Tim Carney on the need for religion; Yuval Levin on the Trump-Biden budget; Chris Brunet on the collapse of the market for econ Ph.D's; Oliver Kim on same
As someone who grew up and attended early 1960's rural SW MO hillbilly churches, I can assure you that the song was not originally "satirical" . . . Skeeter Davis had a hit with it, for God's sake: "In the late 1960s, I recall a gospel tune—which was satirical—that said 'We need a whole lot more religion and a lot less rock’n’roll.'”
Of course, when I let my hair grow later in the 60's and started attending Peace Rallies, I then sneered at the old people concerned about the deleterious effects of "sex, drugs, and rock and roll."
However, now that I am an old person shaking my sparsely grey-haired head at the lunacy of our current society, I wonder if we might have been better off without quite so much "sex, drugs, and rock and roll."
I don't think so, I think just the opposite actually. Generation Z and Alpha are extremely regressive on what we would consider modern traditional Western values, i.e. sex, speech, tolerance, diversity, individualism, etc. and they could def use some "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" to help them break out their neo-puritan shells. You look at statistics around alcohol consumption and social drug use and they are falling off a cliff even sharper that sex, marriage, and bearing children in those generations. I got kids at "party colleges" and teetotaling is rife everywhere. It's like straightedge'ism won but without the overt rebellious motive and moral backing behind it. Likewise Puffy is about to get nearly a decade for a non-crime statutory violation around consensual sex between adults plus cue the entire war on sex that has been doing on since the early oughts.
I proffer the problem is more a Bootleggers and Baptist coalition of Boomers (in the strict descriptive sense) who, like you, someone developed a vitriol disgust of people engaging in the exact same behavior you yourself engaged in and a pathological need to arrest your younger self (never mind you won't turn yourself in even if the statue of limitations hasn't expired; as it hasn't for all those sex crimes you committed) and Gen Z/Alpha youth that were raised in a neo-puritan oven mitts culture that is rebelling against the liberal Gen X values (in their younger years, i.e. senior age).
Something I've heard variants of a thousand times before from tons of people but to use my own mother as an example, she used to be, what we would call today, a "bag hoe" who ended up marrying and having kids with her dealer as part of the "party lifestyle" of the 1960's and yet today she clutches her pearls at the very idea her granddaughters might do a line of cocaine or, God forbid, go on a date when a man more than one year older than them (because even a 25 yo male who dates a 22 yo female is pedophile in the modern narrative because he "grooming her" for IDK, a wife, a date, etc? ... the horror! the horror! I mean what is dating but grooming and prostitution in practice) whereas those same granddaughters were raised via their friends, school, modern culture, and greater society to think all men are rapists, positive sex is only for trannies, and drugs are bad and together with the Boomers, well now we have that society you are railing against yourself.
You my friend are the problem. The problem was never the sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll of your youth, or any youth before or after, the problem is your pearl clutching as you get older and your insentient need to prevent others from doing behaviors you yourself enjoyed (and you turned out perfectly fine) because of some weird internalized self loathing of your youthful indiscretions. You know the same "Greatest Generation" rebellion against their parents on drugs which led to the drug war.
We need MORE sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll (and religion too TBH), not less. Lots and lots more.
We need more marriage & love-making, where love is sex lust plus commitment.
We’re much better off with more kids born to married families. Likely also better off with fewer total kids but a smaller % of kids not living with their married bio parents.
“We’re much better off with more kids born to married families. Likely also better off with fewer total kids but a smaller % of kids not living with their married bio parents.”
You’re of course right about the first sentence.
Because the U.S. is such a magnet for immigrants, you might be correct about the 2nd sentence for our country only, but you would be wrong for any other country, given how low TFR is.
This exact complaint applied to my 1979 Ph.D. from the English department of a solid state university: an economics "degree is a trap: six or more years of grinding work that too often ends with being overeducated, underpaid, and locked out of the profession you trained to join."
The very best of our class got a non-tenure track position at an Ivy--and thence in a few years to a peripheral branch of a state university. The rest went to community colleges, even high schools . . . or as in my case out into the cold of the non-academic workforce.
And yet the English department continued to recruit starry-eyed Ph.D. students, knowing, knowing full well, there would be no prestigious or even numbingly-boring academic positions to fill.
Of course, it did not help that English departments across the land went full lunatic on cultural issues, which has only gotten worse.
Re: "The liberal project, for decades, was to push us towards a more secular, more rational society that leaned less on dogma, tradition, and faith." — Tim Carney (quoted by Arnold)
There was no unitary "liberal project" for a more secular society. A major strand in liberalism, all the way back to Adam Smith, emphasizes that separation of church and state — a liberal ideal — fosters greater involvement in churches etc, via differentiation and competition for adherents.
Of course, Adam Smith's thesis is a ceteris paribus thesis. Liberalism eventually fosters also other mechanisms that might reduce involvement in churches etc. But it is misleading, I think, to define the liberal project as a push for secularism, as distinct from liberty (including freedom of religion).
“But it is misleading, I think, to define the liberal project as a push for secularism, as distinct from liberty (including freedom of religion).”
But the whole point here is that going back centuries, you are correct. Whereas going back decades - specifically, since the mid-1960s - you are not.
And even if you wanted to argue that you were still more correct than not through about 2005, the evidence of the last 20 years shows definitively that you are wrong.
It is decidedly illiberal for the most part. I almost made that comment before.
But it is an extension of the progressive project, and said progressive project is the direction that almost all “liberal” projects have gone.
Classical liberalism is indeed goodness to this day.
Progressivism, which I readily concede had merits early on, is arguably no longer goodness even in its milder form today.
And its leftist progeny - and make no mistake, the leftist movement *is* an outgrowth of the progressive movement - sees no pushback from supposed “progressives” or even the center-left, and is decidedly the opposite of goodness.
“No recent president has surrendered his role in the formal federal budget process like this.”
Every recent president has taken the existing spending level and added to it. It makes a lot more sense to frame Trump as a continuation of recent trends than as a departure.
A blip. What one executive order can do, another can undo. Without legislation to make it "permanent", it won't last longer than Clinton's reductions. And without further legislation to make huge structural changes, even that won't last long.
Um, those hundreds of thousands of people are out of the federal workforce, retired or resigned or fired. There is not going to be mass reinstatement of those same individuals in early 2029 even if a Democrat wins. It's really absurd to call that a blip.
What a terrible example. The military downsizing during the early Clinton years was massive and permanent. The Army ended up losing over half of its divisions by the time he was done with his second term.
Did Clinton not reduce the bureaucracy too, civilians? That's what I was referring to. It's been 30 years and I'm going from memory. If you know otherwise, please say so.
The military budget didn't stay reduced after Clinton for hardly any time at all. Of course that was partly from 911 but it would have gone up almost as quickly without 911.
Fair and it's a good example but this is different in that that was a bipartisan intentional reduction in capabilities, i.e. the vaunted and fondly remembered, but squandered, Cold War dividend. Sure Trump is going to temporarily get rid of some bloat, obviously not much given 90% of the government is still working as "exempt from shutdown", but capability isn't being intentionally reduced which means table of orgs aren't getting changed which means those positions will just stay on the books as a need and get filled in 2029. He is just introducing a backdoor four year limited hiring freeze basically.
