America, Land of the Social Security Check, Home of the Welfare Dependent

I applied for Medicare on Friday.  I'm going to be 65 in roughly three months.  When I called the Social Security Agency (welcome to socialist America),  I had an hour-and-fifteen-minute wait before I could get through, and they told me that I had to apply online.  Mark Zuckerberg needs to know, and make no mistake, Facebook can know if it wants to.  The Social Security website froze me out because I had typed in the wrong password when I had checked it several months before, so I called the helpline, which involved an additional 50-minute wait.  The young government worker was helpful, and I eventually applied after a four-hour battle.

As I was waiting on voicemail, the SSA proudly announced that 50 million Americans are currently on Social Security.  The number of Americans on means-tested welfare is roughly the same, about 52 million.  If you add the number of government employees, about 22 million, that's 124 million.  In July 2017 there were 252 million Americans over age 18, the voting age.  That means that 124/252 = 49.2% of Americans are dependent on the state. If you add to that the people who work in zombie industries that would not exist without state support-- including Wall Street, the auto industry, and public partnership real estate--the percentage of voters who depend on government is well above 50%.

In other words, the productive sector in America is well below 50% of the economy.  So much for land of the free, home of the brave--or liberty and justice for all.  America is a socialist welfare state with a dependent population.

I recently finished Garrett C. Fagan's audio  Roman history series from the Great Courses, which was a wonderful experience. The Great Courses lectures are all wonderful, and Rome was one of my favorites, along with Vejas G. Liulevicius's World War I. Fagan teaches at Penn State and Liulevicius teaches at the University of Tennessee.  My next one will be William R. Cook's history of the Catholic Church.  

In between, though, I am listening to Tucker Carlson's audio book Ship of Fools. Carlson makes a number of excellent points, and I am finding the book to be educational. Also, his writing is sharp.  I'm only up to Chapter Three. (I listen to all this in my car, so it is slow going.)

Carlson blames much of the recent decline in the American economy on elite selfishness and immigration.   Some of  his arguments parallel Christopher Lasch's in his books The Revolt of the Elites and The Culture of Narcissism.  Like Lasch, Carlson notes that the segregation of elites in all-white, upper-income neighborhoods makes them insensitive to the effects of the policies they advocate.   

Carlson's pillorying of Democratic Party looters is awesome. His discussion of dumbed-down, overprivileged millennial Chelsea Clinton is hilarious, and his discussion of  Mark Zuckerberg and the ugly effects of Facebook are eye opening.  He accurately depicts the Southern Poverty Law Center as a one-time opponent of racism that has become a fraudulent partisan advocate for Democratic Party elitists.  

As well, Carlson accurately depicts the current economy as one of decline for the average American and one of subsidization and privilege for financial, political, and technology elites.  However, a point of disagreement is that Carlson places the blame on immigration. 

Real wages have stagnated for the past 50 years, since the early 1970s, when immigrants were less than five percent of the population. Immigration is not the reason for stagnant real wages. It is at most a contributory factor, but in the absence of regulation and subsidization, immigration flows would adjust to the market- clearing level.  Native Americans ought to enjoy an economic advantage over immigrants, who do not know the language and culture. Increasing the minimum wage is likely harming immigrants, whose labor is less valuable than native speakers.  I'm not convinced that immigration is the real problem, and Carlson does not offer much fact for his claim.  The real hourly wage began to stagnate in the 1970s, right after the abolition of the gold standard and less than 10 years after the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid. By 1980 immigrants were still only six percent of the population, but real wages hadn't grown in seven or eight years. 

At the same time, it may be time to put a moratorium on immigration because of the anger it has caused. I have heretofore been in favor of open immigration, but about ten years ago I remember thinking that perhaps a moratorium on immigration might be helpful to American workers, who have suffered grievously at the hands of the Fed, the Democratic Party, and big government.  In general, a free economy based on limited government will result in optimal economic outcomes, including rising real wages, modest income inequality, and a stock market, with six percent returns.  In the 19th century most of the returns from the stock market were in the form of dividends.   

Besides immigration, my chief point of disagreement with Carlson is that he seems to believe that old-fashioned state activist liberalism--New Deal liberalism,--ought to be the new conservatism.  The old-fashioned state activist liberalism of the 1930-1970s may still capture President Trump's supporters' imaginations, but it will not restore the economy; it will not restore real wage growth; it will not return the country to the rapid economic growth of the laissez faire, Progressive, and New Deal eras (which ended in the 1960s).  

