Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Rats in a Social Engineering Lab

Taylorism, Progressivism, and Rule by Experts
By Kevin A. Carson
The Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century—the doctrine from which the main current of modern liberalism developed—is sometimes erroneously viewed as an “anti-business” philosophy. It was anti-market to be sure, but by no means necessarily anti-business. Progressivism was, more than anything, managerialist.
The American economy after the Civil War became increasingly dominated by large organizations. I’ve written in The Freeman before about the role of the government in the growth of the centralized corporate economy: the railroad land grants and subsidies, which tipped the balance toward large manufacturing firms serving a national market (“The Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies,” November 2010), and the patent system, which was a primary tool of consolidation and cartelization in a number of industries (“How ‘Intellectual Property’ Impedes Competition,” October 2009, tinyurl.com/lqzehv)
These giant corporations were followed by large government agencies whose mission was to support and stabilize the corporate economy, and then by large bureaucratic universities, centralized school systems, and assorted “helping professionals” to process the “human resources” the corporations and State fed on. These interlocking bureaucracies required a large managerial class to administer them.
According to Rakesh Khurana of the Harvard Business School (in From Higher Aims to Hired Hands), the first corporation managers came from an industrial engineering background and saw their job as doing for the entire organization what they’d previously done for production on the shop floor. The managerial revolution in the large corporation, Khurana writes, was in essence an attempt to apply the engineer’s approach (standardizing and rationalizing tools, processes, and systems) to the organization as a system.
And according to Yehouda Shenhav (Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution), Progressivism was the ideology of the managers and engineers who administered the large organizations; political action was a matter of applying the same principles they used to rationalize their organizations to society as a whole. Shenhav writes (quoting Robert Wiebe):
Since the difference between the physical, social, and human realms was blurred by acts of translation, society itself was conceptualized and treated as a technical system. As such, society and organizations could, and should, be engineered as machines that are constantly being perfected. Hence, the management of organizations (and society at large) was seen to fall within the province of engineers. Social, cultural, and political issues . . . could be framed and analyzed as “systems” and “subsystems” to be solved by technical means. . .
During this period, “only the professional administrator, the doctor, the social worker, the architect, the economist, could show the way.” In turn, professional control became more elaborate. It involved measurement and prediction and the development of professional techniques for guiding events to predictable outcomes. The experts “devised rudimentary government budgets; introduced central, audited purchasing; and rationalized the structure of offices.” This type of control was not only characteristic of professionals in large corporate systems. It characterized social movements,the management of schools, roads, towns, and political systems.
The managerialist ethos reflected in Progressivism emphasized transcending class and ideological divisions through the application of disinterested expertise. Christopher Lasch (The New Radicalism in America) wrote:

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

A bizarre parallel


They had to burn the village to save it from global warming
From Wikipedia:
One of the most famous quotes of the Vietnam War was a statement attributed to an unnamed U.S. officer by AP correspondent Peter Arnett. Writing about the provincial capital, Bến Tre, on February 7, 1968, Arnett said: “‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,’ a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.”The quote was distorted in subsequent publications, eventually becoming the more familiar, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
In a truly bizarre parallel, the New York Times writes:
“They said if we hesitated they would shoot us,” said William Bakeshisha, adding that he hid in his coffee plantation, watching his house burn down. “Smoke and fire.”But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.
The case twists around an emerging multibillion-dollar market trading carbon-credits under the Kyoto Protocol, which contains mechanisms for outsourcing environmental protection to developing nations.
The company involved, New Forests Company, grows forests in African countries with the purpose of selling credits from the carbon-dioxide its trees soak up to polluters abroad. Its investors include the World Bank, through its private investment arm, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC.
In 2005, the Ugandan government granted New Forests a 50-year license to grow pine and eucalyptus forests in three districts, and the company has applied to the United Nations to trade under the mechanism. The company expects that it could earn up to $1.8 million a year.But there was just one problem: people were living on the land where the company wanted to plant trees. Indeed, they had been there a while.“He was a policeman for King George,” Mr. Bakeshisha said of his father, who served with British forces during World War II in Egypt.
All of this, for something not worth a nickel in America anymore…
Note the flatlined final price of 5 cents per ton of CO2…
…because the Chicago Carbon Exchange closed, as nobody wanted to buy carbon credits that had no tangible value.
And yet people are being burned out of their homes in Africa to plant trees for carbon credits. It is madness.
In the meantime, it appears the existing trees are responding to increased CO2, so planting new stands may not even be needed:
Forests in many regions are becoming larger carbon sinks thanks to higher density, U.S. and European researchers say in a new report.In Europe and North America, increased density significantly raised carbon storage despite little or no expansion of forest area, according to the study, led by Aapo Rautiainen of the University of Helsinki, Finland, and published in the online, open-access journal PLoS One.

