I just remembered Cofnas. He is without question a hostile. He is outraged that Trump and MAGA might be getting ideas of their own; we are supposed to be knuckle-draggers incapable of taking back the wheel of the ship. How dare we try!
The cabal behind Trump is whom Cofnas is waving to; they seek to lever Trump in one direction, while I suspect Trump is trying to lever them back towards a different outcome.
Aristotle, and the entire philosophical tradition after him, argued for ethics to focus on virtue - chasing the common good(s). However, the common good includes many discrete values that exist in real life, and are therefore in tension with each other - we cannot all be the best scholars and best friends and best athletes. Therefore, there is no perfect abstract ideology that can govern our lives.
Ideologies can only be built by people who take one value and make it the measure of all. Doing so causes us to lose touch with all the other real goods that exist in tension with it. To be virtuous, we must recognise the whole commmon good.
I see this vice as being behind the people who look at one good idea (GDP/capita) and blow it up into an entire system that ignores real goods (eg, housing affordability for the average worker). I am not arguing for or against specific policies, but think this can be safely said: Politics must put aside the ideologies and chase after the common good.
GDP as a metric is worse than useless. It doesn't differentiate between extractive and productice economic activity. As a bit of edifying hyperbole, we could have an economy entirely made up of bank overdraft fees and these idiots would claim it is a stronger economy than a nation that produces real, required goods but with a lower overall GDP.
The example is hyperbolic but not by as much as you might think.
GDP is a great example of their attempt to foist their self-delusion on the masses. In addition to being gamed by "hedonic adjustment" includes government spending, so it should be at least better termed "Gross Domestic Spending". If you stripped out gov't spending it would indicate how much worse things really are than the "experts" want us to believe, vs. our lying eyes.
These people are just smart enough to get themselves a sinecure, but not smart enough to realize lying, *especially to yourself*, eventually doesn't benefit you. In fact, if you do it long enough, it usually gets you killed.
There's a reason why the ancients held truthfulness as a virtue. Ignore them at your peril.
In the past, the elites studied the philosophies of the ancients. Now they are only exposed to the philosophies of other elites who believe themselves to be smarter than the philosophers of antiquity.
"Ideologies can only be built by people who take one value and make it the measure of all."
This is the fatal flaw of economics. They have no understanding of value except as a singular, linear vaue: money. Actually, value is a high-dimensional quantity, you can value anything in units of any other currency, good or security, making a huge matrix whose entries change constantly with time. Not only that, but each economic entity has its own valuation matrix series, with logarithmically-weighted personal utilities. Almost all of these valuations are virtual, only occasionally manifesting as real exchanges of value, so estimates of them must largely be based on statistical inference. Still, for most economic, moral and aestheic purposes deciding correctly between alternatives requres reducing that to a single-number valuation for each of the alternatives that can all be compared with each other. This can never be perfect, but it can often be done well enough.
For replacing GDP-per capita, I suggest a metric that takes into account the sum over all individuals' logarithms of real consumption plus increase in log-wealth, with the inflation adjustment calculated to most highly weight the goods such as housing with the lowest elasticities of demand (all as as inferred from card payment processor and bank data). This sort of metric is the only kind that acknowledges what we have known about value since Daniel Bernoulli solved the St. Petersburg paradox over 300 years ago, that value is the logarithm of money, or equivalently over time, the long-term rate of return. It also happens to be a radically egalitarian measure of value, valuing a million people with a extra thusand bucks each many times more than one billionaire being wiped out.
Thank you for sharing! I know very little about econometrics so I will take you at your word that this logarithm would be a better metric than GDP/capita. But, of course, as you say "value is a high-dimensional quantity" (or, as I would say, "the common good is made up of incommensurable basic values") - even a better economic metric cannot serve as an ultimate ideology.
Why would you attack Aristotle when you haven't even the slightest acquaintance with his thought?
The virtues that he analyses are not incommensurable. What you name are not virtues, but callings. A man can lead a virtuous life by following his calling honestly and diligently, to provide for his family, and so on.
Here is a handy little table that will give you the rudiments of Aristotle's classification of the virtues, and the vices that either shrink from them, or take them to excess:
It would have taken you less time to glance over this than it did to write your comment.
The so-called Enlightenment was, at root, a series of anyone-but-Aristotle ideologies. It hasn't worked out well. It provides a common thread that unites 18th-century libertines, austere 19th-century atheists and 20th-century Marxist revolutionaries.
I see from your writings elsewhere that you reject something you call "Tradition". Is it a requirement of your belief system that this rejection should be made on the basis of ignorance - so as to keep your mind pristine? Does that not seem cultish?
Hello, friend - I am not attacking Aristotle. The common good *is* made up of incommensurable values. It therefore cannot be summed up into one "rule" or one "good," as ideologues attempt to do. I would refer you to Professor Finnis's argument in favour of the incommensurability of the goods in Natural Law & Natural Rights (IV.4-V.3). Aristotelian virtue acknowledges each of these goods and pursues them. This is what I mean by my second and third sentence.
I would further like to clarify that I do not reject tradition. My article, "Why I am not a traditionalist," would better be seen as an attempt to save tradition from traditionalists. What I attack is a traditionalism that defines tradition as stasis, which is an ideology that cannot stay alive, for living requires movement and growth (in the case of tradition, we would call this organic development).
In "The Abolition of Man," CS Lewis very well describes the organic development that I would like to embody: "Those who understand the spirit of the Tao and who have been led by that spirit can modify it in directions which that spirit itself demands ... This is why Aristotle said that only those who have been well brought up can usefully study ethics: to the corrupted man, the man who stands outside the Tao, the very starting point of this science is invisible." (This is ca. 2/3 of the way through the second chapter.)
I respect both economic productivity and tradition. However, both are a means, rather than an end (the first to values like life, and play and knowledge, which can only occur when we have sufficient resources for leisure, and the second to values like knowledge and friendship, as well as to practical reasonableness itself - I use here the list of basic values proposed by Professor Finnis). Aristotle's spoudaios maintains respect for each of the incommensurable values that makes up the common good. The virtuous man may not turn either economic productivity or tradition into ultimate ideologies all of their own.
That’s apparently their actual, unironic worldview. Their political program amounts to convincing the leftists who surround them to take them seriously enough to create some kind of regime where they’re regarded as genetic supermen because they’re good at data processing.
They also apparently can't comprehend the difference it can make if you're earning $10 an hour in a part-time service job vs. $15 an hour full-time plus benefits manufacturing job.
Of course, they don't realize that's most of the US.
The Librarian leaves me slackjawed yet again. I hadn't known. Do you suppose that Catturd's parents could have imagined the lustrousness their son's success would add to the family?
yasss! King slay! Catturd is the f*cking worst. All these dumb homlieys and boomerisms. The his naive and child-like takes on current events combined with his popularity is the most damning indictment of the boomers abyssal levels of discernment and wisdom.
I'm a Boomer, and I don't hold it against you. It's my contention that "The Boomers" are a phantom generation, anyway. I'm an early Boomer, and can talk to people from The Silent Generation ( most of whom are very silent these days, indeed ) much more easily than I can talk to late Boomers, let alone, GenXers.
Generationalism is as bad and as stupid as racism. It presupposes that something external to the person, chronology in the case of generationalism, race in the case of racism, determines the totality of a person.
When I was a child in the segregated South, adult racists would say to me about blacks, "They're all the same, Robert." Thank God, there were enough whites who thought that was crap.
But you think that because I am a Boomer, I must be like all other Boomers, and of course, that's always bad, right? Pay attention, dumbbell:
45,000 Boomers were killed in Vietnam. I don't know the statistics, but my hunch is that most were volunteers, not draftees. Draftees who wanted a way out usually succeeded in finding it. How does your generation match up in terms of skilled, healthy young people who volunteered to join the military.
But the Boomers all got the economic prize!
Except the millions who spent their retirement kitties on raising the grandchildren whom their Genx and Millennial children were too irresponsible to raise.
Except the millions who lost their pensions and other retirement money in the 2008 economic collapse.
Except the millions who never chased money to start with, because other kinds of work appealed to them more.
Except the millions of disabled people in every generation, of whom I am one.
You've known rotten Boomers? So have I. My first cousin is a sociopath, but he would have been a sociopath in any generation. Another first cousin, who died in the Covid epidemic, was as dedicated a husband and father as anyone I've ever known. had good parents, but I knew kids who had rotten parents. One girl's mother shot one of the girl's sisters, not fatally, thank God. Yes, that was a Greatest Generation mother.
