You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2010.
I have come to believe that nobody votes for a Democrat.
When I was a kid, Texas Democrats tried (without success) to interest my Dad in going into politics. I never met Lyndon or Speaker Sam, but several of the lower-level muckety-mucks of the Texas Democratic Party were either guests in our home or around in places where I tagged along with my parents. They all thought that ballot-box stuffing, disenfranchising black people (who mostly voted Republican in those days, when they were suffered to vote at all) and other shenanigans were admirable activities, valuable as the source of anecdotes everyone laughed at.
Stories like this just reinforce my prejudice, and you can find more all across the Web. Not even the Party activists bother to actually go to the polls. All votes for Democrats, without exception, are cooked up in Democratic Party headquarters back rooms and inserted into the system by various hooks and crooks, or are cast by people who go into the booth with a crib sheet and a cash payment in their pockets. Nobody who is qualified to vote in the United States has voted for a Democrat since 1860.
I’ve known about the “gradual revolution” idea for a long time, and always discounted it, because I couldn’t see how a sane person could believe it might work.
Jeff Goldstein points to an interview with a college contemporary and friend of Barack Obama’s, one Dr. John Drew; the interview is worth reading. Dr. Drew says, in part,
Obama was looking forward to an imminent social revolution, literally a movement where the working classes would overthrow the ruling class and institute a kind of socialist Utopia in the United States. I mean, that’s how extreme his views were his sophomore year of college.
Now, standing by itself this bothers me not at all. The very word “sophomoric” describes a state of mind in which the sufferer goes for grand and simplistic solutions, unaware of the complications he will learn about in the next couple of years of study, and there are very few grander or more simplistic solutions than the Great Socialist Revolution. Lots of people have that sort of attitude and learn better in later study and/or life; Dr. Drew himself was one such, and now describes himself as “…a Ronald Reagan, church-going, Baptist conservative.”
But there’s a pathological version of that change of heart, formed when the sophomoric idealist learns that the means won’t work but fails to consider whether the goal is desirable. Many, if not most, of the sophomoric Socialists of that earlier era fall into that category, and that is where the “gradual revolution” idea comes from. Goldstein quotes Peter Dreier:
…create government programs that only seem to be “reforms” of the capitalist system. Rightly understood, these supposed reforms are so incompatible with capitalism that they gradually precipitate the system’s collapse.
The reason I have, in the past, discounted the notion is that it is an almost ridiculously explicit example of “static analysis”, the notion that it is possible to make changes, even major ones, in one part of a system without the rest of it changing in response. One of the constant refrains by Democrats is that people should vote “in their economic self-interest”, that is, for people who will promise that the Government will give them money. It is, under that rubric, pretty stupid not to do so — if choice A says you have to work and give other people money, while choice B says you get money and don’t have to work, it’s clear which is the “smart”, self-interested choice.
But what happens when everybody gets smart?
As I never tire of saying, we live in an industrial economy, and the characteristic of an industrial economy is that wealth must be produced. If it is stupid to produce and smart to consume without producing, more and more people will get smart and cease to produce — and if everybody does so, there is no production and everybody starves.
The stupidity inherent in “gradual revolution” is assuming that production will continue despite everybody getting smart. Production, in that view, is static; it does not depend on the behavior of people or on the ratio of producers to consumers, and the wealth available — abundant food, fuel to keep us warm in winter, and all the rest — will continue to be available no matter what. It is such a ludicrous assumption that for a long time it never occurred to me that anybody might entertain it. But they do, don’t they? It’s the basis of the so-called “Cloward-Piven strategy” and nine-tenths of all Democratic Party campaign ads.
Dreier at least hints that his thought processes may not be totally erroneous:
In the longer run, it may give socialist norms an opportunity for ex tension or at least visibility…[but] this intentionally wrought crisis might actually backfire and produce fascism instead of socialism.
Well, d’oh.
It’s an asymptote. Long before everybody gets “smart”, the society reaches a point where the ratio of producers to consumers is no longer sufficient to produce enough to support it. At that point it becomes necessary for anyone who wishes to survive to possess strength and power, and the society dissolves into violent competition among the strong and powerful for control of the diminishing wealth. That competition is not, and cannot be, anything resembling “egalitarian”.
