Is Donald Trump a Socialist?

Is Donald Trump a socialist, or is he just governing like one? For a man who made his money in the freewheeling and dealing Manhattan property market, it seems an odd term to use. And doubtless he and his supporters would reject it vehemently. But let’s go back to first principles and look at what he does, not what he says.

The very essence of a socialist policy is that an economy should not be run by free market methods. It can and should be run on others, designed to support the welfare of all the groups living in it. If they are poor, money must be found through taxes to alleviate that. If their communities depend on certain industrial conglomerations. such as steel making for example, then money must be found to sustain those industries, to avert the social damage which would ensue/ In Britain the key exponents of this view were people like Arthur Scargill and Tony Benn, who felt public money should be found to support the mining industries, even if those industries operated at less than optimum economic efficiency. In the 1970s Benn went further, suggesting a siege economy protected by tariffs as an alternative to joining the European Community, forerunner of the EU.

The alternative view was pioneered by thinkers such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The unhindered operation of free markets, with the lowest possible levels of tax and tariff would facilitate the best possible social outcome. Ricardo developed this in his theory of comparative advantage. By which countries or regions specialising in different products would trade in these to their mutual benefit. His example was Britain and Portugal, which mutually traded manufactured goods and port wine. The same principle holds today.

The key political exponents of this view were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, whose most memorable declaration was “you can’t buck the markets”. As we write, Mr Trump’s policies seem to be doing exactly that. Unlike others, we judge him to have an honesty of purpose: he is trying to protect the communities that voted for him. Communities whose social structure and very identity depend on the old smokestack industries around which they cluster. Time will tell if he will be successful. But two things worry us. Firstly even if factories are attracted back to the rustbelt, it is unlikely that modern automated plants will need many factory hands. And second: the last twenty years or so of the Communist bloc were spent trying to keep these same sort of plants going. History did not judge that enterprise kindly.

#free markets #socialism #communism #adam smith #david ricardo #margaret thatcher #donald trump #united states of america

When a culture turns away from science, its decline begins

Fans of the old Jacob Bronowski TV series The Ascent of Man will recall a key episode. In the early seventeenth century the Catholic Church decided to persecute aspiring scientist Galileo Galilei. In 1633 the Inquisition even put him on trial for having discovered that the Earth goes round the Sun. Using the threat of torture, they forced him to deny this simple reality. Bronowski’s take on all this was to assert that this was the key step which sent the Catholic part of Europe (hitherto the dominant bit) into decline. Scientists and scholars fled to the more tolerant environment of Protestant Europe, whose economies benefitted accordingly. The few Catholic thinkers of note remaining (Descartes and Pascal spring to mind) But they were like the last rays of a setting sun, before darkness and superstition suffocated all.

A one off? Special pleading? History suggests otherwise. From about the 8th Century to the 13th of the Christian Calendar (apologies to Islamic readers, but let it do for now) the Islamic world was dominant not only in trade and war, it was supreme in all the skills of learning and science. Thinkers such as Al Khwarizmi, Ibn Sina (known as Avicenna in western lands) and Al Birani made contributions to human learning which will last forever. Yet, starting about the middle of the twelfth century CE there was a slow but steady trend away from reason and science towards deeper religious orthodoxy as Hilel Ofek explains in his essay Why the Arab World rejected Science [1] Slowly the northern nations began to close the gap and eventually move ahead. Nearer our own time Corelli Barnett showed how Britains decline began as abstract studies of things like Latin and Greek came to dominate the Universities, while subjects like science and engineering were accorded second rate status. [2] [3] The values of a well entrenched landed aristocracy won out over the more plebian instincts of the middle class . With long term disastrous consequences for Britain’s place in the world

And the relevance of all this? Across the western world, there is now a strong, growing and incredibly well-funded movement against science and objective evidence. [4]It’s felt in policy debates on economic questions, university funding, on vaccines, and above all in the swirling brawls around climate science and global warming. The temptation is to put all this down to the ebbs and flows of political debate. But that is to miss the point. Questions of science are not political. They are not open to understanding by the mental tools developed for political and religious debate. A nation, a whole culture is being continually weighed in the balance, and can fall at any time. Is this now happening in the so called “advanced ” western nations.

