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What Do Our Liberal Friends Want?
In The New Criterion, writer Lionel Shriver asks “What do progressives really want?” And 4,000 words later she decides that they certainly don’t want to be held responsible for being wrong. They just want to be “against things”. But imagine a
United States of America with no police, no prisons, and no national borders, where everything is free yet where anyone who might credibly produce all the free stuff is robbed, vilified, and impoverished[.]
Yeah. Imagine
rampant violence and looting, third-world cities overrun with criminals and transactional immigrants ransacking whatever they can get their hands on, a collapsed economy and thus the end of niceties like the internet, running water, electricity, supermarkets, and functional governments[.]
Not quite what they had in mind. Progressives are happiest when protesting and activisming. Actual “Cuba and Venezuela” ain’t that much fun. Shriver thinks that progressives want to fail. Then they can complain endlessly about injustice without ever being responsible for anything that might smell of injustice.
Well, you know me. I think that this mixes things up. To make things clear you have to go full Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. We start with politics:
The political is the distinction between friend and enemy.
Actually, starting yesterday, I say that Schmitt is wrong. What do our liberal friends say? In their Allyism notion they say they are the allies of the oppressed in their fight against the oppressors. So, Carl, let’s revise your maxim. In war you have enemies and you have allies. So,
The political is the distinction between ally and enemy.
Now the point about Schmitt’s concept of the political is that other humans on this Earth are allies or enemies. Doesn’t make them good or evil. After all, we good Yanks allied with the evil Soviets to beat Literally Hitler. The enemy is the enemy, and any ally you can scrounge up is your ally. For now.
The problem with our liberal friends is that they want to mix politics with morality, where
The moral is the distinction between good and evil.
For instance, my beloved Rep. Jayapal is running X posts just about every hour on the hour advocating for Medicare for All. Here’s one of her posts.
The American people are sick and tired of being denied medical care, or avoiding it altogether because it costs an arm and a leg. It’s time for Medicare for All.
No doubt universal health care is a Good Thing. But is it a Good Thing when you force other people to pay for your health care? Our Democratic friends think it is a Good Thing to tax billionaires to pay for their programs. Is it? Here’s my take.
I believe it would be a Good Thing if billionaires got together and created non-profits all over the world to provide health care for the poor. But not if they are forced to do it.
To put it in Schmittian terms, I believe that good and evil are part of the culture of a community that celebrates people that do good things, and shames people that do evil things. But when you “do good” with tax monies obtained by force then you are dealing with taking money from your Enemy and giving it to your Ally.
Get it? That’s why there is so much fraud in government programs. The program is sold on the idea of doing a Good Thing. But it ends up, all too often, just being a handout to your supporters, your “allies.”
And, by the way, the supporters are always demanding more. That’s what the California Wealth Tax, advocated by the SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW). Because those union member healthcare workers need more money.
What do liberals want? It doesn’t matter. All we know is that sooner or later liberals will run out of other peoples’ money.
Never mind about what liberals want. The question is what we want, and what we want is a world where liberals don’t have the power to stick their hands in your wallet.
How do we get out of here? How do we reduce liberal power down to a dull roar?
I am trying to think of something that echoes the rise of cities in the late Middle Ages. See, back then the kings needed more money for their wars. They got more money from the cities in return for giving the cities the right to run their own affairs.
In other words, a pure power play.
Now one thing I have noticed in the last couple of years is that the tech lords aren’t too pleased with the Democrats. The things they want to do — in particular AI — are hindered by all the things that Democrats do: regulating, taxing, delaying, moralizing, woking.
I wonder if the tech lords could do a deal. You want our money? Then here are our demands, or we are outta here. For instance, suppose that Tesla and SpaceX were registered in Singapore. I just checked and Singapore government spending is a little under 11 percent of GDP.
Could it work?
I don’t know, but I am sure it is worth a try.
| Fri, 23 Oct 2026 21:21:32 GMT |
A Science Lesson for DSA Kiddies
Christopher Watts has read through the DSA manifesto — “Workers Deserve More!” — so you and I don’t have to. Workers? When did the left care about the workers after class politics was replaced by race and feminist and LGBTQ politics?
The manifesto calls for “popular control of resources and production”, also known as government control. And “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation ‘aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.’” Yes, honey, but getting all those things on the table are incredibly complex tasks, the sort of tasks that, in the last two hundred years, we have learned the hard way, cannot be run by politicians, activists, and bureaucrats.
In fact the record is clear. If you hand over “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation” to government, and they dream up Five Year Plans and Great Leap Forwards, people will starve. By the millions.
But first, let us talk about “capital accumulation.” Lots of people talk as if capital is something that “accumulates,” like gold bars in a secure cellar. That is rubbish. The capital of a business is the present value of the future income. The capital value of Tesla — that closed today at $374 per share — is the present value of its future income from building and selling cars and leasing FSDs.
So where does “accumulation” come from? It comes from Marx. Lefty John D. Judis:
For Marx, the central engine of growth is the accumulation of capital, which he regards as equivalent to the accumulation of labor time…
The notion is based on the “labor theory of value” created by classical economists like Adam Smith:
According to the labor theory of value… the exchange value of consumer goods and of capital goods (plant, equipment, raw materials) is measured in the labor time it takes to produce them.
Except the labor theory of value and the exchange theory of value were exploded in the marginal revolution of 1870. The market is the market. Prices are what people actually pay or collect when they buy or sell. That is all. When people buy or sell Tesla stock they are combining all their knowledge about the company, from Elon Musk to the sales of Tesla EVs, down to the availability of charging stations. It’s all a guess. And tomorrow the price will be different.
It’s a curious thing. Just after Marx published Das Kapital in 1866 came the marginal revolution in 1870 that blew his economics to smithereens. Only lefties still haven’t got the message.
Next up was the first genuine experiment in national socialism in Bolshevik Russia after the revolution of 1917. Three years later in 1920 came “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” by Ludwig von Mises. He argued that socialism was impossible because it could not compute prices. In 1921 Lenin eased up on the socialism with his New Economic Policy. But Stalin doubled down and gave us Five Year Plans and the Ukraine Famine in the 1930s. When the windows were opened up in 1991 it was clear that Soviet Russia was a basket case.
Never mind. All the good people in the 1940s knew that “planning” was the wave of the future. But in 1944 came F.A. Hayek. He published “The Use of Knowledge in Society” and the book The Road to Serfdom and argued that a planned economy was impossible because the planners and bureaucrats and administrators could not have enough knowledge to plan everything down to the last detail. Hayek’s advice was followed in Germany by Ludwig Erhard and Germany experienced 7 percent annual growth through the 1950s; they called it a Wirtschaftwunder. Britain went in for planning and experienced 0 to 3 percent growth in the 1950s.
Still, all the good people knew that those capitalists and corporations needed to be properly restrained by economic regulation. But in 1971 George Stigler and “The Theory of Economic Regulation” and the notion of “regulatory capture”. That means that
As a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its own benefit rather than for the general public.
In the 1980s, far-right governments like Reagan in the US and Thatcher in Britain loosed the chains of regulation and their economies boomed.
Has anyone ever taught the DSA kiddies about this basic knowledge? High schools? Universities? It’s the fundamental knowledge that anyone needs to live and act in the market economy. If you don’t get taught this in school, or don’t read about it in your young adulthood, you are clueless about how to live in the modern world.
| Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:04:36 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
For men, the cultural is the distinction between ok and not-ok.
Soft power is gifting friends; hard power is fighting enemies.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Against Government Education