Much as I admire Common Sense, Thomas Paine descended into foolishness in his later essays, particularly those discussing “men in a state of Nature”. There is no evidence anywhere in the historical record of men in a state of Nature forming their Government by peaceful means. A “state of Nature” being by definition one of scarcity, lacking the production of industry or even agriculture, what always happens is that the competition for scarce resources takes place by violent means, and the Government that results exemplifies “the strong oppress the weak, according to their relative strengths.”
Since this is precisely the state of affairs modern leftoids describe by the word “fascism” (to the extent that that word has any concrete meaning in their discourse), there is no reason to suppose any other result than a fascistic one. It is no different when the “state of Nature” (i.e., scarcity) is artificially induced, and may be worse because the gradual approach of scarcity impels the formation of coalitions in an attempt to amass enough power to gain the means to survive. The most effective such coalitions will be those who already possess some amount of power: large corporations, financial institutions, and the like. “Gradual revolution” thus virtually guarantees that the society will come to be controlled by the very “banksters” and “megacorps” the leftoids are most vocal in opposing.
A pilot refuses the “security” search: (Via Ace)
A Tennessee pilot who says he’s tired of being manhandled by security agents is waiting to see if he will lose his job because he refused a full body scan.
ExpressJet Airlines first officer Michael Roberts was chosen for the X-ray scan Friday at Memphis International Airport. The Houston-based pilot says he also refused a pat-down and went home.
The 35-year-old Roberts told The Commercial Appeal newspaper he wants to go to work and not be “harassed or molested without cause.”
Transportation Security Administration spokesman Jon Allen says a person was turned away after refusing to follow federal security procedures but declined to say if it was Roberts, citing privacy considerations.
<sneer>Privacy considerations.</sneer> You know what that means, don’t you?
It means TSA no longer distinguishes between crew and passengers for “security” concerns! If the pilot of the frakken airplane is up to no good, searching him for pen-knives accomplishes exactly nothing — as soon as he sits down, he’s got umpteen tons, a good bit of it flammable and/or explosive, driven by thousands of horsepower to aim at whatever he wants to blitz. None of it shows up on a “full body scan”, either. I suppose there are dumbass levellers who think it makes sense in terms of “fairness”, but on any rational scale it’s just loony.
I used to travel a lot, and now that I can’t afford to any more I miss being in new and different places and meeting new people. What I don’t miss is airline “security”.
True story: Many, many years ago, when D/FW airport first opened (and still had the slash in the name), I had occasion to go somewhere — Atlanta, IIRC. At the time, my home was about 150 miles from the airport, and one thing and another kept coming up and keeping me from leaving to catch the plane. Zooming up I-20/I-35/TX-114 got me to the airport with minutes to spare. I parked in the inner part of the “D”, which in those days was the cheap slots — you had to walk over a hundred yards to get to the terminal! — grabbed my bags and went inside. The ticket counter for my flight was just on the point of closing, but I caught the clerk in time, confirmed my reservation, paid for the ticket (ouch!), gave her my bag, and half-ran ’round the end of the counter and across the concourse to the plane, whose attendant was just in the process of closing the door. She smiled, told me where my seat was, and shut the hatch as the engines spooled up, and I went and sat down just before the tractor pushed the plane back.
Total elapsed time, from shutting the car off to sitting down in the seat: under 10 minutes. And yes, silly wabbit, when I got to the claim carousel at Atlanta, my bag was there — first one off, in fact. That’s how DFW and its sister, Kansas City International, were supposed to work. That’s how they were designed to work.
Try it nowadays.
Most business travelers are people who make, or at least charge, good money. My billing rate when I was traveling — what the boss charged the customer; I got a good bit less — was $150 an hour. That means that every time I took a flight, somebody paid a minimum of $300 just for the two hours I spent getting through security. Since I then had to come home again, the client wound up paying a minimum of $600 per trip and got nothing of value for it except “security”. That’s a tax, folks, and the fact that cash doesn’t go anywhere is irrelevant.
