By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday,
February 01, 2022
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the
Turkish caudillo, is surely a typical politician of our times —
our very, very,
very stupid times. Faced with high
inflation caused in part by his illiterate crackpot regime’s loosey-goosey
monetary policy, he ordered an even loosier-goosier policy, cutting interest
rates even further on the theory that high interest rates are just a bankers’ plot
against him — and by “bankers” you can go ahead and just say “Jews,” which is what
the Erdogan regime habitually does.
The unsurprising result is record-high
inflation. And when his government’s chief statistician produced statistics
attesting to the collapse of the Turkish lira, Erdogan — who has the heart of a
tyrant and the brain of a not especially bright wombat — responded by
firing the statistician.
That’ll show ’em!
That’s the great magical thinking of our
time — that every fact of every case is subject to infinite revision as long as
you can find lackeys and sycophant lickspittles who are debased enough to
swallow their pride, take the paycheck, and repeat whatever bullsh** story you
tell them to.
As of this writing, inflation in Turkey is
— according to the kind of calculation that will get a minor bureaucratic
henchman fired from his job — running just a bit under 40 percent. The people
who don’t work for Erdogan’s ghastly little junta estimate the
inflation rate at just above 80 percent.
If this were Washington, then Jen Psaki
would be advising everybody to have a margarita. But having a margarita is not the kind of advice that the pious Turkish
dictator typically gives.
(My colleague Alexandra
DeSanctis writes that Psaki hawks cocktails as though the country were full of nothing but callow Cosmopolitan readers,
but I think Cosmopolitan readers drink more cosmopolitans than
margaritas.)
But, of course, this sort of thing is not
unknown in Washington. As I will explore at some length in the forthcoming
issue of National Review, the
United States has an inflation problem, too, though it is not so bad as
Turkey’s situation. As with Turkey, the American inflation problem is caused in
part by bad public policy. And as with Turkey, such powers as be in our country
refuse to accept the facts of the case because doing so would oblige them to
admit, if only tacitly, that they are to some extent to blame for the higher
prices Americans are paying at the grocery store and the gasoline station.
Unlike their Turkish counterparts, our
Democrats do not typically blame Jews corporately for the nation’s political
woes. Not typically, I repeat: From time to time, Ilhan Omar will say the quiet part out loud or Barack Obama will be
photographed cavorting with a Jew-hating weirdo such as Louis Farrakhan (a photograph
buried by a friendly news media), but old-fashioned Jew-hating is a distinctly minority position
(though not an extinct one) within the Democratic Party, mostly associated with
a dying school of black urban politics in cities such as Philadelphia and
Chicago.
(The new antisemitism is anti-Zionism,
which is a lot like the old antisemitism except that these Jews
are despised on political rather than ethnic grounds
— progress! In a similar way, old-fashioned Holocaust denial has been
supplanted by a strategy of dilution and distraction, for example by larding up
Holocaust remembrances with references to every act of oppression, including
those well short of attempted genocide, and every injustice suffered by any
people anywhere in the world, as is now commonly the case in European
commemorations of the Nazi atrocities against the Jewish people. This is done
not out of overflowing compassion but to erase the particularities of the
Holocaust, a particular atrocity done to a particular people at a particular
time and worth remembering and understanding on those terms rather than merely as
an exemplary episode in a general trend.)
The American Left is not beyond practicing
race hatred, religious hatred, national hatred, or any other kind of hatred,
but if prefers class hatred, as, indeed, does the American
Right at the moment. Class hatred is useful because class in the American
context is infinitely plastic. That isn’t the case everywhere else in the
world: In England, for example, class lines are as plain to most people as
racial differences are in the United States — no Englishman has any more
trouble seeing that Boris Johnson is posh than any American would have had
seeing that George Plimpton was white. (George Plimpton was the second-whitest
American of the 20th century, after Thacher Longstreth. Readers of this
magazine will be surprised to learn that William F. Buckley Jr. was only No.
71.) But because the United States has such a weak sense of class — patrimony
and provenance do not matter nearly as much to us as plain old crass gobs of
money do — we can get away with abusing the notion.
That is the origin of our strange little
gold-plated haters of “elites,” the peculiar situation in which American
“elites” are denounced by private-jet hectomillionaires such as Sean Hannity,
sneered at by Ivy League–educated rich men such as Ted Cruz and Donald Trump,
lectured by Enron advisers such as Paul Krugman or by Walmart board members
such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, howled at by Yale deans and MacArthur fellows,
while “the Real America” is represented by Manhattan-based employees of multi-gazillion-dollar
global media conglomerates, salt-of-the-earth-type figures such as Laura
Ingraham of Dartmouth and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, a
white-shoe law firm with a name Charles Dickens would have blushed to invent.