It is true that much of America's elite--the Clintons, Buffetts, Goldman Sachses, Zuckerbergs, Soroses--are a cancer on the average wage. It is also true that New Deal policies led directly to their ascendancy, and the group that was in power before them was already taking the country down a primrose path. Replacing today's rapacious, politically correct, finance-and-technology elites with the military-industrial complex about which Eisenhower and C Wright Mills warned and included George HW Bush's dad, Prescott Bush,  will not change the underlying problem, which is the result of monetary and regulatory systems controlled by a centralized, special-interest dominated state. The federal government has squashed real wages and allocated credit to crappy technology like Facebook,  crooked Wall Streeters like George Soros, and crooked hacks like the Clintons and Bushes.

Franklin Roosevelt, copying the innovations of Gustav von Schmoller and Bismarck in Germany, implemented a system that has similarities to what brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus imagined for Republican Rome in the early phases of the Roman Revolution, which led to its becoming a dictatorship, then an empire, and ultimately a monarchy:  Their plan was to give the plebeians cheap grain. (Later in the empire Emperor Septimius Severus made grain free.)    The dislocations of World War I and Progressive eras paralleled the processes in the Roman Revolution, which lasted about 150 years.  Although the Progressive era was short, its system may last for as long as the early empire and the Pax Romana, which lasted 150-200 years.  It may be that in 2,000 years historians will view our era as an extension of the Progressive and World War I eras. This is already occurring as historians are beginning to view the two world wars as one war.   

It is sad to see an America with the beautiful ideals of Locke and Jefferson turned into a bread-and-circus, totalitarian state dominated by the nincompoops of today's state, technology, and finance elites and their dumbed-down propagandist-journalists.  Carlson's hilarious depiction of psychopath Max Boot is on the money.

Even if  President Trump follows the proscriptions of Carlson and slows the looting by state, technology, and Wall Street elites, there is little hope for improvement because Americans have been satisfied with a $16,000 Social Security benefit, a welfare check, and Medicare. The dynamics of public choice and special interest behavior guarantee that a large, centralized government will benefit the most corrupt and opportunistic, and  Carlson's debate with the Democrats ignores the underlying dynamic. 

Totalitarian--Authoritarian--Pro-Freedom Political Continuum

The categorization of political views along a spectrum of right to left was never applicable to the United States. The terms "left" and "right" refer to the revolutionary French General Assembly's seating plan. The Jacobins, famous for the Reign of Terror and the first modern political mass murder, sat on the left, and the French aristocrats sat on the right. Instead of left and right I propose a continuum of pro-freedom and anti-freedom.

America has never had aristocrats and never had mass murderers, although Franklin D. Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese during World War II mildly paralleled the direction of European history. Rather, the left has used this dichotomy as propaganda. It claims that the "right" represents "aristocrats" while the "left" represents "the people". But it has never explained why the "people" tend to be highly paid college professors, hedge fund managers, professionals, the Ochs Sulzbergers, Warren Buffet, George Soros, and trust fund babies while the "aristocrats" are inevitably blue collar plumbers and carpenters.

In fact, the "left's" re-distributional scheme has always involved heavy support for the professions; for banking; for the Ochs Sulzbergers; for big business; and for large real estate developers. Thus, the "progressive" supporters of Robert Moses in the 1940s and 1950s, who destroyed New York's entrepreneurial spirit and turned New York into a haven for investment bankers and European aristocrats, today support the "progressive" President Barack Obama, who is handing America to well, well-paid college professors, hedge fund managers, professionals, Warren Buffet, George Soros and trust fund babies. This is accomplished in part by hiding the attack on the dollar that Presidents Obama's and Bush's policies have required. The sale of American assets to the Chinese hides the weakening of the dollar that the Bush-Obama wealth transfer requires. The Chinese are apparently willing to suffer losses in order to prop up the dollar and continue on a straight path to industrialization not impeded by currency fluctations. Nineteenth century American economic history saw considerable fluctuations in the nation's economy when prices rose and fell due to disturbances in Europe. The Chinese are pursuing fool's gold, though, because purchasing overvalued assets in America will ultimately hurt them. They are delaying a hangover by drinking more scotch, but in the end the hangover will be all the worse for them.