Security isn’t the only thing dragging travel down; in the spirit of Dante, Niven, & Pournelle, when Don Carty dies I hope he spends eternity in Hell Air’s hub waiting for the connecting flight to Heaven that never comes. But adding a tax of two hours before and (often enough) an hour after to every airplane flight is a severe drag on the system, and accounts for a huge part of the losses and inefficiencies.
This incident simply adds to the impression I got when the Draconian security measures were first implemented: it’s all theater.
Originally, the “security theater” may have had some point. Real security cannot be accomplished by patrolling the perimeter, and searching passengers and bags is the very definition of “perimeter security”. But the people, the passengers taking the planes, had to be reassured that something was being done, and the dance at the checkpoints is impressive enough to calm most people — at least, the ones who don’t have any idea what the real issues are.
But the last few times I flew gave the impression, confirmed by this story, that convincing the ignorant passengers that security is on the job is no longer the point. The screeners all but smirk. WE ARE THE GOVERNMENT, they almost shout, AND YOU WILL BY GOD DO AS WE TELL YOU. I suppose it impresses some people, and when I was in the line I went along with the program like a good little sheep.
The people who matter don’t. They go by car, or by “fractional share” bizjet, if they can; the airlines don’t get their business, and the extra expense is another load on commerce that yields no return to society or anyone else. That fits with the rest of the recent policies of Government, all of which seem designed to grind this country’s business to a halt. TSA isn’t interested in providing security to air transportation; their mission is to strangle it.
as only he can.
Case in point: the California elections.
A long-ago SF story had the natives providing aid and support to Earth people to settle Venus. The immigrants had a hard time, because they had to suppress some vicious carnivores that also preyed on the Venusians, destroyed crops and food supplies, and generally made life miserable for everyone. They didn’t get much support from the Venusian natives, who were aloof and even disdainful of the new settlers.
The protagonist of the story manages to break through the disdain and communicate with a native Venusian, and returns to HQ. He informs the leader of the colonists that the natives don’t really like Earth people at all, in fact consider them opportunistic parasites whose only good quality is the ability to compete with the predators, which are also parasites. Earth humans are accepted because they are the lesser of two weevils.
I don’t like either of the major California Republican candidates in any absolute sense, but I like the Democrats they oppose even less. Sometimes the only choice you actually have is which weevil is less destructive.
An “elitist” is a person who assumes that he or she is more capable than the general ruck of humanity whether or not such an assumption is justified. “Elitism” is reliance upon self-declared members of the elite, whether by persons who are thus self-declared or otherwise. People who do not consider themselves members of the elite may be elitists if they are depending on elitist self-declaration as a way to choose leaders or managers.
Now: it is an observed fact, throughout the ages, that people who are in fact highly able tend strongly to be at least somewhat humble about it. People who are genuinely elite have no reason to brag about it or assert it, because their actions are sufficient to establish their status.
A person who loudly claims elite status can be assumed, a priori, to be an individual of ordinary or less ability whose claim is based on something other than performance or capability to perform. That “something” may be a credential of some sort, however obtained, but is more normally based on membership in a group of the self-declared elite.
It follows that “false elitism” and “pseudo-elitism” are oxymoronic. It’s a word definition thing.
Louis L’Amour often noted that “there’s no stopping a man who knows he’s in the right and keeps on coming.” Perhaps I’m just overcynical, but even in my teens, when I first discovered the sentiment, my first thought was “yeah, but how much damage can he do if he isn’t in the right but genuinely believes he is?”
Richard Fernandez thinks Obama is appealing to the extreme Left because it’s almost the only reliable constituency left to him.
By energizing the true believers it may be possible to limit the extent of the Republican gains. Going on the defense often means shortening lines. At least, it is a kind of Final Protective Fire.
Jeff Goldstein picks up on that, and applies a little pop psychology:
I think this less a consciously cynical electoral ploy (though it acts as an electoral ploy for the very reasons Fernandez discusses) than it is the effort of a long-pampered and entitled narcissist to hold on to a perception of self as an intellectual giant that even he must be beginning to question, given the failures of his policies.