Among the greatest and saltiest of these
anti-elitists is Senator Elizabeth Warren, the phony Cherokee princess who
holds forth on the plight of the dispossessed from her Cambridge manor while
negotiating tax cuts for rich
metropolitan property owners such as herself. Do you know the expression, “That’s the least you could do!” That was
Professor Warren’s job description at Harvard: She did the least she could do,
teaching only one class and collecting a paycheck in excess of $400,000 for
doing so. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is who is here to tell us
that the problem with inflation isn’t daft Democratic policies but — angels and
ministers of grace defend us! — greed, in the form of “price
gouging” enabled by “concentrated corporate power.”
What is happening in the economy? For one
thing, the people who work the late shift at McDonald’s are getting paid more,
as are delivery-truck drivers and warehouse workers, and hooray for them —
but concentrated corporate power should be made of sterner
stuff: McDonald’s, to take one big example, just missed its quarterly earnings
targets while the bosses were handing out raises to the fry guys. (Don’t worry,
the shareholders are going to be okay.) Denounce “elites” all you like, but the
suits who run McDonald’s do business in the same economy as their customers do,
and they have to deal with economic reality as they encounter it. McDonald’s
isn’t paying workers in Austin twice the minimum wage out of the goodness of
its plaque-clogged heart — no matter what Senator Warren or Boss Erdogan
or Comrade Grumpy
Muppet or Subcomandante
Malarkey or any of the effusive recta of the
cable-news world tell you, the economy is not run by a secret committee
operating out of some smoke-filled back room. The villains change from
generation to generation — Freemasons, Illuminati, the Elders of Zion,
“international capital,” “globalists,” etc. — but the story is always the same.
And it is always wrong.
Of course, Senator Warren knows that it is
not “concentrated corporate power” that is causing the price of bread to go up
in Seekonk or Shutesbury — or in Istanbul: She may not be as smart as she
thinks she is, but she isn’t as dumb as she seems, either. Elizabeth Warren
knows what Joe Biden knows and what Recep Tayyip Erdogan knows: That they
can defeat almost any political enemy except the truth.
Four hundred years ago, they burned
heretics. Three hundred years ago, they hanged witches. Two hundred years ago,
some of our ancestors still lived in abject terror of fairies. One hundred
years ago, the leading lights of the Left were executing “reactionaries” and
“Cossacks” by the hundreds of thousands.
Next time around, it may well be
statisticians.
Words About Words
The word inflation is
related to the words flatulent and blasé —
which is appropriate given the usual tenor of conversations about inflation.
Inflation in the monetary sense dates only from the 19th century. At that
time, inflation denoted an increase in the money supply —
which is what some of us still mean by the word. The effect of
such inflation — a general rise in prices — is what most people mean by inflation today.
But I think this is a distinction worth
preserving. One can (and often does) have inflation in the first sense without
having much or any inflation in the second sense. Often, we fail to take
account of inflation in the second sense, partly because of our bias toward the
present. If the price of a gallon of gas is x today and x tomorrow,
then we assume that any inflation there has been in the first sense (expanding
the money supply) has not produced inflation in the second sense (higher
prices), but we do not really know that, because we do not know what the price
of gasoline would have been absent the change in the money supply. Which is to
say, we think there has been no inflation when prices remain the same, because
we expect prices to remain the same rather than to go down. But prices go down
all the time: The typical American family spends radically less on groceries
than it did a generation ago, restaurant food costs less, televisions cost
less, computers cost less, etc. Cars and houses don’t seem to cost less, until
you consider what it could have cost you to have a car or a house something
like the one you have today in 1960 — you couldn’t get a car or a house like
the ones we have now back then, but the closest substitutes you could have
found would have been impossibly expensive. Clothes are less expensive (a
well-off society lady in my grandmother’s generation might have owned three
good dresses, and a middle-class high-school student in the 1970s might have
owned only two or three pair of jeans and one pair of sneakers), travel is less
expensive, etc.
If you really want to get mad about
something, think about how much richer you — and almost everybody else — would
be if not for destructive government policies that have prevented the natural
emergence of prosperity. Think about the smart phone in your pocket vs. the
semi-mobile phones that were the toys of Wall Street millionaires a generation
ago. Many of the things you own and use get better and cheaper every year, but
some things — some heavily regulated, government-dominated things — get more
expensive every generation, while the quality stagnates or declines. Prominent
among these are education and health care. I am not one of those libertarians
who just says, “The free market will take care of it!” as though that were an
answer to every question. But imagine if the evolution of health care or higher
education looked more like the evolution of the personal computer or the mobile
phone and think about what that would have meant for the world. Capitalism does
amazing things when we let it.
One of the reasons we don’t let capitalism
do its thing is that we let our words confuse us. Inflation is
one of those words. So is greed. So are profit, competition, compassion, cooperation,
and capitalism itself.
We cannot think clearly until we can speak
and write clearly.
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