A Working Hypothesis on Socialism

I do not understand how any 21st Century person, of sound mind and reasonable education, can be a socialist.  We have run the experiments, the data are in, we have the results, we know the answer:  socialism fails 100% of the time.  And yet, not only do we still have socialists, but socialism seems to be gaining in popularity.  It boggles the mind.

My thoughts tended to circle around two ideas:

1. How deep does the ignorance have to go, and 
2. How deep is the desire for power at any price?

I now think it is something else.  I think the question revolves around two other ideas, just as depressing, really, but less sinister:

1. The human desire to get something for nothing, and
2. A society that is too complicated for too many people.

First, the human desire to get something for nothing is very nearly irresistible.  As with sex, only the power of religion can contain it.  Not every religion.  I have in mind primarily Protestantism, and I hope a couple of my friends are right that Judaism works as well.  But, as the force of religion wanes in our society, the power of socialism waxes.  I think the waning of religion is one important explanation for the growing popularity of socialism.  And the strategy of politicians to promise something for nothing, always a danger, has become dominant.

On the second point, I am personally aware of many cases in which intelligent, educated people are shockingly ignorant of basic facts about the world we live in, but it was a conversation with my son about a year ago, on healthcare, that crystallized my thinking on this point.

Forgive me for saying that my son is a pretty smart guy who took his graduate degree in biomedical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.  UPenn is a first class school, especially strong in the life sciences and business (Wharton is there), so he was surround by ideas on healthcare, and he paid attention.

One day, we were chatting about American healthcare.  I admitted to him that I---a college educated man---do not understand how the system works.  His simple and astonishing response was, "nobody does."  Friends, that is a hell of a statement and, almost instantly, all my other thoughts, about our complicated society, rallied to his comment like soldiers rallying around the flag.

Capitalism is the central organizing idea of our society, yet it is more misunderstood by more people than almost any other socially important idea.  Socialism is very easy to understand.  The analogy I like to use, in comparing capitalism to socialism, is the flat vs the round theories on the shape of the earth.

A flat earth is easy to understand:  you can see it and feel it.  Most of us live as if the earth is flat.  Frankly, it does not make any difference, to most people, which theory is correct, so they rightly ignore the whole subject.

On the other hand, 2,500 years ago, a few people knew the earth is round.  And they knew this not merely as a competing superstition, but as fact.  In a simple and lovely exercise in spherical geometry, involving shadows at the bottoms of wells, Greek mathematicians not only proved the earth is round, but they  worked out the circumference of the earth within 10% of the modern figure, I seem to recall.  Not many people, then or now, can understand the mathematical argument.

Ah, but who needs a mathematical argument, these days, when you can see the round earth in pictures taken from space?  Too true.  But recognize the fantastical scientific and engineering infrastructure required to take those pictures.  So my point still stands, very much so:  in one way or another, it is a far more difficult intellectual challenge to understand a round earth than a flat one.  And, space pictures or no, lots of modern, young Americans are still not sure.

Just the same with capitalism and socialism.  Socialism is easy to understand:  let's just get together and fix the problem.  Are there poor people?  Give them money.  Are there sick people?  Give them doctors.  There is an apocryphal conversation between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway:

Fitzgerald:  The rich are different from you and me.
Hemingway:  Yes, they have more money.

suggesting that Hemingway cut through Fitzgerald's effete complexification.  Socialism just can't be more obvious.  And yet, everybody fails at implementing it.  Everybody.

On the other hand, capitalism, the theory that every person pursues his own self-interest, is a byword for selfishness.  How can you help your neighbor by being selfish?  Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, had to conjure an "invisible hand" for explanation,

"Every individual... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it... he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."

What?

You can see a flat earth, it's the round earth that sounds like superstition.  You can understand people working together to solve problems, we do it all the time.  It's the "invisible hand" that sounds like superstition.  Like religion, actually.  The same religion that warns you never to possess things you did not earn by the labor of your own hands.

Capitalism requires a difficult explanation.  Just try reading Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" or
F.A. Hayek's remarkable work, "The Road to Serfdom".  I think most people are no more able to read Smith than to understand the Greek argument in spherical geometry.

The American nation was founded by a small intellectual elite who could read Adam Smith, and understand a geometric argument.  Benjamin Franklin met Smith twice and conducted an extensive correspondence with him.  Their respect and admiration was mutual.

So, it comes down to this.  That small intellectual elite: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, James Monroe, and Benjamin Franklin, created a society in their image.  The rest of us are more or less uncomfortable guests.  Most of us do not understand capitalism, do not understand healthcare, do not understand compound interest, or how to use a credit card responsibly.

