Category: Political

It is readily apparent that America without oil and gas energy will be forced to reduce its living standards.  I ignore the race and gender wars provoked by the ‘woke’ and the absurd anti-merit elements of the woke agenda because Americans will survive the turmoil of the first two and will never accept the anti-merit propositions.

America will not grow. America will learn to live at a zero growth rate. Simple living will be a pervasive choice.

I have long supported the simple living life model and wrote a book Simple Living Investments for Old Age. Of course I had simple living as a voluntary choice, not as a failure of the economic system.

From my vantage point, a simple living America will be more relaxed, will have many more small businesses, be far happier and we will have more artistic people.  America’s vigor will be channeled into new creative outlets.  The Briarpatch was a vital and exciting world.  Part of the hippy domain that I would be happy to relive.

The benefits for the world would be magnificent. One-third of the world lives in a tribal environment and that part does not want modern commerce.  They are happy with tribal life and don’t want the ever plundering modern encroachment on their lives.  That part of the world has already enjoyed the better food supplies and the improved health of the past half century.  Tribal peoples, the world over will be happy to live their tribal lives.

There are many ways to put this but the simplest and clearest for all my readers who have never left the U.S, for those who probably never will and for the few who will leave the U.S. but will not visit the two thirds of the world that is never seen by tourists: what Americans are doing to ourselves and what Americans want other humans to do to themselves is unacceptable.

We want the two thirds of the world that is poor, without cars and without a surfeit of food to suffer. We want them to live with what they have now or to live with less.  

That is what ‘woke America’ and ‘woke Europe’  is asking of the world.  ‘You poor people of the world are to live without oil, natural gas and live in societies that disdain merit.  Whatever you have now you should have less of it.’  

Don’t worry too much about us Americans.  We are already rich and live with an abundant surplus of everything.  

Despite what the ‘woke Americans’ say about the barriers to women and blacks in America, the 200 American women billionaires own more money than all the people in the poorest 50 countries in the world earn in a year and the 10 wealthiest black Americans own more than all the people in Liberia earn in a year.

Kotkin has again come through with the most brilliant and clear statement about our current state of world affairs.

The Ukraine has made three new world alliances visible.

Here is the final sentence in his dire but vital prediction:

“Until the West wakes up from its self-referential slumbers, the tide of history may turn out less friendly to Ukraine’s loyal friends than to those who either abet aggression or maintain a steady indifference.”

No one who follows this blog will fail to know that I am a strong supporter of Israel and consider Bibi one of the greatest leaders in all of Jewish history.  World history for that matter.

I lived in Israel in 1958-9 when Israel was a Kibbutz socialist heaven.  It was the heaven American Lefty-Jews still romanticize. 

Bibi has been a leader who changed Israel into the most successful nation driven by modern commerce and the most successful innovative nation on the planet.

The 60% of American Jews who vote Democrat and long for the lost socialist nation of Israel, are drifting away from support of Israel. The proportion of such Democrat Jews is growing.

First to understand why this drift is happening it helps to read Israeli news.

Sarah Rinder (Mosaic 1/23/2023) has found a way to demonstrate the distance that separates these American Jews from Israel.  Here is some contemporary popular Israeli music.  Compare it to American pop music and rap.

This music references the horror of living with Arabs who kill your fellow Israelis every day, every month and every year. Here is what Rinder says about the music and the singer:

“It raises the question of whether Ben-Ari’s biblicism and Jewish allusions are charming embellishments or so central to his work that they cannot be disentangled from it. But merely to ask this question is to acknowledge that Israeli society’s shared cultural touchstones appear to be growing more and more Jewish, and traditional lines between the secular and religious populations are fading, particularly in the realms of music and art.”

Unless and until Israel can move the Gaza and West Bank Arabs out of Israel, the division between Israel and American Lefty-Reform Jews will continue to grow.

My own naive solution to the Israeli-Arab problem is to pay some Arab nations to take the West Bank and Gaza Arabs who are ready to leave (those between 13 and 25 years old).   We could start with an offer of $1 billion to take 4,000 of these Arabs.  Plenty of Arab countries are corrupt enough to want the money.  

Once the process begins, most members of the U.S. Congress and most European nations will see this as a solution and it should catch on.

The question that has been bothering me is: ’Why could I buy a big house in San Francisco on one salary in 1964 at age 26 and my kids couldn’t at the same age and my grandkids certainly can’t?’

In the simplest case the wife of one kid came from a working class large family where getting a college degree was sold as a way to succeed. The degree was necessary for the license in her field but her earnings have never come close to covering the interest on the college loan even after 23 years.  There is no insight needed in that case.  College loans have drastically altered lives.

College tuition has risen at a far greater rate than other costs for 50 years; due both to the lack of international competition, and the total absence of any institutional efficiency.  Out of control college costs are the result of government subsidy and regulation.

Our whole society has faced the same problem, not just the population in the bottom seven out of ten deciles. Aside from the college loan issue there are two reasons for the decline in living resources in 50 years. 

First the genuine explosive growth of the economy has occurred after 1960 when the hereditary elite class was replaced with meritocracy.  

The elite class had previously maintained a strong control over the excessive and restrictive  functions of government.

Second, American style democracy got out of control once the restraint of the elite was displaced by union power. Unions, in every urban area, replaced the elites in America in the 1960s.  Union power is the triumph of medieval values where seniority and wage equality triumph over merit and all other modern-commercial values including hard work, personal initiative and innovation.