New occupation forces arriving at USA


EPA Wants to add 230,000 MORE Bureaucrats

By the AFP BLOG

We've always said the EPA's extra-legal attempt to rewrite the 1970 Clean Air Act to twist it into a greenhouse gas law -- cap-and-trade by other means -- would be a disaster. Up to now, EPA tried to claim it would only apply permitting requirements to large industrial facilities. Now it is finally telling the truth -- that applying the Clean Air Act as written will force permitting for even small commercial facilities, schools, hospitals, churches, restaurants that use natural gas as a cooking fuel, and even larger single family homes.

In a court filing last week, EPA quantified the vast new army of federal bureaucrats it will need to process millions of new permits under the Prevention of Significant Deterioration and Title V permitting process. A shocking 230,000 new EPA bureaucrats at a cost of $21 billion -- more than tripling the EPA's total budget. In the filing EPA says it will reach these levels by April 30, 2016.

Based on the historical relationship between the number of federal regulators and private sector employment recently quantified by the Phoenix Center the addition of 230,000 federal bureaucrats would destroy 22.5 million private sector jobs.

The EPA doesn't have to do this. The EPA and Obama White House have falsely claimed they were ordered to act by the Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA, but the court in that case only ruled that the EPA had to decide whether to act based on the language of the statute. The same rationale they offered for phasing the rules in under the tailoring rule -- administrative necessity and absurd results -- are the valid legal reason they should have declined to act and left the political question of whether to act on greenhouse gases up to Congress.

Since they seem intent on moving forward, Congress must step in and stop them. As soon as possible.

Miracles do happen in Chile


To Really Fix Social Security, Let's Privatize It
 
The debate about whether or not Social Security is a Ponzi scheme is probably less important of an issue than a discussion about the ultimate and real solution to the unsustainable "insecurity of Social Security": privatization.  Chile's successful transition to a privatized pension system in 1980 provides a model for the U.S. and the rest of the world.  Jose Pinera, the architect of Chile's privatization efforts explains in this article "Empowering Workers: The Privatization of Social Security in Chile":

"A specter is haunting the world. It is the specter of bankrupt state-run pension systems. The pay-as-you-go pension system that has reigned supreme through most of this century has a fundamental flaw, one rooted in a false conception of how human beings behave: it destroys, at the individual level, the essential link between effort and reward--in other words, between personal responsibilities and personal rights. Whenever that happens on a massive scale and for a long period of time, the result is disaster.
Two exogenous factors aggravate the results of that flaw: (1) the global demographic trend toward decreasing fertility rates; and, (2) medical advances that are lengthening life. As a result, fewer and fewer workers are supporting more and more retirees. Since the raising of both the retirement age and payroll taxes has an upper limit, sooner or later the system has to reduce the promised benefits, a telltale sign of a bankrupt system.
Whether this reduction of benefits is done through inflation, as in most developing countries, or through legislation, the final result for the retired worker is the same: anguish in old age created, paradoxically, by the inherent insecurity of the "social security'' system.
In 1980, the government of Chile decided to take the bull by the horns. A government-run pension system was replaced with a revolutionary innovation: a privately administered, national system of Pension Savings Accounts.  After 15 years of operation, the results speak for themselves. Pensions in the new private system already are 50 to 100 percent higher--depending on whether they are old-age, disability, or survivor pensions--than they were in the pay-as-you-go system. The resources administered by the private pension funds amount to $25 billion, or around 40 percent of GNP as of 1995. By improving the functioning of both the capital and the labor markets, pension privatization has been one of the key reforms that has pushed the growth rate of the economy upwards from the historical 3 percent a year to 6.5 percent on average during the last 12 years. It is also a fact that the Chilean savings rate has increased to 27 percent of GNP and the unemployment rate has decreased to 5.0 percent since the reform was undertaken.
More important, still, pensions have ceased to be a government issue, thus depoliticizing a huge sector of the economy and giving individuals more control over their own lives. The structural flaw has been eliminated and the future of pensions depends on individual behavior and market developments."