I knew of a Greatest Generation man who nearly beat his first wife, a friend of my mother's, to death. I could tell you stories of alcoholism and of hired murder in The Greatest Generation adults I knew personally of.
And I could tell you about how alien "Boomer sensibilities" are to me, and always have been, but I will leave you to your anonymous dullardliness.
I quite enjoyed this essay, and don't see much to disagree with. Though this:
"Cofnas thinks tariffs have tanked the economy. They haven't."
Well, it's too early to tell, isn't it? And I think he'll be proven right on that one.
As far as I'm concerned, the best take on the matter was given by Malcom Kyeyune (here, for example: https://unherd.com/2025/04/trumps-gorbachev-moment/). Trump is the American Gorbachev. The system was (in the Soviet case) or is (in the American case) profoundly sclerotic, it was/is absolutely NOT sustainable, and ordinary people were/are deeply cynical about it, for excellent reason. And then Gorbachev brought it all crashing down, and Trump is about to do the same thing. Now here's the thing: while the likes of Jordan Peterson may worship Gorbachev (to the point of naming their kids after him), the man is utterly despised in Russia, and not because ordinary Russians would like to bring back Marxism-Leninism. No. It's because their standard of living took a nosedive in the wake of Perestroika and the subsequent Soviet collapse. Life got far more dangerous (due to crime, for example), and in fact, male life expectancy tanked. I fully expect something similar to happen to the United States.
None of which is to say that the "elite human capital" (gawd...) knows what it's talking about. It quite obviously doesn't. They are the old nomenklatura. But taking lessons from Deng Xiaoping might have been a good idea. Instead, Trump is imitating Gorbachev. Not that I think that the copying is conscious or deliberate. Nah. It's simply a matter of every complex problem having a solution that's simple, obvious, and utterly wrong. And like Mr. Gorbachev before him, Mr. Trump is going for just that solution.
(BTW, that photo on the bottom is hilarious. "Elite human capital," you say? So were the Habsburgs.)
The tariff is as much a negotiating tactic as a settled policy. Trump and his people realize- correctly- that the current system of debt and deficit is unsustainable, and that major changes need to be made. The fact that he’s proceeding so boldly gives me confidence that he understands the full scope of the problem.
And right here is where the cart goes off the rails. The massive tax cut for the wealthy? You’ve been watching MSNBC ( is it still in business) again. Obviously. And in the same breath,mentioning the federal income tax being dropped. So every middle class tax payer gets a 17 percent wage bump. And that’s a tax cut for the wealthy. Do you realize how utterly incongruous that is?
It's true, but that's the point. Income tax is the only tax we have that affects the rich more than everyone else, so shifting to tariffs either increases how much the middle class pays or blows up the debt.
Someone has to pay for the government and deficit. Income tax is the only way wealthy people pay more than everyone else. The more you shift to sales tax or tariffs instead of income tax, the less the wealthy have to pay relative to everyone else.
Your entire premise in this piece is some whiny bullshit. There would be no period in history where one couldn't look back over the last however many decades and say 'wow, the smarty pants aren't as smart as they think they are!'
The fact of the matter is that much of the country lost its mind due to social media. Too many people became culture war morons. That includes you, Cofnas, Musk, and millions and millions of others.
You voted for a fucking retard because of culture war bullshit and I would gladly wager you a large sum of money with regards to how the tariffs shake out. However, I suspect your belief in Daddy Trump is such that all of your opinions are unfalsifiable and you'd refuse to actually make any type of verifiably wrong/right prediction. Because you're a pussy. And an idiot.
So why do the tariffs other countries have imposed over the same decades you tell us to review NOT triggered said trade war? Why did the tariffs that the US have PRIOR to 1913 NOT trigger trade wars but rhe poster child for trade wars that you cling to as the primary example did. Can you even explain that, or are you in just in a different cult?
Speaking for myself, I voted for Trump because he is pro-America and understands that the globalists (BOE, ECB, Euro Parliament, Davos and neocons; AKA the blob) have been undermining the financial stability of the U.S. and pillaging the wealth of the U.S. for decades. The blob has been doing this since the early 1990s and the BOE since Cornwallis surrendered to Washington.
Geopolitically, Trump was in kindergarten his first term. He learned from the school of hard knocks after the blob tried a fake Russia collusion, two impeachments, multiple lawfare attacks and two assassination attempts.
He now has a PhD. in geopolitics and he is determined to protect every American from the EU Digital Services Act, cut-off the welfare to the UK and EU members, get out of NATO and eventually the Middle East quagmire. He’s forming a tri-polar partnership with the two super-powers with the nuclear ability to blow up the world, Russia and China. The U.S. is no longer going to fund and send our soldiers to fight Europe’s wars or Israel’s wars.
The UK, Canada and EU threw everything they had the U.S. markets since Trump announced Liberation Day for the U.S. on April 2, 2025. They drove down stocks, bonds, gold and silver. It failed. And it also flushed out all the usual suspects who have been manipulating our markets for decades.
When Trump announced the market was a buy on the morning of April 9, 2025, it also flushed out the American politicians who were short the market—Schiff, Schumer, Warren et al. Trump then increased tariffs on China, and started negotiating with the 70 countries willing to deal and imposed 10% tariffs on most of the countries. Huge win.
As Big Tech stocks took it on the chin the next three trading days, in the last hour of trading on Friday the tech stocks mysteriously popped up a bit. The icing on the cake is that after the markets closed on Friday, Trump announced a pause on tariffs for tech, chips, etc. For the first time in 32 years, a president told the manipulators that two can play at this game, I have much more financial power than you, and have fun covering your tech shorts on Monday morning when the market opens.
Trump has already won the tariff war, LIBOR is dead as of 3/31/2025, SOFR is under the control of the Federal Reserve, and thus the U.S. has control over the U.S. Treasury yield curve and which banks get favored SOFR rates with or without collateral. (Hint: U.S. banks and Italian, Greek and Hungarian banks get nice rates, no collateral needed; the French, Germans and Brits? Meh.)
The EU and BOE have little liquidity and less collateral. Gold and silver rallied (good luck making deliveries, London!) and their currencies rallied, i.e., they were scrambling for pounds and euros thus making their exports prohibitively expensive. Ouch! The U.S. Treasury can re-finance the $8 trillion debt over the next few months that the traitor Yellen issued with short maturities. Mark Carney is going to strip the Canadian people of their wealth to try to save the BOE and ECB and the Davos globalists.
The Orange Julius Caesar is winning big for America, and you hate it. My guess is that in 2020 -2021 you wore a mask and followed the one-way directions in grocery store aisles. You probably wanted the unvaxxed to be denied medical treatment, maybe even to die. You were pissed when you found out that if you were not over 60 with three or more co-morbidities that you would live. Why do you hate good news? Why do you hate winning so much?
That's some righteous shit you got happening there! Keep your freak flag flying and...yeah...like...whatever man, umm...sheesh...how do I I get out of this nuthouse?
I think that one thing that makes economic theory difficult to apply over time and across cultures is that it treats humans as predictable economic units and doesn’t recognize religious, national, and cultural differences. If you artificially created the exact same economic scenario in Russia, America, China, and South Africa and you implemented the exact same solution in all four countries you would have four completely different outcomes. So an American Gorbachev doesn’t necessarily mean America follows the path that Russia did and an American Deng Xiaoping might have a very different outcome.
Maybe a totally materialistic bureaucracy which has eroded its (actual) human capital in the form of societal bonds of all kinds is just doomed?
I don’t know if you’re right, but I have a feeling you’re on to something.
Equally, I am not sure there is any way to fix the American Empire without taking a pickaxe to its main structures, given the immense inertia from the people inside them.
Final thought: some people stand by the “Golitsyn Thesis” which suggests that the KGB engineered a collapse of the USSR as it was plainly unsustainable, with a view to taking over. It is at least suggestive to consider Putin’s background, and the fact that Gorbachev was promoted by Andropov who had long ties to the KGB. But maybe it’s just nonsense: I really don’t know.
All the same, I get the sense that similar types are behind this Trump Administration. Security types. Again, maybe I am wrong.
Re: "Equally, I am not sure there is any way to fix the American Empire without taking a pickaxe to its main structures, given the immense inertia from the people inside them."
You may be right about this. Though the Chinese managed a relatively smooth transition, so there's that.
I rather doubt that anyone "engineered" Soviet collapse. Certainly not the KGB. It was just a matter of one thing leading to another. As for Putin himself: he was a nobody at the time. Oh, sure, he was a KGB agent, but he was nowhere near the top of the decision making apparatus. (Also, didn't he spend some time working as a cab driver during the 1990s? I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere.)