Do not imagine, however, that lack of understanding is restricted to the "lower" classes.  E.g., there were several strange reasons for the housing crisis of 2008.  Three of them were

1. several million people bought houses they could not afford, 
2. financial institutions traded in securities they did not understand, and
3. a federal agency, the Federal Reserve Bank, that did not understand the market it was supposedly regulating.  

From high school dropouts to economics PhD's, the complexities of their personal and professional lives, in 21st century America, simply eluded their grasp.  For them, for most of us, socialism will come as a physical relief.  We will be poorer but more peaceful in spirit.

There is a passage in "The Fellowship of the Ring" that predicts our fate.  The Lady Galadriel is queen of the Sylvan Elves.  Her great powers derived from the Ring of Power in her possession, one of nine.  All nine Rings of Power were slaves to the One Ring, a ring of great evil.

Galadriel understood the One Ring had to be destroyed.  And, when the One Ring is destroyed,

"...then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten."

The Border Wall

A quick word on the border wall the president wants to build.

One of the main objections Democrats have against the wall is that walls do not work.  Their arguments are preposterous, but I do not want to go down the list, point-by-point.  Rather, I want to give some context.

After the Muslim attack of 9/11/2001, it quickly got out that America had established some "Black Sites", unacknowledged locations outside the U.S. where unnamed people tortured information out of "unlawful enemy combatants".  The revelation caused immediate outcry.

One argument for the Black Sites went as follows.  Suppose Muslims planted a "dirty bomb" in a major American city.  If it exploded, at least a million people would be severely affected, with an immediate 10,000 fatalities.  In your custody is a Muslim with information that would enable you to pre-empt the bomb, if you could get the information out of him.  Would you torture one man to save one million people?

The Democrats answered "No", explaining that torture does not work.   

What?!  Everybody knows torture works.  Every spy novel you ever read, every Cold War movie you ever saw assumes torture works (that's why the hero carries a cyanide tablet in case of capture).  Every real life terrorist group, like the Italian Brigate Rosse and the German Baader-Meinhof Gang, organizes in a clandestine cell system precisely because they know torture works,
"Thus, a cell member who is apprehended and interrogated (or who is a mole) will not likely know the identities of the higher-ranking individuals in the organization."

"The basic principle behind cell organization is simple: By dividing the greater organization into many multiperson groups and compartmentalizing information inside each cell as needed, the greater organization is more likely to survive if one of its components is compromised."

What does "compromised" mean, daddy?  It means you put electrodes on the guy's testicles until he talks.  (After the second jolt, you won't be able to shut him up.)

The moral of the story is this: don't waste your time listening to Democrats.  And, yes, of course walls work.

Alright, one last word:  a border wall will not cure cancer.  I mean, a wall is a tool like any tool.  It will not solve all our problems.  It will not even solve all our immigration problems.  Like any tool, it has to be used correctly and it has its limitations.  So, the issue is not whether a wall solves everything.  The question is whether it is one more effective tool in a box of effective border control tools.

And that is an discussion the Democrats will never have.

Bullshit Is In Our Blood

I cannot understand Post-modernism.  Two of the greatest modern intellectuals, Noam Chomsky and Daniel Dennett, have admitted they do not understand it.  What they really mean, of course, is that PM is bullshit.

In fact, we know PM is bullshit.  In 1992, the physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed “Social Text”, then and now one of the pre-eminent journals of PM.  And in 2017, Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose successfully perpetrated a more elaborate hoax along the same lines.  In both cases, Alan Sokal and Boghossian et al, intentionally wrote obvious bullshit and tried to get it published in reputable, post-modernist, journals.  They succeeded. 

Clearly, every post-modernist, from Michel Foucault to Women’s Studies professors at your local community college, is talking shit. 

Now, this is very odd:  people hear this bullshit and believe it or, at the very least, defer to it.  Why?  I think we are programmed to believe that if we cannot understand a person, it must mean he knows something we do not know, and we are at a terrible disadvantage.

From the moment we are born we are surrounded by adults who nurture us and protect us from a large and frightening world.  And we cannot understand what they say.  Eventually we come to understand, of course, but it takes a long time.  By the time we are eighteen years old, we have spent a life time believing that people we cannot understand know important things.

As students we extend this experience.  From the time we are in fourth grade trying to work out fractions to college trying to calculate a line integral, we struggle to understand our teachers.  Or, maybe it’s physics or micro-economics or problems in metaphysics, we spend much of our lives listening to people we respect but often cannot understand.

