"A Liberating Time to Be Alive"
Plus only the market can tell the 'real thing' from the fake ... European do or die ... and much more
The week’s round-up of creative destruction ...
First a clip from my book so everyone may see the socio-institutional aspect too:
… Institutions cope with the global disequilibria generated by technological and economic revolutions. But cyclical institutional adjustments are also affected by the relative behavioural influences of interests, social values, public emotions, and ideologies. The process of creative destruction extends to social structures over a wide area, and can change the course of institutional development.
No therapy can permanently obstruct the great economic and social process by which business, individual positions, forms of life, cultural values and ideals, sink in the social scale and finally disappear. (Schumpeter 1983: 255)
Our cyclical schema … stresses that kind of economic change that is particularly likely to break up the existing patterns and to create new ones, thereby breaking up old and creating new positions of power, civilizations, valuations, beliefs, and policies. (Schumpeter 1964: 279)
The tendency, however, is for social institutions to lag behind changes in the economy. Crises create opportunities and motivations for resolving disproportionalities. Yet despite pressures exerted upon them by developments in technologies and markets, the response of institutions to economic change is rarely proportional to the pressure.
Social structures, types and attitudes are coins that do not readily melt. Once they are formed they persist, possibly for centuries, and since different structures and types display all different degrees of this ability to survive, we almost always find that the actual group and national behaviour more or less departs from what we should expect it to be if we tried to infer it from the dominant forms of the productive process. (Schumpeter 1947: 12–13) …
Victor Hansen was on particularly good form today.
I listened all the way to the end, which is unusual.
“I think everybody should take a deep breath. I'm doing it right now. This is the greatest cultural, political, social revolution of my lifetime, because there was nothing like it in the 60s. What we are watching is the slow disintegration of identity politics, racial tribalism, democratic demagoguery, and it's insidious and they can't stop it.”
Next, very thoughtful essay by Barton Swaim, read the whole thing:
Markets Foiled Transgender Ideology
“What right-leaning critics of markets fail to appreciate, however, is that the cultural pathologies they lament often don’t originate in the private sector at all—and that markets frequently offer effective antidotes to those pathologies. Consider the ways in which, over the past few years, the private sector has rebuffed the advancement of transgender ideology. … The one unambiguously for-profit institution that does promote trans ideology—the mainstream media—is, perhaps not coincidentally, slowly dying. Some clinics, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies profit from transgender surgeries and hormone drugs. But the medical field is so replete with public money, so heavily regulated by the state, and so dependent on third-party payment that their behavior is best described as rent-seeking.”
Bud Light is “no longer glamorizing transgender influencers. The commercial sector turned out to be one of the few spheres in which ordinary Americans could register their feeling that transgenderism isn’t a thing to celebrate. Several multinational corporations, meanwhile, are significantly curbing or scrapping their diversity, equity and inclusion commitments, chief among those commitments the doctrine that trans identity must be lavishly accommodated for and applauded. Brown-Foreman, Ford, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Lowes, Molson Coors, Stanley Black & Decker, Tractor Supply Co.—these and others have withdrawn from the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, a guide meant to tell investors how friendly listed companies are to “LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion,” “transgender workplace best practices” and so on. But why did these companies embrace transgenderism and other left-wing causes to begin with? The answer is complicated, but the salient point is that none of it was a response to market forces. Corporate America’s promotion of progressive political aims was never about enriching shareholders by responding to customers. It was, and remains, a losing effort by corporate and asset managers to satisfy the demands of a vast network of activists, transnational organizations, government regulators, left-wing politicians and tenured experts. This network … is united by the belief that environmental, social and governance considerations—especially on climate and “equity”—ought to govern the allocation of shareholder resources. Whether managers believe in the causes they purport to champion is beside the point; they must pretend to believe in them if they’re to keep the activists, regulators and other scolds off their backs. Whatever else this describes, it doesn’t describe a free market.”
The indefatigable Douglas Murray says Trump will be good for The West:
Richer, safer, at peace with itself and its neighbours – what Trump might do for America and the world
“Some of the effects of Trump’s success can already be felt. Certain provocations by the West’s enemies have already been reined in. And the corporate world which pandered to the radical Left already looks like it might be ready to do a reset. If this does happen, then something truly extraordinary could happen in the next four years. Because whether in Britain, Europe or America, the West has spent recent years mired in decline. Economic decline, certainly. But a social decline as well. We have been intimidated by hostile anti-Western voices in our own midsts as well as outside. Mass illegal foreign immigration has radically undermined our societies. Countries which were once coherent have become, at root, incoherent and febrile. Equally bad is that voices from within have sought to undermine one of the central facts of the West – which is that people want to come here for a reason. They don’t try to break into China illegally – and the CCP wouldn’t allow them to even if they did. But only in the West have new generations been told that there is something not just bad about us, but uniquely bad about us – all while the world still tries to pour in here. Trump may be an unusual leader for many people, but he might have the opportunity not just to turn American anti-Americanism around, but also Western anti-Westernism too. Perhaps we might even be able to regain a justified pride in ourselves again.”
