Reality to us: Oh, No, No! Don’t Go There!
(c) Can Stock Photo / ngaga35

Usually when we do not recognize some aspect of the nature of Reality, Reality reminds us — often in very unpleasant ways — that it is not to be ignored. Right now, it seems to be shouting at us!  

Departures from Reality

Of course, this may not exactly be news to you, as the general opinion of whether the nation is on the right track or the wrong track has been massively on the wrong track side for a very long time now.

The fact public opinion has been so sour for such a long time now (in fact since before President Obama’s eight years of administration) should be telling us there is something very, very wrong with our ruling ideology. Now I have my opinion about what that something wrong is, and you have your opinion. Progressives have their opinion, and conservatives have theirs. The trick will be to winkle out from all those opinions just what the truth is.

What started me musing about this question was a post by that inestimable lady, Peggy Noonan, in the Wall Street Journal, Democracy’s Majesty and 2016’s Indignity. In it she writes:

The country isn’t just split but unhappy with its choices and pessimistic as to its political future. Twenty sixteen was both the result of and a reckoning with what hasn’t worked the past 15 years. We’ll have to spend the next few years trying to get things in order and figure out how to create a better political reality. … How did we get here? How did we get two candidates so widely disliked and disrespected?

She then went on with the observation that Donald Trump did not break the Republican Party, because it was already broken. Why was that so? If any social force broke the Republican Party, it was the Tea Party movement, angry with uncontrolled government spending and the authoritarian grasp of the federal government on their personal lives. Nothing epitomized both these factors more than the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, or as many have taken to calling it, the Unaffordable Care Act. It was Tea Party votes (and the votes of those who sympathized with the Tea Party) that gave the Republicans their mid-term victories in 2010 and 2014. It has to be admitted that in many cases those votes were ambivalent, but where else did the Tea Party have to go? In return they expected, among other goals, the repeal of Obamacare.

However, the GOP was not able to deliver, not even when they controlled both houses of Congress. In addition, Republican congressional leaders like Speaker of the House John Boehner were very leery of initiating a government shutdown to force moderation in federal government spending. Rather than refusing an authorization to increase the national debt, the Republicans agreed to a compromise with Obama to automatically cut spending in future outlays by a prescribed formula. The result was the Budget Control Act of 2011. So-called “sequestration” of budget funds began in 2013. Tea Partiers would have preferred to see the government shut down in an effort to defund Obamacare. Feeling they had been betrayed by the GOP congressional leadership, those in grass-roots Tea Party organizations initiated a civil war against the party establishment, leading ultimately to the candidacy of Donald J. Trump for president.

How realistic were the Tea Party expectations? The Republican House passed acts to fully repeal Obamacare approximately 50 times, but without the votes to overcome Democratic filibustering in the Senate, or to overturn presidential vetoes, there was absolutely no possibility for congressional Republicans to achieve more. How could those in the multifarious Tea Party organizations have expected more? Yet, the open rebellion by many in the Republican electorate has led to a populist presidential candidate who would have had no chance against a more appetizing opponent than Hillary Clinton. The election of a Jeb Bush and the Republican retention of Congress would probably have given the Tea Party everything they wanted.

Yet, it is not just the Tea Party who have left Reality behind. As Peggy Noonan described in her WSJ essay, Hillary Clinton is par excellence the presidential candidate of the status quo. She notes the Democratic Party

… is now kept together by one central organizing principle: the brute acquisition of power, and holding on to that power no matter what. The worst members of the party appear to care almost nothing about what that power is used for, how it will be wielded to achieve higher purposes. They’re just making a living. They’re just on a team. It is Madison’s fear of the destructive effects of “faction” taken to the nth degree. You see this in the hacked emails of John Podesta. The spirit of the emails I’ve seen is of back-scratching, networking, favor pleading.

