With friends like Economics, who needs enemies? - The diminishing returns of Economic Thinking

I'll close this series of posts out, by going back to our beginning, noting that America's exceptional 'system' was originally no system at all - at least not as economic policy makers think of such matters today. In America's founding, their primary concern was for preserving that Liberty which naturally follows when individuals in a community are able to think for themselves and interact with each other as they see fit, and so long as none violated the rights and property of another, the long arm of the law remained at a distance from their everyday lives. Such a system as that was only possible where individual rights and private property were understood to be inseparable, and where each person - high or low - was understood to be equal before the law. As James Madison put it in his excellent and exceedingly brief essay on Property:

"In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights."

, and that,

"...Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.
Where there is an excess of liberty, the effect is the same, tho' from an opposite cause.
Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own."

When such a system as that is put in place by a people who understand and respect what it provides and requires of them, it results in a society that is able to enjoy the blessings of liberty - being able to produce, buy, sell, trade, associate, speak and think as they see fit - which gave rise to conditions that were later identified as being a Free Market, born of Natural Liberty.

For all of our establishment Republican's stated concern for 'Free Trade', by way of establishing convoluted govt policies which use the law and extensive penalties under it, to define, limit and mandate what type and quantity of trade will be permitted to the people living under those nations that sign on to such 'Free Trade Agreements', they demonstrate a profound ignorance of Madison's warning that "...Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions...", and serve only to undermine self governance, imperil Liberty and eliminate the possibility of a Free Market existing even in theory.

For all of the so called 'Libertarians' loud claims that removing the hand of the law will magically produce the mutation of 'Economic liberty' (which is to Liberty, what 'Social Justice' is to Justice), they demonstrate their ignorance of why Madison warned that tyranny also follows "...Where there is an excess of liberty, the effect is the same, tho' from an opposite cause...", imperiling Liberty itself, as it cannot result from an absence of that which secures it.

For all of Populists such as Tucker Carlson's stated concerns for 'Male wage earners', teens, young married couples, and most others in society today, when he seconds their concern that "...they don’t see a connection between people’s personal lives and the health of our economy...", which the populist believes justifies giving govt the power to use the economy as a tool to 'fix' how they should be living their lives, they demonstrate a dangerous ignorance of that threat to everyone's liberty which, as Madison continued, must inevitably follow,

"...that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species: where arbitrary taxes invade the domestic sanctuaries of the rich, and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor;..."

, and they are willfully blind to the consequences of their 'good intentions',

"... where the keenness and competitions of want are deemed an insufficient spur to labor, and taxes are again applied, by an unfeeling policy, as another spur; in violation of that sacred property, which Heaven, in decreeing man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, kindly reserved to him, in the small repose that could be spared from the supply of his necessities...."

One thing that economics can demonstrate in devastating detail, is how the unforeseen consequences of actions such as penalizing the rich for buying yachts, leaves hundreds of workers unemployed, and in the fashion of Benjamin Franklin's old rhyme 'for want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost...' and so on for the rider, the battle and the entire kingdom, all lost. The populist basks in the warm glow of self-congratulations for 'fixing the problems' of other people's judgment, blind to the reality that they are engaging in the very same misuse & abuse of power which they despise the socialist for craving, and to the fact that forcibly depriving someone of their ability to act on their own judgment, isn't made any better by the good intentions that led to it.

Each of these would-be friends of liberty on 'The Right', and of course its deliberate enemies on The Left, are exhibiting a species of Economic Thinking, which abandons the practice of thinking from those First Principles which America resulted from, and instead behave as if there is and can be no dire consequences from treating effects as causes, and attempting to start off in midstream. A brief glance out at the world around us today, shows you exactly where such foolhardy and prideful thinking leads.

The system of ordered liberty which a Free Market blossoms from and thrives in, depends upon an integrated set of philosophical ideas being at least implicitly understood: that reality exists and is not only knowable, but perilous to disregard, which means that we ought to respond accordingly to what we can see is true, and to not pretend that what we cannot know, can be treated as if it is a 'known'.

Through the roots of Western Civilization, the Greeks left us their philosophical method for knowing the world around us, and its equally important ideals to 'Know thyself' and to engage in self-governance; the Romans left us the idea of a Republic of Laws and its animating core idea of Natural Law, and our Judeo-Christian half showed us that neither wealth, class nor ethnicity, add to nor take away from the equal value of every individual life. Neither liberty nor the pursuit of happiness are possible outside of that entire understanding, and consequently knowing the reality of what the nature of being human is, is knowing that we must be at liberty to think and act, while respecting our fellows need to do the same.

Because we once understood and educated ourselves to have and bear that in mind, we in The West were able to form objective systems of law: its laws known and limited to upholding the individual rights and property of its people, while having a systematic means of justly administering them within society, by recognizing that every person is and must be equal in the eyes of the law; all of which serves to uphold and preserve the means necessary for human life to flourish - AKA: the blessings of liberty.

The danger of beginning from the Economic middle, rather than from First Principles
There is no 'economic model' that defines and creates a 'Free Market' such as that, because its true and defining sources are far outside of and prior to the concerns of economics, whose models can only describe factors within that wider scope, which enables it to identify what interferes with, hampers, and harms its operations. To use economic thinking to determine the political thinking which it springs from, is not only a case of the tail wagging the dog, but of expecting that tail to feed and care for the dog as well.

When you are seduced into arguing for which Economic System a society should be organized under (Socialism or Capitalism, makes little difference), you've blindly stepped onto the battleground that the enemy has prepared for you - the question itself implicitly yields precedence to utility and the management of things, over justice and individual rights - and you cannot argue for what is good and true on those grounds, but only for what will seem more useful, which can only work to the advantage of the Pro-Regressive Left (and Right). Such foundations cannot support Liberty and a Free Market, as a system of objective laws for upholding the rights of the individuals living under them, cannot be supported there, and whatever structures might still be remaining from earlier conditions, will rapidly crumble to the ground. See Hong Kong for reference.

Marx didn't just happen to formulate his 'ideas' on the basis of economics, that was his chosen means of dividing and defeating his enemy! It was no accident that he recast the new ideas of Natural Liberty and a Free Market, into the economic straightjacket of 'Capitalism' - that was a necessary step towards eradicating them, and few have been a greater aid in advancing his strategy, than conservatives, libertarians, and business people who actually thought they'd benefit from such narrowed and illiberal thought of 'just dealing with facts'. As some fiend once quipped, 'the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with'.

It's important that those who sincerely argue for Socialism out of good intentions, to realize that they are not simply arguing for 'a fairer economic system', instead they are calling for an entire political system that will use the force of law to restrict and compel the thoughts and actions of everyone (what begins with permitting what and how some people can produce, buy, sell, trade, is already actively restricting everyone's thoughts and associations), complete with a judicial system whose rules will define 'justice' as being what a powerful few experts from above will declare to be politically correct. Necessarily those rules will not only ignore, but must explicitly violate everyone's individual rights ('those actions necessary for human beings to make choices about, in the course of living a fully human life'), for what the Powers that be demand. The mere existence of such a system is itself a declaration that what is 'Right' or 'Wrong' is nothing more than what is presently permitted or forbidden by those in power, and they will assuredly see your every non-compliant thought and action as being existential threats to their power.

For those who persist in thinking that choosing Socialism is the intelligent and caring thing to do, you would be a fool to not familiarize yourself with Hannah Arendt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about exactly that. Alexis de Tocqueville too, who was writing during the time of the ongoing French Revolutions, described the grave danger of thinking of socialism as being nothing more than economic policies, that,

"...Socialism means, Tocqueville insisted, that

the State must not only direct society, but must be . . . the master of every man . . . his tutor, his teacher; that from fear of letting him fall, the state must always be by his side, above him, around him, in order to guide him, protect him, sustain him, restrain him. In brief . . . it is the elimination of human freedom to a lesser or greater extent.