Finally, even in adulthood, we depend on specialists whose language is almost impenetrable to us.  Doctors, lawyers, accounts, we hear them using English words but the sense of it is often quite beyond our grasp.

World-wide, there is a long tradition of learning other languages in order to study.  The Romans had to learn Greek.  The Europeans had to learn Latin and Greek, later French and German. 

The Japanese had to learn Chinese, a language as difficult for them as it is for us.  Turks and Persians had to learn Arabic.  Today, everybody learns English even if their mother tongue is Tagalog or Khoisan (the African “click” language).  Always, there is a language barrier to knowledge.  We are used to respecting people we cannot understand.

In a different domain of human knowledge, several religions are known for “speaking in tongues”, a tradition that goes back at least as far as the classical world of Greece and Rome.  Again, someone you cannot understand is presumed to convey a message of special importance.

A whole lot of people, for a very long time, have believed, for one reason or another, that special knowledge requires a special language, often difficult or impossible to understand.  This expectation is so old and so widespread, it is bred in our bones.  That is why I believe when Jacques Derrida and all his post-modernist friends talk shit, our first reaction is not to laugh in their faces.  Instead, we harbor a deep and abiding suspicion they know something we do not, and it is important.

So, that is why we let them get away with bullshit.  But, why do they do it?

The writer, Isaac Beshevis Singer, once wrote than whenever he cannot understand a person’s behavior, he assumes some kind of sexual perversity is the reason.  Along this line, here is professor Gad Saad in conversation with professor Daniel Dennett, speculating that Derrida and the post-modernists invented their gibberish to get laid.  They start discussing PM around minute 15:00 and Saad starts speculating about their true, sexual, motivation shortly after minute 24:00.

The desire to get laid may or may not be the real reason the post-modernists talk shit, but it is always my own go-to assumption when nothing else makes sense.  And post-modernism does not make sense.

Dark Things To Come

We all understand the human tragedy of the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh.  Beyond feelings of sympathy and sadness, we who have no personal connection to the Tree of Life Synagogue can do little to help the victims.  For us, however, there remains this important question:  is this shooting a harbinger of dark things to come, for Jews and for America?

One way to start thinking about this is to ask the following question:  does the murderer, Robert Bowers, look more like an SA Stormtrooper or more like David Berkowitz?

The Sturmabteilung ("Storm Detachment"), aka the SA, aka the Brownshirts, were the military wing of the Nazi Party in 1930's Germany.  An individual Stormtrooper, therefore, was part of a well organized group that was, itself, part of a rising and well organized socio-political movement.  A Stormtrooper was, indeed, a harbinger of dark things to come.

David Berkowtiz, the notorious "Son of Sam", murdered six people and wounded seven others in 1970's New York City.  He killed people because his neighbor's dog told him to do it.  While his crimes were every bit as awful as Robert Bower's on a personal level, at the social level Berkowitz was not a harbinger of dark things to come.  He is just a lone lunatic.

So, that is the question:  is Robert Bowers part of a movement or is he a pitiful and contemptible lunatic?  While the answer is a bit murky, I am on the side of lone lunatic.  On the face of it, I think Bowers is not a harbinger of dark things to come.  If I am right, we should find considerable solace in that.

However, while Bowers evidently acted alone, by the grace of the internet he was not entirely isolated.  His kind of lunatic racism will always be with us but now, thanks to one social media platform or another, these lunatics can find each other and talk.  Can they coalesce into something more virulent?

My short answer is no, and I say that because the history of the KKK is instructive.  Once upon a time, the KKK was a major socio-political force in American society.  They have been in steady decline since about 1960.  Today, they are a spent force.  In other words, if we were those people once, we are not them, anymore.

Unless you listen to the Left-wing extremists who would have you believe there is a Klansman under every White person's bed.  The Left have been working hard, for years, to revive the KKK.  My one great fear is they will succeed.

How 2016 Is Like 1967

I think I understand the Russian Collusion hysteria on the political Left.  It lies in bone-deep incredulity, and we have seen this sort of thing before.

In the "Six Day War" between Israel and her Arab neighbors, the Arabs became convinced that Americans were directly involved in the fighting, especially the American air force.  And they were convinced of this, not out of delusion, but for specific, technical, perfectly understandable, and wrong, reasons.

The Arabs knew exactly what planes the Israelis were flying and how many.  Every plane needs some number of hours of maintenance on the ground for every hour of flight.  E.g. (I am making up the numbers), a plane might need 6 hours on the ground for every hour in the air.  These numbers are widely known for each type of plane and you can calculate the theoretical maximum number of sorties an air force can operate in one 24-hr period.  This is an essential calculation for every staff officer drawing up operational plans, whether you are flying the sorties or defending against them.