A good counter example here. The National Weather Service (Department of Commerce) has six geographic headquarters each with about equal staff, let's say around fifty people each, of which the majority are high paid GS-13+ Federal middle management. Four of those headquarters each manage dozens of forecast offices whereas one (Alaska) manages only a single forecast office and one (Pacific) manages only two forecast offices (you can thank senators Inouye and Stevens for that, pork bipartisanship at its best) . Trump will reduce staffing by let's say two people in each HQ (so a total of twelve individuals) as the cuts are generally uniformed and left to the organization to decide itself but what he's not asking is why do those two headquarters even exist. If fifty people in the Western HQ can manage twenty-five forecast offices and fifty people in Southern HQ can manage thirty-two forecast offices, maybe we don't need a hundred people to manage three forecast offices and instead can just shudder both Alaska and Pacific headquarters and reassign those three forecast offices to the Western HQ whom, even including those new additions, will still be managing less that the Central or the Southern HQs and as a bonus you get rid of ninety-six more people permanently, most of them overpaid too.
(Aside: If anybody reading this has a Trump ear, you might want to mention this to one of his staffers because DOGE unsurprisingly missed it too. Trump has been really hands off on NWS since they intentionally torpedoed him the first term with the sharpie).
See that is what Clinton would have did ala DoW reductions whereas Trump on the other hand is just indiscriminately firing a low paid GS-6 secretary at each HQ which won't last long term because the structure is still there.
“My sense is that over the latter half of the twentieth century there were occasional magazine covers touting the emergence of one sort of religious revival or another. None of them lasted.” Or so you think. Perhaps religion morphed into something that you don’t associate with religion. Perhaps those revivals are still ongoing. How is ideology different from religion for example? From the Old Testament, to the New Testament, to the LLM Testament? The revivals haven’t stopped—they’re continuously evolving like life and our universe. Religion is an evolving technology.
It may be that empirical disconfirmation of religion's cosmology gradually led to throwing out the baby with the bath water. But humans have always worshipped something, i.e., tried set something apart as sacred, and so, as you put it, religion morphed into something else, ersatz religions such as the horrific political religions of the 20th century. The old institutional religions had developed guardrails against murderous fanaticism, which mostly worked, unlike the new faiths.
To be fair, history has plenty of murderous fanaticism to go around, from social elements adhering to traditional organized faiths or to some purportedly 'secular' ideological innovations, and it's usually not possible to separate intentions and motivations, that is, as if the mass murder was done mostly to further a political project or for religious reasons. The Thirty Years' War is a good example and was arguably worse than the Black Death in parts of Europe.
I’ve never thought carefully about the difference between intentions and motivations. Fascinating, checking with ChatGPT on this it seems I’ve neglected to read some important books on this topics. Thanks for bringing this blind spot to my attention.
I like this idea of not being able to separate between politically motivated murder and religiously motivated murder in the case you cite. What are your favorite books on this topic?
Do you see religion as a subset to ideology? While touring the Mayflower II in Plymouth last week, one of the museum teachers held this view, and it seems correct to me. Dan Williams recently defined ideologies as popular belief systems. That seems like a simple straightforward definition. I suppose we can delineate between personal belief systems and popular belief systems. Each person has his own personal belief system motivated in part by his ignorance, knowledge, and hypotheses about the world and additionally motivated by his needs and goals. This personal ideology will have some mix of intersection with belief systems of other Individuals. When these individual beliefs systems be sufficiently coherent they can be identified and named.
Just thinking out loud here. How am I doing?
What should I read to learn more about the gist of your comment?
Good one. By new faiths, do you mean political religions? If so, I wonder if you would prefer the following edit: “Most of the old institutional religions had developed guardrails against murderous fanaticism, which mostly worked, unlike the new faiths.” Was just thinking that Iran et. al. might not have developed such guardrails. And more questions for you: approximately what decades or century were such guardrails made effective? What technologies, knowledge, and events allowed this to occur? What should I read to learn more about how these guardrails were conceived and first implemented?
This week Joel Miller taught me that “writing facilitated the exteriorization of thought, serving as a prosthesis for the mind.” Religion serves a similar purpose. Like writing, books, and LLMs, religion is a technology that serves as a prosthesis for the mind. The supernatural concepts that we typically associate with religion are simply our former best hypotheses for explaining the unknown. Once we see the supernatural as hypotheses, then religion isn’t defined by supernatural. Rather it’s defined by hypotheses that we sometimes don’t agree on. The First Amendment can be viewed as the tradition of peaceful disagreement, in which we prohibit ourselves from Congressional favoritism of any one hypothesis, ideology, or religion.
That so many Econ PhD's have no job prospects might be the best lesson in economics those folks are ever going to get. It's the same with the rest of the PhD cohort...they put their faith in (what I believe) are corrupted and misdirected institutions, and now can't understand what went wrong. I'd prefer those folks not having the opportunity to (mis)direct youngsters.
I'm fine with religion. I'm not fine with the idea there's only one true way, which so far, has led to conditions that are the opposite of what religion ostensibly is about.
Identity-based woke oppressor-oppressed ideology is “one true way”.
As of course was its predecessor class-based first cousin communism.
As is “Mother Gaia” worshiping, “climate change is destroying the planet so leftists must be granted authoritarian political power” environmentalism.
Organized religions have plenty in their past to be ashamed of. But Islamist terrorism notably excepted, traditional western religions had eliminated their negative characteristics while retaining the massive benefits of Judeo-Christian values that made western civilization possible.
It is now the overlapping religions of supposedly atheistic leftists that are far more dangerous.
I am rather partial to the diagnosis of wokeism as a Christian/Jewish heresy. They shed the God, but doubled down on the exalting the weak and marginalized, tied to how progressivism focused on perfection of Earth through using the state to achieve personal ends of charity.
I am not sure where to draw the lines there between the heresy and the old religion. Certainly many mainstream Christian churches seem to have adopted the heresy happily enough, at least around here.
I could accept the roots, but… with the acknowledged exception of “charity” towards the less well off, please shows me what other Judeo-Christian values remain within woke.
Progressives had already shed Thou shalt not covet, but they didn’t do all that badly on most of the rest (save Thou shalt have no other gods, of course…).
But the commandment actually doesn't say that. It says, "Thou shalt not murder". Murder is unjustified killing. The Old Testament God often directed the Israelites to kill their enemies. And just about everybody believes some killing is justified, whether it's in self-defense, in a "just war", as punishment for heinous crime, etc.
As Trump believes Venezuelan drug smugglers should be killed, some woke believe that racist, sexist homophobes with power should be killed. So if that's what you think Charlie Kirk was ...
Most people would not pull the trigger themselves, but they think, "If someone could go back in time and kill Hitler before he came to power, I would support that."
I agree on “murder”, vs. kill; you are correct there.
I’m perfectly fine with the theoretical Hitler case.
It’s oppressor-oppressed theory that asserts that the oppressed have the right to overthrow their oppressors BY. ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY. is imo why leftists think it perfectly justifiable to cheer on the murders of Kirk and the United Healthcare CEO.
I reject your Trump Venezuela example as not meritless, but very different, because we give government the monopoly power over violence, including terrorism and war, and so that is just not equivalent to approving of murders. [Do not take the prior as me endorsing blowing up that boat; I’m just saying it is not in the same league here.]
Maybe not the same boat, but the same flotilla of "reasons why this killing is justified".
Governments obviously get special consideration for deciding who is worth killing and who isn't. But everyone thinks they should only do it for a good reason--while often disagreeing on whether a certain situation presents a good reason.
I forgot the "Though Shalt Not Covet" point, sorry!
I agree in principle, but unfortunately, so do they. Note that the progressive elites are always needing money and power to ostensibly help others, to give them things. Just because a fat percentage happens to line their pockets, well that's just because they need to support themselves!
Those who do outright demand things from others always do so by claiming it was unjustly taking from them, so giving things to them is just correcting injustice, giving what should rightfully be theirs.
That is of course the problem of the oppressor/oppressed narrative: it gives easy mental camouflage for any and all covetous behavior.
Not sure we have any disagreement on “covet” at all. The progressive left long ago abandoned that one.