It's funny, but a lot of people on the right are now panicking that the woke will regain power once again, as Trump and his entourage are shown to be utterly incapable of ruling. This strikes me as vanishingly unlikely. But the time Trump/Vance are done, the world will be a very different place, and "woke" will be mostly forgotten. Imagine living in rental housing with a tyrannical landlord, only for someone to dynamite the whole building. Assuming you don't get killed in the explosion, you are not going to go begging to be lorded over by the petty tyrant once again, since he's so much better than the dynamite guy. No. You're going to be busy scrambling for new housing, now that you're homeless and all your stuff disappeared in the explosion.
Great reply. I don’t speak or read Russian and so my knowledge is inevitably really restricted. I found Vladislav Zubok’s book “Collapse” fascinating: it made the case that Gorbachev was basically a fantasist at the end of an empire.
Deng was vastly more able than Gorbachev, I think it’s fair to say, but equally China was at a very different stage in the evolution of materialism than either the West or the USSR. Perhaps that matters too?
I don’t see the woke people coming back either: they’re done, not least as they can only survive in a rich society which can afford to subsidise navel-gazing. I agree with you that that era is over.
The analogy of the exploding building is interesting! And perhaps apt.
Really my own strong feeling is that we face a spiritual rather than a material crisis. For me, the Trump victory offers a breathing space we would not have had if Harris had won and the Left had successfully closed out what remains of Christianity in the West. I don’t see much evidence that Trump will address the spiritual crisis in any meaningful way, but maybe we will have space and time to plant some seeds that can flourish after the storm…
The Gorbachev / Deng comparison is a good one, but we should keep in mind that if the bar is to keep a paradigm while improving its health Deng wins -- but the paradigm in each of those cases was totalitarianism.
If the purpose here is to instead keep the paradigm of free markets and representative democracy while improving *their* health, do these models fit as examples?
Gorbachev failed to liberalize the USSR because, in the end, it wasn't liberalizable. Right? Deng managed to commercialize the PRC because, in the end, consumption (and industry) is not incompatible with autocracy.
Dunno, just spinning thoughts, I like the dichotomy you put out there but I'm trying to see how to twist it to fit the U.S., how to use it without forgetting our point is not just to preserve for the sake of stability but for the sake of the good.
Great comment. The overwhelming theme I get on this sub thread is “we don’t know”… which is surely correct.
There definitely are major differences between the USA now and the USSR in 1989 (let alone China). However, there appear to be - though it is impossible to know how far this matters in practice - fragile structures in the American Empire which are currently under strain and which, if they break, could cause issues which resemble the kinds of chaos at the end of the USSR. To avoid that chaos, the Deng vs Gorbachev debate is relevant.
To preserve the good arguably (definitely?) requires a different set of skills and characteristics from either of those men. It is also worth asking how far the existing structures in the West hinder rather than help the preservation of the good. In other words, do we really want to preserve the system? Is the chaos which could, or will, result if it is not preserved such a serious threat that it should be preserved for all its faults? Can the system even be preserved given the long term effects it has had on the societies it controls? I don’t know, but they are interesting questions!
Very interesting questions, and a Walmart full of cans of worms.
There's the foundational question of whether these unhealthy and arguably immoral systems are naturally part of the American vision or if they are accretions or even intentional distortions or damage.
It wasn't that long ago that I would have argued these structures are mistakes or sins that have glommed on to the country and culture. Now I'm not so sure there hasn't long been a driving force that these structures grow from and all the classical liberal, virtue-seeking ideology has always been just a gloss that some of us took seriously but that folks on the right and left are now openly scoffing naive folks like me over.
I look at some of our foreign policy, for example, and being naturally aghast at things like the sudden abandoning of our allies on the ground in Afghanistan, I can't pretend I don't remember the people in Saigon hanging off the helicopters.
Economically, I don't think there's any doubt, really, that we have a house of cards going. Most people seem to be pretty dedicated to just keeping it together for their own lifetimes, which you can probably track back at least as far as Keynes "in the long run, we're all dead".
I live in a wildlands area, it is really amazing to see both the insanity of a wildfire and also the stages of regrowth and health that follow one. I'm inclined to want to pull out some of those cards and let it come down. But I have young adult children, and I'll confess that there is part of me that says, "O.k., but not now. Let them get on their feet first." And I think it's always that way for us. Make me good, but not just yet, eh? Thanks!
I'm not sure how it fits the US. (Mind you, I'm not American, though I did live in the States for a number of years, and so I do have some personal familiarity with it. But that was a while ago, and now I'm back in Europe.) What *might* happen is that the US collapses (possibly with a civil war), splits into several countries, and one or more successor states remains a liberal democracy (or rediscovers liberal democracy), with no empire (military bases all over the world, etc.) attached to it. But that's just one scenario.
The thing to remember is that, regardless of culture and history, there are material prerequisites to things. For instance, if you want to make aluminum foil, you need to have aluminum (to borrow an example that Malcom Kyeyune gave in some podcast that I listened to). That's completely non-negotiable. If you used to import aluminum, and then this suddenly becomes massively more expensive due to tariffs, a new aluminum mine does not just magically sprout next door to your factory. So, whatever your culture, you do have to address the logistics, and otherwise you suffer a catastrophic collapse.
I'd have seriously considered the breakup scenario as recently as ten years ago, but at this point I feel like the U.S. is like the old married couple that argues and whines all the time and will never divorce precisely because they love arguing and whining. ;)
Your second point reminds me a bit of the housing crisis with the last "recession", it's very expensive and risky to build apartment complexes and when people with their own interests (government but also finance) set up incentives to push banking to support home ownership those apartment complexes didn't get built. Then the crash comes, everyone's foreclosed on, and there's nowhere else to live. We're still dealing with the fallout, our local city has now built a gazillion complexes that obviously can't all fill up at once so I'm looking for the next round of failed developers and bank failures and half-completed cheap building blighting downtown; meanwhile we have the whole private equity buying funds full of homes thing going on, all sorts of market distortions.
I really don't see this being any different, to the degree I don't think the admin seriously thinks we'll be going back to manufacturing as it was. They know building a factory is risky and no one will do it based on a tariff that can be gone overnight. They know automation means no $40 manufacturing jobs. Talking like that is, at best, an oversimplification to get their "vibe" out there. So what are they really going for, and will it be good, and is it likely to happen or will it get sidetracked?
I'm inclined to think this is just a different step in the consolidation of corporate control. Your scarce aluminum is not an issue for Walmart, they'll get over it, they have ways to secure a supply. But the small manufacturer, he's out of luck. I think we're having a new wave of cutting down independent businesses (it happens with most admins, they come down and "fix" things and suddenly Amazon has an even greater share of the market). I think it's going to be side goals like this that we'll find to be the real end in mind. Guess we'll see!
Whether he intends to or not, any positives Trump brings will help refortify and restock a redoubt from which beleagured Heritage Americans can resupply their attempts at not just survival, but survival with the possiblity of rebirth. This is a bottleneck, and such bottlenecks have made us what we are; we are as good at regeneration as it gets.
Proof? Anywhere our people went, whether such stock were dregs from the slums, prisons, armies, or refugees, within 4 generations we carved out a high-level civilization.
Most pertinent is "I get the sense that similar types are behind this Trump Administration." Absolutely; what the Palantir Mafia cabal backing Trump are trying to engineer is a velvet glove covering a steel fist. I'm quite sure the KGB types felt the same need to wrest control of a sinking ship...sinking, frankly, because of their previous engineering.
And don't forget one of their favorite tactics is to roll out inflation numbers that are entirely cooked, as in the included chart, and declare that "things could be worse". They can no longer claim things couldn't be better - though they spent decades doing that with the same cooked numbers. Ignorance is not a defense for those claiming the mantle of elite human capital anymore than it is for the DEI-protected class this smug jerk focuses his ire upon.
Part of being dumb, in the sense I mean, is that you constantly get hit with information delivered with great confidence, but that experience tells you to doubt.
I don’t think that they do, at least not in some significant way, and I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on the grounds that they grasp the severity of the problem.
I mean, with tariffs alone, what's the strategy? Are they a bluff? Are they because other countries have tariffs? Are they because other countries do different things we don't like? Is it to bring manufacturing jobs back? I guess in some way if you give every possible answer one of them will be right but that's not very helpful.
To pick two random example, Trump spent weeks talking about how we were giving millions of dollars of condoms to hamas when it was actually all kinds of reproductive care to a different place in Africa also called Gaza. Or the non-existent epidemic of cat eating Haitians that ended up being a lady who lost and found her cat and a single video of a black guy in another town barbecuing something that nobody can prove wasn't a cat.
