I know that experts agree that our liberal and Democratic friends are the sharpest knives in the drawer, because education and credentials.
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After all, how would they have got to be the ruling class without intelligence and cunning?
But in the last week, we have all started to wonder.
When the Democrats all sing in chorus about the evils of Elon Musk’s first trillion, as though he were a feudal lord with gold in them thar dungeons, you start to wonder.
When all the Democrats sing in unison about the splendor of tat-laden rich-kid Graham Platner, you ask yourself: really?
When California strangely promotes third-place Nithya Raman to second place in the sharp-as-a-tack post-election-day ballot counting, you ask: really?
When the Brits and the Irish finally start to riot about criminal migrant crime, you wonder how well knightly wonders like Sir Keir would do at a medieval tournament, setting their lances in a medieval joust. That’s what knights were, back in the day: mounted soldiers with fancy names.
Maybe, after a while, the sharp knives get to be blunt.
See, I had a bit of a revelation this week, reading P.J. O’Rourke’s book on Adam Smith. It turns out that the burghers in the medieval towns — that’s the bourgeoisie to you lefties — figured out a way to keep the feudal lords at a safe distance. As Google AI says, the burghers paid
a fixed perpetual rent (or “farm”) directly to the king or lords. In return, they won independence from the tyrannical feudal system, laying the groundwork for modern free markets.
Do you see the point? The burghers paid off the forever-broke feudal lords. Then they financed a couple of generations of bought-and-paid-for intellectuals, and in the end, overwhelmed their kingly masters. And all the knives in the drawer got replaced.
Now I think that Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel and the rest of the tech lords are way sharper than Elizabeth Warren and Graham Platner and Scott Pelley and the woke NGO crowd.
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When Sen. Warren tweets that
The typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk’s level of wealth.
Whereas Marc Andreessen recently tweeted:
Five dimensional chess doesn’t exist. Everyone is furiously improvising all the time. The future is utterly uncertain.
I get it. Democrats think they can win elections by playing on resentment —
Now I have a curious conspiracy theory. I believe that the tech lords are way smarter than we think. For instance, read all about Marc Andreeseen and Nietzsche on X. Here is Peter Thiel talking about his encounter at Stanford with René Girard of mimetic theory: “rivalry, violence and the scapegoat mechanism as foundations of religion and culture.” I wonder what Sen. Warren knows about Nietzsche. I wonder what Graham Platner knows about René Girard. And don’t get me started on the RINOs.
Let’s create a grand theory of the Great Enrichment. The medieval burghers were smart; they outsmarted the feudal lords and built prosperous cities all across Europe. But the 19th-century and early 20th-century entrepreneurs who created the industrial economy — the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Wright brothers, Fords — weren’t political, and got sandbagged by the educated elite. Our 21st-century entrepreneurs, I suspect, are wicked smart and have a good chance of sandbagging the current end-of-dynasty neo-feudal elite.
Put it this way. Today’s tech lords are “furiously improvising all the time,” and nobody more than Elon. But I don’t see the Bidens and Harrises and Warrens and Basses and Walzes as furious improvisers. Maybe the FDRs and Brain Trusts of the 1930s and the Civil Rights era leaders of the 1960s were energetic in their day. But not Hillary and Barack and Joe and Gavin. Like Platner, they were born on third base “and act as if they hit a triple.”
I wonder how the tech lords would furiously improvise the welfare state. Back in the Middle Ages, a serf could go to their feudal lord and ask to become a slave: “head for food.” After the American Revolution, ordinary Americans were furiously improvising charity, with “hundreds and thousands of new voluntary associations expressive of a wide array of benevolent goals,” according to Gordon S. Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Then, educated experts decided that government and bureaucrats could sit back and do it better.
A trillion here, and a trillion there, and pretty soon you are running out of other people’s money.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.