Repent and be saved


Amazing Drop in Deaths from Extreme Weather
By M. Perry
The Reason Foundation has released a new study titled, "Wealth and Safety: The Amazing Decline in Deaths from Extreme Weather in an Era of Global Warming, 1900–2010," here's the executive summary (emphasis mine):
"Proponents of drastic curbs on greenhouse gas emissions claim that such emissions cause global warming and that this exacerbates the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including extreme heat, droughts, floods and storms such as hurricanes and cyclones. But what matters is not the incidence of extreme weather events per se but the impact of such events—especially the human impact. To that end, it is instructive to examine trends in global mortality (i.e. the number of people killed) and mortality rates (i.e. the proportion of people killed) associated with extreme weather events for the 111-year period from 1900 to 2010.
Aggregate mortality attributed to all extreme weather events globally has declined by more than 90% since the 1920s, in spite of a four-fold rise in population and much more complete reporting of such events. The aggregate mortality rate (per million population) declined by 98% (see chart above), largely due to decreased mortality in three main areas:
  • ·Deaths and death rates from droughts, which were responsible for approximately 60% of cumulative deaths due to extreme weather events from 1900–2010, are more than 99.9% lower than in the 1920s.
  • Deaths and death rates for floods, responsible for over 30% of cumulative extreme weather deaths, have declined by over 98% since the 1930s.
  • ·Deaths and death rates for storms (i.e. hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, typhoons), responsible for around 7% of extreme weather deaths from 1900–2008, declined by more than 55% since the 1970s.
To put the public health impact of extreme weather events into context, cumulatively they now contribute only 0.07% to global mortality. Mortality from extreme weather events has declined even as all-cause mortality has increased, indicating that humanity is coping better with extreme weather events than it is with far more important health and safety problems.
The decreases in the numbers of deaths and death rates reflect a remarkable improvement in society’s adaptive capacity, likely due to greater wealth and better technology, enabled in part by use of hydrocarbon fuels. Imposing additional restrictions on the use of hydrocarbon fuels may slow the rate of improvement of this adaptive capacity and thereby worsen any negative impact of climate change. At the very least, the potential for such an adverse outcome should be weighed against any putative benefit arising from such restrictions."

Stop the madness


The World Is Being Run By Crazy People



A MUST SEE - I'd embed it if I could: 

Harry Koza on BNN on the European debt crisis. 
The most accurate and terrifying analysis from the mouth of one of the worlds real experts.
Related - watch jaws drop at the BBC.