I take your point that experts have failed us in really dumb embarrassing ways that even "dumb" people could foresee and it bothers me a lot too. I just think we somehow picked someone even worse but we grade him on a curve for some reason I don't understand.
I have read elsewhere in here that there are two ways to look at trump; the first is literally but not seriously, and the second is seriously but not literally. It is an interesting take.
I'd say the evidence suggests otherwise, from Trump stiffing small business contractors in his casino days, scamming ordinary people trying to better themselves with his fake Trump Univesity, paying accountants so that he went multiple years paying no taxes at all while the rest of us do. It's hard for me to reconcile those things with him being on the side of ordinary people, at least economically.
I'll admit I don't fully understand what Elon's game is, but it seems like he's taking a backdoor to getting rid of government services people depend on like veterans affairs and social security by just breaking the systems that deliver them.
Also, they both want to cut funding to the IRS, even though doing so actually loses the government money by reducing enforcement and making it easier for the wealthy to cheat on thier taxes.
You don't understand what it means for any ruler to be on the side of person politically.
Also, the IRS is famous for not bothering with investigating the taxes of rich people anyways, because its' extremely complicated & the rich actually fight in court. A more effective solution would be to cut the Gordian knot of tax policy (intentional loopholes). Another baseline framing issue.
I missed what you said about the IRS. If it were better funded, it would be better able to go after the rich. At current levels, Every dollar of IRS funding generates 5 dollars of revenue.
If they really cared about the debt, they'd increase enforcement. Instead they're doing the opposite.
I 100 percent agree the best solution would be to get rid of every tax break. Doing so would only affect the 10 percent of people who don't take the standard deduction, and make things much less prone to abuse.
If Cofnas is representative of the smart people we have lost, good riddance, we are better for their departure.
If you are going to be the party of working people you must accept that your grassroots are going to have a far better understanding of their pocket book than of grand economic theory. This is good; grand economic theory has impoverished billions and murdered hundreds of millions. Policy is best made by people who understand the effect on working people.
There are a lot of people who are on the right for exactly one issue, which varies from person to person. The Elite Human Capital set are progressives who hate and fear minorities.
Ah, I see it a little differently. Most of the old aristocrats had no use for noblesse oblige, and were perfectly happy to exploit the great mass of peasants under their rule as fodder for work or war.
The ruling meritocrats of today might call them "human capital units," or some other scientific-sounding (but still dehumanizing) term for the masses of workaday slobs just trying to get by, but the sentiment is the same.
Anyway, that's my two-cents-worth. Meantime, all the best, my friend.
It’s interesting to me that the guy with a degree in Biology and Philosophy is trying to use some sort of credentialism to speak as an expert on sociology, economics, and political theory. I can guarantee his degree didn’t involve extensive study of any of those fields. If he studies them as a side hobby then he has no more qualifications in this area than anyone else does.
Interestingly enough there are a couple of areas in which the opinion of a philosopher of biology and/or a bioethicist would be very beneficial to our culture right now. If he wants to put those fancy credentials to work he should probably address the “science” of newly “resurrecting” extinct species like the sort of dire wolf they brought back. I would be genuinely interested to know what a philosopher of biology thinks about using such technology to “supplement” populations of endangered species like the red wolf. What a philosopher of biology says about cloning animals generally, about GMOs, about surrogacy both in people and animals would all genuinely be of interest to the public right now and are a use of his “actual” credentials.
He posits a stark dichotomy between people who agree with him and people who are stupid, and such an argument is readily undermined by pointing out that plenty of smart people disagree with him.
It's also undermined by any reader's awareness that he's reading a narcissistic assh*le, pardon the redundancy, and that the normal reaction of The Dumbs, who far outnumber The Smarts, to such people is to want to take after them with a 2x4.
We won't know how what Trump is doing or not doing will play out in the future. It may take a few years to understand and see the results or complications. But know this: Everything the politicians and the DC Swamp have done since the Civil War has moved us into the place were are at now. So it's not just Trump who has destroyed our faith in government.
Part of the problem is detangling problems created by policy from problems created by circumstances outside of anyone’s control. There are so many factors that go into a functioning (or dysfunctional) economy that the arguments are necessarily endless. However, in this case, Trump’s reforms are so comprehensive that- for better or worse- he’s launching the globe into some kind of new era.
Excellent point. He has surrounded himself with “smarties” this time, for sure, and had four years of college level courses between stints. Comprehensive it is.
Was chatting with my 18 year old the other day and trying to explain to her that it's only been during about half my adult lifetime that Americans have had so much interaction with the federal government. Sure, it might send you to war or might set up a program that helps or hurts you on the margins. But this thing where we of necessity think about it almost every day is the end point of, as you say, centuries of accelerating concentration of power. And it wasn't new in the 1860s, the question was just whether we would spin off into two centers of increasingly dense power or stick with one.
The "place where we are now" is dangling from a cliff by our fingers, or perhaps in already free fall. Silly to focus on being above everyone else in that circumstance. We need a parachute, if we can't get back up.
The weirdest thing, to me, is all these allegedly smart people being unable to understand, model or address what all the allegedly dumb people have been pointing out, culminating in the giant "fuck you" that was electing Trump twice.
I don't like to brag about this because it's a stupid thing to brag about, but I am certified Very Smart myself. I have no trouble understanding economic theories or most other theories (I get a bit lost in higher math and physics, probably for lack of prerequisites, but nothing an economist has ever thrown at me scared me).
My guess is that the reason I don't suffer from their blind spot is that I skipped through and then dropped out of college before they surgically extracted the part of my brain responsible for comparing theory to reality.
That and that I live down here on planet earth, having decided I wanted to work with my hands and my mind more than I wanted to make a lot of money, so I don't live in the Elite bubble. I'm directly exposed on a daily basis to the experiences of ordinary people in this supposed utopia.
And even though I can successfully navigate the endless gauntlet of traps the Very Smarts have laid out for the Dumb Uneducateds, rather than smugly laughing at them when they fall for it over and over again, I mostly feel shame at the thought of being associated with the trap makers (another reason for not mentioning my Big Smarts very often).
Anyway, I am sick and tired of hearing these people whine about how the dumbs are messing up all their brilliant plans. You *suck*, do you get that? You're terrible, selfish, short-sighted people and you're blowing it all up in your pursuit of hypothetical paradises. Just shut up and take your medicine.
I think we need more Letters From A Stupid American since our betters seem quite confounded.
There’s over 20,000 letters in the essay. How many more do you need?
Ah but you simply repeated a lot of them, especially the 'Es' & 'As' !
🤣
Flummoxed. They’re flummoxed.
I just remembered Cofnas. He is without question a hostile. He is outraged that Trump and MAGA might be getting ideas of their own; we are supposed to be knuckle-draggers incapable of taking back the wheel of the ship. How dare we try!
The cabal behind Trump is whom Cofnas is waving to; they seek to lever Trump in one direction, while I suspect Trump is trying to lever them back towards a different outcome.
After 2021, Doctors were 'baffled' by all the turbo c@ncers. Completely took them by surprise and now they must post-hoc expert answers to it.
Aristotle, and the entire philosophical tradition after him, argued for ethics to focus on virtue - chasing the common good(s). However, the common good includes many discrete values that exist in real life, and are therefore in tension with each other - we cannot all be the best scholars and best friends and best athletes. Therefore, there is no perfect abstract ideology that can govern our lives.
Ideologies can only be built by people who take one value and make it the measure of all. Doing so causes us to lose touch with all the other real goods that exist in tension with it. To be virtuous, we must recognise the whole commmon good.
I see this vice as being behind the people who look at one good idea (GDP/capita) and blow it up into an entire system that ignores real goods (eg, housing affordability for the average worker). I am not arguing for or against specific policies, but think this can be safely said: Politics must put aside the ideologies and chase after the common good.
Most moral errors are the result of taking some virtue from its normal bounds and elevating it above all the others.
A great line from Trading Places -
Priest: "Would you like a drink?"
Muslim: "No, it is against my religion."
Priest: "I always say religion is a fine thing when taken in moderation."
GDP as a metric is worse than useless. It doesn't differentiate between extractive and productice economic activity. As a bit of edifying hyperbole, we could have an economy entirely made up of bank overdraft fees and these idiots would claim it is a stronger economy than a nation that produces real, required goods but with a lower overall GDP.
The example is hyperbolic but not by as much as you might think.
Or when two economists sell each other their own excrement for $5000 and GDP goes up by $10000.
Not a fictional example. That's called a mainstream media talk show.
GDP only measures net transfers of money between parties. Governments like it because each transfer can be considered "income" and thus taxed.