Those are strong words. Socialism, for Tocqueville, portends “a new form of servitude” in the name of protecting everyone against life’s ups-and-down. Paradoxically enough, he argued, this made socialism similar to the ancien régime that the French Revolution overthrew. It too had held that

"wisdom resides in the state alone, that its subjects are weak and infirm beings whom one must always lead by the hand for fear that they might fall or hurt themselves; that it is good continually to constrict, to oppose, to constrain individual liberties; that it is necessary to regulate industry, to guarantee the quality of goods, to prevent free competition...."

Statism in all its variations increases its power by 'abridging', infringing upon, or otherwise abusing and denying the structural supports for Individual Rights & Property, from its political philosophy and those laws written under it, and it justifies those actions by proclaiming whichever issue might seem most useful in appealing to the popular opinion of the moment, and whether that might be 'elimination of private property', or 'govt ownership of the means of production', or 'all within the state, nothing outside of the state', or maybe 'it takes a village', or even a more pragmatic 'make the market fairer!', makes no more meaningful difference than what was the more rhetorically useful tool at that moment.

Socialism, Communism, Fascism, 'Progressivism', Populism, and every other form of totalitarian control over society and its individuals, are more than simply 'economic' policies, and knowing nothing more of an economic system than its stated policies and terminology, is dangerously delusional, and that only becomes possible once the deeper philosophical fundamentals which those ideologies all share, are left out of popular discussion - if you ever wondered what the phrase 'Out of sight, out of mind' meant, that's it (thanks schools!). 

No matter what fine seeming goals you've conned yourself into believing, that is what every variant of Socialism requires of its 'citizenry', on penalty of death. It is not reality, it doesn't conform to what we can know of reality, it forbids ethics and morality, requires totalitarian injustice, and crushes the human spirt, until reaching that point where the system is in complete collapse, and the survivors have to try and recreate society from the ashes of a populace that is horrendously scarred and distrustful. See Russia & Vladimir Putin for reference. The result of such isms is not and never has been 'a fairer economic system' - not in ancient Greece, not in Revolutionary France, and not in any of the nationalist death traps of the 20th Century - but a system where each must be forced to deny what they know to be true, where each must be prepared to comply with anything that those in power tell them, no matter what they might still be capable of deciding for themselves.

When you fail to consider where the ideas that you are playing with fire with came from, you're gonna get burned. Count on it.

Whichever ideological labels you choose to justify your plans with, using differing labels & intentions to establish the same types of 'policies' while expecting that they will somehow make a real difference in how things must turn out, is but an exercise in making distinctions without a difference. If you employ some set of abuses & denials of Individual Rights, as did the communists & fascists abroad, and the Progressives (Left & Right) at home, or the Libertarian and Populists termites who only slightly more slowly reduce us to the same anemic philosophical state - whether they call that creating more 'economic fairness', or 'transforming America', rather than fascism or socialism, that is making distinctions without any fundamental differences.

The central issue facing us today is that economics is the result of philosophy, and not the cause of either philosophy, political philosophy or even of an economy, and using Economics as if it actually has some mysteriously self-contained black box of powers to enable them to escape the consequences of those ideas they want to benefit from without thinking through, dooms society and economy alike. And yet Conservatives, Libertarians, Leftists and Populists, all play along as if their economic policies can and should function as some form of technological Social Science app, suitable for rolling out their every whim to 'fix' the lives of 300+ millions of people - 'for their own good' - with the 'click' of a policy choice. Spoiler alert: That app is going to crash.

Marx's goal of eliminating private property to benefit the proletariat, and the 'Progressive's goal of using regulatory controls to override any & all properties of private property that hinder them from serving 'the greater good', differ only in the speed of 'progress' with which their respective systems will overtake and overrun that society. It is what it is, no matter what you're more comfortable with pretending it 'is', and formal declarations of 'economic policy' differences, changes nothing.

It is not only Socialists that lead us to that same ruin, every 'Economic' argument that fails to hearken back to the philosophical realities it rests upon, serves to undermine, not just the 'Free Market', but the only foundations of liberty that are conducive to an entire society living lives worth living. Whatever glowing exercise in intellectual finger-painting one or another economic ideology might present you with - be it communism, socialism, libertarianism, populism, traditionalism - they all undermine liberty and justice with their every word, and I am really, really, sick of hearing it, no matter which side of whoever's mouth those words are coming out of.

The good news is that returning to First Principles, requires only that you stop participating in their lies, and not hiding the fact that from your family, friends & neighbors.

'Freed!' to Box Ourselves In - The diminishing returns of Economic Thinking

In the last two posts (here and then here), we've gone over how the apparent differences of Left, Right, Libertarian, Populists, who are economically severed from any principled contact with reality, producing only an indistinguishable growth of government power, which none of their supporters like, and yet all continue to urge more of the same to 'change' which has boxed us into the short sighted world of relativism and power. We also looked at the worldview that came before the world of the Administrative State's Economic Black Box, an integrated way of looking at the world which refused to go along with divorcing thought from action, and would not allow Great Britain to use its own black box thinking upon the Colonies, transforming those colonies into The United States of America... and the tell tale signs of how we lost that understanding, and were slowly sucked into the dismal Black Box of economic thinking.

What's most apparent today, is that we won't get out of the box we're in, by using the same thinking that put us into it, no matter how well intentioned that thinking might be. Populists, who like to think of themselves as bucking the economic elites of the Left and Right, are little different from the economically minded that they imagine themselves to be opposing, and while they often do see that 'something's up!' with what the Left, Right, and Libertarians are ignoring, they venture in no deeper than the same shallow end of the economic wading pool, which the Left & Right are busily splashing about in. Populists are quick to call out those policies and issues which they dislike (Big Tech, etc.), through some form of lukewarm traditionalism and folksy standards, but they do so without bothering to identify what the problem actually is, and so they never identify, let alone refute its premises, and so are unable to call for any meaningful reform of what the actual problem is (such as the regulatory structure which makes and encourages the issue they are calling out). Instead, they invariably utilize, reinforce and grow the very thing that brought about the problem in the first place, as they do when demanding that govt use those same regulatory agencies to enact their policies to force other 'bad people' to behave according to what some half remembered past would have described as being "only fair!".

The populist's stand upon the divided ground of the Left & Right is doubly dangerous, as their nominal support of liberty and traditional rights is formed around the same economic measures, and the traditionalist grab bag which once had vaguely seemed to at least have a bottom-line, splits their justifications between the two in their calls for using govt power to 'do something!' to achieve what they too excuse as being for 'the greater good'. Case in point, Tucker Carlson stated in the same monologue, that:

"Socialism is a disaster. It doesn’t work. It’s what we should be working desperately to avoid. But socialism is exactly what we’re going to get, and soon, unless a group of responsible people in our political system reforms the American economy in a way that protects normal people. "[emphasis mine]

, somehow oblivious to the fact that pushing 'reforms to protect normal people' is precisely the costume that Socialists and every other statist ideology parades around before the public eye in, in order to justify their preferred system's usurpation of your power over your life, in order to create the world that they're convinced that you should want. It must not be forgotten that an 'economy' is made up of all of the choices that you and your fellows make in your lives - what do you think that their reforms of limiting and prohibiting the choices of others in the market, will mean to your being able to make those choices, which you might want to choose for the living of your life? Such considerations as those which segregate thoughts from actions, are what are kept out of sight through the welcome operations of the Economic Black Box.