Early on, much of the Jacobin platform was consistent with a moderate degree of limited government republicanism, to include separation of church and state and universal education. Initially, the Jacobins were mostly aristocrats and French middle class or bourgeois. The debate between left and right in France did parallel a debate in America. The Federalists supported Burke's ideas, which today would be called "conservative". The Democratic-Republicans of Jefferson were supportive of France. But in America, unlike in France where both sides were somewhat statist, the dispute between right and left was between advocates of limited government intervention, especially of support for business and banking, and advocates of limited government who opposed supports for business and banking. If anything, the "left" of today, along with today's "conservatives", is closer to the Federalists of Revolutionary War times in that they support government intervention in all areas of life, to include anti-civil-libertarian intervention with respect to speech (see, for instance, Dinesh D'Souz's Illiberal University) as well as with respect to business (as in the recent bailout). The recent bailout was a Federalist program that both national Democrats and Republicans supported. The Democrats did so more heartily than the Republicans because a large fraction of the Republicans are pro-freedom and anti-Bush. The Democrats are mostly anti-freedom and anti-Bush.

In America, the debate between Federalists and Democratic Republicans; Democrats and Whigs and Progressives and their opponents has increasingly revolved around freedom as well as privilege. The Progressive-liberal philosophy of Herbert Croly and Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, was carried forward by the social democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat. Further confusing the discussion, the left appropriated the term "liberal" which was an appellation of support for free trade and liberty. It has claimed that it is in favor of civil liberties. But when the left gains power, as it has in universities, it adopts speech codes and advocates tight, politically correct restrictions on speech that deviate from its ugly moral opinions. This is consistent with the left's anti-liberal stance where it has gained power in Europe and in the communist countries.

Today there are three views: the descendants of the old Federalists, Whigs and Progressives, who might be called "Rockefeller Republicans"; the descendants of social democratic Progressives, socialists, who are "liberal" Democrats; and descendants of Jeffersonian Republicans, who are liberal or libertarian Republicans and some Democrats. The first two of these groups, the Progressives and social democrats, differ primarily with respect to who should get the spoils. The Republican Progressives advocate taxing the majority and redistributing wealth 60% to the wealthy and 40% to others. The Democratic social democrats advocate taxing the majority and redistributing wealth 55% to the wealthy and 45% to others. It is only the pro-freedom Republicans (and some Democrats) who advocate ending taxation; who see taxation as theft; and understand that an innovative economy cannot be planned.

The continuum of American politics looks like this:


Totalitarian--->Authoritarian--->Pro-Freedom Republicans/Libertarians/Democrats

Some examples of these groupings are:

Totalitarian

Communist Party
Neo-Nazi Party
Socialists
Bill Ayers


Authoritarian

Democratic Party
New York Times
George W. Bush
John McCain
National Republican Party
Neo-conservatives

Pro-Freedom

Tea Parties
Republican Liberty Caucus
Goldwater Republicans
Ron Paul
Libertarian Party

The Roman Model

The Roman conquest of Europe was a natural extension of the tribal world view in that it assumed that resource endowments are given and cannot be expanded so that conquest rather than technology generates additional wealth. The resource-dependence view of wealth is still with us and has challenged the technological view of wealth expansion from the time that modern technological advance began to materially challenge Rome's. That would be the sixteenth century around the time of the Protestant Reformation. It is possible that the English rejection of Catholicism is related to it in that the traditional legal and social patterns that had been handed down from the Romans were eliminated and to be replaced by new patterns. It would not be surprising if early designers of the new Roman models, such as Henry VIII and his ministers, were to adopt the same pattern of thinking as the traditions that they overturned. Certainly, by the 17th and 18th centuries mercantilism involved an attempt to impose an economic social purpose on England and the rest of Europe. Socialism and other "progressive" ideologies are variations on the mercantilist pattern. As change proceeded, it caused increasing anxiety. The chronic anxieties of people moving from tribal to individualist ways of organizing society generated reaction in the form of alternative Romanizing models such as socialism, communism, social democracy and Progressivism.

The reaction to individualism was Roman in that it aimed to impose methods of production and social organization envisioned by an elite. In the case of communism the elite was to be revolutionary while in the case of social democracy and Progressivism the elite was to be economic, hereditary and social.

