The Low-Trust State

Guest Post by The Zman

Social trust is one of those things that we know is important to economic growth, sound government and social stability. When the people of a society generally trust one another and wish to be trusted by others, their society prospers. The question that always arises is over causality. Some would argue that altruism is a biological trait that scales up to social trust. Others would argue that good government and the rule of law encourages positive economic growth, which in turn increases social trust. It is one of those topics that keeps academics busy.

The distinguishing characteristic of low-trust societies is a near total lack of trust in the state by the people. Russians, during the old Soviet Union, understood that everything that was said by the state was a lie of some sort. In fact, the only thing they could trust from the Bolsheviks was that whatever they said was untrue. This amplified the natural distrust of Russians as they did not have an authority to which they could appeal in order to arbitrate disputes. Contracts have to be enforceable before anyone will enter into them.

The point here is that you can debate the causality of social trust, but a society with a corrupt and untrustworthy state is going to be a low-trust society. Alternatively, to use the language of the pseudo-sciences, social trust correlates with public corruption. The causal arrows may point one way or both ways, but public corruption is a good proxy for social trust. There are measures of public corruption and the most popular is from these guys, who publish downloadable statistics every year for the pseudo-sciences.

Trust in the state is always going to drift over time, but you can spot some trends. Just take a look at the US over the last few decades. In the 1980’s, the savings and loan crisis put a lot of people in prison. Even some politicians got dinged for getting too cozy with the crooked bankers. A decade later we had the dot-com bubble and the accounting scandals, but no one went to jail. They just lost money. Less than a decade later we had the mortgage crisis and the crooks got bailed out by the government with taxpayer funds. This is a trend worth noticing.

Now, look around at what we are seeing today. The Clinton e-mail scandal is so outlandish, it is now threatening the rule of law. In the 70’s, Nixon was run from office from 18 missing minutes of tape. Clinton erased 17,000 emails, some may have been under subpoena. It is blazingly obvious that she and her cronies violated Federal law by mishandling classified information. The most logical explanation for all of this is they were selling it for cash through that ridiculous charity they run. A charity that has systematically violated the law with regards to accounting for donations.

How is it possible that this woman and her flunkies are not in jumpsuits waddling around Danbury FCI?

The first problem is the head of state appears to be a pathological liar. This Iran story is the sort of thing that used to bring down governments. It was certainly the sort of thing that should have administration officials hiring lawyers in preparation for the FBI visit. That would require an FBI that is not equally corrupt. Of course, the FBI is a product of the political class and ours is proving to be astonishingly corrupt. Today we learn that the politicians are conspiring to rig public hearings, which are the bedrock of popular government.

A certain amount of public corruption is to be expected. Politics will always attract shady characters, but it should also attract honest characters too. These are the folks that enjoy the boring work of good government. They police the system, enforce the rules and make public appeals for cleaning up the problems. Today, those people either do not exist or they have become too afraid to speak up. The American political class looks a lot like a corrupt police precinct. The crooks are in charge and they have inverted morality so that the honest fear detection by the corrupt.

It is not unreasonable to think that we may have passed the point where the political class can be expected to reform itself. Their unwillingness to even try to thwart the rise of these vulgar grifters from the Ozarks suggests the the political elite has lost the capacity to feel shame. Anyone willing to defend Hillary Clinton to the public is someone, who will lie about anything, violate any law, violate any taboo. That is a person lacking in anything resembling a soul. A political class populated with such people is a ruling class at war with itself, the very definition of a low trust state.

The truly frightening thing is that the only institution the public trusts is the military. Take a look at what is happening with the sports ball players protesting during the national anthem. This coming Sunday is 9/11 and even the most reptilian of Progressives are saying such a protest on that day would be a slap in the face to the men and women who serve the country. When no one trusts the ruling class, and the military is the only institution in which the public has faith, there is always one result. It does not have to be that way, but that’s the way it has always been.

At some level, some portion of the public understands this. The Trump phenomenon is not about Trump in the conventional sense. There’s a lot not to like about the man, but he is honest, he loves his countrymen and he is not doing this for the money. Whether or not he understands his role and the movement he is leading is unknown. Maybe his election will just be a false dawn and what follows is what always follows the onset of a low-trust state. If things are going to turn out different for us, Trump will win and usher in an era of reform.

Otherwise, what comes next will be much worse.


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Dutchman
Dutchman

I’ll tell you how bad the lies have become …. I had a zoning issue with Minneapolis. I live on one of many lakes – a fairly expensive home. The street I live on is ‘L’ shaped, I live in the corner of the ‘L’. At the zoning meeting, the city told me I didn’t live on the street! I had my property tax statement with me, and noted that they show my address as living on the street. They insisted, so I asked: “What street do I live on?” No answer. Cost me another $2,500 (attorney fee) to ‘stick it up their ass’, and they finally ‘went away’.