[1]https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science

[2]Corelli Barnett The Collapse of British Power 1972

[3[ Corelli Barnett The Audit of War 1986

[4]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/20/kemi-badenoch-net-zero-brexit-right-clima

#science #global warming #climate change #reason #history #christianity #islaam #british empire

Is human evolution a mess? Depends how you look at it

When we were young, we believed in a Story. First there was Australopithecus, a toolless, speechless, walking chimp. He begat a brave pioneer called Homo erectus, a handy sort of chap who at least had decent looking tools and invented fire. He begat two sons: a hairy, primitive savage one called Neanderthal Man, who deservedly came to a sticky end. And a tall, cool handsome one which called itself Homo sapiens (“the wise man”), in one of the most outrageous acts of vanity and self-delusion in history.

The truth turned out to be far more complicated. Even looking at the story of the last 500 000 years , when everyone was about as modern as you can get. First Neanderthals have been getting steadily cleverer for the last forty years or so. They probably had language, clothes and y even art, goddammit. Along came another relative, the Denisovans who were similarly equipped. And then came the geneticists lead by the inimitable Professor Paabo, whose discoveries have upended everything , blurred every category and wiped every line. Latest instalment in this trope comes from the discoveries of the learned Professor Cousins of Cambridge University which we channel both from Jonathan Chadwick of the Mail[1] and for those with a little more time, the original paper itself [2] The story of the last million years or so is not of some heroic hero on a quest for self-improvement. But bunches of largely helpless bipeds pushed hither and thither by the vagaries of climate and geology, splitting, meeting and breeding; spawning a mishmash of different types which their distant descendants come along and label with important- sounding names. And we think we see a pattern in all this.

Firstly :you know a lot less than you think you do. We have been tracking human evolution for nearly sixty years now, so we can be fairly confident about that statement. Secondly: there is always something buried out there which is going to upend everything you know; so stay cautious. Thirdly: someone in another field is going to park their intellectual tanks on your lawn sooner or later, reducing your omniscient learning to at most part of things, not the whole of it. And finally:-human evolution makes a pretty good paradigm for all other learning. Not just hard sciences, not just social sciences but also things like history and economics. Beware of anyone who knows the answers, because they are not telling the truth.

[1]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14508089/Scientists-hidden-chapter-human-evolution.html

[2]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02117-1

#homo sapiens #dna #genetics #neanderthal #anthropology #science #knowledge #evolution

Black Universities: a source of untapped potential

“The trouble with racism is that it means second-rate people in first rate jobs.” These words, once spoken casually to us, are the real basis of our opposition to discrimination of all kinds: It’s inefficient; it’s not in the long term interests of the oppressor. All societies suffer from hierarchy and ethnic hatreds, But was saddest of all to see the United States of America, born in such enlightenment, to be so disfigured by this most ancient weakness of the human mind. One attempt to counter this was the establishment of Historically Black Universities and Colleges, which aimed to provide some higher education for students who were excluded from white institutions. They have been around for a long time, and you would have thought by now that the penny would have dropped: “this is a fantastic source of underused potential which could benefit us all, especially now that China is treading on our cowboy heels”. Well, read this and think again: Unshackle Historically Black Universities in Nature Briefing

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States “are producing world-class research and record numbers of Black scientists with one hand tied behind our backs and shackles on our ankles” because of “consistent, drastic underfunding” compared to institutions established to educate white students, writes evolutionary biologist Joseph Graves Jr. “For example, my research group alone has produced more Black women with PhDs in microbial evolution in the past five years than the rest of the country has in the past five decades.” Graves calls on industry, philanthropists and individuals to shore up weakening government support for HBCUs, minority-serving institutions and tribal colleges and universities.Nature | 10 min read

It’s not that we especially like black people ,or white people, or any ethnic, religious or social group . Quite the opposite, most of the time, for most of them. Nor are we especially compassionate or just, as far as we know. But we do regard all forms of generalised prejudice as a debility of the human mind, like the propensities to gamble, drink to excess, or indulge in concupiscent and promiscuous sexual practices. (that’s a polite way to put it!-ed) All of these errors waste time and money which in the long run would make us wiser, happier and safer. Let’s see if anyone does anything about these colleges.