Matthew Lynn on same theme from a different angle:
Britain should side with Trump over Europe
“Although the US is the UK’s single largest trade partner, the EU overall is a lot larger. In a trade war, there is an argument for trying to steer a middle way between the two sides. Even so, it would still be a huge mistake. First, the UK has a very different economy to the rest of Europe, and is far more reliant on services over manufactured goods. But services are typically exempt from tariffs. All the British law firms, consultancies and media companies selling around the world won’t notice a trade war in the way German and French auto and chemical businesses will. Next, the US is the world’s growth economy, and that will be even more true as Trump cuts taxes and regulations. The EU by contrast has ground to a halt, and it makes little sense to tie yourself to a failing bloc. Finally, after the trauma of our departure from the EU, Brussels can’t be trusted. We are no longer part of the club and can’t expect our interests to be protected. If its trade officials need to throw the British to the wolves to cut a deal, they will, and, in truth, it would be hard to blame them. By contrast, if we side with Washington, we will be rewarded …”
Walter Russell Mead on similar theme:
Maybe Europe Needs Trump: Tough love from the U.S. could spur the Continent to deal with problems on its own.
“The EU has failed to build an economy, tech industry, political system or security strategy that is adequate to the demands of the 21st century. It’s not only Mr. Trump’s America that is less deferential to European wishes these days. Turkey, China, India, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia—nobody cares as much about European interests as they used to. To much of the world, Europe seems less a model to emulate than an example of what not to do. As the Indo-Pacific emerges as the critical theater in world politics and economics, neither the European Union nor any single European country plays a significant role in the region’s affairs. Although many Americans, especially on the right, enjoy gloating over Europe’s problems, we need to understand that Europe’s decline is a problem for the U.S. It’s in America’s interest for Europe to succeed.”
“European fragility is a significant factor in the developing world crisis. It’s easy to blame Europeans for these failures, and most of the responsibility for Europe’s choices rests on the policymakers who made them. But Americans too need to reflect. Is the fecklessness of most countries’ security policy a consequence of an American security blanket that spared them the necessity of making hard choices? Have we been too much of a helicopter parent—for example, by intervening in Kosovo in 1999 rather than forcing Europeans to deal with major issues in their region on their own?In France particularly, there are Europeans who are almost looking forward to tense trans-Atlantic relations under President Trump. They say Europe will never grow up to be a serious actor in international affairs unless the Americans stand back. The coming Trump presidency will, they hope, be the kind of wake-up call that finally makes even the Germans think realistically about the dangers Europe faces. The French could be right. Some Trumpian tough love may be exactly what Europe needs.”
Last but not least, Gerry Baker sighs with heartfelt relief.
Four More Years of Trump May Make America Normal Again
“For a decade or more … we have been led by peddlers of a set of ideas that have clothed our institutions and the country in social and political doctrines, fake claims and strictures that have inflicted untold harms. The fancy new items of invisible attire that our nation’s rulers have made us wear for too long include these:
The idea that people who have stolen into this country illegally should be showered with all the rights and benefits of citizens, that it is immoral to deny them those rights, and that they should instead be treated as victims of persecution and given “sanctuary” in our crowded and fiscally strained cities.
The idea that a nation that sits atop one of the greatest reservoirs of natural energy resources on Earth should forcibly restrain itself from exploiting them to “save the planet” on the basis of politicized science, while other countries are free to do much more damage to the global environment.
The idea that after a century and a half of progress in expiating America’s original sin of racism and making the country more equal, we are suddenly obliged to believe that America is as oppressive as it was in 1619, and that the best way to right the past wrong of treating people based on the color of their skin is to treat people based on the color of their skin.
The idea that children should, without parental consultation or consent, be free to choose their “gender,” be assisted by the state in committing acts of self-mutilation to do so, and all on the understanding that we have repealed millennia of science and just discovered that there is no such thing as biological sex.
The idea that democracy and freedom are best protected by denying people the right to express certain views that the authorities deem “misinformation” and by weaponizing the law against political opponents lest they weaponize the law for political purposes.
Ambitious elites in business and civil society went along with the fictions. Politicians on all sides, including Republicans, declined to dissent for fear of being called out. It took a man with some of the instincts of a child, a political ingénue lacking the sophistication to participate in the sham, to call the whole thing out for what it was. … Four years from now, there’s a good chance that the nonsense we have had to endure will be buried, that important things will have become normal again.”
My thanks to the Wall Street Journal, the Spectator, the Telegraph, and conservative Condorito
Dr Michael G. Heller