Billy
Billy

Dutch, I feel your pain brother…

My father despised the local apparatchiks. I mean just loathed them. Whenever he dealt with them, he treated them with open contempt, if not outright hostility.

Backstory:

In the 1950’s, “Contractor A” builds a house on the end of a lonely road that dead-ends in a cow field on top of a hill. It’s Kentucky, so there’s hills everywhere.

It’s a really nice house. He built it for himself. The house next door, he built for a relation.

The backyard of Contractor A’s house is substantial, but since it is on a hill, the backyard is reinforced with a retaining wall built of railroad ties.

Fast forward a couple years, and my father buys the house in 1960.

Fast forward a couple more years, and the retaining wall needs replacement. This was 1978 or 1979.

My father pays a princely sum to have the son of Contractor A – who is also a contractor and builder – literally replace the entire retaining wall with a new retaining wall made of railroad ties. These were freakin ENORMOUS – 10 or 15 feet long. All interlocked and spiked together.

Meanwhile, THE CITY decides that – since our little town of only a few thousand people needs more money (read: someplace to cram more people so we can tax them) – they will make a new street. The ONLY place for this street to go is… at the bottom of the hill my father and his family (including us kids) lived on.

Now, it does not take a genius to figure out that if you bulldoze out the toe of a steep hill, everything north of what you just bulldozed is going to head south eventually, due to water erosion and the laws that govern the fucking Universe – like GRAVITY.

My father protested. He tried to get his neighbors involved in a class action to stop the city. Hell, even us neighborhood kids took whiffle bats and smacked rocks down the hill at the construction crews!

Nope. The City decided a temporary gain in new residents to tax was preferable – they’d be LONG FUCKING GONE by the time that hillside slid…

And slide it did. Twice. After 28 straight days of rain, our neighbor’s backyard relocated 200 yards due south. Only that retaining wall that Contractor A built and my father maintained/rebuilt saved our land.

But, eventually, it happened to us too. After another extreme stretch of rain, about half our back yard went south.

My father – who was by this time an old man – had the retaining wall rebuilt AGAIN, and had dump trucks place new fill in the void, then re-seeded with grass and young trees…

Guess who shows up at our house? Some fucking pencil-necked mother fucker with a clipboard, telling he’s there to fine my father for building a retaining wall without a permit!

Oh mother fucker YOU JUST DID NOT!!!

My father – who saved everything important – shoved multiple files, invoices and photos going back to 1960 up that mother fucker’s ass, PROVING that wall already fucking existed and that he didn’t NEED their fucking permission.

In a fit of fucking petty vindictiveness I have rarely seen, they told him he had to pay for cleaning the street. See, dump trucks hauling dirt will get that dirt on the street. Rain will wash it clean, eventually, but they were not content in waiting for rain to take care of it for free…. so they tried to invoice my father to have the street cleaned…

My father went and got every section of water hose he owned and hosed all the dirt down the sewer himself. Fuck those mother fuckers!

After he passed on a couple years back, a different shitter from the City showed up. Astonishingly, he told my now-aged mother that yes, the City moved on putting that street in, knowing damn well the hillside would collapse, which caused much pain and financial hardship to everyone on our street… and that compensation – at least for the retaining wall and maintenance costs – would be coming her way…

You should have seen my old Mama lay into that guy – you guys think I’m a fireball? You do not want to fuck with Mama… especially now that she’s aged as well – old people do not give a fuck, and she has an acid tongue when she’s on a roll…

That poor bastard retreated so fast, I thought he was gonna actually cry…

Mother fuckers…. there ain’t enough rope, I tell ya…

larry morris
larry morris

good for your mom. I live in a town of 37000 and the town is so broke, and can’t quit spending money no end in sight. Most people just blind to every thing.

Iconoclast421
Iconoclast421

Social trust is meaningless. The government could use patsies to fly planes into its own buildings and kill thousands of people, and every pseudo-scientific measure of social trust would increase when they should have decreased. Hell, even congress’ approval ratings would go up after such an event.

RCW
RCW

Regarding this post:

Harridan MacBeth’s deeds and words are so crooked, her mouth could open a wine bottle.

On a tangent to Billy’s reply:

one day last week in a post reply, I flung an aspersion & somewhat snarky comment towards KY’s Dept. of Travel & Tourism, doubting their follow through to forward a KY state road map to me, for the purpose of my possibly relocating there from MD. They did in fact post the road map, and I thought it only right that I state for the record & publicly apologize for my disparaging remark; I was wrong. 🙁

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