Most of our disagreement seems to be roughly the following: for me, progressives are wrong on the reality of their economics, but are otherwise moral (writ large) in their intentions [thou shalt not covet notwithstanding].
Oppressor-oppressed woke, OTOH, is both wrong on their economics, wrong on individual liberty, wrong on civil society AND deeply immoral with their intentions.
I.e. progressive utopia might at least tend towards heaven; woke “utopia” would be dystopian hell.
My problem with progressives is that they do seem to understand that Islamists supporting terror and Sharia law are bad, but choose to emphasize that most Muslims are “‘peaceful”; fair enough on its own. But most refuse to recognize that oppressor-oppressed woke is dangerous and about as bad; the few who might mostly refuse to speak up about it.
Before critical theory / intersectionality / DIE / oppressor-oppressed woke, I always believed - as do the “moderates” who bemoan our current politics - that “we all share roughly the same values, we just disagree on best means to attain them and on tradeoffs on the margin”. Sure there were Nazis on the right and communists on the left, but in the last 65 years neither had any mainstream credibility.
But the woke do NOT share the values of the large majority of Americans; OTOH, I *still* believe that “ordinary” progressives, classical liberal-type libertarians, centrists, social conservatives, and most of the “MAGA” populist working class do roughly share the same values.
But with the partial sharing of values with woke combined with tribal overlap and a refusal to “punch left”, progressives have ignored this massive values disagreement to the country’s detriment.
I had hoped October 8th would show the depravity, but only a few seem to have noticed. There’s a chance Kirk’s murder aftermath will get a few more to notice, but I no longer hold out much hope on that score.
I think you are largely correct. I largely disagree on progressives being moral, because I think they are very much interested in control, even if it is for "your own good". I agree that many aren't bad people and you could be friends with them without politics coming up. However, I believe they have a strong belief that it is right and proper to use government to force people to adhere to the beliefs they hold. Where they differ from the woke is that the woke are competing for social status via who can have the craziest most pure beliefs and are spiraling into insanity as a result, but fundamentally the progressive can't really argue against the woke on philosophical grounds. I believe that is why so few have.
Incidentally, progressives are not alone in that. I am reminded of the moral panic church ladies of my youth.
Many centrists with a leftward bent did have and do have limiting principles, sometimes free speech, sometimes "don't burn down and loot cities", sometimes being able to recognize murder. Those limiting principles have peeled them away from the rapidly spiraling lunatic left. Some progressives might get there, too. However, at least those I would call progressives (the label might be being applied by us in very different ways, I grant), are largely comfortable using the power of government to coerce people into believing the way they do, which precludes and preempts concerns about free speech, destruction of property and, yes, killing, so long as they are progressing towards utopia.
Numbers 4, 6 and 1 are the big ones, with 4 and 6 being the primary purity spirals. Love thy neighbor becomes a competition to love the most distant person as you love yourself (in word if not in deed) combined with showing off how much you can invert the status of the most marginal groups.
The heresy is obviously the non-theistic nature of the religion, but the hyper purity spiral of 4, 6 and 1 (through forced appropriation of resources and less personal giving) stem from the basic Christian value set.
The heresy is also clearly backwards compatible with the host religion.
Roger Sweeny pointed out that "thou shalt not kill" is more correctly translated as "thou shalt not murder".
Yes, and in fact in their minds caring (in words if not in direct action) is lauded as more virtuous the more removed the target person is. After all, anyone can love people like them, but only the truly virtuous can love people they will never meet or see. Or so the thought process goes. Hence all the talk of global community, global village, etc., right down to the "picture that explains everything" you see making the rounds. The story of the good Samaritan taken to the utmost extreme.
I agree on “kill” / “murder”. And my point is that the woke have abandoned *that*.
I defer to you that 6 is distinct; I was lumping it together with 1.
Where we still profoundly disagree is on your 4 in particular and your general claim that the “heresy is also clearly backwards compatible with the host religion.”
[Acknowledgement/disclaimer: I was raised Jewish and am now agnostic thisclose to atheist myself, and claim little understanding of any “true” Christian definition of heresy.
I’m merely a firm believer in Judeo-Christian values writ large, believe that older school progressives also broadly held those values, but believe that it is the woke that have abandoned them, and believe that progressives are partly but not entirely responsible for said woke abandonment of those values, while said progressives *are* almost entirely responsible for woke values becoming *acceptable* in mainstream society.]
Re kill/murder: Murder is unjustified, improper killing. The convenient thing about fanaticism is that it lets you justify a lot of killing, with none of the limiting principles that regular people tend to recognize.
Regarding loving one's neighbor as thyself, that's where the heresy comes in with the purity spiral. If loving one's neighbor as thyself is good, loving neighbors further away must be better because it is more difficult. Get them far enough way, say the other side of the world, and wow, look how much more virtuous you must be! Anyone can love someone just like them, but loving people wildly different than you, who even hate you, that shows true virtue.
As to the backwards compatibility, note how many churches have gone super woke. Hell, even the current pope is pretty far down that road. That wouldn't fly in say Islam, but wokeism isn't inherently incompatible with Christianity for most Christian organizations. Conservative Christians push against it, sure, but it isn't even clear that it is the majority, much less a very large percent. It isn't like 90% of churches recoiled hard against wokeism.
Progressives, and the left more generally, have the problem that they do not have limiting principles in their ideology or morality, nothing that brings them back from the edge of purity spirals. The more extreme elements tend to drag the centrists along to crazy town because at the philosophical level, the extremists are more true to the group's professed beliefs.
It is much like Muslim fundamentalists and Muslims in general: the crazies who want to kill infidels and force conversion of everyone to Islam are annoying to Muslims who just want to life their life, but they don't get resisted or told to shut the hell up. Why? Well, because technically they are more correct based on the group's moral founding. It is apparently all but impossible to be Muslim and not also agree that Sharia law would be an improvement, and those that are not spreading the religion by word or by sword are kind of slacking.
Of course it is not just leftists and Muslims that have the "no enemies to the more extreme side" problem, they are just the obvious modern exemplars of it.
Before accepting the conclusion that “all the sound and fury coming out of Washington signifies nothing” one might want to look at the top line numbers as well as the department level figures that Levin cites.
So, because the statement report by fiscal year, and the federal fiscal year begins in September during the last administration, we might want to do a 2024 - 2025 month to month comparison. For August, (the most recent statement), total receipts were $306,540 million in August 2024 and $344,315 for same month 2025. Outlays: $686,620 and $689,107. Deficit: $ 380,080 and $344,792. If my math is correct that means a 12.3% increase in revenues versus a $3.6 increase in outlays and a decline in the monthly deficit of about 9.3%.
Nothing?
The increase in receipts is mostly due to the second quarter GDP increase of 3.8%. Just eyeballing Table 4 of the monthly statement, it seems as if income and payroll tax receipts all increased significantly. And this would seem to align with the weird jump in the civilian labor force December 2024 – January 2025 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV )
And to give Trump a fair shake, it might be noted that his budget did propose to cut federal spending by $163 billion. Or as the New York Times put it: “Trump Proposes Slashing Domestic Spending to the Lowest Level of the Modern Era.” (https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/05/02/us/trump-budget-2026 )
And a lot of the sound and the fury about DOGE came about from the attempt to clean up the social security rosters and Medicare payments, so it seems premature to dismiss their efforts out of hand. We won’t know until the trust fund reports come out next year whether or not anything will show up then.
Sure it is horrifying that outlays increased in some of the swamp agencies, but some of this might be costs associated with letting employees go. Federal employees get a lot of expensive severance pay benefits when they are let go. But even back in August prior to shut-down layoff threats, OPM’s Scott Kupor was claiming that the federal workforce would be reduced about 12%, or 300,000 by the end of the calendar year. If this pans out, it would be a great boon for the budget long term as federal retirement benefit cost demands are reduced.