#HBUCs #education #prejudice #racism #supercilious #economics #USA

You are now living in a completely new world-but don’t let that spoil the weekend

The English Wars of the Roses (1450-1485) were savage bloody affairs. Forget all the costumes and Shakespearean poetry: the dynastic struggles of York and Lancaster really mattered at the time, and as late as Elizabeth 1 , the succeeding Tudor Dynasty lived in constant fear that a Plantagenet claimant might reignite the struggle. Now fast forward 80 years or so to the English Civil War, an even more sanguinary and passionate affair. No one cared in the slightest who was a Yorkist or a Tudor. You might as well have talked about Romans and Carthaginians for all the relevance it had at Marston Moor. Over, gone, forgotten.

Here’s another thought. Growing out of that civil war came a rivalry between Crown and Parliament that lasted for well over a hundred years, and twice exploded into violent war in the Jacobite rebellions (1715 and 1745) The leader of the second rebellion, called Bonnie Prince Charlie by some, lingered in exile until 1788. Read that last date carefully. Because the next year was the start of the French Revolution, unleashing a series of global changes so far reaching and dramatic that the world would never be the same again. Would anyone at Trafalgar, Waterloo or even in the British House of Commons, have tried to map their experiences onto a template provided by the Bonny Prince?

Our present age lasted from the Second World War until the second election of Donald Trump. It’s founding myth was 1940: gallant Britain battled alone until the mighty United States arrived to tip the scales decisively for the forces of freedom and goodness. After the war the benefits of Anglo-Saxon order were spread to places like Europe and Japan. It was good while it lasted. People kept gardens, obsessed with sport, brought hundreds of bright new shiny things and believed themselves to be clever and happy and free. Many thought it ws the natural order of things and would last forever.

We believe that the fundamental order of that world cracked after the US invaded Iraq in 2003. It was shattered by the financial crisis of 2008. Technological developments such as social media and fossil fuels produced profound and unmanageable instabilities in the environments of even very rich countries, rendering their political and economic settlements obsolete.

It is easy to mourn the passing of the old order, easy to rail against its destroyers like Trump and Putin. Such nostalgia is dangerous, for it will lead to attempts to live in the vanished past and even recreate it. Far better to first recognise this is a new age, and all old assumptions, all old patterns have been shattered irrevocably. There were good things in the old order. They must be preserved. There will be good things in the new, however remote and distant they seem. You have the weekend, ladies and gentlemen to consider what those might be. Enjoy it profitably, and we will see you on Monday.

#history #politics #economics #donald trump #vladimir putin #united states #NATO

No, Trump is being perfectly rational. That is is the real problem

President Trump Postlaunch Remarks (NHQ202005300037) by NASA HQ PHOTO is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0

A lot of abuse has been hurled at US President Donald Trump in recent days, particularly by those who have been inconvenienced by has actions. He has been accused of baseness of character, of capriciousness, of lacking moral fibre. But before we rush to judgement, let’s look at his action through the eyes of history. And a pattern emerges: he is taking the classic decisions made by an empire in decline, one that realises it can no longer be strong everywhere and therefore tries to husband its resources.

The first signs of decline in the British Empire were the need to concentrate its hitherto hegemonic naval forces in the North Sea and hand the security of its eastern possessions to an alliance with Japan. But the more telling historical parallel is with mighty Rome. From the fourth century onwards, Emperors like Constantine I and Julian realised they no longer had the men or the money to hold whole areas with regular Roman troops. Instead they handed over responsibility to foederati: barbarian tribes who marched under their own kings. In theory they were loyal allies of the Emperor, defending outlying provinces, But they spoke their own language, fought their own way and lived under their own rules. Where they were stationed Rome existed in name only. And that not for long.