The Roman model takes a value position that it aims to impose on the uneducated and unwashed. In contrast, the individualist model assume that individuals are ends into themselves and therefore ought not to be molded or assigned position. The assumption of all discussants of political systems hinges on power --- who gets what, when, why and how. Individualism, in contrast, focuses on individual autonomy. Psychologically, these are different position and therefore we would expect different psychological and perhaps even biological types to be attracted to individualism and Romanism. Jefferson claimed that liberals (by which he meant individualists) tended to be hardy while conservatives (by which he meant Romanizers) tended to be sickly. Today, a number of scholars are working on a thesis that biologically or even genetically rooted patterns generate political belief. It that is so, then different types of people will thrive under liberal versus Roman political patterns. Because the Roman model contemplates the assignment of elite positions to intellectuals and the molding of society according to intellectuals' preferences, intellectuals mostly support it.

In economics, the history of the Roman model begins with mercantilist views of Shaftesbury and David Hume, which were adopted by the Federalists, especially Hamilton. The history of the individualist view is rooted in the English Civil War and the Whig culture as well.

If one compares the development of Rome to the Progressivism in the United States and to attempts to develop the Third World in the immediate post war era, one sees that they operate on almost identical assumptions. That is, modern socialist theory is simply a reassertion of Roman imperialism, not so much in terms of it assumption of the need to conquer other nations (the reason being that individualism has already disproved that assumption) but rather in their assumption that an elite is necessary to impose a specific world view. Much of the dialogue about society rests not so much on Rousseau as on the Roman view that urbanization of values and imposition of process by an elite is necessary to civilize society. Thus, one philosopher advocates the necessity of requiring a "minimax" assessment of risk, a policy of minimizing the maximum possible loss to any member of society, as a necessary condition for rational social organization. Another argues that a specific range for income inequality is necessary. A third that all Americans must have psychiatric care as part of their health insurance, and so on. These refined positions can be subjected to a a popular vote and even win it, but they are too refined to conceivably reflect permanent public preferences.

Yet, most of public policy is designed along these lines--enforcement of particular preferences of a particular segment of the public at a particular point in time as somehow reflect the "national will".

4th Century Rome or 21st Century America?

"The reforms of Diocletian and Constantine, by giving permanence to the policy of organized robbery on the part of the state, made all productive economic activity impossible. But it did not stop the formation of large fortunes, rather, it contributed to their formation, while altering their character. The foundation of the new fortunes was no longer the creative energy of men, nor the discovery and exploitation of new sources of wealth, nor the improvement and development of commercial, industrial and agricultural enterprises; it was in the main the skillful use of a privileged position in the state to cheat and exploit the state and the people alike. Public officials, both high and low, grew rich on bribery and corruption. The senatorial class...invested their spoil in land and used their influence, the influence of their caste...to divert the burdens of taxation on to the other classes, to cheat the Treasury directly, and to enslave ever larger numbers of workmen...Thus, more than ever before, society was divided into two classes: those who became steadily poorer and more destitute, and those who built up their prosperity on the spoils of the ruined Empire--real drones, who never made any contribution to economic life but lived on the toil and travail of other classes."

----M. Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, pp. 475-77.

Obama's Subservient Bow

In recent months I have been blogging about the American republic's failure. Republicanism requires an informed citizenry and a committed culture. America's citizenry is ill-educated and bamboozled by "progressive"-dominated cultural institutions. American schools graduate illiterates who cannot grasp basic political issues, such as the central bank, that 19th century Americans with elementary educations had no trouble grasping. American education emphasizes Marx and Keynes, but ignores Locke and Jefferson.

As a result, medieval patterns appropriate to the Renaissance and before have recrudesced, and Americans have become comfortable with increasingly socialist values. Aristocrats like the Kennedys, the Bushes and the Clintons increasingly dominate politics. The two political parties represent charity and privilege, the two medieval political forces (church or charity and king or privilege). There is no individualist, freedom-based alternative. Thus, the philosophy that guided once-free America is dead and gone. In the view of today's neo-medieval politicians and social theorists, regulaton is preferable to freedom. Group authority and suppression are desirable, freedom is not.