Based on perfectly good Arab calculations, the Israelis were flying way more sorties than was theoretically possible.  There had to be more planes than the Israelis possessed, and they could have come only from the U.S.

There was nothing wrong with the logic, but the Arabs were not aware of Israeli capacity for innovation.  At the time, the Arabs could not know that the Israelis made modifications to their combat aircraft and, with excellent training of their ground crews, the Israelis were able to dramatically reduce ground time.  All else equal, if you can halve the ground time you can double the sorties.  It's a big deal.

No doubt, most of the Arab military officers now understand this.  But, for most people, ignorant of the technical issues, American complicity is easier to understand.  And it is a far more comforting narrative than the superior technical abilities of a contemptible enemy.  The myth of American complicity is very much alive and well in the Arab world.  Indeed, it has only grown in the telling.

I think something very like this happened in 2016.  The Trump team had a superior campaign strategy, not well understood by the Democratic Party at the time.  Combined with an especially bad Democratic candidate, Trump pulled off a victory the Democrats were sure was impossible.  In military parlance, besides an innovative strategy, Trump was "lucky in his enemies".

But, if you are the Democratic Party and Trump is the contemptible enemy, outside help is a far more comforting narrative, and it grows in the telling.  Many people on the Left sincerely believe the Mueller investigation will discover what they "know" has to be true, and they will take that belief to the grave, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

The American Embassy in Jerusalem

I guess I just wasn’t paying attention.  Only recently I learned that some real people think the American embassy move to Jerusalem is a bad idea.  I don’t mean the anti-Semites, or sufferers of Trump Derangement Psychosis, or Left-wing pundits, I mean normal people.  Even an Israeli friend thinks the move is a needless provocation that endangers her family.  I think it is important to understand why these sincere and decent people are wrong and President Trump is right.

First of all, the Muslims cannot be provoked.  Their mission is to destroy Israel, they will kill as many Jews as necessary to do it, and they have been undeterred since 1947.  So, the comment about unnecessarily provoking the Muslims is especially disturbing coming from an Israeli because Israelis cannot afford to misjudge their enemy.

Nonsense aside (and there is just so much of it whenever the subject is Israel), the one great danger to my friend and her family is the never-ending war between Israel and her Arab neighbors.  Today, Israel is secure because she is strong and her enemies are divided and weak, but what will be ten years from now?  A hundred years from now?  There are more than 400 million Arabs surrounding Israel, and the day they get their shit together will be Israel’s last day on earth.  Time is not on her side and Israel needs to make peace now, while she can do it from a position of strength.  But, how to do that?

All wars end in only one of two ways.  Either one side is comprehensively defeated, or they both realize victory is impossible and continued hostilities are pointless, and too expensive in blood and treasure.  There is nothing else.

The great modern example of the first case is World War II, which ended only when the Germans were pulverized, and the Japanese were incinerated, into submission.

The great modern example of the second case is the U.S. in Vietnam.  The Americans won every battle, including the notorious and much misunderstood Tet Offensive of 1968, which was a military disaster for the North Vietnamese.  And yet, although devastated, the North Vietnamese clearly and convincingly signaled their intent to continue the war.  The Americans concluded that victory, if it could ever be achieved, would come at a price they were not willing to pay, so they packed up their entrenching tools and went home.

I should mention that the North Vietnamese were able to continue the war because they got enormous political support world-wide and enormous material support from China and the USSR.  So, the war was not just the U.S. against N. Vietnam, it was the U.S. against N. Vietnam and half the world.

Even in the Middle East, Egypt treated for peace with Israel only after the “Yom Kippur War”.  Although Egypt could execute a complete tactical surprise and battlefield advances at the beginning, in days their 3^rd Army was surrounded and nearly annihilated in the Sinai Desert.  And, due to some astonishing “out-of-the-box” thinking by Ariel Sharon, elements of the Israeli Army crossed the Suez Canal, out-flanked Egyptian forces, and stopped a mere 100 km (60 mi) from a defenseless Cairo.  Explaining the stop, one Israeli soldier quipped, “What would we do with Cairo?” but Anwar el-Sadat understood the threat.

Israeli arms convinced Sadat he could not win on the battlefield.  Shortly thereafter, Sadat signed the first of two agreements with Israel and, in 1977, made his historic visit to Jerusalem for a peace treaty with Israel.