Monday, September 26, 2011

The never ending tragedy of the Russian people


Putin and the KGB State

Under Putin's direction, a 'state mafia' has replaced the street mafias of the chaotic Yeltsin years.
By Paul Gregory
After more than a decade of Vladimir Putin's rule, Russia has become a "KGB state."1 Although the KGB was abolished in 1991 after its chairman, Vladimir Kryuchhov, participated in the failed coup d'etat against USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev, the KGB mentality still thrives. Russian is run by former KGB officials and Kremlin-friendly oligarchs. They control industry, commerce, media, and banking, conduct covert operations at home and abroad, and operate their own prisons. They order telephone justice (tell judges their verdicts) and gather compromising material to intimidate opponents. If they do not directly order assassinations, they make sure that those who do are not caught. Outsiders do not know how the KGB state works. Insiders may be confused as well.
The KGB state does not tolerate political opposition. It disenfranchises opposition parties, except for the shop-worn communists, who make for a convenient and hapless opposition. They beat and jail prominent opposition figures in violation of constitutional assembly rights. Russia ranks regularly among the most dangerous countries for journalists.2
Conflicts of interest are ignored in the KGB state. Up until mid-2011 when President Medvedev outlawed the practice, ministers and regulators could manage, sit on boards of, or be paid by the very companies they controlled. Although some freedom of the print media remains, state or Kremlin-friendly oligarchs own and control television. The TV nightly news features a resolute Putin (or Medvedev) attending patriotic events, congratulating award winners, and seeming to look after the health, safety and welfare of ordinary Russians.
Under Putin's direction, a "state mafia" has replaced the street mafias of the chaotic Yeltsin years. At the bottom of this mafia's pecking order, armies of corrupt tax, fire and health inspectors have taken the place of the brawny young street thugs and racketeers of the Yeltsin era. They can ruin any small or medium-sized business that does not cooperate with them. At higher levels, municipal and regional officials allocate contracts, receive bribes from local businesses, wipe out fines or indictments, and look the other way in the case of unsafe cruise ships. At the top of the ladder, ministers and deputy prime ministers have replaced private oligarchs as heads of gigantic energy and mineral concerns. They deal with their victims politely in fancy hotels and modern offices, but the result is a classic shakedown worthy of the New Jersey mafia.
The KGB mind set has not changed since the KGB's predecessor organization, the Cheka, was founded in 19183. We can paraphrase Putin's "Once KGB, always KGB" as "Once KGB, always think like the KGB." Throughout the Soviet period, the KGB considered itself the unsheathed sword of the state, free to dispense unconstrained "justice." Rules and laws were for others. At the peak of its power in 1938, KGB (then NKVD) officers declared: "I am the judge, jury, and executioner." Shortly thereafter, Stalin cut it back to size, executing its head and about half of its officers. 4 The KGB mind set also envisions Russia as encircled by enemies who must be defeated. A cooperative world of global commerce does not exist in the KGB lexicon.
Putin's Russia is Stalin's nightmare of an unconstrained KGB that decides "justice" and divides economic spoils. There is no superior authority to rein it in.

Lied morning, noon and night


Can Sovereign Borrowing Be a Criminal Offence?
By Anthony de Jasay
There is a winding path in our contemporary history from the Keynesian multiplier through the double-dip recession, majority rule and sovereign debt default, to the penal responsibility of a former Hungarian socialist premier for the excessive budget deficit of his country—a path whose twists and switchbacks it is perhaps instructive to survey.
Three generations of economists have been brought up on the Keynesian mechanism of the economy. They think in the terms  John Maynard Keynes formulated to describe the Meccano construction he put up—the propensity to consume, the saving-investment identity, liquidity preference, the marginal efficiency of capital—even when they are in substantive disagreement with Keynes about what these levers really do and how they ought to be pulled to get certain results. The domination of Keynes's model is not undeserved. It is clearer, less ambiguous than its predecessors, it is far easier to teach to students and more convincing to the man in the street because it holds out the prospect of simple remedies against the ills of unemployment on the downside, and overheating on the upside that a market economy is apparently so apt to catch.
Over the three years 2008-2010, most governments in Europe and America have been knowingly swallowing big doses of the Keynesian remedies to pull their economies out of recession. Some did so as a matter of deliberate choice; the U.S.A. is the clearest example. Others, of which France is the most typical, merely allowed their vast welfare overhang to act as an automatic stabilizer. With well over 50 per cent of GDP absorbed by government spending and independent of market demand, and with the oncoming recession actually stimulating government spending on unemployment benefits while government income falls as tax receipts fall, the French-style modern welfare state generates the rising dissaving needed to offset the falling private investment and consumption. This big government is supposed to act as its own stabilizer. In fact, during the grim years of 2008 and 2009, France's GDP fell noticeably less than the Western European average, and the country's mostly left-leaning intelligentsia had much satisfaction in pointing out that a model biased toward "social protection" is proving to be more stable and resistant to shocks than one biased toward unfettered free markets.
However, the automatic stabiliser effect of the welfare state involves an equally automatic swelling of government debt, for the stabilisation operates through additional government dissaving. A rough measure of this dissaving is the budget deficit. Whether the deficit rises thanks to automatic shortfalls in tax revenues and costlier social protection, or because governments deliberately pump up anti-crisis spending programmes, the effect is the same. Over the three years 2008-2010, the sovereign debt (roughly, the cumulative budget deficit) of the European states as well as of the United States rose by 20 to 30 percentage points of their GDP, reaching 85 per cent in France and 100 in the United Kingdom and also in the United States. Current economic consensus holds that the 90 per cent level is critical and once beyond it, it is inordinately painful if not impractical to work it down again.1 A fundamental and almost sacrilegious question then arises: does the Keynesian mechanism work as it was supposed to do? Do the stabilizers really stabilize? Could it be that while the deficit ought to stimulate output and employment through the effect of the Keynesian multiplier, the rising level of the national debt acts as a kind of negative anti-multiplier that offsets the stimulus?