In short, there definitely is a lot more budget cutting to do, but Levin may be jumping the gun. When the next budget comes out and when the trust fund reports reflect the Musk interventions, we may have a clearer picture of what, if anything, is happening.
“‘Amazingly, Trump and his team seem content to keep in place the spending levels approved by Joe Biden and the last Congress through perhaps as much as half of Trump’s second term. No recent president has surrendered his role in the formal federal budget process like this.’
So all the sound and fury coming out of Washington signifies nothing. The Biden bump in spending is going to persist.”
You can blame Trump for a lot of things - including, IMO, high spending during his first term as president (I most certainly do).
But it’s really hard to blame the current high locked in spending on him.
Blame it on the razor-thin GOP margin in the House, along with the small handful of “moderate” Senators (Collins, Murkowski for sure, then a few others like Romney on various specifics) and there is sadly not a majority in Congress willing to make cuts.
Trump tried for cuts with DOGE, with recessions, with not spending all allocated. He actually succeeded in slowing the rate of growth of Medicaid. How do you utterly fail to give him credit for this?
Trump 47 has been worse on several things than Trump 45, no doubt. But on spending, the Musks of the world have had an effect, and he’s been better.
The problem is no longer with him, it is with the Democrats (of course) and the GOP “moderates” in Congress.
Catholics had an answer to "sex, drugs, and rock and roll", which was " 'sex', 'drugs', and 'rock and roll' ". But channels into pro-social institutions. Men could have sex with young virgins, if they married them and had as many kids as they could afford. Drugs was plenty of holidays and festivities when it was ok to get at least a little drunk. Rock and roll was all the spiritually moving, elegantly decoration, promotion of refined taste, entertaining decorations, and uplifting aesthetic beauty of the architecture, art, and music The Church patronized and publicized, to provide an enduring legacy of great benefit of all future humanity, I must insist.
It was the Northern Protestants in particular who, in a singularity of "holier than thou" competitive sanctimony, came to advocate more puritanical and minimalist - I would say proto-Brutalist - austere forms of art, dress, and worship associated with their religious movements and societies*. This translated inevitably into patterns of harsh discipline and self-denial in culture and life itself, perhaps to include Weber's "Protestant Work Ethic", but a social institutions of behavioral management which required a high level of personally experienced pressure and tension with little opportunity for relief for their functioning. America was a Protestant culture and the Anglosphere won The Big One, and it was the the rebellion against those un-Catholic social constraints that gave them a taste of Catholicism-sanctioned enjoyments, though, with none of the pro-social channeling.
*In contrast to the Latin-cultures of Southern Europe full of incoherent but socially stable tacit balancings and salutary hypocrisies, my impression of their history is that the Northern Europeans always seem to take everything deadly seriously or not at all and so quickly fly from one extreme to another, so it was either harsh discipline and austere worship or else they were quaking and shaking and gyrating and speaking in tongues and forming utopian cults or whatever. In the South, even the remote past was familiar. In the North, even the recent past of one's own homeland was always a foreign country.
Maybe someone can help me with this... I was just looking on FRED and was very surprised to see that the federal total public debt went down for two quarters in a row (the latest data they have are for 4/1/25). How can that be? Is there some sort of delay in reporting, or something?
Burnet’s Reason #4 - lying about inflation, tho I’d call it making false predictions about inflation. Because the power of science is based on making accurate predictions.
Economists have been failing: failed on inflation during Covid, failed before the 2008 Recession/ bailout for the rich speculators, and recently failed on tariffs increasing inflation. AK is included here in failing, in April 2025, predicting so much higher inflation because of tariffs that Trump should be strongly criticized. (Showing AK has a mild TDS)
The whole “too much govt spending” schtick has gotten pretty old, because Japan at 260% debt/GNP shows it’s possible to be over 250%, and the US is only over 100%. AK, and most economists, fail to note Japanese spending success, while emphasizing Venezuelan or Zimbabwean failure after too much mis-spending & hyperinflation. Or the US Great Depression, before any us were born & before the history change of WW II. Reminding me that the 1920’s tech changes allowing huge farm productivity, thru mechanization & far fewer farm laborers, was likely a more important negative influence on the Depression than Fed actions at the time. (Will ai tech be similar? Probably yes).
I strongly support less govt spending, but based on the far more difficult & specific Return on Investment criteria, where USAID was terrible, and tempered by electoral considerations.
High Rep spending, with less waste (a lot? Or just a little? Where are the economic estimates of how much waste is being cut?), is definitely better than the same amount of spending by Dems with more waste. Tho not individually for the recipients of the wasted money, which might well include many employed economists
How many years of caution about too much spending, falsely predicting near-term catastrophe, before it becomes more fear-mongering rather than real caution? Of course, if economists stop predicting econ failure, and there is one, that will also be used against them, and their failing theories.
The AK focus on Specialization & Trade makes fewer predictions, and thus has fewer failures, but reduces the (unearned?) power & prestige & higher salaries of economists. Plus politicians, and maybe especially the public, want simple numbers for scoring the economy, so they can more easily claim their side is better, and thus should have more political power. GNP, inflation, unemployment (or employment), budget deficit, trade deficit, median wage—that’s only a few key numbers but already too many for most folks.
More college grads should be looking to become owners & managers of their own businesses, or franchises, and do more trading production for cash from customers.
I thought Trump tried to sunset a couple of government agencies but the judiciary prevented him, saying this is our call, not yours. And assorted other things he tried to do - to be sure, not all of them wise.
Concur completely with Carney, yet... We don't believe in service to some socio-political agenda, we believe in service to God. Having spent over half my life as a church going Catholic, I found the benefits that Carney writes of to be real and of value, but beside the point. As Tolstoy confessed "Whatever answers faith gives, regardless of which faith, or to whom the answers are given, such answers always give an infinite meaning to the finite existence of man; a meaning that is not destroyed by suffering, deprivation or death. This means that only in faith can we find the meaning and possibility of life." Becoming "unchurched" has not cost me any faith. Indeed, I am immersed now in a deeply spiritual life, praying at least a dozen times a day. The candle we lit a few days ago still burns in front of the dish of candy set out for Saints Cosmas and Damian and another candle burns in the other room in front of a statue of an "old black." Amongst all the herbs growing in the garden is a small altar which has cigars and liquor inside but I have yet to be read in on the theological significance of this despite all these years, but I am regularly rinsed from head to toe with herbal washes brewed from the herbs and my clothes bear the smell of smoke from the home-made censer that regularly fumigates evil from the house. I probably hear the phrase "nossa" or "nossa senora" (in reference to Our Lady Aparecida)
a dozen times a day. And the social atmosphere is calm and loving and not at all wound too tight as it seems life is in the US these days. Going unchurched need not lead to social breakdown. Indeed, given the antics of these two recent popes, might churchgoing actually be distracting from faith? I regret it, but every time the Church is drawn to my attention, I seem to be reminded of Canto XIX of Dante's Inferno.
As someone who grew up and attended early 1960's rural SW MO hillbilly churches, I can assure you that the song was not originally "satirical" . . . Skeeter Davis had a hit with it, for God's sake: "In the late 1960s, I recall a gospel tune—which was satirical—that said 'We need a whole lot more religion and a lot less rock’n’roll.'”
Of course, when I let my hair grow later in the 60's and started attending Peace Rallies, I then sneered at the old people concerned about the deleterious effects of "sex, drugs, and rock and roll."
However, now that I am an old person shaking my sparsely grey-haired head at the lunacy of our current society, I wonder if we might have been better off without quite so much "sex, drugs, and rock and roll."