The latest demonstration of America's increasingly medieval mindset and its betrayal of American republicanism is seen in Barack Obama's willingness to literally kowtow and bow to a foreign king. Not surprisingly, the media, which kowtows to Obama just as Obama kowtows to a king, has not covered this story. Obama does not display the spirit of a free American. He does not know what an American is. And the American news media does not know what a free press is.

Take a look at the repugnant video below, courtesy of Newsmax.

The Greatest Compliment Is When a Progressive Says You Wear a "Tin Foil Hat"

A poster on my blog who uses the misnomer Diogenes aims to insult me. I do not publish all of his posts, many of which are ad hominem attacks on, for instance, my teaching. Progressives, going back to the days of Theodore Roosevelt, have used insult rather than coherent argument because their arguments are weak. But it is revealing that Diogenes, more appropriately called Meletus after Socrates's accuser, uses one insult over and over, one that he or she considers to be most devastating, and that insult is that I wear a "tin foil hat". I do not travel in left wing circles and so I had never heard of that expression before reading it in Meletus's posts on my blog. Apparently, it refers to certain schizophrenics who delusionally believe that tin foil hats capture radio waves.

The phrase is distasteful because it expresses disrespect toward sufferers of mental illness, but beyond that it reveals a deep fear of the wielder of the insult: the fear of not conforming to received doctrine. Nothing is more frightening to a Progressive than nonconformity, for Progressives lack the ability to think creatively, but rather have been indoctrinated to conform to the authority of university professors and the mass media. Progressivism is very much derivative of early Puritanism as it is an attempt to insist on a community of ideology, and it displaces religion and replaces it with fanatical devotion to a "social gospel" of reactionary ignorance on which Progressives religiously insist even as empirical evidence suggests that their ideas have failed. Some examples are urban renewal, welfare, the Federal Reserve System and the income tax.

In other words, Meletus believes that the worst insult he can use toward Americans is that they are "crazy" or that their ideas do not fit a predetermined mold established by academics and the failed media. This was the complaint about Sarah Palin. She did not fit the Progressive mold, she did not conform. But most Progressives have never read Locke, Montesquieu, Smith, Crevecoeur or de Tocqueville, but feel themselves better qualified than others to evaluate what is important, authentic, legitimate or open to discussion.

Note that Meletus does not say that he has read Locke, but only that people who have but are not "academic specialists" lack the authority to discuss Locke's ideas because they are not "experts" who have filled out a multiple choice test at a college.

Progressives are not Americans in the sense of agreeing with the fundamental principles on which the nation is based and do not share in its history or values. This is so in a fundamental way. American culture is based on conscience, on virtue and understanding of the difference between right and wrong. It prizes common sense and practical wisdom. It is in part classically rooted and in part rooted in the Christian values that informed even the founders, such as Jefferson, who rejected traditional religion.

Unlike Americans, Progressives base their value system on shame, on conformity. They believe in authority and experts. They believe that the law ought to enforce professionalization. They devalue common sense and practical wisdom. Their value system is other-directed, not inner-directed, as David Riesman put it in his book Lonely Crowd in the 1950s. With the phrase "other-directed" Riesman was not writing about rural Americans but rather about urban, college educated, blue state professionals, that is, Progressives.

Progressives lack conscience because universities have brainwashed them into obsequious acquiescence to the progressive value system and to the authority of the Progressive priesthood, that is, the professoriate and the editors of several newspapers. Conformity to the Progressive priesthood and its religious dogma, political correctness, are valued over truth. Progressives are willing to accept silly lies, such as that Egyptians flew airplanes, because they make some students feel good. And, of course, like a political Borg, the silliest of issues gain status as IMPORTANT because the New York Times says so, and Meletuses scurry to believe, for they know that if they do not they might be said to be wearing "tin foil hats". A fringe subculture in which conformity is prized above all else, Progressives spend their time accusing others of nonconformity as though something were wrong with not conforming to their cult.

So thank you, Meletus, for the compliment when you say that I wear a "tin foil hat". Coming from a shame- and other-directed Progressive whose ideas glorify mass murder, your saying so makes me proud.

Institutional Death in America and Europe

The new and old worlds are divided not just by their relative emphasis on flexibility and markets, but also by their openness to change. Radicalism in Europe has generally taken the forms of Hegelian emphasis on historicism. Marxism and its derivatives while pretending to advocate radical change are romantic reassertions of medieval stability and security. The chief outcomes of Russian and eastern European communism were societies that had difficulty with flexibility and change, that could not integrate information about price and consumer demand intelligently and that placed political stability before economic change. As well, Europe has emphasized the Nietzschean will to power and minimized liberal openness to change.

