Jeffrey A. Tucker is musing about the difficulties President Trump is having and how it relates to the realities of being head of state. After a quick run from Plato to Auron MacIntyre, he notes that everything in politics is designed to prevent change. Every great interest is represented in government and the whole idea is to defend the interest against change. Big corporations have the Department of Commerce; Big Pharma has the Department of Health; Big Labor has the Department of Labor.

(And Big Protest has USAID).

But I think that everyone is missing the point. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit gets it with his periodic warning about the next Carrington Event. The last one in 1859 melted a few telegraph stations. No problem because Thomas Edison didn’t build the Pearl St. generating station in NYC till 1882. Today a Carrington Event would probably take down the entire world’s electric system and the internet.

Instead of Carrington Events our rulers today worry about Climate Change.

But if the world’s electric system goes down, forget climate. Have the experts agreed on what to do? Is there a passionate Swedish teenager warning us of the end of civilization unless we act now?

Back in the day politics was about Muslims conquering up to the gates of Vienna, or Genghis Khan enjoying the lamentation of women all across Asia.

But now things are different. Ordinary people are changing the world without conquest or lamentation. Who needs politics?

For instance, here are the five big technological revolutions of the last 200 years mentioned by Carlota Perez in her Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital.

1. 1771 Industrial Revolution and machine textiles
2. 1829 Age of Steam and Railways
3. 1875 Age of Steel, Electricity and Heavy Engineering
4. 1908 Age of Oil, Automobile and Mass Production
5. 1971 Age of Information and Telecommunications

And may I add the sixth revolution:

6. 2025 Age of Artificial Intelligence

Now, you tell me how politics made a blind bit of difference to any of these revolutions except to bollix things up?

Let’s rehearse the sophisticated intellectual reaction to the six revolutions.

1. Textiles: Dark Satanic Mills
2. Railways, Steamships: Encourages the poor to travel about
3. Steel: Immiseration of workers
4. Oil and Auto: Nightmare of suburbs, climate change
5. Information: But Climate Change!
6. AI: end of humanity

My narrative says that machine textiles meant that the poor could afford clothes; railways and steamers liberated the poor to migrate across the world; Steel and electricity meant jobs for everyone; autos meant personal transportation for everyone; internet made information available to everyone; AI means everything for everyone, but nobody knows what.

The politicians and activists tell us that labor and wage-and-hour laws and unions saved the workers from a fate worse than death, that free education saved the lower classes from ignorance, that the vote saved women from the patriarchy, that civil-rights laws saved blacks from lynchings, that environmental laws saved the cities from pollution.

In response, let us list some of the robber barons, malefactors of great wealth, economic royalists, and oligarchs that created the five technological revolutions:

1. Textiles: Arkwright, son of a tailor.
2. Steam: Newcomen, lay preacher.
3. Steel: Carnegie, telegraph messenger.
4. Oil, Auto: Rockefeller, store clerk; Ford, machinist.
5. Information: Jobs, son of a Coast Guard mechanic.

Talk about a collection of nobodies!

I say that politicians and activists have created an education system that does not educate, a welfare system that demolishes the lower-class family, famines in Russia and China in an age when food could be transported across the world anywhere anytime, world wars in an age where conquest is meaningless, an administrative state so corrupt it makes the old spoils system seem like a church picnic.

Back to Jeffrey Tucker and his narrative about politicians and the big industrial tycoons making corrupt bargains together. No worries! Mandami in New York is going to freeze rents and make buses free. Here in Seattle Katie Wilson is going to create “affordability.”

But what is the solution to politics, when it does nothing except create corruption between politicians and special interests with everything from the high and mighty USAID Industrial Complex to your local Homeless Industrial Complex?

After deep philosophical reflection I have decided that the answer lies in dealing with the male Culture of Insult, as in Athenian and Spartan warriors shouting insults at each other from ship to ship in the Battle of Aegospotami, and the female Culture of Complaint, as in “I can’t believe you said that.”

The problem of men as warriors was solved two hundred years ago by the invention of team sports. The problem of women as domestic complainers is in the midst of being solved as every liberal woman in the nation happily attends her local No Kings protest of the week to shriek her complaints about Trump.

And so they all lived happily ever after -- until the next Carrington Event.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Edward Lamson Henry