Same boat, agree.
I don't think so, I think just the opposite actually. Generation Z and Alpha are extremely regressive on what we would consider modern traditional Western values, i.e. sex, speech, tolerance, diversity, individualism, etc. and they could def use some "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" to help them break out their neo-puritan shells. You look at statistics around alcohol consumption and social drug use and they are falling off a cliff even sharper that sex, marriage, and bearing children in those generations. I got kids at "party colleges" and teetotaling is rife everywhere. It's like straightedge'ism won but without the overt rebellious motive and moral backing behind it. Likewise Puffy is about to get nearly a decade for a non-crime statutory violation around consensual sex between adults plus cue the entire war on sex that has been doing on since the early oughts.
I proffer the problem is more a Bootleggers and Baptist coalition of Boomers (in the strict descriptive sense) who, like you, someone developed a vitriol disgust of people engaging in the exact same behavior you yourself engaged in and a pathological need to arrest your younger self (never mind you won't turn yourself in even if the statue of limitations hasn't expired; as it hasn't for all those sex crimes you committed) and Gen Z/Alpha youth that were raised in a neo-puritan oven mitts culture that is rebelling against the liberal Gen X values (in their younger years, i.e. senior age).
Something I've heard variants of a thousand times before from tons of people but to use my own mother as an example, she used to be, what we would call today, a "bag hoe" who ended up marrying and having kids with her dealer as part of the "party lifestyle" of the 1960's and yet today she clutches her pearls at the very idea her granddaughters might do a line of cocaine or, God forbid, go on a date when a man more than one year older than them (because even a 25 yo male who dates a 22 yo female is pedophile in the modern narrative because he "grooming her" for IDK, a wife, a date, etc? ... the horror! the horror! I mean what is dating but grooming and prostitution in practice) whereas those same granddaughters were raised via their friends, school, modern culture, and greater society to think all men are rapists, positive sex is only for trannies, and drugs are bad and together with the Boomers, well now we have that society you are railing against yourself.
You my friend are the problem. The problem was never the sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll of your youth, or any youth before or after, the problem is your pearl clutching as you get older and your insentient need to prevent others from doing behaviors you yourself enjoyed (and you turned out perfectly fine) because of some weird internalized self loathing of your youthful indiscretions. You know the same "Greatest Generation" rebellion against their parents on drugs which led to the drug war.
We need MORE sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll (and religion too TBH), not less. Lots and lots more.
I’m with you on the drugs.
On the “‘rock and roll”, I think it’s arguable either way.
On the sex, seems to me with the TFRs we got, we need more of that, not less…
We need more marriage & love-making, where love is sex lust plus commitment.
We’re much better off with more kids born to married families. Likely also better off with fewer total kids but a smaller % of kids not living with their married bio parents.
“We’re much better off with more kids born to married families. Likely also better off with fewer total kids but a smaller % of kids not living with their married bio parents.”
You’re of course right about the first sentence.
Because the U.S. is such a magnet for immigrants, you might be correct about the 2nd sentence for our country only, but you would be wrong for any other country, given how low TFR is.
This exact complaint applied to my 1979 Ph.D. from the English department of a solid state university: an economics "degree is a trap: six or more years of grinding work that too often ends with being overeducated, underpaid, and locked out of the profession you trained to join."
The very best of our class got a non-tenure track position at an Ivy--and thence in a few years to a peripheral branch of a state university. The rest went to community colleges, even high schools . . . or as in my case out into the cold of the non-academic workforce.
And yet the English department continued to recruit starry-eyed Ph.D. students, knowing, knowing full well, there would be no prestigious or even numbingly-boring academic positions to fill.
Of course, it did not help that English departments across the land went full lunatic on cultural issues, which has only gotten worse.
Re: "The liberal project, for decades, was to push us towards a more secular, more rational society that leaned less on dogma, tradition, and faith." — Tim Carney (quoted by Arnold)
There was no unitary "liberal project" for a more secular society. A major strand in liberalism, all the way back to Adam Smith, emphasizes that separation of church and state — a liberal ideal — fosters greater involvement in churches etc, via differentiation and competition for adherents.
Of course, Adam Smith's thesis is a ceteris paribus thesis. Liberalism eventually fosters also other mechanisms that might reduce involvement in churches etc. But it is misleading, I think, to define the liberal project as a push for secularism, as distinct from liberty (including freedom of religion).
“But it is misleading, I think, to define the liberal project as a push for secularism, as distinct from liberty (including freedom of religion).”
But the whole point here is that going back centuries, you are correct. Whereas going back decades - specifically, since the mid-1960s - you are not.
And even if you wanted to argue that you were still more correct than not through about 2005, the evidence of the last 20 years shows definitively that you are wrong.
Andy G,
Isn't it a stretch to call pushes for secularism since 2005 "the liberal project"?
John
Agreed.
It is decidedly illiberal for the most part. I almost made that comment before.
But it is an extension of the progressive project, and said progressive project is the direction that almost all “liberal” projects have gone.
Classical liberalism is indeed goodness to this day.
Progressivism, which I readily concede had merits early on, is arguably no longer goodness even in its milder form today.
And its leftist progeny - and make no mistake, the leftist movement *is* an outgrowth of the progressive movement - sees no pushback from supposed “progressives” or even the center-left, and is decidedly the opposite of goodness.
And so we are where we are.
“No recent president has surrendered his role in the formal federal budget process like this.”
Every recent president has taken the existing spending level and added to it. It makes a lot more sense to frame Trump as a continuation of recent trends than as a departure.
I mean, if a six figure decline in the number of federal employees in just a few months isn't a trend discontinuity, what is?
Cutting employees is not the same as cutting spending.
Clinton cut employees quite a bit while those same agencies hired contractors to do much of the same work.
Yep, Bush 2 did the same
Google says he tried but the workforce went up, mainly due to increases in defense and homeland security.
I guess I didn't remember because I was in dod.
A blip. What one executive order can do, another can undo. Without legislation to make it "permanent", it won't last longer than Clinton's reductions. And without further legislation to make huge structural changes, even that won't last long.
Um, those hundreds of thousands of people are out of the federal workforce, retired or resigned or fired. There is not going to be mass reinstatement of those same individuals in early 2029 even if a Democrat wins. It's really absurd to call that a blip.
How long did Clinton’s layoffs and firings last? Why would Trump’s last any longer?
What a terrible example. The military downsizing during the early Clinton years was massive and permanent. The Army ended up losing over half of its divisions by the time he was done with his second term.
Did Clinton not reduce the bureaucracy too, civilians? That's what I was referring to. It's been 30 years and I'm going from memory. If you know otherwise, please say so.
The military budget didn't stay reduced after Clinton for hardly any time at all. Of course that was partly from 911 but it would have gone up almost as quickly without 911.
Fair and it's a good example but this is different in that that was a bipartisan intentional reduction in capabilities, i.e. the vaunted and fondly remembered, but squandered, Cold War dividend. Sure Trump is going to temporarily get rid of some bloat, obviously not much given 90% of the government is still working as "exempt from shutdown", but capability isn't being intentionally reduced which means table of orgs aren't getting changed which means those positions will just stay on the books as a need and get filled in 2029. He is just introducing a backdoor four year limited hiring freeze basically.