American style democracy turns out to be a failure in times of rapid commercial economic growth when it is combined with union government control. Suggested originally by Milton Friedman.

I saw the transition when I worked in the California legislature as a campaign manager and legislative aide in 1964. Legislators were always atypical people.  Not too bright, very tribal in their values which gave immense power to the Democrat Party. They are small-minded people determined to get re-elected by passing as many laws, often frivolous and impactful on daily life, as possible. I saw Jesse Unruh use union money and the Democrat Party to take personal control of the California government.  He later handed it off to Willie Brown.

For the past sixty years legislators have passed 500 bills annually on the state level and the same numbers on the federal level.  This has made the successful functioning of commerce nearly impossible.  

It has promoted large business over small business because economies of scale can cover the costs of dealing with overwhelming government bureaucracy.

I have worked as a consultant with a vast number and array of businesses.  I have watched their productivity stifled every day in every way by incredible and obsessive control of commerce by out-of-control government.

The extraordinary power of modern commerce to produce wealth for everyone has been negated, totally, by 60 years of ponderous growth of government regulation.

That is why my grandchildren may have technological miracles in their lives without the ability to buy a house on one person’s income.

Solution

There is a solution that I don’t expect to see in my lifetime: sortition. My book A Citizen Legislature in 1985 (with Chick Callenbach) explains how randomly selected people can serve a three-year term in a legislature and provide a truly democratic governance.  Such citizens would never increase the number of laws that would constrain them.

Dick was married to my father’s sister. Carol was a San Francisco supervisor.

Uncle Dick had his own advertising agency and hired me to work when I was in college.  It lasted a week. One job he gave me was to write radio copy for a Japanese restaurant.  Part of the copy I wrote was “Savor the cloying aroma of the succulent sukiyaki.”  Dick fired me for that sentence and he was right.  Dick didn’t live long enough to read my best selling book, 25 years later, Marketing Without Advertising. (Co-author was Salli Rasberry.)

Fifteen years after I was fired, Dick and I were still on good terms.  By then I was a well known hippie business leader and Dick was tight with the San Francisco police crowd.  I ran into him at Sansome and Bush around lunch.  Dan White had recently murdered Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, both friends of mine.  Dick asked what punishment I thought White would get and I said ‘The electric chair.’  Dick said “No,” the deal had already been worked out by the DA. Joe Freitas and White’s defense lawyer, Doug Schmidt, agreed to an 8 year sentence.  Dick probably got the insight from his friend Doug Schmidt. The sentence turned out to be 7 years and White got out after 5 years. (photo George Moscone)

The trial was in late May. I was dating Carol at the time, One of six women I was dating then. Carol was a supervisor.  She had gone to the University of Chicago, which we had in common, she was very bright and lots of fun.  As a supervisor Carol carried a pistol on her all the time, on the right front of her belt. Sexy from my point of view. She drove a pick-up truck and usually wore pants with a belt.

We had a date the day before the Dan White trial started and I told her what Dick had told me.  She immediately told DA Frietas and the judge she wanted to testify.  Which she did.  

She testified that on his way out of City Hall, after killing Harvey, he went into Carol’s office to kill her. She hid under her desk.  Like most people, even with a gun in her waist, she hid and he left.

Frietas lost his reelection later that year.

I’ve never told that story in print.  Most of it can not be found anywhere else.

On my blogs I’ve told what Margo St. James told me. She repeated what Dan White’s two close police buddies told her.  They had coffee near City Hall with Dan before he went to crawl in a window in the basement of City Hall. He came by to talk to them after the murders and told them what he had done. He asked what he ‘should do next.’  They told him to go to the nearby St. Mary's Cathedral and confess to a priest and then call their friendly police detective.  (photo Harvey Milk)

The context, that we all knew at the time, was that the police were furious at the Mayor for appointing Charlie Gain as police chief. Gain was a reformer and an outsider in a very inbred police force. To keep from being murdered by other cops,  he never carried a gun and had all press conferences in front of a U.S. flag, a California flag and the San Francisco Flag.

You now know more of this specific history than anyone else alive.  There is one more silent piece no one knows.  On the night before Mayor Moscone was shot, my close friend Bob Gnaizda visited him to make sure he didn’t reappoint Dan White to the Board of Supervisors because the legal court order to integrate blacks into the hierarchy of the police department still had to be voted on by the Board and White was sure to vote against it. Bob told me about that visit only two years ago, shortly before he died.

The current annualized inflation of 8% is going to continue to rise.

I identified the Biden-caused oil/gas price rise as the primary cause of the current global inflation which will undergird about eight years of inflation as the consequences play out in steel, cement and fertilizer. The price rise will work its way through the economy with a ratchet effect in wages.

Now we see the Phillips curve kick in.  The Phillips curve isn’t me, it was William Phillips who showed a statistical correlation between rising labor scarcity and rising inflation.

We currently have a very historically low unemployment rate which is labor scarcity.  This will begin kicking in to the inflation scenario.  The labor scarcity is due to three primary factors.  

• The first and most important is that many workers dropped out of the labor force during Covid-19 when they decided that the service industry was too precarious and sought training and opportunities in other fields.  
• The second was a sheer drop out of the labor force with the realization that the American work standard is too intense for comfort and easier living was a reasonable goal. 
• Third is the close income competition created by government largess that means middle-income workers saw that non-workers were earning nearly as much and decided to join the non-workers on the dole.

Inflation will be increasing.