Jeff has a good point, but I’m always a little leery of pyschological explanations. Fernandez does better, I think, by quoting Lenin:
We have been bustling for five years trying to improve our state apparatus, but it has been mere bustle, which has proved useless in these five years, of even futile, or even harmful. This bustle created the impression that we were doing something, but in effect it was only clogging up our institutions and our brains.
It is high time things were changed.
That is the pronouncement of a true believer. Lenin truly believed that his policies were, in fact, good ones that would yield benefits for the Russian people; his complaint was not that the policies had failed, but that they had been stalled by faulty implementations, and some pure and simple bad luck, that were seized upon by Enemies of the People and used to block Progress. The fact that the policies had failed didn’t mean they were bad, it meant that they weren’t put properly into effect.
Diagnoses of narcissism and stupidity may or may not be valid, but what needs to be seriously considered is the possibility that we are looking at the Second Coming of Vladimir Ilyitch. Barack Obama has never once given any indication that he questions the validity of his proposals and policies; you would be hard-pressed to find an example of his recognition that the policies might validly be questioned. In fact, it is difficult to find an example of his defending his policies. His response to questions is not to defend his proposals and theories, but to attack the motives and reasoning powers of the questioners, whom he does not see as “critics” but as obstructionists.
Obama is a true believer who sees himself not as wrong, but as beleaguered. He is the Louis L’Amour hero, battered, bloody, and gunshot, who retires from the field only long enough to recover sufficiently to return to the battle, because he knows he’s in the right and means to keep on coming. Lenin again, from Fernandez:
I know that enormous resistance will have to be put up, that devilish persistence will be required, that in the first few years at least work in this field will be hellishly hard. Nevertheless, I am convinced that only by such effort shall we be able to achieve our aim; and that only by achieving this aim shall we create a republic that is really worthy of the name of Soviet, socialist, and so on, and so forth.
Advisers in self-defense often tell us to carry the biggest gun we can comfortably use, because in the face of a sufficiently motivated attacker the important thing is stopping power. When faced with “devilish persistence”, damage must be incapacitating to be of value. How likely is it that a mere election setback will dissuade or even deter a determined true believer who intends to return to the fray and keep on coming?
Hannah Elliott at Forbes tells us “How to Beat a Speeding Ticket“. The advice given is sound, but unremarkable: be submissive to the cop, don’t admit anything, if the ticket is issued hold them to all the technical details. The usual stuff.
The howlers come in the leadin, where Ms. Elliott talks about speed limits in general:
“That [speed limit] is for the condition of the roadway, the amount of traffic that’s in that area [and] environmental conditions that may exist,” says Sgt. Kern Swoboda of the New York State Police. “All those are taken into consideration when a speed limit is posted. It’s not a recommendation.”
Don’t you just know he was sincere when he said that? After all, sincerity is key — once you learn to fake that, you can get away with all kinds of things.
Having watched Sgt. Swoboda lie with a straight face, Hannah lets him do it again:
Swoboda says speeding tickets are not issued to make up for police-department budget deficits. It’s about safety, he says, and the numbers don’t lie. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 40,000 people are killed each year in auto accidents; speeding is a factor in 30% of those crashes.
Here in Texas, the speed limit on the open Interstate — four lanes, divided, limited access, with hundred-foot (minimum) medians and side right of way, mostly with fairly decent surfaces and all the signs, bridges, etc. guardrailed, buffered, and/or built as breakaways in case of high-speed strikes — is 65 MPH except in cities (where it’s less) and a few places ‘way out West where there’s nothing to hit. But you see that narrow overcrossing just ahead? The one with a short exit to it, and a sign that says “FM something-or-other”? That will lead you to a two-lane, “two-rod” (i.e., about 30 feet wide) undivided winding road through the country, with a total of 100 feet of right-of-way including the surface and both verges, hemmed in by mailboxes and solid concrete creek crossings with no or minimal guardrails, let alone buffers, and populated by farmers driving tractors with implements on at five miles an hour.