A good counter example here. The National Weather Service (Department of Commerce) has six geographic headquarters each with about equal staff, let's say around fifty people each, of which the majority are high paid GS-13+ Federal middle management. Four of those headquarters each manage dozens of forecast offices whereas one (Alaska) manages only a single forecast office and one (Pacific) manages only two forecast offices (you can thank senators Inouye and Stevens for that, pork bipartisanship at its best) . Trump will reduce staffing by let's say two people in each HQ (so a total of twelve individuals) as the cuts are generally uniformed and left to the organization to decide itself but what he's not asking is why do those two headquarters even exist. If fifty people in the Western HQ can manage twenty-five forecast offices and fifty people in Southern HQ can manage thirty-two forecast offices, maybe we don't need a hundred people to manage three forecast offices and instead can just shudder both Alaska and Pacific headquarters and reassign those three forecast offices to the Western HQ whom, even including those new additions, will still be managing less that the Central or the Southern HQs and as a bonus you get rid of ninety-six more people permanently, most of them overpaid too.
(Aside: If anybody reading this has a Trump ear, you might want to mention this to one of his staffers because DOGE unsurprisingly missed it too. Trump has been really hands off on NWS since they intentionally torpedoed him the first term with the sharpie).
See that is what Clinton would have did ala DoW reductions whereas Trump on the other hand is just indiscriminately firing a low paid GS-6 secretary at each HQ which won't last long term because the structure is still there.
“My sense is that over the latter half of the twentieth century there were occasional magazine covers touting the emergence of one sort of religious revival or another. None of them lasted.” Or so you think. Perhaps religion morphed into something that you don’t associate with religion. Perhaps those revivals are still ongoing. How is ideology different from religion for example? From the Old Testament, to the New Testament, to the LLM Testament? The revivals haven’t stopped—they’re continuously evolving like life and our universe. Religion is an evolving technology.
It may be that empirical disconfirmation of religion's cosmology gradually led to throwing out the baby with the bath water. But humans have always worshipped something, i.e., tried set something apart as sacred, and so, as you put it, religion morphed into something else, ersatz religions such as the horrific political religions of the 20th century. The old institutional religions had developed guardrails against murderous fanaticism, which mostly worked, unlike the new faiths.
To be fair, history has plenty of murderous fanaticism to go around, from social elements adhering to traditional organized faiths or to some purportedly 'secular' ideological innovations, and it's usually not possible to separate intentions and motivations, that is, as if the mass murder was done mostly to further a political project or for religious reasons. The Thirty Years' War is a good example and was arguably worse than the Black Death in parts of Europe.
I’ve never thought carefully about the difference between intentions and motivations. Fascinating, checking with ChatGPT on this it seems I’ve neglected to read some important books on this topics. Thanks for bringing this blind spot to my attention.
I like this idea of not being able to separate between politically motivated murder and religiously motivated murder in the case you cite. What are your favorite books on this topic?
Do you see religion as a subset to ideology? While touring the Mayflower II in Plymouth last week, one of the museum teachers held this view, and it seems correct to me. Dan Williams recently defined ideologies as popular belief systems. That seems like a simple straightforward definition. I suppose we can delineate between personal belief systems and popular belief systems. Each person has his own personal belief system motivated in part by his ignorance, knowledge, and hypotheses about the world and additionally motivated by his needs and goals. This personal ideology will have some mix of intersection with belief systems of other Individuals. When these individual beliefs systems be sufficiently coherent they can be identified and named.
Just thinking out loud here. How am I doing?
What should I read to learn more about the gist of your comment?
Good one. By new faiths, do you mean political religions? If so, I wonder if you would prefer the following edit: “Most of the old institutional religions had developed guardrails against murderous fanaticism, which mostly worked, unlike the new faiths.” Was just thinking that Iran et. al. might not have developed such guardrails. And more questions for you: approximately what decades or century were such guardrails made effective? What technologies, knowledge, and events allowed this to occur? What should I read to learn more about how these guardrails were conceived and first implemented?
This week Joel Miller taught me that “writing facilitated the exteriorization of thought, serving as a prosthesis for the mind.” Religion serves a similar purpose. Like writing, books, and LLMs, religion is a technology that serves as a prosthesis for the mind. The supernatural concepts that we typically associate with religion are simply our former best hypotheses for explaining the unknown. Once we see the supernatural as hypotheses, then religion isn’t defined by supernatural. Rather it’s defined by hypotheses that we sometimes don’t agree on. The First Amendment can be viewed as the tradition of peaceful disagreement, in which we prohibit ourselves from Congressional favoritism of any one hypothesis, ideology, or religion.
Okay. Done with my rant for today.
https://www.millersbookreview.com/p/tour-my-upcoming-book-the-idea-machine-plus-preorder-bonuses?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Woke is a religion.
That so many Econ PhD's have no job prospects might be the best lesson in economics those folks are ever going to get. It's the same with the rest of the PhD cohort...they put their faith in (what I believe) are corrupted and misdirected institutions, and now can't understand what went wrong. I'd prefer those folks not having the opportunity to (mis)direct youngsters.
I'm fine with religion. I'm not fine with the idea there's only one true way, which so far, has led to conditions that are the opposite of what religion ostensibly is about.
Agreed 100%.
Identity-based woke oppressor-oppressed ideology is “one true way”.
As of course was its predecessor class-based first cousin communism.
As is “Mother Gaia” worshiping, “climate change is destroying the planet so leftists must be granted authoritarian political power” environmentalism.
Organized religions have plenty in their past to be ashamed of. But Islamist terrorism notably excepted, traditional western religions had eliminated their negative characteristics while retaining the massive benefits of Judeo-Christian values that made western civilization possible.
It is now the overlapping religions of supposedly atheistic leftists that are far more dangerous.
I am rather partial to the diagnosis of wokeism as a Christian/Jewish heresy. They shed the God, but doubled down on the exalting the weak and marginalized, tied to how progressivism focused on perfection of Earth through using the state to achieve personal ends of charity.
I am not sure where to draw the lines there between the heresy and the old religion. Certainly many mainstream Christian churches seem to have adopted the heresy happily enough, at least around here.
I could accept the roots, but… with the acknowledged exception of “charity” towards the less well off, please shows me what other Judeo-Christian values remain within woke.
Progressives had already shed Thou shalt not covet, but they didn’t do all that badly on most of the rest (save Thou shalt have no other gods, of course…).
Woke even disavows Thou shalt not kill…
But the commandment actually doesn't say that. It says, "Thou shalt not murder". Murder is unjustified killing. The Old Testament God often directed the Israelites to kill their enemies. And just about everybody believes some killing is justified, whether it's in self-defense, in a "just war", as punishment for heinous crime, etc.
As Trump believes Venezuelan drug smugglers should be killed, some woke believe that racist, sexist homophobes with power should be killed. So if that's what you think Charlie Kirk was ...
Most people would not pull the trigger themselves, but they think, "If someone could go back in time and kill Hitler before he came to power, I would support that."
I agree on “murder”, vs. kill; you are correct there.
I’m perfectly fine with the theoretical Hitler case.
It’s oppressor-oppressed theory that asserts that the oppressed have the right to overthrow their oppressors BY. ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY. is imo why leftists think it perfectly justifiable to cheer on the murders of Kirk and the United Healthcare CEO.
I reject your Trump Venezuela example as not meritless, but very different, because we give government the monopoly power over violence, including terrorism and war, and so that is just not equivalent to approving of murders. [Do not take the prior as me endorsing blowing up that boat; I’m just saying it is not in the same league here.]
Maybe not the same boat, but the same flotilla of "reasons why this killing is justified".
Governments obviously get special consideration for deciding who is worth killing and who isn't. But everyone thinks they should only do it for a good reason--while often disagreeing on whether a certain situation presents a good reason.
I forgot the "Though Shalt Not Covet" point, sorry!
I agree in principle, but unfortunately, so do they. Note that the progressive elites are always needing money and power to ostensibly help others, to give them things. Just because a fat percentage happens to line their pockets, well that's just because they need to support themselves!
Those who do outright demand things from others always do so by claiming it was unjustly taking from them, so giving things to them is just correcting injustice, giving what should rightfully be theirs.