GDP is a great example of their attempt to foist their self-delusion on the masses. In addition to being gamed by "hedonic adjustment" includes government spending, so it should be at least better termed "Gross Domestic Spending". If you stripped out gov't spending it would indicate how much worse things really are than the "experts" want us to believe, vs. our lying eyes.
These people are just smart enough to get themselves a sinecure, but not smart enough to realize lying, *especially to yourself*, eventually doesn't benefit you. In fact, if you do it long enough, it usually gets you killed.
There's a reason why the ancients held truthfulness as a virtue. Ignore them at your peril.
In the past, the elites studied the philosophies of the ancients. Now they are only exposed to the philosophies of other elites who believe themselves to be smarter than the philosophers of antiquity.
"Ideologies can only be built by people who take one value and make it the measure of all."
This is the fatal flaw of economics. They have no understanding of value except as a singular, linear vaue: money. Actually, value is a high-dimensional quantity, you can value anything in units of any other currency, good or security, making a huge matrix whose entries change constantly with time. Not only that, but each economic entity has its own valuation matrix series, with logarithmically-weighted personal utilities. Almost all of these valuations are virtual, only occasionally manifesting as real exchanges of value, so estimates of them must largely be based on statistical inference. Still, for most economic, moral and aestheic purposes deciding correctly between alternatives requres reducing that to a single-number valuation for each of the alternatives that can all be compared with each other. This can never be perfect, but it can often be done well enough.
For replacing GDP-per capita, I suggest a metric that takes into account the sum over all individuals' logarithms of real consumption plus increase in log-wealth, with the inflation adjustment calculated to most highly weight the goods such as housing with the lowest elasticities of demand (all as as inferred from card payment processor and bank data). This sort of metric is the only kind that acknowledges what we have known about value since Daniel Bernoulli solved the St. Petersburg paradox over 300 years ago, that value is the logarithm of money, or equivalently over time, the long-term rate of return. It also happens to be a radically egalitarian measure of value, valuing a million people with a extra thusand bucks each many times more than one billionaire being wiped out.
Thank you for sharing! I know very little about econometrics so I will take you at your word that this logarithm would be a better metric than GDP/capita. But, of course, as you say "value is a high-dimensional quantity" (or, as I would say, "the common good is made up of incommensurable basic values") - even a better economic metric cannot serve as an ultimate ideology.
Why would you attack Aristotle when you haven't even the slightest acquaintance with his thought?
The virtues that he analyses are not incommensurable. What you name are not virtues, but callings. A man can lead a virtuous life by following his calling honestly and diligently, to provide for his family, and so on.
Here is a handy little table that will give you the rudiments of Aristotle's classification of the virtues, and the vices that either shrink from them, or take them to excess:
https://philosophy.tamucc.edu/notes/aristotelian-virtues
It would have taken you less time to glance over this than it did to write your comment.
The so-called Enlightenment was, at root, a series of anyone-but-Aristotle ideologies. It hasn't worked out well. It provides a common thread that unites 18th-century libertines, austere 19th-century atheists and 20th-century Marxist revolutionaries.
I see from your writings elsewhere that you reject something you call "Tradition". Is it a requirement of your belief system that this rejection should be made on the basis of ignorance - so as to keep your mind pristine? Does that not seem cultish?
Hello, friend - I am not attacking Aristotle. The common good *is* made up of incommensurable values. It therefore cannot be summed up into one "rule" or one "good," as ideologues attempt to do. I would refer you to Professor Finnis's argument in favour of the incommensurability of the goods in Natural Law & Natural Rights (IV.4-V.3). Aristotelian virtue acknowledges each of these goods and pursues them. This is what I mean by my second and third sentence.
I would further like to clarify that I do not reject tradition. My article, "Why I am not a traditionalist," would better be seen as an attempt to save tradition from traditionalists. What I attack is a traditionalism that defines tradition as stasis, which is an ideology that cannot stay alive, for living requires movement and growth (in the case of tradition, we would call this organic development).
In "The Abolition of Man," CS Lewis very well describes the organic development that I would like to embody: "Those who understand the spirit of the Tao and who have been led by that spirit can modify it in directions which that spirit itself demands ... This is why Aristotle said that only those who have been well brought up can usefully study ethics: to the corrupted man, the man who stands outside the Tao, the very starting point of this science is invisible." (This is ca. 2/3 of the way through the second chapter.)
I respect both economic productivity and tradition. However, both are a means, rather than an end (the first to values like life, and play and knowledge, which can only occur when we have sufficient resources for leisure, and the second to values like knowledge and friendship, as well as to practical reasonableness itself - I use here the list of basic values proposed by Professor Finnis). Aristotle's spoudaios maintains respect for each of the incommensurable values that makes up the common good. The virtuous man may not turn either economic productivity or tradition into ultimate ideologies all of their own.
Bioleninism, but for frail rationalist nerds instead of gender goblins...
That’s apparently their actual, unironic worldview. Their political program amounts to convincing the leftists who surround them to take them seriously enough to create some kind of regime where they’re regarded as genetic supermen because they’re good at data processing.
They also apparently can't comprehend the difference it can make if you're earning $10 an hour in a part-time service job vs. $15 an hour full-time plus benefits manufacturing job.
Of course, they don't realize that's most of the US.
It’s part of a worldview that sees everything as a quantifiable abstraction.
But would they care if they realized that? People in the academy, who cannot be fired, don't care and can't be bothered to understand 'the poors'.
Brilliant. The only arrow remaining in the quiver of the managerial elite is the ad hominem attack.
Thank you
I have an inviolable rule of life, which is never to be impressed by people who use "Catturds" to describe their enemies.
In fairness, Catturd is an actual X personality.
The Librarian leaves me slackjawed yet again. I hadn't known. Do you suppose that Catturd's parents could have imagined the lustrousness their son's success would add to the family?
Come on--Catturd's cool. He's not as dumb as you all seem to think and he rescues abandoned dogs in his spare time.
yasss! King slay! Catturd is the f*cking worst. All these dumb homlieys and boomerisms. The his naive and child-like takes on current events combined with his popularity is the most damning indictment of the boomers abyssal levels of discernment and wisdom.
I'm a Boomer, and I don't hold it against you. It's my contention that "The Boomers" are a phantom generation, anyway. I'm an early Boomer, and can talk to people from The Silent Generation ( most of whom are very silent these days, indeed ) much more easily than I can talk to late Boomers, let alone, GenXers.
https://voxday.net/2024/11/17/boomers-boss-level-edition/
Generationalism is as bad and as stupid as racism. It presupposes that something external to the person, chronology in the case of generationalism, race in the case of racism, determines the totality of a person.
When I was a child in the segregated South, adult racists would say to me about blacks, "They're all the same, Robert." Thank God, there were enough whites who thought that was crap.
But you think that because I am a Boomer, I must be like all other Boomers, and of course, that's always bad, right? Pay attention, dumbbell:
45,000 Boomers were killed in Vietnam. I don't know the statistics, but my hunch is that most were volunteers, not draftees. Draftees who wanted a way out usually succeeded in finding it. How does your generation match up in terms of skilled, healthy young people who volunteered to join the military.
But the Boomers all got the economic prize!
Except the millions who spent their retirement kitties on raising the grandchildren whom their Genx and Millennial children were too irresponsible to raise.
Except the millions who lost their pensions and other retirement money in the 2008 economic collapse.
Except the millions who never chased money to start with, because other kinds of work appealed to them more.
Except the millions of disabled people in every generation, of whom I am one.
You've known rotten Boomers? So have I. My first cousin is a sociopath, but he would have been a sociopath in any generation. Another first cousin, who died in the Covid epidemic, was as dedicated a husband and father as anyone I've ever known. had good parents, but I knew kids who had rotten parents. One girl's mother shot one of the girl's sisters, not fatally, thank God. Yes, that was a Greatest Generation mother.
I knew of a Greatest Generation man who nearly beat his first wife, a friend of my mother's, to death. I could tell you stories of alcoholism and of hired murder in The Greatest Generation adults I knew personally of.
And I could tell you about how alien "Boomer sensibilities" are to me, and always have been, but I will leave you to your anonymous dullardliness.
I quite enjoyed this essay, and don't see much to disagree with. Though this:
"Cofnas thinks tariffs have tanked the economy. They haven't."
Well, it's too early to tell, isn't it? And I think he'll be proven right on that one.