The new religion


War of words over global warming as Nobel laureate resigns in protest
 Ivar Giaever, 1929: Global warming
A Nobel laureate has quit one of the world's leading organisations for scientists in protest at its assertion that the evidence of damaging global warming is "incontrovertible".
By Philip Sherwell
In a fresh challenge to claims that there is scientific "consensus" on climate change, Prof Ivar Giaever has resigned from the American Physical Society, where his peers had elected him a fellow to honour his work.
The society, which has 48,000 members, has adopted a policy statement which states: "The evidence is incontrovertible: global warming is occurring."
But Prof Giaever, who shared the 1973 Nobel award for physics, told The Sunday Telegraph. "Incontrovertible is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science."
The US-based Norwegian physicist, who is the chief technology officer at Applied Biophysics Inc and a retired academic at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world, added: "Global warming has become the new religion."
Prof Giaever was one of Barack Obama's leading scientific supporters during the 2008 president election campaign, joining 70 Nobel science laureates endorsing his candidacy.
But he has since criticised Mr Obama over his stance on global warming and was one of more 100 scientists who wrote an open letter to him, declaring: "We maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated."
He has now parted company with the APS after what he called lengthy consideration. In an email to its executive office Kate Kirby, he said he "cannot live" with its official statement on global warming.
He questioned whether the average temperature of "the whole earth for a whole year" can be accurately measured, but contended that even if the results are accurate, they indicate the climate has actually been "amazingly stable" for 150 years.
And he concluded that in any case, both "human health and happiness have definitely improved" over the so-called "warming period" of the last century and a half.
In its policy statement, the APS declares: "Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes. The evidence is incontrovertible: global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now."
Prof Giaever is one of the most prominent scientific dissenters challenging the controversial man-made global warming claims of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former US vice-president Al Gore.
He has testified to the US Senate about his doubts, calling himself a "sceptic" on global warming and citing both his birthplace and other scientific scares he has seen come and go during his career.
"I am Norwegian, should I really worry about a little bit of warming?" he said. "I am unfortunately becoming an old man. We have heard many similar warnings about the acid rain 30 years ago and the ozone hole 10 years ago or deforestation but the humanity is still around.
"Global warming has become a new religion. We frequently hear about the number of scientists who support it. But the number is not important: only whether they are correct is important. We don't really know what the actual effect on the global temperature is. There are better ways to spend the money."
Prof Giaever, 82, is not alone in rejecting the APS's insistence that there is consensus on the existence and severity of man-made global warming.
Several prominent members have expressed frustration that it has refused to reconsider its position – drawn up in 2007 – in the light of the "Climategate" controversy about the findings of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
"Measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th - 21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today," dissenters wrote in an open letter to it its governing board.
Last year, another sceptic, Hal Lewis, a University of California professor quit the group, describing global warming as a "scam" and a "pseudoscientific fraud".
In a statement issued after Prof Lewis' departure, the APS said that "on the matter of global climate change, APS notes that virtually all reputable scientists agree... carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere due to human activity".
Tawanda Johnson, an APS spokeswoman, told The Sunday Telegraph that the society was "disappointed" by Prof Giaever's decision. It believed the criticisms were based on "misunderstandings" but would not "engage in a back-and-forth on Ivar's observations".
The APS says it that its climate change statement does not assert that "anthropogenic" (man-made) climate change is incontrovertible – but that the evidence of global warming is.
The society continues: "The graph of global temperature vs. time for the last 30 years shows just that. The statement also contains the following language: 'Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate.' That statement is based on basic principles of molecular physics and thermodynamics.
"Finally, the statement acknowledges uncertainties in the science: 'Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth's climate.'"