That is the very same populist means by which the likes of Teddy Roosevelt first saddled us with the Administrative State to begin with, which, then as now, operates through rationalizations which are just as economically divorced from reality as what they are opposing. Thomas Sowell sums up the implications of that in his "The Quest for Cosmic Justice" (an overview here):

“In politics, the great non-sequitur of our time is that 1) things are not right and that 2) the government should make them right. Where right all too often means cosmic justice, trying to set things right means writing a blank check for a never-ending expansion of government power.”

Worse, as they justify their measures with little more than "We The People demand this!", they lead to ever more pandering appeals to the passions of the majority through a more and more democratic process, to use power over a vilified minority, bringing us even closer to, as it was put in Federalist #10, yet another historical repeat of a forgotten lesson, that

"... democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths..."

The painful reality is that when you follow matters through to their ends, you find that for all their trumpeting against socialism, and for 'capitalism', or traditionalism, their populist ideals have too few roots in what is real, and serve mostly as props to support their rationalizing the imposition of power over others, for what they passionately see as being useful for (and excused by) the 'greater good'.

In short, just as 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions', the road to 'Progressivism' is paved with Populism.   

Freeing ourselves from the Box
Why does philosophy matter? It matters, because as I noted at the beginning, a proper and valuable use of Economics, can only come at the end of a long train of philosophic thinking about what is, how you know it, what you should do about it, and how to resolve disputes over that and why, and the fields of study which inform us about and help us think about such matters, are the philosophical subjects of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political, legal & moral philosophy, which 'Modern Economics' has virtually banished from modern educational practice, which if taught at all, are taught as words only, with no meaning, integration into, or relevance to their lives. It matters because by our unthinkingly beginning our thinking from the pretext of economic ideals, which itself refuses to anchor its actions down through the ethical and epistemological waters and into the metaphysical ground, we're 'Freed!' (AKA: enslaved) from the requirement to engage in the thought and effort of explaining how our understanding of economics fits or conflicts with our political philosophy, and so any 'necessary' political machinations will be approved of so long as some expert reports that 'it works!'.

By such actions we are 'Freed!' from the need to adhere to and operate within a compatible system of ethics, as 'Freed!' from that anchor, we feel free to act as if 'the ends justify the means', which ensures that you will drift with what seems useful and 'cool!', and not getting caught is all that's needed for the justification of authoritative reports that 'it works!'. And so of course, the nature of life 'Freed!' from believing that our actions need to be supported by a sound epistemology, which would root their meaning and operations in the 'burden' of logic, and so 'Freed!' from a concern for what the meaning of anything actually is, vapid rhetorical wordplay will do just fine, so long as we can *confidently* say that 'it works'.

That chain of reasoning is precisely how the Economic Black Box enables us all - Left, Right, Populist - to evade and escape from the requirements of what is meaningfully real and true, it is what assimilates you and your thoughts securely into the Black Box, and that is how 'Economics' has managed to substitute itself for 'philosophy' in our world today: it enables us to brush off questions of Right and Wrong, and even of reality itself, through its supposed expert power to 'do something!'. There is no love of wisdom there, only bargaining with devils so as to get a deal... and in come the walls of the box snugly around you, while telling you that it has 'Freed!' you from those outmoded ideas of dreadful past, which must be cursed and forgotten.

To escape from the Economic Black Box we've put ourselves into, we've got to learn to identify what it is that it was designed to blind us to. Tomorrow.

What came before the Box we put ourselves in? - The diminishing returns of Economic Thinking

The previous post went into how the unifying nature of the Administrative State's partisan divides, takes in the bitterly divided positions of the Left, Right, Libertarian, Populists, and their desire to 'do something!' for or against 'Capitalism', and outputs an indistinguishable lump of ever growing laws and regulations, bereft of principles, yet packed with promises to do this, and to do that, and do anything else to 'change' the world through govt's truly unlimited power. They all see that the system is not working as they expected, and they all continue doing the very same things to 'fix' it, which are what broke it. As Inigo Montoya might say, "You keep using that word 'America' - I do not think it means what you think it means".

What it is that all of these economic fundamentalists need to be willing to see, is the fact that 'capitalism' was and still is a rhetorical product of Karl Marx's darkly economic imagination; a tool which he and nearly all economically minded experts since him have expertly used to divert our conversations away from the underlying philosophy of liberty through securing individual rights, which is what Adam Smith was attempting to describe the interrelations of. Yet discussions of terms like 'Capitalism' today, are quickly run through the procrustean bed of modern 'economics', which ideologically turns us away from giving a due regard to those parts (of the whole) of reality which had enabled Adam Smith to observe what he called 'Natural Liberty' in action, and the amazing new burst of wealth which it was producing.

This Professor gives a glimpse at what such black box thinking necessarily closes our eyes to, even as he too leaves a critical factor out of it:

"...Natural liberty is not a neatly packaged system of political economy. Marxism is a religious system. Socialism is a control system based on government. Capitalism is a somewhat loose formulation of economic production and distribution, but it is an “ism” and is a system. Natural liberty is a descriptive term that eschews all systems and lets liberty obtain. It is a philosophy of society and human action which requires no system. When restraints are lifted the market works in a manner similar to the laws of motion—though not as precise and exact. The laws of the market are not determined but are formulated from the tendencies of people to act in a somewhat predictable manner. The magic of a free market is more nearly analogous to actuarial prediction, rather than a physical law such as the law of gravity..."

Did you notice what he left out? Ask yourself this: What was it that enabled those 'laws of the market' to begin operating, where they never had before? Why was there suddenly something there, for Adam Smith to observe and study? To see what I mean, I think it's important to keep in mind that Adam Smith was not an 'economist', but a moral philosopher, and that his revolutionary book was not about 'Capitalism' or even about 'Economics' (two terms which did not exist then, as they do today), but "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations", which - its errors and mixed messages notwithstanding - at least he didn't ignore those wider and deeper depths which are 'pragmatically' ignored in the field today.

The first stirrings of a Free Market began emerging in the West at the time it was reaching the pinnacle of Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian civilization's development. Despite the many and often bloody political and doctrinal divisions which spread across Europe, and around the world, our Founder's era benefited from thousands of years of a maturing philosophy of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and law, and because of that their education shared in an integrated understanding of its arts, culture, and religion, which was producing a society that was not only eagerly developing science, but also a political philosophy that in scope and depth was quickly surpassing all that had come before it. Through that foundation, the West had developed the concept of a Rule of Law, whose objective purpose should be Justice, rather than simply order, and through that lens, further principled observations on the nature of Individual Rights and of Govt's proper relation to them, were brought into clearer focus by people such as John Locke, which came to a point in one of the most revolutionary ideas in all of human history: that the traditional idea of government's purpose being to maintain order while also 'serving the interests of the stronger', should be transformed into an entity whose purpose should be to uphold and defend the individual rights and property of all of its citizenry, equally before the Rule of Law.

That, and only that, and all of that, is what led to there being something to emerge on the world stage for Adam Smith to begin observing, and prior to that there were no unusual amounts of wealth being created, in any nation, for anyone to begin inquiring into! Once Western nations began to recognize the right under law of their people to have (some) measure of liberty in their actions and security in their property, unusual amounts of wealth began to be generated in their markets, and the more secure their liberty was (as was especially the case in Britain & America), the more wealth there was to observe being produced through them. After Smith published his "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" in Britain in 1776, the need for a new branch on our philosophic tree soon became obvious, and what Smith had roughly identified as 'Natural Liberty' which had caused Free Markets to enable the production of wealth, within certain a political contexts, it became better identified as being 'Political Economy'. One of the best efforts in the new field, was Jean Baptiste Say's 1803 work, on 'A Treatise on Political Economy', which greatly clarified and improved upon Smith's rougher pioneering efforts, as Thomas Jefferson noted:

"...In France, John Baptist Say has the merit of producing a very superior work on the subject of Political economy. his arrangement is luminous, ideas clear, style perspicuous, and the whole subject brought within half the volume of Smith’s work, add to this considerable advances in correctness and extension of principles...."