As far as I'm concerned, the best take on the matter was given by Malcom Kyeyune (here, for example: https://unherd.com/2025/04/trumps-gorbachev-moment/). Trump is the American Gorbachev. The system was (in the Soviet case) or is (in the American case) profoundly sclerotic, it was/is absolutely NOT sustainable, and ordinary people were/are deeply cynical about it, for excellent reason. And then Gorbachev brought it all crashing down, and Trump is about to do the same thing. Now here's the thing: while the likes of Jordan Peterson may worship Gorbachev (to the point of naming their kids after him), the man is utterly despised in Russia, and not because ordinary Russians would like to bring back Marxism-Leninism. No. It's because their standard of living took a nosedive in the wake of Perestroika and the subsequent Soviet collapse. Life got far more dangerous (due to crime, for example), and in fact, male life expectancy tanked. I fully expect something similar to happen to the United States.
None of which is to say that the "elite human capital" (gawd...) knows what it's talking about. It quite obviously doesn't. They are the old nomenklatura. But taking lessons from Deng Xiaoping might have been a good idea. Instead, Trump is imitating Gorbachev. Not that I think that the copying is conscious or deliberate. Nah. It's simply a matter of every complex problem having a solution that's simple, obvious, and utterly wrong. And like Mr. Gorbachev before him, Mr. Trump is going for just that solution.
(BTW, that photo on the bottom is hilarious. "Elite human capital," you say? So were the Habsburgs.)
(Edited for spelling.)
The tariff is as much a negotiating tactic as a settled policy. Trump and his people realize- correctly- that the current system of debt and deficit is unsustainable, and that major changes need to be made. The fact that he’s proceeding so boldly gives me confidence that he understands the full scope of the problem.
I suspect you're wrong, but here's the thing: things are moving very fast. So, we'll get to find out reasonably soon, no need to wait 50 years.
If the debt is so important to them, why are they trying to pass a massive tax cut for the wealthy, and floating getting rid of income taxes entirely?
And right here is where the cart goes off the rails. The massive tax cut for the wealthy? You’ve been watching MSNBC ( is it still in business) again. Obviously. And in the same breath,mentioning the federal income tax being dropped. So every middle class tax payer gets a 17 percent wage bump. And that’s a tax cut for the wealthy. Do you realize how utterly incongruous that is?
Never watched MSNBC. Half the money from the Trump tax cuts go to the top 5%. Everyone else gets to fight over the rest.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/2025-budget-stakes-high-income-tax-cuts-price-hiking-tariffs-would-harm
Where are you getting 17 percent wage bump from?
The top 5% of earners pay more than half (57-66% depending on the source) of all income taxes so it’s logical they’d get half the tax cut.
It's true, but that's the point. Income tax is the only tax we have that affects the rich more than everyone else, so shifting to tariffs either increases how much the middle class pays or blows up the debt.
Someone has to pay for the government and deficit. Income tax is the only way wealthy people pay more than everyone else. The more you shift to sales tax or tariffs instead of income tax, the less the wealthy have to pay relative to everyone else.
Huh? You're a fucking moron.
You truly are a fucking idiot if you really believe this. Astonishingly dumb.
Your entire premise in this piece is some whiny bullshit. There would be no period in history where one couldn't look back over the last however many decades and say 'wow, the smarty pants aren't as smart as they think they are!'
The fact of the matter is that much of the country lost its mind due to social media. Too many people became culture war morons. That includes you, Cofnas, Musk, and millions and millions of others.
You voted for a fucking retard because of culture war bullshit and I would gladly wager you a large sum of money with regards to how the tariffs shake out. However, I suspect your belief in Daddy Trump is such that all of your opinions are unfalsifiable and you'd refuse to actually make any type of verifiably wrong/right prediction. Because you're a pussy. And an idiot.
Ma’am, I’m not sure what I said to get you this worked up, but maybe try some box breathing.
Chronic double poster. You hate to see it.
Maybe recommend hospice?
So why do the tariffs other countries have imposed over the same decades you tell us to review NOT triggered said trade war? Why did the tariffs that the US have PRIOR to 1913 NOT trigger trade wars but rhe poster child for trade wars that you cling to as the primary example did. Can you even explain that, or are you in just in a different cult?
I’ll take some action on the tariffs.
Speaking for myself, I voted for Trump because he is pro-America and understands that the globalists (BOE, ECB, Euro Parliament, Davos and neocons; AKA the blob) have been undermining the financial stability of the U.S. and pillaging the wealth of the U.S. for decades. The blob has been doing this since the early 1990s and the BOE since Cornwallis surrendered to Washington.
Geopolitically, Trump was in kindergarten his first term. He learned from the school of hard knocks after the blob tried a fake Russia collusion, two impeachments, multiple lawfare attacks and two assassination attempts.
He now has a PhD. in geopolitics and he is determined to protect every American from the EU Digital Services Act, cut-off the welfare to the UK and EU members, get out of NATO and eventually the Middle East quagmire. He’s forming a tri-polar partnership with the two super-powers with the nuclear ability to blow up the world, Russia and China. The U.S. is no longer going to fund and send our soldiers to fight Europe’s wars or Israel’s wars.
The UK, Canada and EU threw everything they had the U.S. markets since Trump announced Liberation Day for the U.S. on April 2, 2025. They drove down stocks, bonds, gold and silver. It failed. And it also flushed out all the usual suspects who have been manipulating our markets for decades.
When Trump announced the market was a buy on the morning of April 9, 2025, it also flushed out the American politicians who were short the market—Schiff, Schumer, Warren et al. Trump then increased tariffs on China, and started negotiating with the 70 countries willing to deal and imposed 10% tariffs on most of the countries. Huge win.
As Big Tech stocks took it on the chin the next three trading days, in the last hour of trading on Friday the tech stocks mysteriously popped up a bit. The icing on the cake is that after the markets closed on Friday, Trump announced a pause on tariffs for tech, chips, etc. For the first time in 32 years, a president told the manipulators that two can play at this game, I have much more financial power than you, and have fun covering your tech shorts on Monday morning when the market opens.
Trump has already won the tariff war, LIBOR is dead as of 3/31/2025, SOFR is under the control of the Federal Reserve, and thus the U.S. has control over the U.S. Treasury yield curve and which banks get favored SOFR rates with or without collateral. (Hint: U.S. banks and Italian, Greek and Hungarian banks get nice rates, no collateral needed; the French, Germans and Brits? Meh.)
The EU and BOE have little liquidity and less collateral. Gold and silver rallied (good luck making deliveries, London!) and their currencies rallied, i.e., they were scrambling for pounds and euros thus making their exports prohibitively expensive. Ouch! The U.S. Treasury can re-finance the $8 trillion debt over the next few months that the traitor Yellen issued with short maturities. Mark Carney is going to strip the Canadian people of their wealth to try to save the BOE and ECB and the Davos globalists.
The Orange Julius Caesar is winning big for America, and you hate it. My guess is that in 2020 -2021 you wore a mask and followed the one-way directions in grocery store aisles. You probably wanted the unvaxxed to be denied medical treatment, maybe even to die. You were pissed when you found out that if you were not over 60 with three or more co-morbidities that you would live. Why do you hate good news? Why do you hate winning so much?
This must be one of the most astounding ripostés I've ever read.
Huzzah, sir! I abase myself! I tremble!
Chapeau, Sir! Fine work.
That's some righteous shit you got happening there! Keep your freak flag flying and...yeah...like...whatever man, umm...sheesh...how do I I get out of this nuthouse?
I think that one thing that makes economic theory difficult to apply over time and across cultures is that it treats humans as predictable economic units and doesn’t recognize religious, national, and cultural differences. If you artificially created the exact same economic scenario in Russia, America, China, and South Africa and you implemented the exact same solution in all four countries you would have four completely different outcomes. So an American Gorbachev doesn’t necessarily mean America follows the path that Russia did and an American Deng Xiaoping might have a very different outcome.
Maybe a totally materialistic bureaucracy which has eroded its (actual) human capital in the form of societal bonds of all kinds is just doomed?
I don’t know if you’re right, but I have a feeling you’re on to something.
Equally, I am not sure there is any way to fix the American Empire without taking a pickaxe to its main structures, given the immense inertia from the people inside them.
Final thought: some people stand by the “Golitsyn Thesis” which suggests that the KGB engineered a collapse of the USSR as it was plainly unsustainable, with a view to taking over. It is at least suggestive to consider Putin’s background, and the fact that Gorbachev was promoted by Andropov who had long ties to the KGB. But maybe it’s just nonsense: I really don’t know.
All the same, I get the sense that similar types are behind this Trump Administration. Security types. Again, maybe I am wrong.
Re: "Equally, I am not sure there is any way to fix the American Empire without taking a pickaxe to its main structures, given the immense inertia from the people inside them."
