fascism as an escape from the failure of class-warfare theory, then had to both fight their malignant offspring to death and gaslight everyone else into thinking that the second word in “National Socialism” meant anything but what it said.
During its short lifetime, Fascism did exert quite a fascination on the emerging managerial-statist elite. Before WWII much of that elite viewed Mussolini and Hitler as super-managers who Got Things Done, models to be emulated rather than blood-soaked tyrants. But Fascism’s appeal did not long survive its defeat.
Marxists had more success through replacing the Marxian economic class hierarchy with other ontologies of power in which some new victim group could be substituted for the vanished proletariat and plugged into the same drama of immiseration leading to inevitable revolution.
Most importantly, each of these mutations offered the international managerial elite a privileged role as the vanguard of the new revolution – a way to justify its supremacy and its embrace of managerial state socialism. This is how we got the Great Inversion – Marxists in the middle and upper classes, anti-Marxists in the working class being dismissed as gammons and deplorables.
Leaving out some failed experiments, we can distinguish three major categories of substitution. One, “world systems theory”, is no longer of more than historical interest. In this story, the role of the proletariat is taken by oppressed Third-World nations being raped of resources by capitalist oppressors.
Though world systems theory still gets some worship in academia, it succumbed to the inconvenient fact that the areas of the Third World most penetrated by capitalist “exploitation” tended to be those where living standards rose the fastest. The few really serious hellholes left are places (like, e.g. the Congo) where capitalism has been thwarted or co-opted by local bandits. But in general, Frantz Fanon’s wretched of the Earth are now being bourgeoisified as fast as the old proletariat was during and after WWII.
The other two mutations of Marxian vanguard theory were much more successful. One replaced the Marxian class hierarchy with a racialized hierarchy of victim groups. The other simply replaced “the proletariat” with “the environment”.
Eric S. Raymond, “The Great Inversion”, Armed and Dangerous, 2019-12-23.
August 23, 2024
QotD: The decline of the British working class
Marxists themselves were perhaps the first to notice that the “proletariat” as their theory conceived it was vanishing, assimilated to the petty bourgeoisie by the postwar rise in living standards and the propagation of middlebrow culture through the then-new media of paperback books, radio, and television.
In the new environment, being “working class” became steadily less of a purchasing-power distinction and more one of culture, affiliation, and educational limits on upward mobility. A plumber might make more than an advertising copywriter per hour, but the copywriter could reasonably hope to run his own ad agency – or at least a corporate marketing department – some day. The plumber remained “working class” because, lacking his A-level, he could never hope to join the managerial elite.
At the same time, state socialism was becoming increasingly appealing to the managerial and upper classes because it offered the prospect not of revolution but of a managed economy that would freeze power relationships into a shape they were familiar with and knew how to manipulate. This came to be seen as greatly preferable to the chaotic dynamism of unrestrained free markets – and to upper-SES people who every year feared falling into poverty less but losing relative status more, it really was preferable.
In Great Britain, the formation of the National Health Service in 1947 was therefore not a radical move but a conservative one. It was a triumph not of revolutionary working-class fervor overthrowing elites but of managerial statism cementing elite power in place.
During the long recovery boom after World War II – until the early 1970s – it was possible to avoid noticing that the interests of the managerial elite and the working classes were diverging. Both the U.S. and Great Britain used their unmatched industrial capacity to act as price-takers in international markets, delivering profits fat enough to both buoy up working-class wages and blur the purchasing-power line between the upper-level managerial class and the owners of large capital concentrations almost out of existence.
The largest divergence was that the managerial elite, like capitalists before them, became de-localized and international. What mobility of money had done for the owners of capital by the end of the 19th century, mobility of skills did for the managerial class towards the end of the 20th.
As late as the 1960s, when I had an international childhood because my father was one of the few exceptions, the ability of capital owners to chase low labor costs was limited by the unwillingness of their hired managers to live and work outside their home countries.
The year my family returned to the U.S. for good – 1971 – was about the time the long post-war boom ended. The U.S. and Great Britain, exposed to competition (especially from a re-industrialized Germany and Japan) began a period of relative decline.
But while working-class wage gains were increasingly smothered, the managerial elite actually increased its ability to price-take in international markets after the boom. They became less and less tied to their home countries and communities – more willing and able to offshore not just themselves but working-class jobs as well. As that barrier eroded, the great hollowing out of the British industrial North and the American Rust Belt began.
The working class increasingly found itself trapped in dying towns. Where it wasn’t, credentialism often proved an equally effective barrier to upward mobility. My wife bootstrapped herself out of a hardscrabble working-class background after 1975 to become a partner at a law firm, but the way she did it would be unavailable to anyone outside the 1 in 100 of her peers at or above the IQ required to earn a graduate degree. She didn’t need that IQ to be a lawyer; she needed it to get the sheepskin that said she was allowed to be a lawyer.
The increasingly internationalized managerial-statist tribe traded increasingly in such permissions – both in getting them and in denying them to others. My older readers might be able to remember, just barely, when what medical treatment you could get was between you and your physician and didn’t depend on the gatekeeping of a faceless monitor at an insurance company.
Eventually, processing of those medical-insurance claims was largely outsourced to India. The whole tier of clerical jobs that had once been the least demanding white-collar work came under pressure from outsourcing and automation. effectively disappearing. This made the gap between working-class jobs and the lowest tier of the managerial elite more difficult to cross.
In this and other ways, the internationalized managerial elite grew more and more unlike a working class for which both economic and social life remained stubbornly local. Like every other ruling elite, as that distance increased it developed a correspondingly increasing demand for an ideology that justified that distinction and legitimized its power. And in the post-class-warfare mutations of Marxism, it found one.
Eric S. Raymond, “The Great Inversion”, Armed and Dangerous, 2019-12-23.
July 15, 2024
QotD: Sticking it to “the Man” in Collegetown, USA
But it made a certain type of college kid, and of course xzhyr professors, feel good about themselves, sticking it to The Man like that, so they kept on keepin’ on. In the grand tradition of puerile student protest, they’d routinely chalk up the parking lot and sidewalk in front of the building with catchy slogans like “this sidewalk brought to you by socialism!” Yes, they really thought that, and if you’ve followed my “inside the ivory gulag” posts, you can easily suss out why: Sidewalks are public services; public services are paid for by taxes; “conservatives” are against taxes; “conservatives” are also against socialism; therefore sidewalks are socialist.
No, really — I’ve heard more than one professor make a version of that “argument”. If it’s a public service of any kind — police, trash pickup, whatever — it’s by definition “socialist”, because it’s paid for by taxes, and “conservatives” think all taxes, everywhere, are totally illegitimate.
College these days runs about $20K per year on average, by the way. What a deal, huh?
Severian, “Caveat Emptor”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-16.