In the need to maintain power, the Democratic Party hacks seem to have forgotten all about Reality, and Reality is the wrong chick to jilt! I have often wondered why progressives never seem to see the writing on the wall condemning their favorite policies. Are corporations not investing enough to keep our economy growing? Clearly, we must tax them even more! Does it look like in the next one to two decades federal entitlement expenditures plus payments of interest on the national debt will absorb every single penny of government revenues? Obviously, the government should spend even more to stimulate the economy! Private corporations are not behaving as government regulators would prefer? Indisputably, government must control and micromanage businesses with even more regulations! 

The evident fact that progressives are reacting to the failure of their policies by doubling down on them brings to mind a quotation from Benjamin Franklin: “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”

What Is Reality Really Trying to Tell Us?

Unfortunately,  such flights from Reality do not seem to be limited entirely to the United States, as both Western Europe and Japan, as well as many other countries are in that race as well. And it is not just economic problems involved, as we can see in the growing “Ferguson Effect”, and in increasing racial tensions.

At this point I will tell you my opinion about what Reality is really trying to tell us with all these phenomena. Then, should you choose, you can share your opinion with all of us on what you think those lessons should be by commenting below.

I really never grow tired of trying to make the point that phenomena involving human beings (outside of organized warfare) are mostly between individuals and private sector groups of individuals. Individuals such as a businessman selling something and a consumer buying that something. Groups like companies and churches. The point I am trying to make here is the interactions that really matter in the stability of society, economic or otherwise, are local in the sense that they are generally between individuals or relatively small groups of individuals. Governments can never maintain a healthy economy by globally acting on the entire economy, because the balances that really determine that health are innumerable and between individuals and groups of individuals. This kind of argument can easily be extended to many other kinds of social interactions, such as those determining race relations, or the education and intellectual attainments of our people.

So why is Reality now frowning on us? The ruling political, economic, and intellectual elites of North America and Europe have always felt they knew better how social problems of any kind can be solved, much better than the great unwashed, relatively much less educated common folk. They have felt it their noblesse oblige to look after the common folk, and guarantee their welfare through the state and the coercive power of law.

After all, human reason has conquered so many other truly formidable intellectual problems, why should it not solve all important social problems at the level of the nation-state, or even better at the level of the United Nations? The historical record of astounding human intellectual accomplishments has seduced progressives and the dirigiste of the world into thinking they could assure the general welfare by technocratic regulation.

If you have read many of my essays, you probably recognize my description of human systems as a very large number of interacting components (i.e. individuals) acting mostly locally between individuals. This is the description of a particular kind of chaotic system. In fact most of a country’s human systems, including the economy, are chaotic in exactly the same sense as the planetary weather system: they are systems with a truly humongous number of degrees of freedom that interact mostly between pairs of the components.

The argument that Reality has with us is that attempting to perturb such a system globally generally has the effect of disturbing all the microbalances at the local level that determines the overall balance of the system. In terms of an economic system, an economically global government perturbation meant to stimulate economic growth most probably will unbalance innumerable local supply-demand balances, causing either economically wasteful surpluses or shortages of goods and services. Do that a little and a government achieves economic stagnation. (Aficionados of Keynesian Secular Stagnation, take note!) Do it a little more and the economy goes into recession. Do it a lot and the economy will dive into the abyss of depression.

Does this imply that government should do absolutely nothing; or more clearly, would we all live better in an anarchy? Having erected that straw man, allow me to knock it down. The free-markets I advocate would not last long in a state of anarchy. With absolutely no law, there would be no enforcement of contracts, without which there could no exchange of goods and services. With no agreed-upon traffic laws, there would be a lot of wasteful and painful collisions. There are a few other services of the state absolutely essential for a healthy economic system, such as management of the money supply and defense against external military threats. Privatizing the armed services would seem a dangerous thing to do, although there have been some interesting proposals for privatizing the monetary system. However, beyond these limited functions, and perhaps a few others, government should limit its interference with the economy. Most particularly, beyond demanding taxes to support its limited functions, government should refrain from allocating goods and services for different uses. Every time a government has tried to do that on a large scale, the results have never been happy. (See the histories of the Soviet Union and Communist China.)

If your ideology gives you a different view of reality, please explain it in a comment below for everyone to consider. The one certain thing we know is that government activity is currently making human problems worse, not better.

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