You may be right about this. Though the Chinese managed a relatively smooth transition, so there's that.
I rather doubt that anyone "engineered" Soviet collapse. Certainly not the KGB. It was just a matter of one thing leading to another. As for Putin himself: he was a nobody at the time. Oh, sure, he was a KGB agent, but he was nowhere near the top of the decision making apparatus. (Also, didn't he spend some time working as a cab driver during the 1990s? I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere.)
It's funny, but a lot of people on the right are now panicking that the woke will regain power once again, as Trump and his entourage are shown to be utterly incapable of ruling. This strikes me as vanishingly unlikely. But the time Trump/Vance are done, the world will be a very different place, and "woke" will be mostly forgotten. Imagine living in rental housing with a tyrannical landlord, only for someone to dynamite the whole building. Assuming you don't get killed in the explosion, you are not going to go begging to be lorded over by the petty tyrant once again, since he's so much better than the dynamite guy. No. You're going to be busy scrambling for new housing, now that you're homeless and all your stuff disappeared in the explosion.
Great reply. I don’t speak or read Russian and so my knowledge is inevitably really restricted. I found Vladislav Zubok’s book “Collapse” fascinating: it made the case that Gorbachev was basically a fantasist at the end of an empire.
Deng was vastly more able than Gorbachev, I think it’s fair to say, but equally China was at a very different stage in the evolution of materialism than either the West or the USSR. Perhaps that matters too?
I don’t see the woke people coming back either: they’re done, not least as they can only survive in a rich society which can afford to subsidise navel-gazing. I agree with you that that era is over.
The analogy of the exploding building is interesting! And perhaps apt.
Really my own strong feeling is that we face a spiritual rather than a material crisis. For me, the Trump victory offers a breathing space we would not have had if Harris had won and the Left had successfully closed out what remains of Christianity in the West. I don’t see much evidence that Trump will address the spiritual crisis in any meaningful way, but maybe we will have space and time to plant some seeds that can flourish after the storm…
The Gorbachev / Deng comparison is a good one, but we should keep in mind that if the bar is to keep a paradigm while improving its health Deng wins -- but the paradigm in each of those cases was totalitarianism.
If the purpose here is to instead keep the paradigm of free markets and representative democracy while improving *their* health, do these models fit as examples?
Gorbachev failed to liberalize the USSR because, in the end, it wasn't liberalizable. Right? Deng managed to commercialize the PRC because, in the end, consumption (and industry) is not incompatible with autocracy.
Dunno, just spinning thoughts, I like the dichotomy you put out there but I'm trying to see how to twist it to fit the U.S., how to use it without forgetting our point is not just to preserve for the sake of stability but for the sake of the good.
Great comment. The overwhelming theme I get on this sub thread is “we don’t know”… which is surely correct.
There definitely are major differences between the USA now and the USSR in 1989 (let alone China). However, there appear to be - though it is impossible to know how far this matters in practice - fragile structures in the American Empire which are currently under strain and which, if they break, could cause issues which resemble the kinds of chaos at the end of the USSR. To avoid that chaos, the Deng vs Gorbachev debate is relevant.
To preserve the good arguably (definitely?) requires a different set of skills and characteristics from either of those men. It is also worth asking how far the existing structures in the West hinder rather than help the preservation of the good. In other words, do we really want to preserve the system? Is the chaos which could, or will, result if it is not preserved such a serious threat that it should be preserved for all its faults? Can the system even be preserved given the long term effects it has had on the societies it controls? I don’t know, but they are interesting questions!
Very interesting questions, and a Walmart full of cans of worms.
There's the foundational question of whether these unhealthy and arguably immoral systems are naturally part of the American vision or if they are accretions or even intentional distortions or damage.
It wasn't that long ago that I would have argued these structures are mistakes or sins that have glommed on to the country and culture. Now I'm not so sure there hasn't long been a driving force that these structures grow from and all the classical liberal, virtue-seeking ideology has always been just a gloss that some of us took seriously but that folks on the right and left are now openly scoffing naive folks like me over.
I look at some of our foreign policy, for example, and being naturally aghast at things like the sudden abandoning of our allies on the ground in Afghanistan, I can't pretend I don't remember the people in Saigon hanging off the helicopters.
Economically, I don't think there's any doubt, really, that we have a house of cards going. Most people seem to be pretty dedicated to just keeping it together for their own lifetimes, which you can probably track back at least as far as Keynes "in the long run, we're all dead".
I live in a wildlands area, it is really amazing to see both the insanity of a wildfire and also the stages of regrowth and health that follow one. I'm inclined to want to pull out some of those cards and let it come down. But I have young adult children, and I'll confess that there is part of me that says, "O.k., but not now. Let them get on their feet first." And I think it's always that way for us. Make me good, but not just yet, eh? Thanks!
I'm not sure how it fits the US. (Mind you, I'm not American, though I did live in the States for a number of years, and so I do have some personal familiarity with it. But that was a while ago, and now I'm back in Europe.) What *might* happen is that the US collapses (possibly with a civil war), splits into several countries, and one or more successor states remains a liberal democracy (or rediscovers liberal democracy), with no empire (military bases all over the world, etc.) attached to it. But that's just one scenario.
The thing to remember is that, regardless of culture and history, there are material prerequisites to things. For instance, if you want to make aluminum foil, you need to have aluminum (to borrow an example that Malcom Kyeyune gave in some podcast that I listened to). That's completely non-negotiable. If you used to import aluminum, and then this suddenly becomes massively more expensive due to tariffs, a new aluminum mine does not just magically sprout next door to your factory. So, whatever your culture, you do have to address the logistics, and otherwise you suffer a catastrophic collapse.
I'd have seriously considered the breakup scenario as recently as ten years ago, but at this point I feel like the U.S. is like the old married couple that argues and whines all the time and will never divorce precisely because they love arguing and whining. ;)
Your second point reminds me a bit of the housing crisis with the last "recession", it's very expensive and risky to build apartment complexes and when people with their own interests (government but also finance) set up incentives to push banking to support home ownership those apartment complexes didn't get built. Then the crash comes, everyone's foreclosed on, and there's nowhere else to live. We're still dealing with the fallout, our local city has now built a gazillion complexes that obviously can't all fill up at once so I'm looking for the next round of failed developers and bank failures and half-completed cheap building blighting downtown; meanwhile we have the whole private equity buying funds full of homes thing going on, all sorts of market distortions.
I really don't see this being any different, to the degree I don't think the admin seriously thinks we'll be going back to manufacturing as it was. They know building a factory is risky and no one will do it based on a tariff that can be gone overnight. They know automation means no $40 manufacturing jobs. Talking like that is, at best, an oversimplification to get their "vibe" out there. So what are they really going for, and will it be good, and is it likely to happen or will it get sidetracked?
I'm inclined to think this is just a different step in the consolidation of corporate control. Your scarce aluminum is not an issue for Walmart, they'll get over it, they have ways to secure a supply. But the small manufacturer, he's out of luck. I think we're having a new wave of cutting down independent businesses (it happens with most admins, they come down and "fix" things and suddenly Amazon has an even greater share of the market). I think it's going to be side goals like this that we'll find to be the real end in mind. Guess we'll see!
"National Divorce" was shut down the last time. I doubt it would go much differently the second.
And say what you will, the US is uniquely blessed with material wealth as a nation, we just have to be willing to extract it.
Whether he intends to or not, any positives Trump brings will help refortify and restock a redoubt from which beleagured Heritage Americans can resupply their attempts at not just survival, but survival with the possiblity of rebirth. This is a bottleneck, and such bottlenecks have made us what we are; we are as good at regeneration as it gets.
Proof? Anywhere our people went, whether such stock were dregs from the slums, prisons, armies, or refugees, within 4 generations we carved out a high-level civilization.
Most pertinent is "I get the sense that similar types are behind this Trump Administration." Absolutely; what the Palantir Mafia cabal backing Trump are trying to engineer is a velvet glove covering a steel fist. I'm quite sure the KGB types felt the same need to wrest control of a sinking ship...sinking, frankly, because of their previous engineering.
In defense of the Hapsburgs, their descendants are still around & the majority of the line was not inbred.
Well then maybe there's hope for the trio from the photo! Within a few generations...
The Habsburgs married their cousins and nieces…which is probably the closest Cofnas gets to women.
You truly are a fucking idiot if you really believe this. Astonishingly dumb.
I mean, I revealed that I was a stupid person in the title, so …
And don't forget one of their favorite tactics is to roll out inflation numbers that are entirely cooked, as in the included chart, and declare that "things could be worse". They can no longer claim things couldn't be better - though they spent decades doing that with the same cooked numbers. Ignorance is not a defense for those claiming the mantle of elite human capital anymore than it is for the DEI-protected class this smug jerk focuses his ire upon.