, and chief among those extensions of principles, was his 'Law of Markets', or 'Say's Law', which has been the bane of every false economic theory ever since.

If you believe such a development as a Free Market, is separable from the general culture and philosophy which brought it about (as most 'libertarians' do), I challenge you to find another instance of it in all of the rest of the known history of the world. You will not find any such instance, because none exist. It is unique, and the wealth and power of such a society as that, cannot be overcome from the outside, but it can and will be brought down from within, by losing an understanding of what made it possible to emerge in the first place.

What I'm not saying, is that people in 'the good 'ol days' somehow knew more stuff. Probably as few people then as now, had an encyclopedic knowledge that extended down into the philosophical depths of all that could be known. But the thing is, there was no need to have that degree of knowledge, in order to benefit from all that was known to them. Why? Because what they knew, was reflected in everything else that they knew of. What was understood by 'all', was that such depths of knowledge did exist, and that what was known in one area, touched on and was integrated into what was known in another, and was reinforced by, and greatly reflected through their common culture of history, arts, literature, etc. If you knew little of a particular matter, then through related issues which touched on it, you had some general gist of it, and you knew what went with something, and what did not, and if you didn't know enough of what you needed to, someone you knew, knew it in more detail, and or could point you to some one, or some book, which could inform you more deeply about it. What was and could be known, mattered, and it was understood that valid concerns, ideas, and criteria, had to either integrate into that whole, or else its poor fit would be rejected, or even laughed off, by everyone you might meet.

Self Evident, even....

The closest we can probably get today to that universal sense of a meaningful whole being understood to exist, even by those who have no extensive familiarity with it, might, appropriately enough, best be felt by picturing a meme which has Star Trek's Capt. Kirk yelling 'Kahn!' in it, or Star Wars' Darth Vader reaching out to Luke who's screaming 'Nooo..!' You may laugh, but most people who've reached 8yrs old somewhere between 1976 & 2021, can very likely call those scenes to mind, and fill you in on the stories leading up to, and after them. Even those who know little or nothing of either's movie & TV franchises, still very likely recognize the characters and have a general sense of the story involved in each. And nearly everyone you meet today would, if presented with a scene containing both Capt. Kirk and Darth Vader meeting together in a corridor, would feel an immediate sense of 'WTH?!' on seeing that, knowing at a glance that they not only don't belong together, but that they cannot sensibly be pictured together in the same scene.

Now imagine, what it would be like if the two characters of Kirk & Vader, represented not just (what's taken today as being) meaningless adventure stories, but represented active links in people's minds into entire histories and volumes of school lessons...meaningful images that were not seen as the stuff of trivial amusement, but as guidance into the more meaningful structures of life itself?

For instance, there was a popular theme for painters of the period to capture, called 'The Choice of Hercules', which typically had the Greek demigod Hercules deliberating on a choice between Athena, goddess of wisdom, urging him to take the steeper and more difficult high road, as a voluptuous Vice attempts to seduce him to come with her down the easier and more pleasurable low road.

As nearly any person in America today would recognize the characters of Capt. Kirk and Darth Vader, and understand something of their traits, etc., so would nearly any person living in colonial America recognize Hercules in that painting, and be familiar with the scene it was portraying, would tie it into histories of ancient Greece, significant figures in history and literature that echoed the themes conveyed in that painting, and it would resonate with uncountable school lessons, books, conversations and historical references, which wove together themes from ancient myth, and contemporary issues of virtue and vice, and the importance of moral reflection in making choices. For them - and for us - art was not something that could or should be dismissed as 'mere entertainment' - but where they were aware of that, we are not, we instead (having been subjected to the eclipsing economic mindset), take the pragmatic (ignorant) view that nothing is integrated, all is separate, random and meaningless.

If they were to come upon some equivalent of a meme mashup, perhaps a painting portraying Hercules' choice as being of no importance, it would have set off, not the trivial chuckle of 'WTH?!', but a sense of foreboding and chaos, and if it was promoted in Revolutionary America as being a serious statement and something to be taught in schools, it would have rattled heart & mind, and set alarms ringing with scandalized discussions throughout the town and countryside that would've made 'woke cancelling' pale by comparison. Not as a pretentious ideological trigger for those who want to posture about as being offended about politically correct positions, but because it would have been seen as an attack upon themes of what it means to be a hero, the importance of making a distinction between virtue and vice, and what the importance of moral reflection and choice are, and would rightfully be seen as being a clear and present threat to every aspect of society, which should be fought back against (see what was beginning to emerge in Germany at that time, with Goethe's 'The sorrows of young Werther').

Now try to imagine what raising the suggestion of 'transgender story hour for kindergartners' would entail. And yet before you chide them as 'conservatives afraid of change', such was the nature of their world, that making a reasonable argument that the existing system of royal rule had run its course, while demonstrating how a new innovation (a Constitutional, representative Republic, for instance) was a truer improvement over what had always been, that resonated through that same web of knowledge and community, and produced an actual revolution.

It was that entire system, whole, which made it objectively possible for people to realize that engaging in "the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses" (which is the proper definition of what Economics actually is), would in its proper context, be of great importance to all, but not at the cost of ignoring whether or not those 'uses' are both justified and justifiable. America was not founded upon an Economic Black Box thinking of 'the ends justify the means', America was founded from refusing to allow Great Britain to use its own black box thinking upon the Colonies, the American Colonies became The United States of America, because we refused to go along with divorcing thought from action - and 'No taxation without representation', and Lexington & Concord's refusal to give up their guns, were the thoughts and actions of a people whose thinking was deeply integrated with and into their lives.

BTW, care to guess who advised Lord North to 'do something!' about Britain's deficits by collecting taxes from the colonies? Adam Smith. God loves good comedy. And as you might guess from that, our Founding era had developed an exceptionalism which had been nipped in the bud in Europe, and our revolution came at the last possible moment that it could have occurred in the West, as the beginnings of that chaos which we see around us today, was already polluting minds through the pens of Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Bentham, and Hegel, who's ideas were helping to spread a materialized and denatured rationalism throughout society, via education, the arts and even the sciences. In Germany the Sturm und Drang movement was bringing something like our meme mash-up above, into the arts, and it didn't take long at all for that corruption to spread to Political Economy as well. By the early 1800's modern 'Economics' began to emerge (the gory details of which are well presented here), as the likes of J.S. Mill, & David Ricardo, and the Positivists, gradually twisted Say's words & meaning, to the point that when John Maynard Keynes came along, he was able to disregard the laws Say had revealed, and the field completed its slide into the isolated black box study that is what modern 'Economics' is today.

'Economics' is not what the American system of government was derived from or founded upon and it could not have been, and it cannot continue on for long by treating it as if it's a proper basis and guidance for it - that is unsustainable. It, America, Is not that, and can no more be so than a man can successfully identify as a women, or that houses of straw and sticks can identify as a house of bricks. You can make the claim, but the reality is that the political power of the big bad wolf is going to come and blow your house down.