In all of human history, here is what never happened.  It has never happened that one belligerent says to the other, “Stop being a dick”.  Whereupon the other side slaps their forehead in realization and says, “You know what?  You’re right.”  And then they kiss and make up and live happily ever after.  So, if your strategy for peace depends upon one side or the other being persuaded by a smooth-talking Obama-like figure, don’t bet the safety and security of your children on it.

Which brings us to Arab-Israeli wars.  The Arabs lose every battle but continue the war.  Why do they do it?  How is that even possible?

The Arabs are neither stupid nor crazy.  They continue to fight because they think they can win, and they are reasonable in that expectation.  Like the N. Vietnamese before them, the Arabs get enormous political support world-wide, and they get enormous material support from Muslim countries, even some European ones.  They see Israel’s hand being restrained, even by America, putatively her closest ally.  They, too, can read a map (Israel is a speck in an ocean of Arabs), and their memories are long.  The Arabs remember it took them 200 years to expel the Crusaders, and they are willing to spend another 200 years, if that is what it takes, to expel the Jews.

The Arabs will never stop.  Unless they are convinced that victory is impossible, and they are made to endure too much pain at too high a cost.  I’m sorry, but there is no other way.

To the Arabs, the American embassy move to Jerusalem is a clear signal the political climate is changing against them.  Of course, the move counts for little, by itself, but it is not nothing.  And, if it is the first of many signals that they are losing support, and that Israel is gaining it, the Arabs will make peace with Israel.

How can I be so sure?  Think of it this way:  we know how wars have ended, in all other places in all other times.  For 70 years, we have tried a different strategy to end the Arab-Israeli war, and this strategy has failed, utterly.  I think we should use the one strategy that has the highest chance for success:  the Arabs must be convinced victory is impossible.

The American embassy move sends exactly the right signal.

Lucius Junius Brutus and the Lesson for DACA

By any objective measure, Western Civilization is spectacularly successful.  One important reason for this is the Rule of Law.  It is said "we are a nation of laws, not men" and that "no man is above the law".  Well, "Rule of Law" is easy to say, but it can be agonizing to do, and Lucius Junius Brutus teaches us this lesson.

At the dawn of the Roman Republic, in the sixth century B.C., Brutus was one of the first consuls of Rome.  The establishment of the Roman republic involved an insurrection against their Etruscan king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquinius the Proud).  Tarquinius conspired to regain his throne and Brutus's own sons, Titus and Tiberius, conspired with Tarquinius against the republic.

The conspiracy failed, and "Brutus gained respect for his stoicism in watching the execution of his own sons, even though he showed emotion during the punishment."

It is not easy to build a nation of laws.

There are surprisingly difficult ramifications of the Rule of Law.  One important ramification is that a criminal should not profit from his crime.  That is why, e.g., New York State passed the "Son of Sam Law" in the 1970's.

Until the serial murderer, David Berkowitz ("Son of Sam"), nobody imagined that a criminal could profit from his crimes by publishing his story.  There is the additional problem of the First Amendment, so the Son of Sam Law had to go through several iterations.  But, the basic principle is clear:  a criminal should not profit from his crimes.

Now, consider the problem of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.  Barack Obama, that vaunted professor of constitutional law, theorized that the children were small so breaking the law was not their fault.  Immediately, the children benefit from the criminality of their parents.

Then, once the children gain citizenship, their families---possibly including the very parents who originally broke the law---will benefit from chain migration.  Under Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, everybody benefits from criminality.  Except you.  What other inconvenient law should we ignore?  If DACA survives, the Rule of Law will not.

There are about 800,000 people at risk of deportation because of DACA.  Is that too big a number for the salvation of our Republic?  It is often said that about 620,000 citizens died fighting in the American Civil War.  That is true.  But if you include deaths from wounds and disease (disease being a serious problem in armies at war) then, including both sides, nearly 2 million people gave their lives to save our Republic.

In World Wars I and II, together, the United States sacrificed nearly 1 million dead and wounded, mainly for the benefit of others.  In the Vietnam war, nearly 50,000 Americans died.  And so on.

We are asking 800,000 DACA children to go home, most of whom are not children, anymore.  This is not such a big number, and nobody is asking them to die.  They just need to go home.

Furthermore, DACA is not about 800,000 individuals.  It is about the foundation of our society.  It is about the Rule of Law.  It is about the survival of "The Last Best Hope of Man on Earth."  If Lucius Junius Brutus could watch the execution of his own sons, to save the Roman Republic, you can deport the DACA children to save the United States of America.