Works and Days


Why Does the Good Life End?

By Victor Davis Hanson

A look Back

People just don’t disappear. Look at Germany in 1946 or Athenians in 339 B.C. They continue, but their governments and cultures end. Aside from the dramatic military implosions of authoritarian or tribal societies — the destruction of Tenochtitlan, the end of Nazism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the annexation of tribal Gaul — what brings consensual states to an end, or at least an end to the good life?

The city-states could not stop 30,000 Macedonians in a way — when far poorer and 150 year earlier — they had stopped 300,000 Persians descending on many of the same routes. The French Republic of 1939 had more tanks and troops on the Rhine than the Third Reich that was busy overrunning Poland. A poorer Britain fought differently at el-Alamein than it does now over Libya. A British battleship was once a sign of national pride; today a destroyer represents a billion pounds stolen from social services.

Give me

Redistribution of wealth rather than emphasis on its creation is surely a symptom of aging societies. Whether at Byzantium during the Nika Riots or in bread and circuses Rome, when the public expects government to provide security rather than the individual to become autonomous through a growing economy, then there grows a collective lethargy. I think that is the message of Juvenal’s savage satires about both mobs and the idle rich. Fourth-century Athenian literature is characterized by forensic law suits, as citizens sought to sue each other, or to sue the state for sustenance, or to fight over inheritances.

The subtext of Petronius’s Satyricon is an affluent, childless, often underemployed citizenry seeking inheritances and lampooning the productive classes that produce enough excess for the wily to get by just fine without working. Somewhere around 1985 in California I noticed that my students were hoping for a state job first, a federal job second, a municipal job third — and a private one last. Around 1990, suddenly two sorts of commercials were aired everywhere: how to join a law suit by calling a law firm’s 1-800 number or how to get a free power chair, scooter, or some other device by calling the 1-800 number of
a health care company that would do the paper work for Social Security on your behalf.

Regulate, not create

Why is it more moral for a federal bureaucrat in a state-supplied SUV to shut down an offshore oil rig on grounds that it is too dangerous for the environment than for a private individual to risk his own capital to find some sort of new fuel to power his government’s SUV fleet? All affluent societies believe that they are just too rich not to be able to afford another regulation, just one more moralizing indulgence, yet again an added entitlement. But as we see now in postmodern America, idle 250,000 acres of farmland for a tiny fish, shut down an entire oilfield, put off a new natural gas find in worry over possible environmental alteration, add a cent to the sales tax, mandate yet another prescription drug entitlement not funded, or offer yet another in-state tuition discount to an illegal alien — and the costs finally equate to an implosion as we see in Greece or California. And as we know from past collapses, a new entitlement in a matter of minutes becomes an institutionalized right whose withdrawal causes far more anguish than its prior nonexistence. Justinian learned that when he sought to cut the civil service and almost lost his throne.

Them

Not that the elite are exempt. Western moral literature, from Horace to Thackeray, focuses on the vanity of the rich who think that a greedy heir won’t really inherit their hard-won or suspect riches, or that their always aging hips and knees will always so briskly power them up the monumental stairs of their colossal homes, or that a fifth sailboat or another 1000 acres will at last end the boredom. But the rub is not whether they are rich but whether they are idle, whether they send a message that affluence can make life better, rather than affluence is inevitably corrupting. In Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, the theme is not just imperial decadence and cruelty, but also the blind passions of the mob that the elite so cynically manipulate for their own useless privilege and nonsensical indulgence.