The Real Consequences of being boxed in by Economic Ideas - The diminishing returns of Economic Thinking

Here's something you don't hear every day: An Economy is not the result of Economic Thinking, and Economic Thinking is not the first, but the last stage in a long train of philosophic thinking (about what is, how you know it, what you should do about it, and how to resolve disputes over that, and why), which, if done well, will result in an economy worth applying economic thinking to. Whether from the Left, Right, Libertarian or Populists today, most are united in ignoring, if not actively evading the truth of this, probably because they sense that confronting it threatens all of their favorite ideologies and assumptions about how the world 'really works'. Yet putting Economics first in our thoughts, as deTracy, Marx, Keynes, Rothbard and others have led us to do, is a folly which has severed us from what we should have been seeking guidance from. To make societal decisions based upon narrow economic expectations, in ignorance of and often in contradiction to that wisdom which Western Civilization has spent thousands of years developing, is a folly which has left our society's back door open to ideologies ranging from Populism to Fascism, and to the chaotic perspectives of those Post-Modern & Critical '[whatever]' Studies which have followed in their wake, and which are now dis-integrating the very nature of life in our society today.

Why we don't want to think about what it is that Economic Thinking enables us to evade thinking of, becomes easy enough to understand when you consider two things:

1. why we began doing this in the first place: Power.
2. the Black Box concept: a system which takes in simple commands, and by means which are complicated, incomprehensible, or hidden from view, promises to output desirable results

Thinking only in Economic terms about what are philosophic issues, in everything from the minimum wage to foreign aid, provides a Black Box of unlimited power to 'do something!', without the uncomfortable technicalities and ideas of what you should do getting in the way of getting 'something' done. This system is not only desirable to those 'great' folks pursuing control of that black box in seats of power, but is also welcomed by the 'little people' who are pleased to pretend that they have no such power, and so are not responsible for how it is used in their name by the people, parties and issues which they give their support to. To accept the Economic Black Box, the sides of which are constructed out of notions of 'relative truths' and the flattery of seeing ourselves as pragmatic thinkers standing for 'economic principles!', turns a willfully blind eye to the nature of the black box itself, and to the nature of Pragmatism which was designed to escape the 'burden' of thinking either in principles, or beyond the range of the moment. Climbing into that box, naturally curves its sides back in upon itself, enclosing and absorbing the thinker within them, who's then both unable to climb back out and unaware that they should. We don't think outside of the box today because we've become the box, it's become invisible to us, even as its power tempts us everywhere we look to 'do something!' about this, and about that, and about everything else. Truly, unlimited power.

This is, to be sure, a bi-partisan and even tri-partisan enthusiasm, and the results of its inversion are felt no matter how any particular economic coin toss might be called through an election - whether it's 'Heads!' for the utopian Leftists, or 'Tails!' for the 'practical policies' of the Conservative/Libertarian Right, or even landing on that (4th?) Populist edge of policies cherry picked from both traditionalists & utopians - whichever one wins will use the Economic Black Box to transform their own opinions into what '...the meaning of 'is', is', for them, which will then be enforced upon us all.

The Administrative State's unifying partisan divide
If you're in the habit of criticizing those 'other' parties who are harming America, here's something to consider: If our bi, tri, & quad partisan factions were as bitterly divided as it's claimed they are, wouldn't their collisions produce something more than headline noise in the news? After all, when truly divided people of opposing principles and the worldviews do collide in the real world, they have room for little more than open battle - think Hamas & Israel - and those collisions leave very visible marks. Back in the day of the epic clashes between Hamiltonians vs Jeffersonians, even though the broader principles they shared in enabled them to reasonably resolve their differences, the battles they had over which particular steps should be taken down the road they'd mutually agreed upon... they left significant changes in for our judiciary & systems of finance, and more. But in the '*collisions*' of our bi, tri & quad partisan factions today, the agencies of the Administrative State have steadily grown through every administration since FDR - Republican or Democrat - and none of them, not even Reagan, significantly challenged, or even successfully questioned, the wisdom and morality of the Administrative State.

Why?

Because while their positions outwardly disagree over 'what should be done', they are all unified in using the Economic Black Box for doing them, and so they have no underlying philosophy for real conflicts to develop out of, they have no principles or convictions to clash over. Doing something, is more important for them than what is being done, which in the end all tends to look very much the same - a sameness which, incidentally, helps their partisan positions to contrast ever more sharply in their next electoral 'clash', where each side will make statements for or against philosophic principles of 'Free Trade!' and 'Liberty!' - whenever a crowd is near enough to hear.

For those 'Libertarians' who'd like to pose as blameless while blaming the other two parties for 'losing their liberty', to do that they've got to ignore the fact that many if not most libertarians are just fine with undermining liberty themselves, so long as they get some personal ju$tification out of it, as with:

• their enthusiastic support for Govt to impose Net-Neutrality when they thought it'd get them cheap Netflix & broadband rates;
• trumpeting 'Free Trade!' with Communist "eliminate all private property" China, which uses those 'profits' to steal intellectual property, undermine and threaten security, liberty & private property globally, while forbidding all individual rights to all of their own people and forcing many of them into slave labor and concentration camps;
• openly making 'free use' of Intellectual Property in 'open source' and 'file-sharing' scams which steal copyrighted property;
• and of course their ludicrous support for black box proposals such as anarcho-capitalism that can end in nothing other than full on tyranny,

... et-friggin'-cettera. A sizable portion of 'libertarians' who shout their 'Principles!', form them from their raw adolescent desire to be 'free from restraint', which they've been equating with 'liberty' since (the Utilitarian, Positivist, Socialist) J.S. Mill, at the expense of what actual Liberty (a society which systematically upholds and defends the individual rights and property of all) is, and requires.

For those who think themselves above the party system because they look outside of the political parties for an 'outsider' to rescue them from its effects, pointing perhaps to President Trump rolling back sizable numbers of regulations (and yes, that was good), I'm sorry to point out that he did so not by persuading the nation to a clearer understanding of what is Right and Wrong, but by using that same Economic Black Box through the power of an Executive Order to 'do something!' because 'it works' - for the moment, a moment which was always unlikely to last longer than the next POTUS to come after him, which, sadly, came sooner, rather than later.

And then there's the erstwhile Populists who congratulate themselves for being more protective of 'the little guy', than the political parties, as they turn their grass-roots public spiritedness into demands that govt power be used to 'do something!' to make life 'more fair' for all, by reforming you (but only the bad 'yous' out there, of course) into what they think that you should do and be. Populists call on govt to use and abuse the very same powers as those they verbally tar & feather as 'socialists!' & 'globalists!', and justify it the same way, with their good intentions for the 'greater good'. Few need the Economic Black Box and the knowledge it helps them evade, more than populists do.

Believe it or not, I'm not being cynical here - I despise cynicism - I'm simply pointing out the reality that most everyone else is so intent upon ignoring. All parties that are party to utilizing the powers of the Economic Black Box, become assimilated into the Administrative State, as it was tailor made for (and made out of) that box, and when its power to 'do something!' is placed in the hands of those at the top - Left or Right, or Libertarian, or Populist or other - they can't help but think, from that perspective, about how those poor dears below them can best be saved from themselves by those they are lucky enough to have in power above them. 

The success of this system requires nothing more than that the philosophy of America's Founding be absent from We The People's minds, which, coincidentally, is precisely what our system of education has, largely at the direction of the economically minded, produced: Americans unaware of what America is and means. Nothing has, or will, move beyond or think outside of that black box, so long as the exceptional ideas of America's founding, remain foreign to the Americans living in America.

How does doing bad, for good, cause bad?

It should be no surprise that every affiliation that is a party to using the power of the Administrative State's Economic Black Box, will put their faith in the pious use and abuse of its power, to fix the 'other sides' by devoting their time, energy, and passions, to criticizing 'them' for doing the flipside of the very same things that they're seeking to do themselves, and doing so while religiously avoiding looking into the reasons behind what it is that they propose doing.

That was the case in this bit from Tucker Carlson's attention getting monologue from early 2019, where he assured people that 'they can prevail', but:

"...first, Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion."

