Jim's Blog

Nigel asks:

A problem is over-reliance on foreign work to produce goods. The jobs that are left here are service jobs and managerial jobs. …

Did we get this way by free trade or by government intervention?

In “Death of the Doctor”, the virtue of a character is proved by that character having traveled around protesting:

…he’s picketing an oil rig…

…you’re fighting oil barons and factories…

Fighting factories. Not any specific kind of factory – just, factories, as if it were proof enough of a person’s virtue that he was fighting factories – any factories.

This is the same worldview as encapsulated in “sweatshop” – that capital formation, savings and investment, harms people.

The regulatory state is overwhelmingly dominated by people who have internalized that worldview – thus regulation is in practice applied to halt capital formation by businesses, to prevent savings from being put to productive use, in particular and especially to prevent them from being applied to factories.  Regulators see it as a simple wrong, to be stopped on any vaguely plausible grounds.

This regulation produces the Keynesian paradox – that saving is harmful and has to be offset by state dissaving.

The Keynesian fallacy is not that Keynesians believe that governments can stimulate. Of course governments armed with fiat money can stimulate. Look at Argentina! Look at Zimbabwe! Look at the Wiemar Republic! The Keynesian fallacy is that Keynesians believe that turning labor into goods is easy, so excess demand will mop up excess labor, resulting in the expected level of production.

Some of the conditions required to turn labor into goods are security of property rights, the rule of law, and freedom of trade.

Well that sounds like mere piety. Everyone is in favor of those things (though not necessarily for foreigners or with foreigners). In practice, however, these things mean that a well run business succeeds, and a poorly run business fails. If the government deems it a crisis when a poorly run business, run by pals of the government, fails, and intervenes with regulation to keep the zombie business running, then you don’t have freedom of trade, security of property, etc, you have socialism without a central plan. And your economy is going to go to hell in a handbasket. Zombie businesses are not capitalism, but crony capitalism.

Turning labor into goods is hard, and people whose chief asset is their place on the revolving door between the regulators and the regulated are not going to do it. Stimulus may raise profits and employment, but you are not in fact going to get production. The economy is running on habit and inertia, on people doing what they used to do because that is what used to be done, and over time, this gets more and more detached from doing anything very useful.

Finding stimulus unstimulating, governments then lie about inflation and GDP, at first lying a little, and then, eventually, like Argentina, lying a lot.

Looks to me that living standards in the US have been declining since 1972. Food, fuel, education, and house that is safe to raise children, goes up, but supposedly this is offset by the fact that you now have an internet connection that can download more porn than anyone could watch, and your car now has electric windows. Every so often growth declines to a new new normal, and statistics are adjusted so that we pretend the old normal is still in effect. Median male income has, notoriously, been falling, as has male employment. Creative measures of inflation, wherein everything you have to buy goes up, but it is supposedly offset by everything you don’t much care about going down, is not the only distortion. Increased female employment transfers unmeasured household production (such as children and a nice house) to measured production, thus male income is arguably a better indicator than GDP per head. Increased female employment leads to a statistical mismeasure, since they were probably working harder and producing more value back in the days before they had office jobs. If female employment goes up while age of marriage goes up, there is not necessarily more production. If male employment goes down, there is really, no kidding, less production. Comparing the past with the present leads to a lot of apples and oranges problems, and the government increasingly chooses whichever approach that makes the present look good, and the past look bad.

The old deal, legally enforced before 1857, and socially enforced before 1960, was that a man got:

1. The role of head of household.
2. Marriage for life.
3. Not to be denied sex by his wife.
4. A bride who gives him her youth, virginity, and submission.

This gave all males a powerful incentive to build civilization for their posterity, to invest in the future and in themselves.

The deal has been endlessly changed to be worse, and yet supply and demand tilted ever further in favor of women

Before 1857,  women were eager, indeed frantic, to sign up for the deal, and men considerably less enthusiastic

In 2000 or so, however, a women in her thirties, her pussy saggy from being pounded by hundreds of high status charismatic manly males with big tools, had no difficulty getting some poor loser to sign up for a deal where he is apt to lose all his assets and his children.

Although the deal got steadily worse for men, most women are happy to have one thirtieth of a high status male, leaving the other twenty nine males lonely losers. Hence the high male demand for marriage, even on highly unfavorable terms.

Note that when I say high status, I don’t mean high status as males measure status.  Women assess status childishly, like four year old children who say “my daddy can beat up your daddy”.  Thus the guy in jail for rape and murder gets unsolicited pen pal letters from hot chicks who want to meet him in person, while the guy in the corner office who landed the account of a major corporation does not.  In general, a woman is only apt to sleep with her boss’s boss when her boss actually demands she do her job, and successfully gets her to do it, thereby demonstrating his superior status.  While men settle their status differences quickly, and then get on with the job, a woman always pushes back, always testing a little, always pressing a little, which makes them profoundly disruptive when you allow them into an organizational hierarchy.  They are superficially more compliant than men, but they never stop pressing, never stop testing, and these days it is almost impossible for a male to pass the test without being guilty of sexual harassment.  One way to press on and test her boss, is to sleep with his boss.  If, on the other hand, she succeeds in walking all over her boss, as she usually does, she is apt to satisfy her hypergamous impulse not by sleeping with his boss, but by sleeping with a thug.  Thus the declining rate of boss fucking, and the increasing rate of thug fucking, indicates the collapse of discipline within organizations.  Women are less and less inclined to view organizational status as real, because when they press on it, it is not real, whereas men regard organizational status as real, partly because unlike women they do not get special legal status, partly because men are less inclined to keep on pressing, but mostly because of who signs their pay checks.  Men perceive a job as a deal where they do stuff that people want done and get paid for doing it, while women perceive a job as boyfriend and family.  When their boss is not nice to them they want a divorce with alimony and the house their boss fired but they should keep the office and the paycheck

Absent legal and social enforcement of monogamy, there is a massive surplus of males and shortage of females.  At age thirty or so, this tends to become less unbalanced, as the highly desirable males don’t particularly want to poke used up old women, with the result that women become willing to reluctantly and regretfully settle for males who are willing to commit, when formerly if any male was so desperate as to give indications of willingness to commit, they would have turned up their noses at any loser so desperate as to offer commitment.  Indeed, I can say from personal experience and direct observation, that if you are a man and want to marry young, you must give not the slightest indication of interest in marrying young, or indeed ever.