Now Trump seeks to hand over defence of Ukraine to European allies. The American machine can no longer support the burdens it once carried with ease, and must choose its most dangerous enemy against which to concentrate. No, Donald Trump is not mad, nor disloyal. We think he and his advisers have looked into the books of the American Empire, and have found some very bad things indeed. They are trying to act accordingly, in order to slow its decline . Perhaps they will be temporarily successful, perhaps not. But decline is the result of long term historical forces, and once underway cannot be stopped. The rest of us, particularly former provincials in the Empire, once basked in the luxuriance of its protection. Now we must look to our own safety. Urgently.

#USA #China #donald trump #roman empire #history #geopolitics #NATO #europe

Declining Life Expectancy: a sure sign of a declining civilisation

You , your children and your grandchildren are going to live a lot less than you should have done. That’s the stark message from Andrew Gregory of the Guardian,[1] who has been busy reviewing a major study of life expectancies across 20 European nations. It’s a topic which has concerned us before here(LSS 21 12 21) and not only is it not going away but we think it is a sign of something deeply general going wrong.

The first signs that the old Soviet Union was in real trouble came in the 1970s when astute researches suddenly realised they weren’t returning their annual health figures to the WHO and other bodies. Their economy was no longer delivering, people were going hungry: and you just can’t spin health statistics over the long term. Within a few years the system had fallen in on itself. According to a study by the University of East Anglia the long rise in life expectancy which we have taken for granted for centuries has now stalled. Worried? You should be.

Greece(lashed by cataclysmic economic woes 15 years ago) is second worse. But it is the countries of the UK, one of the most unequal societies in the western world, which are doing worst of all. And we think we know why. Our old friends Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett [2] long pointed to inequality as the root causes of many evils such as obesity poor health bad diets over work and chronic illness[2] And -surprise, surprise! These are exactly the factors which the authors cite to be dragging UK statistics so drastically backwards. But can you forgive us one more observation, gentle readers? One country bucking the trend is Norway. Which some readers will recall set up a sovereign wealth fund with their share of North Sea Oil back in the 1980s of the last century.(LSS 6 7 20) While the British in the same years splurged theirs on new cars, shopping, time share villas and an utterly botched programme of de-industrialisation. Here are the consequences.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/european-countries-experience-life-expectancy-slowdown-research-shows

[2] R Wilkinson K Pickett The Spirit Level Penguin 2010

#inequality #life expectancy #sovereign wealth fund #public health

World Government #4: The Downsides

The Empire of the Romans filled the world, and when that Empire fell into the hands of a single person, the world became a safe and dreary prison for his enemies Edward Gibbon The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

For good commercial reasons the Roman World had expanded to its possible geographical limits, beyond which were nothing but deserts, oceans, and barbarians. It was the same with Imperial China. At least dissidents in present autocracies can live with the hope that somewhere are free men, or at least national enemies, who may still thumb their noses at the tyrant. A World Empire would close down dissent forever.

Such is the case made by the eloquent Ilya Somin for the Cato Institute [1] We do not always revere the pronouncements of this Institute as much as they might like. But there has always been an honesty of purpose about them, and we take this admonition very seriously indeed. In fact we would add another danger. The existence of nation states , each with different ways of doing things, potentially allows the growth of centres of excellence*, where new ways of thinking can be tried and tested. A single government might rapidly stifle progress, or at least slow it to a crawl.

Always beware of a good idea, especially when it is your own. We have spent three blogs advocating the benefits of a World Government. We hope that this one advertises the very real dangers sufficiently.

*The most intelligent person we have ever known believes in this concept

[1]https://www.bing.com/search?q=Cato+institure+world+government&form=ANNTH1&refig=CE70A53FE2214B2DB64595022921BCC8&pc=HCTS

#world government #edward gibbon #freedom #tyranny #economics #politics #Cato institute

Torsten Bell’s prescription: but will the British take his medicine?

Here’s a telling statistic about the United Kingdom. Between 1850 and 1992 more than 200 reservoirs were regularly opened across the country, even during World War Two: seven were dug in 1955 alone. Since 1992, not one has been constructed. What goes for reservoirs goes for every other conceivable aspect of infrastructure. Britain is a country living off its past like fallen aristocrats, in deadly hock to nostalgia and expecting a comfort of life way beyond its means.