True enough, Tucker, true enough. But to do that will also require that you, they, and all of the other 'leaders' in politics and media, and those they are leading, to look inside their precious Economic Black Box, and examine what it is that they've been using it to conceal from themselves, and from everyone else as well. 

We'll look into that, and what came before the box, tomorrow.

America - Some things that should not have been forgotten are being lost

It's a dangerous thing that Economics is being taken as a substitute for Philosophy today, in part because it hides from popular awareness things that should not be forgotten, substituting things that seem shiny and pleasing on the surface, absent mindedly putting into other's hands the power to deeply affect your ability to live your life, posing real dangers to society and to our having lives worth living. The last post began to dip a toe beneath the surface of the reflecting pool of economic appearances, peaking at the most obvious issues that can be seen laying just below those words that sound so good, such as Tucker Carlson's monolog from earlier last year. This time we'll poke a little bit deeper and see what populist assertions such as his are made of and how much weight they can bear.

Forgotten or not we're always being tested

Understandably, the populist minded become irritated when Leftists, Libertarians, and Conservatives, pontificate about those 'Economics Realities' which they are expected to kowtow to, but while the populist rails at the problems which such short sighted policies usher in, they are content to remain on the surface of appearances where it's easy to view causes, effects, and corrections, through one conveniently narrow economic lens or another, without ever questioning what economics itself rests upon. But however much they'd all like to ignore it, Economics does rest upon something else, it is not a stand-alone system of ideas, and whether that something it stands upon is bedrock, or mud, they willfully don't know... and they seem to like it that way. Personally, I prefer to see what they prefer to ignore.

A good spot to begin seeing what it is that they prefer to ignore, is where they make a feint towards the philosophical high ground, as Carlson did several times in his monologue, such as in this:

"...At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest of us will be too. The country will remain. What kind of country will it be then? How do we want our grandchildren to live? These are the only questions that matter."

Taking those as the only issues that matter, stated in that way makes it seem as if they do matter to him, but he doesn't examine them as if they do, he simply states it, and states it with no more depth to the opinion than the emotional angst of the moment; it's difficult to see them leading listeners anywhere other than a continuation of the endless series of partisan policy fights that makeup the eternal whirlpool of the Now which we've been trapped in and at each other's throats over, for a hundred years now. The way out of that pool, out of that endless loop, begins with taking a deeper look into the themes of what he says "matters", and noting that these matters weren't spontaneously generated in the storm of the latest news cycle. They developed, they grew, and they have their roots in those very philosophic issues which the Economically minded in general, and the Economic Populists in particular, don't bother to give any serious thought to. What I mean by that is that if any would step outside the economic self-service booth, they'd see a larger view of what he said, rests upon:

• "...The country will remain" - that is Metaphysics: what is, and the identity it is, as.
• "What kind of country will it be then?" that is Epistemology - how do you know what you do, or can't, know, and how to verify it
• "How do we want our grandchildren to live?" that is Ethics, what is Right and Wrong
• "These are the only questions that matter" concerns Political Philosophy, which is (or should be) concerned with wielding power Ethically, constrained within a rigorous Epistemology, and anchored in the Metaphysically real - but if that is not thought of first, then there can be no limits put upon what must be limited, for freedom to ring.

These issues which are 'all that matters', are so storm tossed today, because Leftists, Libertarians, Populists and Conservatives are so fixated upon the shallow economic appearances, that they pay no attention to their roots, they've no idea what soil they do or don't have to anchor in, or what acts as nourishment or poison to them. It doesn't take that much consideration to look past the level of appearances, to see the nature of what Tucker himself just said was 'all that matters', so why ignore them? Shouldn't they be attended to? If they truly do matter, should we be making careless demands for exercising political power in their direction? If these are the only things that do matter, then oughtn't you damn well better think carefully about them? People like Carlson want to express their feelings of angst about these matters which they say truly matter, but it sure seems as if the truth is that they can't be bothered to actively think about what they supposedly care so much about?

Is that the case?

Yes and no. One consequence of substituting Economics for Philosophy, is that there's nothing in your thinking that is going to alert you that you should be more careful and deliberate in your thinking on some subjects, instead, you're going to be blissfully satisfied with quibbling over partisan policy issues, blissfully unaware that your careless ignorance of what lurks beneath those issues is putting those things that you say 'really matter!', in serious jeopardy. Tell me, do you have a favorite movie series? Batman? The Lord of the Rings? The Avengers or Star Wars? What would you think of the person who saw only the last of any of those movies, and then felt confident in telling you what was and wasn't worthwhile in that or any of the preceding movies (which they hadn't seen)? That is what taking Economics as being the starting point of thinking on such matters, amounts to. The fact is that neither Carlson nor any other human being can avoid dealing in philosophic fundamentals - the only thing they can do, to avoid the appearance of contradicting themselves upon those realities, is to speak as if those more fundamental 'matters' don't exist, and as much as possible avoid learning too much about them to begin with. Consciously or unconsciously, populists and the other economically minded, keep themselves at a safe distance from such matters through their well practiced techniques, Leftists say 'no one can know for sure', Libertarians say it all begins not with ideas but with action, Conservative's say that others know (knew) and you must follow, while Populists, and not a few Conservatives, give a disdainful sniff & a smirk and shoo such thoughts away with a curt 'philosophy is elitist'.

Well perhaps it is elitist.

But they are the very same 'elitist concerns' which our Founding Fathers began the American Revolution over; not 'Taxes', as populists, elitists, leftists and libertarians would have you think, but over the deeper philosophical concerns for what rightly constitutes political representation, which is what they expressed with "No taxation without representation!". What had begun to be grasped in our Founder's era, on both sides of the Atlantic, was a growing awareness that the larger timeless philosophical concerns, were what formed the deeper roots of everyone's day to day concerns, choices, and actions, that people made in their daily lives, which was responsible for producing that degree of prosperity which their society did, or didn't, achieve. Adam Smith's "An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" (a work which makes zero mention of 'Capitalism', that moniker/epithet had to wait 50 years for Karl Marx to bestow it upon a bizarrely willing West), which was first published in that same revolutionary year of 1776, was the first expression of the philosophical realities behind the appearances of what, prior to that era, people had been content to assume that they knew all that they needed to know about. The awareness that appearances aren't enough, is what led to establishing the field of study which was just called 'Political Economy', and which we more misleadingly refer to today, as just 'Economics'.

Our modern society, and populists in particular, are eager to pluck the economic fruits grown from those deeper concerns, while ignoring the soil which is required for them to grow in, but boy oh boy do they ever so eagerly use and abuse that ground in their desire to begin 'taking action!' on those same issues. But it is only after passing through the layered ideas of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and into ethic's subset of political philosophy, and only if done without disabling contradictions, rejecting the illusory freedoms of ignorance and falsehood in favor of the constraints inherent in conforming to what is true, do you get to political philosophy's subset of Economics. Only then can you enjoy real liberty, and its self-evident truths. But instead of seeing Economics as the result of prior philosophy, modern Economics is taken as a starting point, and more often than not today, it will be used as a platform to subvert and corrupt those ideas that brought economics into being in the first place - a violent flip which is possible only because the basic rules of philosophy were ignored to begin with. Those economic policies which attack private property, for instance, are the philosophical equivalent of sawing off the intellectual branch that you are sitting on; endorsing them implicitly cuts you off from engaging with those ideas, without their ever having been raised or examined in your own mind.

How well do you think that's going to turn out? To act on good intentions without regard for what is good, and what is required to be good? How well can that work out? Again - look around you at the world today.

Worse still, the populists entire approach to answering those issues and the means of critiquing them, as Carlson does when he condemns 'the religion of economics', is rooted in the worldview and purview of the very worst of modern Economics. His every substantial question or point, is positioned within an Economic point of view, even his displeasures with economics, such as this:

"...The answer used to be obvious: the overriding goal for America is more prosperity, meaning cheaper consumer goods. But is that still true?"