That is of course the problem of the oppressor/oppressed narrative: it gives easy mental camouflage for any and all covetous behavior.
Not sure we have any disagreement on “covet” at all. The progressive left long ago abandoned that one.
Most of our disagreement seems to be roughly the following: for me, progressives are wrong on the reality of their economics, but are otherwise moral (writ large) in their intentions [thou shalt not covet notwithstanding].
Oppressor-oppressed woke, OTOH, is both wrong on their economics, wrong on individual liberty, wrong on civil society AND deeply immoral with their intentions.
I.e. progressive utopia might at least tend towards heaven; woke “utopia” would be dystopian hell.
My problem with progressives is that they do seem to understand that Islamists supporting terror and Sharia law are bad, but choose to emphasize that most Muslims are “‘peaceful”; fair enough on its own. But most refuse to recognize that oppressor-oppressed woke is dangerous and about as bad; the few who might mostly refuse to speak up about it.
Before critical theory / intersectionality / DIE / oppressor-oppressed woke, I always believed - as do the “moderates” who bemoan our current politics - that “we all share roughly the same values, we just disagree on best means to attain them and on tradeoffs on the margin”. Sure there were Nazis on the right and communists on the left, but in the last 65 years neither had any mainstream credibility.
But the woke do NOT share the values of the large majority of Americans; OTOH, I *still* believe that “ordinary” progressives, classical liberal-type libertarians, centrists, social conservatives, and most of the “MAGA” populist working class do roughly share the same values.
But with the partial sharing of values with woke combined with tribal overlap and a refusal to “punch left”, progressives have ignored this massive values disagreement to the country’s detriment.
I had hoped October 8th would show the depravity, but only a few seem to have noticed. There’s a chance Kirk’s murder aftermath will get a few more to notice, but I no longer hold out much hope on that score.
I think you are largely correct. I largely disagree on progressives being moral, because I think they are very much interested in control, even if it is for "your own good". I agree that many aren't bad people and you could be friends with them without politics coming up. However, I believe they have a strong belief that it is right and proper to use government to force people to adhere to the beliefs they hold. Where they differ from the woke is that the woke are competing for social status via who can have the craziest most pure beliefs and are spiraling into insanity as a result, but fundamentally the progressive can't really argue against the woke on philosophical grounds. I believe that is why so few have.
Incidentally, progressives are not alone in that. I am reminded of the moral panic church ladies of my youth.
Many centrists with a leftward bent did have and do have limiting principles, sometimes free speech, sometimes "don't burn down and loot cities", sometimes being able to recognize murder. Those limiting principles have peeled them away from the rapidly spiraling lunatic left. Some progressives might get there, too. However, at least those I would call progressives (the label might be being applied by us in very different ways, I grant), are largely comfortable using the power of government to coerce people into believing the way they do, which precludes and preempts concerns about free speech, destruction of property and, yes, killing, so long as they are progressing towards utopia.
Let's see:
1: Charity, as you say
2: Original sin (privilege)
3: Humility/confession (struggle sessions)
4: Love thy neighbor
5: Proselytizing
6: Raise up the marginalized
Numbers 4, 6 and 1 are the big ones, with 4 and 6 being the primary purity spirals. Love thy neighbor becomes a competition to love the most distant person as you love yourself (in word if not in deed) combined with showing off how much you can invert the status of the most marginal groups.
The heresy is obviously the non-theistic nature of the religion, but the hyper purity spiral of 4, 6 and 1 (through forced appropriation of resources and less personal giving) stem from the basic Christian value set.
The heresy is also clearly backwards compatible with the host religion.
Roger Sweeny pointed out that "thou shalt not kill" is more correctly translated as "thou shalt not murder".
I would say they're very selective about loving their neighbors.
Yes, and in fact in their minds caring (in words if not in direct action) is lauded as more virtuous the more removed the target person is. After all, anyone can love people like them, but only the truly virtuous can love people they will never meet or see. Or so the thought process goes. Hence all the talk of global community, global village, etc., right down to the "picture that explains everything" you see making the rounds. The story of the good Samaritan taken to the utmost extreme.
I agree on “kill” / “murder”. And my point is that the woke have abandoned *that*.
I defer to you that 6 is distinct; I was lumping it together with 1.
Where we still profoundly disagree is on your 4 in particular and your general claim that the “heresy is also clearly backwards compatible with the host religion.”
[Acknowledgement/disclaimer: I was raised Jewish and am now agnostic thisclose to atheist myself, and claim little understanding of any “true” Christian definition of heresy.
I’m merely a firm believer in Judeo-Christian values writ large, believe that older school progressives also broadly held those values, but believe that it is the woke that have abandoned them, and believe that progressives are partly but not entirely responsible for said woke abandonment of those values, while said progressives *are* almost entirely responsible for woke values becoming *acceptable* in mainstream society.]
Re kill/murder: Murder is unjustified, improper killing. The convenient thing about fanaticism is that it lets you justify a lot of killing, with none of the limiting principles that regular people tend to recognize.
Regarding loving one's neighbor as thyself, that's where the heresy comes in with the purity spiral. If loving one's neighbor as thyself is good, loving neighbors further away must be better because it is more difficult. Get them far enough way, say the other side of the world, and wow, look how much more virtuous you must be! Anyone can love someone just like them, but loving people wildly different than you, who even hate you, that shows true virtue.
As to the backwards compatibility, note how many churches have gone super woke. Hell, even the current pope is pretty far down that road. That wouldn't fly in say Islam, but wokeism isn't inherently incompatible with Christianity for most Christian organizations. Conservative Christians push against it, sure, but it isn't even clear that it is the majority, much less a very large percent. It isn't like 90% of churches recoiled hard against wokeism.
Progressives, and the left more generally, have the problem that they do not have limiting principles in their ideology or morality, nothing that brings them back from the edge of purity spirals. The more extreme elements tend to drag the centrists along to crazy town because at the philosophical level, the extremists are more true to the group's professed beliefs.
It is much like Muslim fundamentalists and Muslims in general: the crazies who want to kill infidels and force conversion of everyone to Islam are annoying to Muslims who just want to life their life, but they don't get resisted or told to shut the hell up. Why? Well, because technically they are more correct based on the group's moral founding. It is apparently all but impossible to be Muslim and not also agree that Sharia law would be an improvement, and those that are not spreading the religion by word or by sword are kind of slacking.
Of course it is not just leftists and Muslims that have the "no enemies to the more extreme side" problem, they are just the obvious modern exemplars of it.
The religious revival stuff always sounds like wishful thinking and confirmation bias to me.
Before accepting the conclusion that “all the sound and fury coming out of Washington signifies nothing” one might want to look at the top line numbers as well as the department level figures that Levin cites.
So, because the statement report by fiscal year, and the federal fiscal year begins in September during the last administration, we might want to do a 2024 - 2025 month to month comparison. For August, (the most recent statement), total receipts were $306,540 million in August 2024 and $344,315 for same month 2025. Outlays: $686,620 and $689,107. Deficit: $ 380,080 and $344,792. If my math is correct that means a 12.3% increase in revenues versus a $3.6 increase in outlays and a decline in the monthly deficit of about 9.3%.
Nothing?
The increase in receipts is mostly due to the second quarter GDP increase of 3.8%. Just eyeballing Table 4 of the monthly statement, it seems as if income and payroll tax receipts all increased significantly. And this would seem to align with the weird jump in the civilian labor force December 2024 – January 2025 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV )
And to give Trump a fair shake, it might be noted that his budget did propose to cut federal spending by $163 billion. Or as the New York Times put it: “Trump Proposes Slashing Domestic Spending to the Lowest Level of the Modern Era.” (https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/05/02/us/trump-budget-2026 )
And a lot of the sound and the fury about DOGE came about from the attempt to clean up the social security rosters and Medicare payments, so it seems premature to dismiss their efforts out of hand. We won’t know until the trust fund reports come out next year whether or not anything will show up then.