We are good and therefore can act badly

The outsourcing of private morality to the state is a particularly modern affliction, but equally as pernicious. We witness the startling paradox that today’s private society is crasser, less honest, and more uncouth even as its government’s official morality stresses gender, race, class, and green ethical superiority. But just because the state now thankfully mandates disabled parking spaces does not mean that we honor a crippled relative more than in the past, or that our children are more likely to write a note of thanks to a grandparent’s gift. I can surely see an erosion in the public expression of manners and morality even as I sense our government is now more “fair” and “equal” than ever before.

Just because the state will sue you for the appearance of sexual harassment does not mean that leaving your laptop in a college university carrel means it is less likely to be stolen than, say, a wallet in 1955. The frightening worry is that the two are connected: the more the state steps in to to assure that we are cosmically moral, the more we assume we can relax and therefore become concretely immoral. Detroit is a symptom of that transition from family to state definitions of morality. Go to Athens today, and one can read high-sounding praises of the all-encompassing welfare state, and see all around private machinations to get out of taxes and boasts about getting a public job that requires no work and earns lots of pay.

When poverty is defined as relative want rather than existential need, states decay and societies decline. In the fifth century, Athenians were content to be paid to go to the theater; by the fourth, they were paid also to vote — even as they hired mercenaries to fight and forgot who won at Salamis, and why. Flash mobbing did not hit bulk food stores. The looters organized on Facebook through laptops and cell phones, not through organizing during soup kitchens and bread lines. Random assaults were not because of elemental poverty, but anger at not having exactly what appears on TV.

Obesity, not malnutrition, is the affliction at Wal-Mart. In our strange culture, that someone drives an overpriced BMW apparently means that our own Toyotas don’t have air conditioners or stereos. But that John Edwards or John Kerry or Al Gore has a huge house doesn’t mean that mine is inadequate — or the tract homes that sprout in my community for new arrivals from Mexico are too small.

Of course, the elite have responsibility to use their largess wisely and not turn into the Kardashians. But that a fifth of one percent of the taxpayers are finding ways not to pay at the income tax rate on their large incomes does not hurt the republic as much as 50% of the population paying no income tax at all. The latter noble sorts do not bother us as much, but their noncompliance bothers the foundations of our society far more than that of the stingy, but minuscule, number of grasping rich.

Lala land

Unreality is an especially disturbing symptom. When Jimmy Hoffa threatens the non-unionists, one imagines that Detroit is building better, safer, more reliable cars at a better price and has for decades. When Barack Obama urges the Black Caucus to march for equality, and adopts the cadences and pose of a 1960 civil rights leader, one would think the right wing in Florida just picked Bull Connor, not Herman Cain, as their straw poll winner. When the third-generation, hip spokesman for La Raza talks about inequality, one would think she herself just crossed the border from Oaxaca, forced to flee a benevolent Mexico to work in the pits of an American Mordor.

Hope

We all know what will save us and what is destroying us. But the trick is to see how the two will collide. A new tax code, simple rates, few deductions, everybody pays something; new entitlement reform, less benefits, later retirement; a smaller government, a larger private sector; a different popular culture that honors character rather than excess — all that is not, and yet is, impossible to envision. It will only transpire when the cries of the self-interested anguished are ignored. My expectation is that soon that the affluent of suddenly rich China and India will come down with the Western disease that we see endemically in Europe and among our own, even as America snaps out of it, and recommits itself to self-reliance and wealth creation. But when I look at 18th-century Venice, or 1950s Britain, or France in 1935, or 3rd-century Athens, or 5th-century AD Rome, I am worried. I don’t think we wish to live in a quiet but collapsed Greece in the age of Plutarch, forever dreaming about a far off age of past accomplishment.