Part of being dumb, in the sense I mean, is that you constantly get hit with information delivered with great confidence, but that experience tells you to doubt.
I partly understand this, but don't Trump and Elon do this all the time? Why is it more palatable when they do it?
I don’t think that they do, at least not in some significant way, and I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on the grounds that they grasp the severity of the problem.
I mean, with tariffs alone, what's the strategy? Are they a bluff? Are they because other countries have tariffs? Are they because other countries do different things we don't like? Is it to bring manufacturing jobs back? I guess in some way if you give every possible answer one of them will be right but that's not very helpful.
To pick two random example, Trump spent weeks talking about how we were giving millions of dollars of condoms to hamas when it was actually all kinds of reproductive care to a different place in Africa also called Gaza. Or the non-existent epidemic of cat eating Haitians that ended up being a lady who lost and found her cat and a single video of a black guy in another town barbecuing something that nobody can prove wasn't a cat.
I take your point that experts have failed us in really dumb embarrassing ways that even "dumb" people could foresee and it bothers me a lot too. I just think we somehow picked someone even worse but we grade him on a curve for some reason I don't understand.
I have read elsewhere in here that there are two ways to look at trump; the first is literally but not seriously, and the second is seriously but not literally. It is an interesting take.
Trump & Elon are our friends, or on our side, so far. The other guys never were.
I'd say the evidence suggests otherwise, from Trump stiffing small business contractors in his casino days, scamming ordinary people trying to better themselves with his fake Trump Univesity, paying accountants so that he went multiple years paying no taxes at all while the rest of us do. It's hard for me to reconcile those things with him being on the side of ordinary people, at least economically.
I'll admit I don't fully understand what Elon's game is, but it seems like he's taking a backdoor to getting rid of government services people depend on like veterans affairs and social security by just breaking the systems that deliver them.
Also, they both want to cut funding to the IRS, even though doing so actually loses the government money by reducing enforcement and making it easier for the wealthy to cheat on thier taxes.
You don't understand what it means for any ruler to be on the side of person politically.
Also, the IRS is famous for not bothering with investigating the taxes of rich people anyways, because its' extremely complicated & the rich actually fight in court. A more effective solution would be to cut the Gordian knot of tax policy (intentional loopholes). Another baseline framing issue.
I missed what you said about the IRS. If it were better funded, it would be better able to go after the rich. At current levels, Every dollar of IRS funding generates 5 dollars of revenue.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/irs-says-tax-enforcement-pays-for-itselfand-then-some-bc0c78c1
If they really cared about the debt, they'd increase enforcement. Instead they're doing the opposite.
I 100 percent agree the best solution would be to get rid of every tax break. Doing so would only affect the 10 percent of people who don't take the standard deduction, and make things much less prone to abuse.
What does it mean?
Great piece, good close. Two thoughts...
If Cofnas is representative of the smart people we have lost, good riddance, we are better for their departure.
If you are going to be the party of working people you must accept that your grassroots are going to have a far better understanding of their pocket book than of grand economic theory. This is good; grand economic theory has impoverished billions and murdered hundreds of millions. Policy is best made by people who understand the effect on working people.
There are a lot of people who are on the right for exactly one issue, which varies from person to person. The Elite Human Capital set are progressives who hate and fear minorities.
Good point. They can't stand dissent. Dissenters have always been persecuted by the High Priests of the Current Thing.
I may be just a dumb dumb. But even I understand why the old aristocrats had the concept of nobleese oblige, not "you're all dummies"
These are meritocrats, not aristocrats. They took a test.
Ah, I see it a little differently. Most of the old aristocrats had no use for noblesse oblige, and were perfectly happy to exploit the great mass of peasants under their rule as fodder for work or war.
The ruling meritocrats of today might call them "human capital units," or some other scientific-sounding (but still dehumanizing) term for the masses of workaday slobs just trying to get by, but the sentiment is the same.
Anyway, that's my two-cents-worth. Meantime, all the best, my friend.
It’s interesting to me that the guy with a degree in Biology and Philosophy is trying to use some sort of credentialism to speak as an expert on sociology, economics, and political theory. I can guarantee his degree didn’t involve extensive study of any of those fields. If he studies them as a side hobby then he has no more qualifications in this area than anyone else does.
Interestingly enough there are a couple of areas in which the opinion of a philosopher of biology and/or a bioethicist would be very beneficial to our culture right now. If he wants to put those fancy credentials to work he should probably address the “science” of newly “resurrecting” extinct species like the sort of dire wolf they brought back. I would be genuinely interested to know what a philosopher of biology thinks about using such technology to “supplement” populations of endangered species like the red wolf. What a philosopher of biology says about cloning animals generally, about GMOs, about surrogacy both in people and animals would all genuinely be of interest to the public right now and are a use of his “actual” credentials.
He posits a stark dichotomy between people who agree with him and people who are stupid, and such an argument is readily undermined by pointing out that plenty of smart people disagree with him.
It's also undermined by any reader's awareness that he's reading a narcissistic assh*le, pardon the redundancy, and that the normal reaction of The Dumbs, who far outnumber The Smarts, to such people is to want to take after them with a 2x4.
Excellent piece
Thank you
We won't know how what Trump is doing or not doing will play out in the future. It may take a few years to understand and see the results or complications. But know this: Everything the politicians and the DC Swamp have done since the Civil War has moved us into the place were are at now. So it's not just Trump who has destroyed our faith in government.
Part of the problem is detangling problems created by policy from problems created by circumstances outside of anyone’s control. There are so many factors that go into a functioning (or dysfunctional) economy that the arguments are necessarily endless. However, in this case, Trump’s reforms are so comprehensive that- for better or worse- he’s launching the globe into some kind of new era.
Excellent point. He has surrounded himself with “smarties” this time, for sure, and had four years of college level courses between stints. Comprehensive it is.
Was chatting with my 18 year old the other day and trying to explain to her that it's only been during about half my adult lifetime that Americans have had so much interaction with the federal government. Sure, it might send you to war or might set up a program that helps or hurts you on the margins. But this thing where we of necessity think about it almost every day is the end point of, as you say, centuries of accelerating concentration of power. And it wasn't new in the 1860s, the question was just whether we would spin off into two centers of increasingly dense power or stick with one.
Isn't the place we are now better than pretty much any other country in the world? Where would you rather live?
The "place where we are now" is dangling from a cliff by our fingers, or perhaps in already free fall. Silly to focus on being above everyone else in that circumstance. We need a parachute, if we can't get back up.
A little heady for me but the pics are great.
There’s magazines like that…
Well said.
The weirdest thing, to me, is all these allegedly smart people being unable to understand, model or address what all the allegedly dumb people have been pointing out, culminating in the giant "fuck you" that was electing Trump twice.
I don't like to brag about this because it's a stupid thing to brag about, but I am certified Very Smart myself. I have no trouble understanding economic theories or most other theories (I get a bit lost in higher math and physics, probably for lack of prerequisites, but nothing an economist has ever thrown at me scared me).
My guess is that the reason I don't suffer from their blind spot is that I skipped through and then dropped out of college before they surgically extracted the part of my brain responsible for comparing theory to reality.
That and that I live down here on planet earth, having decided I wanted to work with my hands and my mind more than I wanted to make a lot of money, so I don't live in the Elite bubble. I'm directly exposed on a daily basis to the experiences of ordinary people in this supposed utopia.
And even though I can successfully navigate the endless gauntlet of traps the Very Smarts have laid out for the Dumb Uneducateds, rather than smugly laughing at them when they fall for it over and over again, I mostly feel shame at the thought of being associated with the trap makers (another reason for not mentioning my Big Smarts very often).
Anyway, I am sick and tired of hearing these people whine about how the dumbs are messing up all their brilliant plans. You *suck*, do you get that? You're terrible, selfish, short-sighted people and you're blowing it all up in your pursuit of hypothetical paradises. Just shut up and take your medicine.
It’s the smart people who are, bafflingly, the only ones shocked by Trump governing like Trump.
Perhaps that says something about the behavior they normally engage in.
Lock up your daughter, lock up your wife, lock up your backdoor, and run for your life -- the hereditarians are back in town!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiJeSSzu9Bo
Cause you’re TNT?!
Cofnas is expressing my bosses' views perfectly. The managerial elite really does see the rest of us as hopelessly stupid. Great piece!
A lot of bosses have that view; it’s what comes from entitlement born of an excess of stability.