Is it still true? If you think it ever was true, it's because you're thinking from within the confines of a modern economic box, and I'd suggest first asking if it should ever be true, but... those weren't the questions that Tucker wanted to pursue, and ignoring philosophy was his means of passively not pursuing them. Begging the question of whether that ever was, or should be true, he simply assumes it is and goes on to state that:

"...Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot...."

That at least is true. But it's also true that anyone who believes that, and yet looks for solutions to that problem in exclusively economic terms and policies to impose them in a thoroughly tail wagging the dog manner, are not only flirting with that very same idiot, but are doing so with a slobbering lip-lock of a truly gross public display of affection.

Even many of the good points he makes in one phrase, he takes away in the next, probably because his points have no deeper ground than the shifting sands of popular public opinion, to sink their philosophic roots down into. For instance - Carlson makes a very good point with this,

"One of the biggest lies our leaders tell is that you can separate economics from everything else that matters. Economics is a topic for public debate. ...
... They don’t care how you live, as long as the bills are paid and the markets function. Somehow they don’t see a connection between people’s personal lives and the health of our economy, or for that matter, the country’s ability to pay its bills. As far as they’re concerned, these are two totally separate categories. "

It is a lie that economics can somehow be separated from everything else that matters - that is the very point that I am making here. But he doesn't seem to understand why that is, and it isn't consistent with what he believes, as is apparent only a few paragraphs further on, when he says:

"Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster."

Now ask yourself: doesn't treating economics as a staple gun, or a toaster, mean treating economics as a discrete, modular unit, and so imply that it is a mere bit of disposable chattel that is separable from everything else that matters? So 'market capitalism' is just one brand of tool that can be replaced by another brand of tool? Excuse me Tucker, but you just said "One of the biggest lies our leaders tell is that you can separate economics from everything else that matters."? The real problem here, is that he, and they, think of economic policy as dis-integrated choices, matters of preference and convenience, which you, the person living in 'their' economy, have no real right to choose to engage in. That is exactly what comes from thinking of Economics as a first level cause, rather than as a downstream result of higher level philosophical principles, causes, and effects of living in reality.

"... You’d have to be a fool to worship it."

You would. And a bigger fool to think that you can pick and choose and alter or discard one feature or another, as if it has no relation to everything else that is true and matters in our lives (which is the aim of the pitifully poor philosophy of Pragmatism, more on that in the next post). What is betrayed by the populist 'economic man' such as Carlson, as he voices concern that "...they don’t see a connection between people’s personal lives and the health of our economy...", is the idea that the economy isn't something that results from their living their lives, but that the economy is a tool to 'fix' how people like Tucker think that they should be living their lives. To say that this is a case of the 'tail wagging the dog', is putting it in a far better light than it deserves.

Had he had a more pointed concern with the legitimate basis and limited actions that our political 'leaders' can rightly use to exert political power over us, then he might be able to offer actual solutions to them. Instead, Carlson seems to buy into all of the marketing materials of what is a fundamentally anti-American ideology, lamenting only that they are being exercised in ways he doesn't like - but make no mistake, exercising them, the notion of Govt having that power over other people's lives, that is A-Ok with Tucker Carlson in particular, and with populists and other economically minded folks in general.

Of course he wouldn't agree with it being stated that way, and I've no doubt that he does not intend it in that way, but this is the problem, that the words he uses cast deep shadows, and those shadows which when backed by political power, become conveniently dark enough to swallow everyone's good intentions whole. Such shadows encourage and invite the actions of those who do see things in that way which he does not intend, and so 'conservatives' like Tucker Carlson, time and time again, find their own words being used against anything they might do to stop it.

He asks a good question with this:

"What will it take to get a country like that?"

For one thing, it will require our becoming a people once again, who understand what a life worth living is, and that it is not defined or subordinated to economic policies, and will have to understand what political requirements and limitations are required to be in place to support that, and the proper, very limited role, that govt plays in that.

All of this brings to mind a quote from the Lord of the Rings,

“And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge.”
Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings

Whether or not we remember or forget what was needed for America to come into being, we are always and at all times being tested as to whether or not America will remain, and whether it will remain America, or succumb to the lure of power. We cannot gain or regain the benefits of being Americans, without first being Americans in some more meaningful way than having a checkmark on your birth certificate. A nation founded upon ideas, cannot survive its people forgetting what those ideas were or meant, or the foundations which they stand upon.

I've gone into what those ideas are, plenty of times before. The next post will dive a little deeper into what it is which those ideas that are being forgotten, rest upon.

When the 'Progressive' Left & the Populist Right lead to the same Pro-Regressive ends, Check your Map

Folks sometimes wonder why I'm often shaking my head at the wrong people... meaning the 'right' people of the 'Right'. The short answer is, because they're often wrong... but what is left out of a short answer, simply will not do. Especially in those kinds of cases where what they say sounds so good, on the surface. If you take a moment to wonder about what's under that surface though, and what those attractive appearances must be resting upon, or concealing, it seems to me that it's difficult to avoid gaining an understanding that'll set your head to shaking. Take Tucker Carlson, for instance.

I enjoy watching Tucker Carlson interview people, especially those trying to push an agenda at odds with the facts. I enjoy it as his questions slowly pull their carefully hidden contradictions out into the full light of embarrassment. I also enjoy that he not only gives no ground to the rage mob, but goes on the attack instead. But I don't enjoy watching his show, because when he switches from asking questions of other people's opinions, to giving his own opinions, his own opinions don't always seem to have benefited from having been subjected to that same quality of questioning, and the opinions which he lets slip on through that gap stir up so many misgivings that I soon lose my interest in whatever point he was trying to make. Carlson's monologue in response to Mitt Romney's pitiful op-ed in January 2019 (which I also criticized here), is a good example of the kinds of misgivings that I so often have about him, and a great many others on 'the Right' (and Left, and Center), and it highlights something that's been setting my head to shaking back and forth for some time now: that the place of philosophy in the vast majority of people's minds today, has, for all practical purposes, been pretty much replaced by Economics - or at least by those theories, policies and sentiments most associated with it - which have produced results of very questionable value.

What if neither Left nor Right leads home?

It isn't always easy to see what's questionable about substituting economics for philosophy, because most such statements appear to be fairly reasonable, on the surface at least, as with this quote which is true to the tone of Carlson's monologue, shows:

"The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity. It’s happiness. There are a lot of ingredients in being happy: Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are the things that you want for your children. They’re what our leaders should want for us, and would if they cared. But our leaders don’t care."

Now, on the surface, and taken in the way that I assume he intends it, most of us, myself included, probably find our heads nodding along with him, at least to some of it, right? But what if there are implications to those words, that, if known, would set your head to shaking 'no!' or even 'Oh, Hell no!', instead? You see, you shouldn't mistake my head shaking for missing what sounds good on the surface - I get the appearances of it - but I can't help but be disturbed by what I see lurking in the shadows of the economic points - even & perhaps especially the populist points - that he and so many others on 'our side' so often make.

My own perspective on this comes neither from a Libertarian view, nor from that of a traditional Conservative one, but through my staunch support of those philosophic and moral reasons that leads to a Free Market (Please note: I did not say 'Capitalism' or 'Free Trade'), and which are in fact the very reasons why a Free Market works, works best, and is the most economically sound option there is - and the only one that can hope to sustain Liberty over the long run. It's important to realize that all economic theories - no matter their stated or unstated premises - are derived from more fundamental philosophical, moral reasonings (which are implicitly imposed or violated whenever the more eye-catching policies are adopted), and it is equally important to note how many economically minded folks either don't know that, or don't want others to know that. And you can bet that there are philosophical and moral reasons for that too, and more often than not, that too should set your head to shaking back and forth.

