Porcupine’s Seventh Law:

The number of parties in the country is proportional to the health of democracy and inversely proportional to expedience in governing.

I think racism, so called, or rather otherism in general, of which racism is only one form, is only going to increase.

Why?

Not because of those nasty ol’ white men, or whoever else opposes the Woke, but because the GOP base has broken with Wall Street. Otherism is entropy, the default state of human beings, and order, or being not otherist, requires a feeling of wealth. The more the cost of living increases, the less wealthy people feel and the less able they are to resist impulses to otherism. Which means– and I know I have made this thesis in the past– that the social left is the natural ally of the economic right. It used to be that this alliance was more or less hidden, but I would argue that its recent slow trend toward revelation has been the wedge driving the rift between the Republican base and Big Business.

Poverty and racism are thus closely linked– but it’s poverty in the sense of how much work is required to solve how many problems, and racism in the sense not of the personal failure of empathy that makes for a good moral-political target, but in the sense of a tidal receding of the economic waters that lifted people to a higher point on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

The difficulties people face, both internal and external, in forming wealth is a subject I think about a lot.  I keep on thinking that the size of the gap you have to jump over to make it from renting to buying is a major factor in preventing many people from pursuing wealth-accumulating habits. Imagine you could buy a 4′ by 8′ plot of land for a month’s pay and tent there rent-free from then on. You want more space, buy an adjacent plot for another month’s pay. With the next month’s pay you sell that land and buy a capsule in a condominium version of a capsule hotel, if one existed. The link between the saving and the owning would be so close that many more people would do it.
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It therefore follows that many laws, fees and customs– certificates of habitability, for example, or minimum lot size requirements, or social assumptions about lifestyle– are actually hindering wealth formation.  Frictional costs in trading land, like those tiny plots of ground, are another obstacle.

Why is this?  Well, I suspect being able to live at the rock-bottom minimum of expense will attract not only good people that are trying to get richer quickly by living cheaply while working hard, but also a lot of the “dregs of society” that lawmakers and richer constituents don’t want around, and since they can’t simply pass laws against individuals, they have to pass laws that make it more expensive to live.  They limit rental housing for much the same reason.  But nobody actually stops and thinks about this enough to realize that this is happening, apart from the occasional odd porcupine.  It’s a form of discrimination, though I consider that word to be merely a pejorative for “judgment the speaker doesn’t like”, and came to be hidden as an effect of the unresolvable clash between the importance of judgment in life and the moralistic drive to squelch judgment that “society” doesn’t like.

There may be some hope for the Washington Post, since it not only publishes my favorite columnist, Megan McArdle, but also published this— as a farewell, true, so no one can demand he be fired for WrongThink, but still, they did publish it.

As for the content– the guy is obviously quite correct– I never cease to be astonished at the myopia of Progressives. They simply can’t see that the poor don’t serve the rich– poor people overwhelmingly serve other poor people. Nor can they see that a lot of the businesses that employ minimum wage workers or anything close are commodities that can’t pay more for labor without raising prices, or raise prices without either hurting poor people or losing customers and going out of business.

They’re essentially trying to create artificial, de facto, in-the-aggregate ownership of businesses using politics, like unions used to be, but can’t see that in a globalized world, that only works in “resource republics” (and even then not forever, as Venezuelans could attest). By contrast, when most of the value is in labor, applying politics to steal something makes the value vanish.

Basically, it’s the political application of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Porcupine’s Sixth Law:

Politicians do not want to be effective, but to have the reputation of having fought, preferably dramatically, and purchased, vitally, at the lowest possible price in political capital.

The corollary to which is that they’re often delighted to have a publicly explainable reason why their noble intentions were foiled by those hacking oligarchical badgers on the other side, especially if they themselves didn’t personally believe in the value or wisdom of what the base demanded they fight for and were glad to have a way out of having to accomplish it.  It’s political flopping.

I had occasion recently to revisit Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics, which are:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.  (This was actually first formulated by John O’Sullivan, and should so be better known as O’Sullivan’s Law.)
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

And of course I like Jane Galt’s Law, coined by Megan McArdle: “The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.”

In that vein, I have been coining some laws of my own for some time.  The first I already posted about here.

Porcupine’s First Law:

The probability of getting any policy in place varies directly with the product of its profitability to lobbyists by the degree to which it’s too boring for the public to care about it.

Porcupine’s Second Law:

Wealth is not only a matter of what you have, but of what the people around you don’t have.

That is, the cost of living is proportional to the general level of wealth of the people around you, and the lower the cost of living, the more of other people’s work you can afford.

Porcupine’s Third Law:

The responsiveness of government to voters is inversely proportional to the number of political parties in play, while its incompetence is directly proportional.

Porcupine’s Fourth Law (the Law of Conservation of Scandal):

The demand for fascists, racists, et cetera is always far greater than the supply. Combine it with addictions to righteousness, and you get pressure to redefine these things to create more supply.

Corollary to the Fourth Law:

Political linguistic drift is usually an example of this phenomenon:  Whenever the demand for scandal and cheap moralizing gets sufficiently ahead of the supply, activists put pressure on language downward to create new villains.

This is an example of the creation of the “endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary” that Mencken observed was “the whole aim of practical politics”.

Porcupine’s Fifth Law:

Taboo criticisms become truer over time.

This seems almost a corollary of the law of natural selection.  When the natural predators of ideas are eliminated, they grow until stopped by some other force.

Megan McArdle writes, “I’ve watched so many disaffected conservatives and libertarians explain why they think the Republican Party can only be redeemed by its utter destruction in Tuesday’s elections.”

She adds, “the Republicans…deserve to lose after enabling this fame-addled mountebank”

I was recently asked on social media whether the redefinition of a term was a bad thing.  The questioner asked, in essence, why not?  Because there’s all this “soft racism” out there that we need to address.

Yes, the redefinition of a term is generally a bad thing.  Whenever there’s a term with social, moral and political juice, it becomes a horse that everyone tries to hitch their pet cause to, or stretch to cover what they want or don’t want.  People were persuaded to accept the term racism back in the 1960s, or whenever, under one definition, probably best described as being what prevented King’s children from being judged by the content of their character.  Those were the conditions under which people consented to make opposing racism a societal value.  And now it’s being used to persecute people for the most minor claimed examples of it, and as a cover-up for personal failure and bad behavior, by people for whom being judged on the content of their character is the last thing they want.

Things fall apart.   Idealism gets corrupted and co-opted by the greedy, whether for money or for power. History teaches that this happens over and over and over again.  Unions used to be about a fair shake and became bloated and greedy and corrupt. The Catholic Church began selling forgiveness in advance for committing sins.  Supporting the troops became the military-industrial complex.  The real democratic consent of the Constitution became SCOTUS reading whatever’s popular into the interstate commerce clause and the 14th Amendment.  Now it’s happening with racism, sexism and so on, and it’s tearing the country apart.

I said all this in reply.  I ended with this thought: if we need to fight “soft racism”, then come up with a new term and popularize it. In the end, all real social and political accomplishment boils down to persuading people in their private hearts. Anything short of that is burning the ship’s timber for fuel.