Speed limit on FM roads? 70 MPH. Posted and everything.
My experience in New York is not extensive, but is really no different. As with any other State, the speed limits are set by the Legislature and/or local authorities, and applied as blanket policies regardless of actual conditions — the limit on a section of Interstate that sees six cars an hour through open country is the same as that where it winds through hills in heavy traffic next to a town, and the secondary roads are similarly posted. Just as the Texas example demonstrates, they’re arbitrary. The notion that any engineer or other knowledgeable person ever considered “…the condition of the roadway, the amount of traffic that’s in that area [and] environmental conditions…” before putting up the sign is too ludicrous to be laughable.
As for safety, that’s equally risible. When “double nickels” was imposed by that very same NHTSB, the accident rate went up, not down — and I’m not going to provide you a link to that; look it up yourself, so you know I’m not cherrypicking. Oh, and the fraction of accidents where speed was a factor stayed about the same. It’s quite true that high-speed accidents tend to be much, much nastier than low-speed ones; if the crash I had a couple months ago had been at even 15 MPH instead of 5, I might not be here to bitch. But there’s no limit to that, is there? If we all had to poke along at 10 MPH on the freeway, there wouldn’t be many fatalities in wrecks. That wouldn’t end the fatalities, though. Consider the number of people who would grow old and die trying to drive between Denver and Salt Lake City. Like everything else, speed is a tradeoff of advantages and disadvantages.
Denying that it’s all about revenue at least has the advantage that it isn’t always about revenue. There are lots of places where speeding fines are a trivial part of the City or County budget.
That’s the way to bet, though. There’s a town in Texas called Estelline; look where the Red River meets the north-south eastern boundary of the Panhandle, and there it is, just south of the river on Highway 287. Estelline used to be legendary. Approaching it from the east, there’s a sharp curve to the right; just before the curve the posted signs went from highway speeds (70 MPH, in those days) down to 30 MPH within about 200 yards, and the town’s policeman sat under an awning just where the curve straightens out again. Ca$h bonanza! Then the State of Texas passed an interesting law: speeding fines on State and Federal highways go to the State, and are returned to municipalities according to the size of their police forces, not how many tickets they write. If you drive through Estelline nowadays, the likelihood that you’ll see a cop is near nil.
There is one sometimes, though, and the speed limit signs are still where they always were; you can definitely get a ticket in Estelline if you aren’t lucky. It’ll probably be from a State Trooper rather than a local cop, because without ticket revenue tiny Estelline can’t afford to maintain much of a police department. But if it isn’t safety, and it isn’t revenue, what’s all that for?
What’s the first advice, above, for avoiding a ticket? –be obsequious to the cop; yessir nosir you’re the badass and I cringe and cry is a very good strategy for getting the policeman to put his ticket book away, although it isn’t perfect. One of my father’s favorite stories was the time he took my youngest brother’s hopped-up, jacked-up hot rod to Houston for my middle brother to use; he got stopped in a college town, and watched with amusement as the officer hitched up his gunbelt, straightened his tie and gig-line, and carefully arranged his mirror sunshades — and nearly laughed out loud when the cop’s face fell, upon discovering a fifty-something-year-old man in a coat and tie driving the vehicle, instead of an eighteen-year-old kid he could get his rocks off by hassling.
The police themselves call it presence. They want you to believe, all the time, that there’s a cop looking over your shoulder so’s you’ll behave. Since the War on Drugs makes that laughable to the point of ludicrousness, they have to be hardasses with the easy stuff in order to feel in control.
George III and Parliament kept a standing army in the Colonies, and not only had them maintain a constant presence by patrolling the streets, had them quartered — that is, living and getting fed — in the homes of ordinary citizens, especially those suspected of being unsympathetic to the authority of the Crown. The goal was to intimidate, to convince people that their desire for liberty and independence was futile, because there would always be a soldier nearby to exert authority over dissenters. That’s why the Framers and Founders had such a horror of standing armies.
And that’s what speed limits are for. They keep you looking over your shoulder for the people who are (or want to be) in control. It is, perhaps, something of a pity that the Tsar of the Russias didn’t get the okhrana fully established and famous before the American Revolution.
