The Laws of History

Oh goody! Virtue is rewarded! My "Radical Suits and Their Suckers" just got a mention at Instapundit, and the money quote was

Not to get too Marxist about this, but we are talking about the inevitability of a law of history. The productive forces are changing, and the social superstructure is going to have to change too. The liberal and the radical suits can help their Big Unit followers through the change or they can drive them into the ditch. It’s their choice.

Rather nice, don't you think?

I am trying to take the strategic view of the current situation. What is going to happen to the present correlation of forces in the United States? Are the liberals and Democrats going to be able to stop the spending cuts with the semi-violence of mass protests and sporadic thuggery? Or will the new spirit of retrenchment sweep all before it?

Here's Timothey P. Carney writing that the Democrats just don't get the new populism.

The Left has misread the postbailout populist sentiment all along, assuming public anger was directed at the rich. But American anger, I suspect, is directed not at some people who have money or success, but at those who profit through cronyism and their connections to power.

But Brian Doherty at Reason takes a darker view.

Wisconsin is an early sign of the stresses that will either shift our system of government action and spending to something unrecognizable to those who lived in the post-WW II boom years or tear that system apart. And everyone seems ready to fight about this necessary shift...

We may not be France yet, but there are disturbing signs that Americans may be ready to take to the streets angrily in defense of their government deals and giveaways.

But that gets back to the laws of history. If there isn't any money to pay the government workers then there isn't. And don't forget that the government workers are peanuts compared to Social Security and Medicare.

Here's another thought. I'd say that a very large proportion of government workers are women: teachers, nurses, social workers, paper pushers. I just don't believe that women are going to take to the streets to defend their perquisites; it's just not the female way.

What will happen is that there will be a big sorting out. And many of the people that have tagged along on the Democratic gravy train are going to be eating the paint off the walls. That's something that our liberal friends have not thought about. The fact is that government benefits are not ownership rights. They are given at the discretion of Congress, as the Supreme Court has ruled. So what the government giveth, the government taketh.

A couple of years ago, a young Democrat told me that he was glad of Social Security because it wasn't subject to the vagaries of the stock market. That was a clever thing to say in the fall of 2008, but I'm afraid that as the government fiddles around with the entitlements in the next few years, probing the American people for the soft spots, this young chap, now older, will wish he had some sort of ownership rights on his government benefits.

In any case, it ain't gonna be pretty. Prettiness only obtains where people refuse the temptations of political power and limit their actions to peaceful cooperation. The whole point of the administrative welfare state is political power for the educated class and clientage for the great unwashed masses. On the one side the serpent. On the other side a million Eves. I need hardly remind my readers that the story of the Garden of Eden did not end happily.