Patriarchy with polygyny causes similar problems, as the absence of patriarchy.  There is massive homosexuality among Pashtun males for lack of women, but the big problem that needs control is women wanting better, not men wanting more.  A society that allows hypergamy is more messed up than a society than allows polygyny.

The only way to make supply equal demand is to enforce monogamy, and since females are the uncontrollably lustful sex, the big problem is enforcing monogamy on women.  When a girl is young enough and pretty enough get plowed by Mister One in Thirty, she is happy to have three percent of Mister One in Thirty.

To maximize male investment in posterity and the future, need to share out one man per woman, and one woman per man, something that is forcefully resisted both by women and by high status men, but the resistance by women is the harder problem..

At some point the deal gets so bad, that increasing numbers of men just give up, contenting themselves with porn, whores, and whiskey.  We are now approaching that point.  The massive decline in male participation in the labor force is a measure of the problem.

The age of marriage can be considered to be approximately the marriage price.  Marrying an old woman is what a man desperate to get married pays for marriage.   Conversely, marrying young and staying faithful, thus giving up all that alpha cock, is what a woman desperate to get married and stay married pays for marriage.  Age of marriage is the price matching supply and demand.

If shortage of wives, if wives are in high demand, women do not respond to that demand.  Instead women ride the cock carousel until they notice that they no longer need an abortions every couple of months, and start worrying about their fertility, so, obese and pushing towards forty, hop off the cock carousel to condescend to reluctantly marry some lucky guy.

If shortage of husbands, girls start figuring who is husband material at age sixteen, and worry that if they kiss a boy, or wear unduly sexy clothes, they will get a reputation for being easy and no one will marry them, and they do their best to get married when they are at the age of peak hotness, which is to say, very young,which was roughly the  situation before 1820 or so.

Suppose that Uncle Sam the Big Pimp ceased paying women to spawn bastard children, that all the numerous subsidies from men to women are ended, except the subsidy that a man is expected to support his good, obedient, and faithful wife, that all the sex quotas for women to take the career track were ended, so that any woman on the career track would forced to compete with men on equal terms, which of course most women cannot do except at the lower end.

Suppose that illegitimacy is disgraceful for both mother and child.  In China, illegitimacy is fined instead of subsidized.  If they can punish them, so can we.

So suddenly a lot more woman would want to get married.  Presumably all those who would in today’s order be spawning bastards, would instead be looking for husbands, thus approximately doubling the supply of potential wives, relative to the supply of potential husbands, since about fifty percent of children are fatherless.   In addition, approximately one third of generation X wound up childless who had not planned on being childless, presumably career tracked and distracted by the cock carousel, so a more conservative environment would roughly triple the supply of prospective wives relative to prospective husbands.

So women would have to offer more – more youth and chastity, or else get left on the shelf.  The age of marriage would then drop, to equalize supply and demand.

Monogamy, of course, would also require a lot of cheap housing.  In most states, to subdivide land and build housing on it requires environmental review that no one can possibly pass except by political pull and massive bribery.  In those states where it is reasonably possible to subdivide, notably Texas, housing is cheap, family formation is correspondingly high, resulting in people voting conservative.

Reasonably priced housing of course also require that police and private citizens would be allowed to profile, to prevent whites from being ethnically cleansed.  In most of America, whites are being ethnically cleansed, depriving whites of reasonably priced housing.  The reverse phenomenon, gentrification, occurs in places like San Francisco where the left piously looks the other way and encourages, indeed directs, the police to act like jackbooted Nazi thugs.  Ethnic cleansing occurs when black thuggery is indulged, but white self defense is not permitted, as happened most infamously in Detroit. Gentrification occurs when elite members of the left, finding their elevated selves are being preyed upon by non asian minority thugs, finding their bubble is frighteningly small and alarmingly permeable, tell the cops to go hog wild and supply law and order to those that profile as disorderly and lawless, San Francisco being an extreme example of such left wing hypocrisy.

There is a positive feedback effect (readers of this blog, unlike our “cognitive elite”, know the difference between positive feedback and negative feedback).  The more supply and demand favors women, the less they practice monogamy.  The less they practice monogamy, the more supply and demand favors women.  So society tends to flip between two states, the state where males, marriage, and commitment is in high demand, and most children have fathers, and the state where most males are surplus to requirements, have no incentive to contribute to or protect society, and most children are fatherless.  Civilization only gets built in the condition where males, marriage, and commitment, are in high demand.

When a government moves left, it damages the economy. When it moves left far enough and fast enough, this becomes embarrassing, so it lies about the economy. North Korea, Cuba, and Argentina are infamous examples of this, the Soviet Union used to be an infamous example. Lately the USA has been understating inflation and overstating real GDP growth. How far out of contact with reality have things gone? (more…)