Goldstein at PW points us to yet another example of leftoid academia’s enforcement of groupthink under the heading of “diversity”. Jeff is quite capable of carrying the linguistic and epistemological aspects, and Thompson and FIRE are much better than I at explicating the specifics. What interests me is something a bit deeper.
The Left began from the observation that, in the process of converting an agricultural economy into an industrial one, the productive were not receiving the benefits of the new order. Marx takes that to the limit, arguing that the only productive elements are the workers, who should receive all the benefits. As a side effect, the Left also adopted the ideal of free speech. In order to obtain their just portion, workers had to be able to advocate freely for a different ordering of society.
Sometime between then and now, the nominal “Left” took the concept of “fairness”, which had originally referred to the lack of equity consequent to denying the workers the product of their labor, and extended it to form the concept of positive rights. Positive rights theory begins with the unremarkable proposition that the benefits of society are unevenly distributed, and concludes that the original “rights” as conceived by such people as the US Constitution’s Framers are meaningless.
I live in Texas. Am I free to go to London? Of course not, under “positive rights”: I am sitting here shivering because I can’t afford enough propane to last through the winter[1]. There is no way I can afford a plane ticket across the Pond, or a place to stay when I got there.
More deeply, am I free to speak, or even to live? Not unless I have enough food to survive. In general, positive rights theory argues that no one is free to do anything unless they possess the wherewithal to exercise that freedom, from which it follows that for “rights” to mean anything the wherewithal to exercise them must also be a right.
There are people who have food, but they deny it to me unless I give them something in return. This is clearly extortion — the possessors of food are denying my right to live unless I satisfy their base urges for profit. It follows that people who have food must have it taken away in order to satisfy my right to good nutrition, and that their complaints must be ignored or suppressed as the blatherings of criminals.
But the people who have food must, in general, have produced it — the food did not simply appear in their larders; they had to expend effort (“work”) in order for it to be there. “Positive rights” demands that the producers — the workers — have the product of their labor taken away, and that their speech in defense of keeping the benefits of their labor be suppressed.
In this way, the advocates of positive rights have totally inverted the ideals that animated the original Left. This is why I refer to them as “leftoids”.
[1] Tip jar at upper left (hint, hint)
A Corporation is a deputy Government. The outstanding feature of Government is that it is seen as a unit — the individuals comprising it are not prime movers, but exercisers of Sovereignty. Government issues a charter to form a Corporation, and thereafter debts and the acts of individuals are not seen as applying to individuals, but to the Corporation as a whole: it is a “legal person”.
The system works because it is an instance of decentralization. A Corporation is closer to the problem than Government is, and can respond to actual conditions more quickly and effectively.
As Corporations become larger in relation to the Government, both their management and their bureaucratic support find that they have more in common with management and bureaucratic support in Government than with the People, and they build closer ties. In particular, Corporate management controls resources that can be used to influence Government management to establish policies and procedures that have the effect of aggrandizing the Corporation’s size and influence, both absolutely and vis-a-vis its competitors. (At the extreme this yields monopoly, which cannot exist at all unless Government enforces a pathological version of “private property”.)
At the same time and in the same way, Government’s tendency to self-aggrandizement yields closer and closer control of Corporate activities; the two impulses are positive feedback to one another, and the process continues until the advantages of decentralization are lost completely because the Corporation is micromanaged by Government under a fig-leaf of “private” operation. Both parties are anxious to preserve the appearance of separation; Government uses it to argue that its control is necessary to prevent abuse, and the Corporation exploits it to gain support from those with libertarian impulses.
The result is a hydra in the ocean. Depending on specifics the head named “Government” may be larger than the others, but whichever head eats you the detritus is shat out the same aperture.
The estimable Norm Geras, likely the least-insane leftoid you will find, asks:
I just want him or someone else to spell out how you combine inequality as end product with fair opportunity as starting point; how you avoid that the former will be passed on from parent to child so that the next generation can’t enjoy fair opportunity, because some children will get from that prior-generation inequality advantages that other children won’t have. It’s not a deep point, but I’ve never seen anyone attempt to answer it.
