THE ANTHONY STATE

With the looming arrival of The Gunslinger, this will be last post for a little while, except of course for the NCAA Handicapping Contest. By the way, The 'Slinger is one of the most admirable people who draws breath. I recommend everyone try to find a copy of the TRAVEL CHANNEL piece from this summer about him. It is supposed to re-run shortly. It's about poker, fyi. If you can look yourself in the mirror and answer the question of yourself "chump, what've you done?" after seeing it, I congratulate you. The interested student may inquire further.

I have, however, begun soliciting deputies to write for me this week, but so far, no takers. Big surprise! Water became dry, I guess. I had a pretty good idea school was out the day a left-wing blogger compared me to Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter. Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter? For real? I say "Coolio." Muchas gracias. Me alegro. Todo esta chevere y vacano y chimba. I wish I had their pulpit and their money.

It has always been hard for me to keep these promises but this time it's for real. I can't entertain a good friend and do all my work and do this. You will, indeed, not have Dick Nixon to kick around any more -- for a little while, anyway.

The fine folks at THE 'FORK are taking up a discussion of something we've been on about here over and over again: that America is not too-capitalist; it's not capitalist enough. By capitalism, we don't mean, of course, give the telecoms immunity for spying on American citizens, nor do we mean 3 cheers for Halliburton and Blackwater because they got no-bid, cost-plus contracts. We don't mean anti-Communism. We don't mean xenophobia. We mean quite simply: liquid markets, fungibility of assets and liabilities, and clear rules to include property rights, contract rights, collective bargaining, few barriers to entry, and as much trasparency as possible. You smile if you win. You pay if you lose. That's capitalism, no? When exactly did capitalism get conflated with that other stuff? When did the word "capitalism" cease to mean the mostly morally-neutral ideas above and start to mean "dictatorship"?

What's happening in the United States now is not capitalism. It meets the dictionary definition of fascism to be sure, but most of all it feels like THE ANTHONY STATE. Google "The Twilight Zone" and "Anthony" and you'll get the idea. It was a story about a small, Midwest town in the thrall of a pre-adolescent child with telekinetic power, who did bestride the town like a colossus, woe to him or her that ran afoul of the boy. How, of course, could any business thrive in a town like that?

That's what America's all about right now. Anthony sits in the Oval Office. He cannot pronounce the word "nuclear," so no one may pronounce it that way. What a tragedy that a country with the highest productivity to the unit of labor can only produce War and Weapons, Entertainment Product and Government Debt. So, Anthony decides that playing G.I. Joe is the way forward and everybody fearing being turned into a jack-in-the-box goes along. This beggars the dollar. This creates panic in the commodities markets. This produces pressures in the markets for financial derivatives which puts pressure on the last remaining source of large scale tax-revenues: housing. This allowed Anthony The Regent and his minders to pull off one of the cleverest attacks on reason and intellectualism yet: they put a bona fide intellectual named Ben Bernanke into a position as Fed Chairman in which given Anthony's fiscal madness, Bernanke could not possibly succeed. He is and will remain with a horrible Hobson's Choice: raise them and pulverize housing, lower then and beg for inflation, or wait-and-see and get pounded by everyone especially because his thoughtful, gentle persona just begs for it. So, the answer is more war and more cheerleading by the usual names. You know who they are. I'm finding Wolf Blitzer and Andrew Sullivan the most repulsive right now, but there are so, so many all-stars.

Even in the absence of the 9/11 card, would American business be all that great? For cultural reasons and a myth of exceptionalism deriving from having 25% of the workforce as unpaid slave labor, and highly exploited immigrant labor thereafter, capitalism as such wasn't necessary until recently. Before the flag waving, capitalism was a very foreign concept here. Elsewhere, if you built the better mousetrap, you spawn imitators. In the US if you build the better mousetrap, the exterminators' lobby calls upon the Bible School Girl prosecutors to stop you from building the better mousetrap.

For my part, I like peace and prosperity. Peace is no longer available. Neither is prosperity. The problem right now for Americans is that they are in the tall weeds. They hate peace and fear capitalism as deeply as they love war and religion. And there is no prosperity under the economic conditions which obtain today without peace.

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