I'll limit myself here to pointing out a few highlights from his monologue that cast the more obvious shadows, which, if not enough to be convincing, will hopefully get you thinking a little further past those appearances. I'll leave it for later posts to dive deeper into the problems I see beneath their surfaces, and hopefully by that point, even if you don't fully agree with me, you'll at least understand why it is that I'm so often over here shaking my head back & forth.

Before returning to what set my head to shaking in the quote above, let me emphasize the need to resist saying "Oh, I'm sure he didn't mean that!". I don't think that Tucker Carlson has bad intentions, and neither do I think that of the other conservatives, libertarians and populists, who are are saying variations on the same themes. What I am saying though, is that the things that are being said by people like Carlson (and the majority of We The People), are said because they believe that they not only can, but should begin their thinking on these issues from within the framework of the policies and positions of economic thinking, or in response to them, which is precisely what enables them to not see and not consider what should have been considered before ever actually giving voice to their good intentions. Worse, if the careless words of influential people like Carlson stir public opinion into putting them into legislation, once on the books they will be put to use by far less charitable people who will wring them of every ounce of power they can get from them, and they will not be swayed by the good intentions which those words will ride into our lives on. Whether Tucker and others meant what their words actually mean, should not prevent us from considering what they do actually mean, and would justify being done in their name, if others took them seriously.

So with that in mind, let's take a look at what's easy to notice just beneath the surface of Carlson's quote from above:

"The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity. It’s happiness. There are a lot of ingredients in being happy: Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are the things that you want for your children. They’re what our leaders should want for us, and would if they cared.... "

As noted, on the surface this seems fine, thoughtful even, with an almost philosophical yearning for the moral high ground of a 'life well lived', doesn't it? Unfortunately it plunges to a messy death with the last line, "They’re what our leaders should want for us, and would if they cared." Why? Because while such concerns that might be fine for your friend and neighbor to express, they should be horrifying to have coming from a "Leader" with a faceless bureaucracy at their beck & call, and the power to act on their concerns. Such a mission given to Govt must result in its intruding into your life to identify those concerns, classify and quantify the nature of those concerns, and determine how deeply 'You The People' are to be affected by those concerns. Any such legislative or regulatory measures would have to be tasked with somehow rating your sense of 'Dignity'... perhaps on a scale of 1 to 10; and of course when you last had a health professional's verification of exactly how much 'Dignity' you have; and no way they could neglect recording Do you currently engage in any of these undignified activities..."? Whether those intrusions come about through new census questions, or with an assist from the likes of what we saw in Obamacare era regulations, such as requiring (at the penalty of perjury of course) insurance and healthcare personnel to probe into your mental health the next time you need a broken bone set, or an allergy shot for your child, won't make that much of a difference in the end, as political power would be used to intrude into your living of what you'd mistakenly (in their less than humble opinion) thought of as being your own life... for your own good.

How much imagination and news cycle recall does it take to see that? Can anyone doubt that such a popularized concern when transformed into Govt policy, would lead 'community minded leaders' to write some asinine legislation along the lines of a "Federal Citizen Dignity Assurance Act" would be stepping in to 'help you' achieve your minimum daily dose of 'dignity'? Surely anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the last century, should realize this?

I can understand if you're thinking "Van! Get a grip! He's just a 'T.V. Commentator voicing concerns!", and while I get that, you do realize that commentators voice their comments in order to influence people, right? And that as enough of those people are perceptibly influenced, their support becomes useful to those in power, right? Did you happen to catch MO freshman Sen. Josh Hawley's 1st Senate Floor Speech? It's worth comparing to Carlson's monologs. I also wonder if you realize that similar commentators commenting their particular views into popularity, have led up to everything from Prohibition, to LBJ's 'War on poverty', and of course ObamaCare or Medicare for all? No one should need to look any further than the lives and families of those who're existing in our inner cities, to discover just what Govt concern for their well being and 'deep relationships' can do for the depth and quality of their lives and relationships, and I can find no excuse for those who fail to connect those obvious dots. I really don't think that I'm the one that needs to 'get a grip' here.

All such governmental attempts would soon make a mockery of Dignity, Purpose, Self-Control and Independence, and render those words utterly meaningless. It would also require violating one and all of those privileges and immunities which our Bill of Rights identifies and forbids our govt from intervening in - limitations that were not made for economic purposes, but in order to preserve and protect our individual rights from the abusive and intrusive use of governmental power. We're rushing towards dystopia fast enough as it is, do we really need to encourage a merging of Orwell's 1984, and Huxley's Brave New World?

It seems reasonable, responsible, that the words of talking heads having an audience of millions, should be taken as seriously by us as the political passions and actions which their words are intended to arouse in us. Doing so requires poking into the shadows that lay behind and beneath the apparent meaning of their words, as even the slightest poke reveals realities that would be at odds with the apparent good intentions which those words deeper meaning are hiding behind. That is the danger of economic populism - if the popularity of the words they used to express their good intentions with, ever succeeded in carrying their words into law, they would be made use of by those who do grasp the darker powers implicit in them, and you can be sure that those people will use the real power and force of law which they give them, for very different purposes, and their true meaning would soon be felt by all.

That is at least partly what I mean about his opinions lacking the benefit of his own skillful questioning. And it's not like that was a fluke of a single careless line, as in the very next line he can be seen scolding economic thinking, from an economic perspective!:

"... But our leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our problems."

And again, because he's speaking to millions of viewers, you have to take his words seriously, and that might as well start with the word Rule. You might be able to speak of 'dignity, independence...' etc in terms of self-governance, but not in terms of some people ruling over others or being ruled by them. Of course you could say that he didn't really mean the reality which the word 'Rule' really means - but that again is just my point: his opinions have more to do with his deepest feelings than with coherent thoughts on the real world, indicative of a set of boxed in views which are all that a disjointed economically based view permits. And seriously, what sort of POV is a 'conservative' conserving, in wanting Govt to 'understand' or somehow solve their problems?

And it's difficult not to notice how closely Carlson's line "...They’re what our leaders should want for us, and would if they cared...", resembles the spirit of a similar line in the execrable Romney op-ed that he's reacting to, that:

"...To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation...."

Both of them fail to see into the shadows of their own words, and to both of them I'll repeat what I said of Romney's, that it has

"... the rancid odor of pro-regressive conceit & the 'nudge' of political correctness about it of the typical Pro-Regressive republican who believes that govt can 'help you' by making better decisions for you - which is also one of the reasons why Trump won..."

Ironically, both elitist Romney, and populist Carlson, blunder through those shadows, without the light or awareness needed to see where they're going, which is exactly what leads to govt stumbling into our personal lives with political powers that it has zero 'business' concerning itself with.

The painful fact - and a painfully common one, which is in no way limited to Tucker Carlson - is that the meaning of what his words would in reality require for Govt to act on and implement them - are in pursuit of the very same unrestricted power of govt that the Pro-Regressive Left (and Right) desires - Govt having fewer and fewer limits on its power to take an active part in our lives, giving it control over our lives - for our own good. Fuzzy economic thinkers of the Left and Right, want govt to have the same interests in, and powers over, our lives, they differ only on what their vision of 'the Right' good intentions are, which they see as justifying the economic policies that please them.

Both rely upon evading the same reality.

And both rely upon the absence of philosophy in We The People's minds in order to do so, and thanks to over a century of Govt controlling our educational system, that absence is a no-brainer, and among its more devastating consequences is the loss of principled foundations to stand upon, and reliable roads to follow.