You won’t see anyone attempt to answer it, either, because in those terms it’s a semantic null, more or less equivalent to “what shade of pink should the sky be?” or “how many legs should a horse have?”
Different people have different abilities, and as a result will succeed or fail to different degrees. Until and unless we adopt the Forever War solution — all humanity a single clone[1] with identical genetics — this will continue to be the case, and for so long as we continue to entertain the concept of “family” the offspring of the successful will enjoy advantages. Even if we dismantle families and raise all the children in creches with equal treatment, the offspring of successful people will enjoy genetic advantages over those of the less successful; tall people will likely have tall descendants.
When libertarian-oriented people speak of “equality of opportunity” we mean the elimination of artificial means of suppression. No person or group of persons is empowered to deny opportunity to anyone[2]. In that view, everyone is able to succeed according to whatever they started with, and the result will inevitably be inequality of result; and, in that view, equality of result and equality of opportunity are directly opposed to one another. If you have equality of opportunity, you will inherently have inequality of result. If you have equality of result, it is proof positive that you have inequality of opportunity.
The unfair advantage enjoyed by the offspring of successful people is handled in two ways: by the long view, and by exploiting them.
Here in the United States we for a long time had substantial equality of opportunity, at least for those who enjoyed any opportunity at all — no one is denying that the system was substantially less than what it claimed, but it did work for those it worked for. What we discovered was a curious thing, by ancient standards: the children of successful people are remarkably unlikely to be themselves successful, the grandchildren of successful people essentially revert to the mean, and even successful people do not, as a rule, remain successful for their entire lifetime. Forbes magazine maintains an annual list of the world’s richest people, and the amazing thing about it is how few Americans on any given year’s list come as high the next time, and how many drop of altogether, replaced by new ones, every year. It is also remarkable how few children and grandchildren of the very rich appear on the list once their parents pass.
This is a direct contradiction of the notion of a hereditary aristocracy, and confirms what the Founders believed: the children of the aristocracy are unlikely to be any better than those of the hoi polloi, and are frequently worse. Fortunes are temporary, lasting at most a single lifetime, except for a few extraordinary cases. Human genetics are too complex, varied, and randomly-distributed for the concept of “breeding” as applied to animals to work.
That being the case, the children of the rich (and, often enough, the rich themselves) are available to be exploited. In an industrial economy, it is necessary to gather the wherewithal — the capital — in order to build the means of production. It is further noticed that the vast majority of new enterprises do not succeed, because the product of the enterprise is not something people want or need, or because the enterprise itself is badly managed. Much of the wealth devoted to capital is wasted.
The children of the rich, having wealth at their disposal, are ready-made suckers for attempts at capital formation. They are easy to find, for the most part they are easy to bamboozle, and it isn’t necessary to flimflam as many of them to get the necessary as it would be if wealth were more evenly distributed[3]. Most such “investments” fail, leaving them less rich; the ones which succeed simply provide further pools of nascent capital for later con artists to extract.
Inheritors also tend strongly to be driven by fad, and thus serve as “first adopters” of most new technologies — the new product is ridiculously expensive because the production facilities are not yet fully developed, so only the rich can afford it until the managers of the capital assets “ramp up” to economies of scale; the rich provide early returns and feedback to let the managers know which products are wanted and which are not. Henry Ford would never have developed the production line if rich people had not spent two decades impoverishing themselves to validate the concept of the automobile.
When given a lemon, the saying goes, make lemonade. Inequality is inevitable. The question is not how to eliminate it, because you cannot, any more than you can make lions and sheep interchangeable, and the attempt is itself damaging. Market capitalism exploits inequality to the betterment of all society.
[1] “Clone” is properly all the genetically identical individuals. Haldeman’s novel postulates some several billions of them.
[2] This is why we despise levellers. In order to achieve equality of result, it is necessary to deny opportunity to those who would otherwise be successful.
[3] The inevitable riposte to this is central planning. It demonstrably does not work; demonstrations fill the history books, and the reasons why are too much for a short essay.