Both Americans like Europeans have revealed prejudices but while Americans are discarding them, Europeans are not. In the 19th century the people of California hated Asians and passed discriminatory laws against them. The first immigration law in America, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, excluded Chinese mining labor from immigration under penalty of law and required that Chinese immigrants obtain certification of their qualification to immigrate. In 1902 Chinese immigrants were required to register with the government and obtain a certificate of residency. Similarly, antagonism and hatred toward African-Americans following Reconstruction led to passage of Jim Crow laws by post-Reconstruction redeemer governments beginning in 1876 and the laws continued in force until passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The northeastern Mugwumps, the educated post-reconstruction Republicans who preceded the Progressives around 1884, did not advocate the Jim Crow laws aggressively but did not oppose them aggressively either. The Jim Crow laws were primarily the product of southern Democrats. The northern Democrats did not oppose them either. As president, Woodrow Wilson intensified the Jim Crow laws and supported them. During the Progressive era, imperialist sentiment fit the racism of the Jim Crow laws. Progressivism was very much associated with racism.

In Europe, there was a parallel history of anti-Semitism. Jews were banned from England, France and Spain in the middle ages and were forced to migrate to Asia Minor and eastern Europe. In Germany and Italy they were forced to live in ghettos. During the Crusades, Crusaders murdered tens of thousands of Jews (along with eastern Christians, southern French Christians and Muslims). There was a brief period of liberalization in the 19th century, but in the twentieth the rise of Nazism, a derivative of Marxism, led to the murder of the majority of European Jews.

Despite this history of bigotry in both continents, in recent decades Americans have reduced but not eliminated the degree of anti-Asian and anti-Chinese racism. In contrast, anti-Semitism is more intense in Europe than it has been since World War II. The European addiction to anti-Semitism attends a deeper inability to overcome antiquated traditions and class structures that inhibit change.

Americans' ability to create and accept change may in part be the cultural residue of the American frontier. The open frontier led this people to see the possibility of the new. As well, the science and technology that freedom made possible, the inventions and progress that came from laissez faire capitalism, led to an openness to change. Perhaps the openness to change went to far under the philosophy of modernism, but it is preferable to the alternative, which is the stagnation of bigotry, impoverishment and lost economic opportunity. The degree of tradition and change is best balanced through private decision, not through bureaucratic laws that require landmark preservation.

As well, Americans are a religious people, and their acceptance of change is likely linked to their faith. In America, religious tolerance has been the norm and religion has been a matter of belief and conscience rather than social imposition and structure. Many Americans have believed that material rewards reflect divine grace. Since belief in God is a matter of conscience, not social institution, and since material rewards reflect divine election, in many Americans' view, American are likely to pursue and feel comfortable with such rewards and with the change that they require.

Since the creation of wealth requires the creation of change, of new ideas, of new markets and new technology, the converse of new ideas, the death of old ones, is critical to change. Europeans are reluctant to give up old prejudices like anti-Semitism and tribal social arrangements like socialism. Firms cannot in the European model be allowed to go bankrupt. Business executives must be permitted to maintain their social position and employees must be secure in their jobs.

To the extent that Americans adopt such tribal, European views they will be unable to change. Change depends on death. The growth of the economy depends on the death of failed firms. Incompetent managements like Bear Stearn's or Enron's do not deserve subsidies. Their managements have failed and deserve the economic returns that failure implies.

Likewise, the introduction of Progressive and New Deal institutions were significant not so much because they reflected change, but rather because the institutions reflected the tribal views of German historicism and so became institutionalized as reaction to change. Few Progressive institutions have been overturned and those New Deal institutions that were not rejected by the Supreme Court have remained in place for the past 70 years. When change in proposed, the American people's reaction is not the openness to change that characterized America in an earlier era but a European-style tribal reacton, a fear of change and a hostility to the possibility that failed institutions ought to change. Likewise, when American business has failed, as it increasingly often has in the past decade, the American people's reaction has been to protect the wealth of those whose businesses failed to produce value for investors or for the American people and so shore up a class system that is decidedly non-American in nature.