Sure it is horrifying that outlays increased in some of the swamp agencies, but some of this might be costs associated with letting employees go. Federal employees get a lot of expensive severance pay benefits when they are let go. But even back in August prior to shut-down layoff threats, OPM’s Scott Kupor was claiming that the federal workforce would be reduced about 12%, or 300,000 by the end of the calendar year. If this pans out, it would be a great boon for the budget long term as federal retirement benefit cost demands are reduced.
In short, there definitely is a lot more budget cutting to do, but Levin may be jumping the gun. When the next budget comes out and when the trust fund reports reflect the Musk interventions, we may have a clearer picture of what, if anything, is happening.
“‘Amazingly, Trump and his team seem content to keep in place the spending levels approved by Joe Biden and the last Congress through perhaps as much as half of Trump’s second term. No recent president has surrendered his role in the formal federal budget process like this.’
So all the sound and fury coming out of Washington signifies nothing. The Biden bump in spending is going to persist.”
You can blame Trump for a lot of things - including, IMO, high spending during his first term as president (I most certainly do).
But it’s really hard to blame the current high locked in spending on him.
Blame it on the razor-thin GOP margin in the House, along with the small handful of “moderate” Senators (Collins, Murkowski for sure, then a few others like Romney on various specifics) and there is sadly not a majority in Congress willing to make cuts.
Trump tried for cuts with DOGE, with recessions, with not spending all allocated. He actually succeeded in slowing the rate of growth of Medicaid. How do you utterly fail to give him credit for this?
Trump 47 has been worse on several things than Trump 45, no doubt. But on spending, the Musks of the world have had an effect, and he’s been better.
The problem is no longer with him, it is with the Democrats (of course) and the GOP “moderates” in Congress.
I was raised Catholic and during the early 1970s Mass often had folk rock songs accompanied by guitar. (In Texas. Roger Staubach went to my church.)
Catholics had an answer to "sex, drugs, and rock and roll", which was " 'sex', 'drugs', and 'rock and roll' ". But channels into pro-social institutions. Men could have sex with young virgins, if they married them and had as many kids as they could afford. Drugs was plenty of holidays and festivities when it was ok to get at least a little drunk. Rock and roll was all the spiritually moving, elegantly decoration, promotion of refined taste, entertaining decorations, and uplifting aesthetic beauty of the architecture, art, and music The Church patronized and publicized, to provide an enduring legacy of great benefit of all future humanity, I must insist.
It was the Northern Protestants in particular who, in a singularity of "holier than thou" competitive sanctimony, came to advocate more puritanical and minimalist - I would say proto-Brutalist - austere forms of art, dress, and worship associated with their religious movements and societies*. This translated inevitably into patterns of harsh discipline and self-denial in culture and life itself, perhaps to include Weber's "Protestant Work Ethic", but a social institutions of behavioral management which required a high level of personally experienced pressure and tension with little opportunity for relief for their functioning. America was a Protestant culture and the Anglosphere won The Big One, and it was the the rebellion against those un-Catholic social constraints that gave them a taste of Catholicism-sanctioned enjoyments, though, with none of the pro-social channeling.
*In contrast to the Latin-cultures of Southern Europe full of incoherent but socially stable tacit balancings and salutary hypocrisies, my impression of their history is that the Northern Europeans always seem to take everything deadly seriously or not at all and so quickly fly from one extreme to another, so it was either harsh discipline and austere worship or else they were quaking and shaking and gyrating and speaking in tongues and forming utopian cults or whatever. In the South, even the remote past was familiar. In the North, even the recent past of one's own homeland was always a foreign country.
Maybe someone can help me with this... I was just looking on FRED and was very surprised to see that the federal total public debt went down for two quarters in a row (the latest data they have are for 4/1/25). How can that be? Is there some sort of delay in reporting, or something?
Burnet’s Reason #4 - lying about inflation, tho I’d call it making false predictions about inflation. Because the power of science is based on making accurate predictions.
Economists have been failing: failed on inflation during Covid, failed before the 2008 Recession/ bailout for the rich speculators, and recently failed on tariffs increasing inflation. AK is included here in failing, in April 2025, predicting so much higher inflation because of tariffs that Trump should be strongly criticized. (Showing AK has a mild TDS)
The whole “too much govt spending” schtick has gotten pretty old, because Japan at 260% debt/GNP shows it’s possible to be over 250%, and the US is only over 100%. AK, and most economists, fail to note Japanese spending success, while emphasizing Venezuelan or Zimbabwean failure after too much mis-spending & hyperinflation. Or the US Great Depression, before any us were born & before the history change of WW II. Reminding me that the 1920’s tech changes allowing huge farm productivity, thru mechanization & far fewer farm laborers, was likely a more important negative influence on the Depression than Fed actions at the time. (Will ai tech be similar? Probably yes).
I strongly support less govt spending, but based on the far more difficult & specific Return on Investment criteria, where USAID was terrible, and tempered by electoral considerations.
High Rep spending, with less waste (a lot? Or just a little? Where are the economic estimates of how much waste is being cut?), is definitely better than the same amount of spending by Dems with more waste. Tho not individually for the recipients of the wasted money, which might well include many employed economists
How many years of caution about too much spending, falsely predicting near-term catastrophe, before it becomes more fear-mongering rather than real caution? Of course, if economists stop predicting econ failure, and there is one, that will also be used against them, and their failing theories.
The AK focus on Specialization & Trade makes fewer predictions, and thus has fewer failures, but reduces the (unearned?) power & prestige & higher salaries of economists. Plus politicians, and maybe especially the public, want simple numbers for scoring the economy, so they can more easily claim their side is better, and thus should have more political power. GNP, inflation, unemployment (or employment), budget deficit, trade deficit, median wage—that’s only a few key numbers but already too many for most folks.
More college grads should be looking to become owners & managers of their own businesses, or franchises, and do more trading production for cash from customers.
I thought Trump tried to sunset a couple of government agencies but the judiciary prevented him, saying this is our call, not yours. And assorted other things he tried to do - to be sure, not all of them wise.
Concur completely with Carney, yet... We don't believe in service to some socio-political agenda, we believe in service to God. Having spent over half my life as a church going Catholic, I found the benefits that Carney writes of to be real and of value, but beside the point. As Tolstoy confessed "Whatever answers faith gives, regardless of which faith, or to whom the answers are given, such answers always give an infinite meaning to the finite existence of man; a meaning that is not destroyed by suffering, deprivation or death. This means that only in faith can we find the meaning and possibility of life." Becoming "unchurched" has not cost me any faith. Indeed, I am immersed now in a deeply spiritual life, praying at least a dozen times a day. The candle we lit a few days ago still burns in front of the dish of candy set out for Saints Cosmas and Damian and another candle burns in the other room in front of a statue of an "old black." Amongst all the herbs growing in the garden is a small altar which has cigars and liquor inside but I have yet to be read in on the theological significance of this despite all these years, but I am regularly rinsed from head to toe with herbal washes brewed from the herbs and my clothes bear the smell of smoke from the home-made censer that regularly fumigates evil from the house. I probably hear the phrase "nossa" or "nossa senora" (in reference to Our Lady Aparecida)
a dozen times a day. And the social atmosphere is calm and loving and not at all wound too tight as it seems life is in the US these days. Going unchurched need not lead to social breakdown. Indeed, given the antics of these two recent popes, might churchgoing actually be distracting from faith? I regret it, but every time the Church is drawn to my attention, I seem to be reminded of Canto XIX of Dante's Inferno.