Such is the thesis of Torsten Bell (Judd School, PPE Oxford, Resolution Foundation and now Labour MP) He presents his thesis in a work of immense detail and careful scholarship called Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back. He details the consequences of our doleful mismanagement in terms of education, poverty wages, health, and a tax-and-benefits system of Byzantine complexity and contradiction. Yet it is chapter five on investment which diagnoses the root causes of British woes. Compared to other OECD countries, the British are terrible at it, both public and private. This in turn leads to appalling weaknesses in productivity, entailing less investment, and so on etc, etc. Downwards. The consequences of this economic stagnation will be a rise in political extremism as different ethnic and cultural groups fight over the shares of a declining national cake.

His analysis and prescriptions read like the DNA of the present Labour Government. It fits into a long tradition of well-meaning analyses of what’s wrong with Britain. Yet he cautions against the pat solutions of Centre Left bien-pensants (our problems are much deeper than membership or not of the EU) He calls for a new patriotism, based on our undoubted strengths in things like service industries. In this and many other recommendations, he has much good to say. But will the British want his, and his party’s, medicine? Consider this:

Anyone serious about governing Britain should plan on taxes remaining at higher levels than we are used to (p189)

Paying taxes is the litmus test of patriotism: if you won’t put your hand in your pocket, how serious are your protestations of national love? Our fellow countrymen grumble about health and roads: but they hate, viscerally hate, paying taxes, as we know from our lived experience of them. So any new ethos based on shared experience will die stillborn; there are still too many comfortable with the mental furniture of our decline, at least among the English.

Great Britain PLC is a failing company: underinvested , indebted, overdrawn and still overpaid in many grades. A merger was tried between 1973 and 2016, but it failed. Now the only option is a foreign takeover. How hostile shall it be?

We have one criticism of the hardback The graphs are printed in weak grey ink, thereby making comprehension difficult at times, and spoiling the hard work of the author and his researchers

Torsten Bell Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back The Bodley Head 2024

#great britain #uk #economics #politics #social democracy

Out of Africa #2: Upsetting the Apple Cart

Fans of this blog will recall our long standing reservations about the various Out-of-Africa hypotheses which crowd the field of human paleontology. We’ve mentioned our doubts about the earlier one before (LSS 18 5 23). To be fair, the second one, involving modern Homo sapiens has stood up rather better, in view of all the archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence which supports it.[1] [2] All of which is no reason not to be glad when someone comes along and upsets the apple cart. Today that someone is Professor Huan Shi, whose work is more than admirably reported on by Matthew Phelan for the Mail. [3]

The jumping -off point for Professor Shi is the Dali skull from Shaanxi province. Not only is it very old (260 000 BCE) for something which displays a lot of modern traits; it’s also a very long way from Africa. He goes on to suggest genetic similarities between early H sapiens in Europe and those in East Asia, distancing both from African centred populations. Finally he rests on the (slightly controversial) theory of Maximum Genetic Diversity, which suggests ancestral populations will exhibit a lower diversity, while derived ones will go higher.

Out thoughts? Since China rejoined the community of civilised nations after 1976 they have made some wonderful contributions to paleontology; so treat this with respect. However: there are even older fossils in parts of Africa, such as Jebel Irhoud at 315 000 BCE, which have modern features.. And all the all the models of linguistic complexity suggest the most complicated phoneme patterns are in African languages, and the least out in the Pacific islands, almost the last places we reached in our wanderings. What if both sides are asking the wrong question?After all, a thousand years is a long time for a powerful top predator. Such a species spreading at only ten miles a year would cover the whole landmasses of Africa and Eurasia in that time. Add a few thousand more and maybe the odd climate fluctuation and instead you would have a population endlessly marching, cross breeding and throwing up all sorts of variations. Of which a few fragments found hundreds of thousands of years later will give only the most cursory understanding. What if our species never began at all but has just carried on evolving, and always will?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans

[2]https://www.nature.com/articles/srep36645

[3]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14236961/Scientist-challenges-Africa-theory-human-evolution.html

human evolution #china #homo sapiens #out of africa #lingiustics #genetics #microbiology