The Government Union Bind

Pity a poor government union leader. The glory days are over.

It was all such fun when government employees were underpaid and underappreciated. But over the last generation union leaders in partnership with their Democratic friends have made government employee unions into the big power player in state and local politics.

Kevin Williamson writes about the power of the government employee unions in chilling detail.

Public-sector unions are enormously important political players, including in those states where their collective-bargaining rights are limited or nonexistent...

Many union critics in the past few days have referenced Stanford professor Terry M. Moe’s fascinating paper “Political Control and the Power of the Agent,” published by the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization in 2005, citing a single extraordinary fact: In the elections Professor Moe studied, union support was as valuable as incumbency in determining winners.

Now begins the long recessional. The reason is pretty simple, according to Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct. He is discussing the egalitarian social structure of hunter-gatherer bands.

Men like power and will seize it if they can. But if they can't rule, their next preference is that no one rule over them.

Fairly short and sweet, and it explains a lot. It helps us understand why people are indulgent towards people perceived as victims, but they combine against people that are perceived as having power to rule over them.

That is why, in this age of enormous government power, practical politicians and activists make such a big deal about how their clients are helpless victims. They are like the foxes in the henhouse insisting that there's nobody here but us chickens.

The problem with the government employee demonstrations that started in Wisconsin is that they are communicating to the American people that government employees are not helpless victims. They are communicating that they are, in fact, powerful, the rank-and-file of a very powerful political faction. In fact, as Professor Moe details, they are so powerful that their power is as significant a factor in election results as the power of incumbency.

For years and years the American people have not really understood the power of the public-sector unions. But now they are getting a lesson in the power of unions. And, according to opinion poll results, they don't like it. They want to see government-employee union power reduced.

The practical thing for the government employee unions to do would be to step back into the woodwork and negotiate some give-backs. But of course that is not how the world works. The rank and file demand that their leaders act as leaders and fight back against the give backs. Strategically that is the worst thing to do because it dramatizes the power of government employee unions in a way that is likely to unite the American people against the unions. But there's nothing the leaders can do. Their members demand to keep all their benefits. The leaders must fight. They must lead their members into a battle they they know will end in a horrible defeat. Why defeat? Because people hate the powerful and instinctively combine against them.

It all fits into my theory of politics, that the trouble with government Anything is that you can't fix that Anything until it is broken. For years we knew that Fannie and Freddie were a problem, but we could never do anything about reform until they practically wrecked the world economy. For years we conservatives have been railing about the power of government employee unions to no avail. But now that the pay and pensions of government employees are threatening to wreck the finances of state and local governments, now people are paying attention.

Which leads to my basic question. Never mind the power of the unions, or the economic damages of debt and taxes. Why would anyone in their right mind surrender their child for a 12-year term in a government child custodial facility with no possibility of parole or early release? Why would anyone in their right mind give the government custody of their retirement money? Why would anyone trust the government to do the right thing by granny in 2030 when the budget is a bigger mess than it is today?

You tell me.

Last Time the Dems Were in the Streets

I know it's terribly unfair. Last year the media was terribly troubled about the lack of "civility" in the Tea Party protests, and Democratic activists giggled over their "teabagger" pejorative. This year we have labor unions occupying state houses and assaulting women journalists and the story is all about fighting back against the Man.

But let us not be discouraged. The last time Democrats took to the streets was in the 1960s. Then as now, the media fawned over the rioters and the protesters. Remember what happened next?

The American people voted for a Republican president four out of the next five times. Until Bill Clinton came along the only time that the American people elected a Democratic president was in 1976 after the Democrats had successfully driven a president from office for doing things that your FDRs and your LBJs did as a matter of course. Yes, in case you have forgotten, starting in 1968 Americans elected Nixon, Nixon, (Carter), Reagan, Reagan, and Bush. Ordinary middle-class Americans hated the Sixties, and they hated it mainly because they knew that it was all a double standard. It was OK for liberal darlings to take to the streets and hurl epithets and tear the place up, but don't you try that, because we know where you live.

The mistake that Democrats make when they get all excited about their street action is that they only talk to each other. They live in a liberal world so they just don't have a clue about what other people think.

Now as then, liberals are thrilling to the symbolic violence of boycott and protest. Aren't we all having a jolly time!

But for millions of Americans, it is time to think about what would happen in they dared to pour into the streets, how the rules would be very different for them.

The left makes a big deal about dignity, how the workers organize and demonstrate for the right to be treated with dignity--as full human beings with full civil rights. But imagine this for a moment. The demand for dignity beats in every human breast, liberal or conservative. And one of the consequences of the "punitive liberalism" of the past generation is that liberals have been dishing out indignity to non-liberal Americans by the bucket load. Here's how James Piereson describes the sentiment driving "punitive liberalism:"

The idea developed in [liberal] minds that instead of self-congratulation the nation deserved punishment and chastisement for its manifold failures to live up to its ideals. In this way reform liberalism gave way to "punitive liberalism" and in turn to various policies that sought to punish the middle class for winning success at the expense of higher ideals.

Kinda hits the spot, doesn't it?

Sooner or later, the worm turns, on dignity for non-liberals as on so many things. And the worm could be turning right now.

The Laws of History

Oh goody! Virtue is rewarded! My "Radical Suits and Their Suckers" just got a mention at Instapundit, and the money quote was

Not to get too Marxist about this, but we are talking about the inevitability of a law of history. The productive forces are changing, and the social superstructure is going to have to change too. The liberal and the radical suits can help their Big Unit followers through the change or they can drive them into the ditch. It’s their choice.

Rather nice, don't you think?

I am trying to take the strategic view of the current situation. What is going to happen to the present correlation of forces in the United States? Are the liberals and Democrats going to be able to stop the spending cuts with the semi-violence of mass protests and sporadic thuggery? Or will the new spirit of retrenchment sweep all before it?

Here's Timothey P. Carney writing that the Democrats just don't get the new populism.

The Left has misread the postbailout populist sentiment all along, assuming public anger was directed at the rich. But American anger, I suspect, is directed not at some people who have money or success, but at those who profit through cronyism and their connections to power.

But Brian Doherty at Reason takes a darker view.

Wisconsin is an early sign of the stresses that will either shift our system of government action and spending to something unrecognizable to those who lived in the post-WW II boom years or tear that system apart. And everyone seems ready to fight about this necessary shift...

We may not be France yet, but there are disturbing signs that Americans may be ready to take to the streets angrily in defense of their government deals and giveaways.

But that gets back to the laws of history. If there isn't any money to pay the government workers then there isn't. And don't forget that the government workers are peanuts compared to Social Security and Medicare.

Here's another thought. I'd say that a very large proportion of government workers are women: teachers, nurses, social workers, paper pushers. I just don't believe that women are going to take to the streets to defend their perquisites; it's just not the female way.

What will happen is that there will be a big sorting out. And many of the people that have tagged along on the Democratic gravy train are going to be eating the paint off the walls. That's something that our liberal friends have not thought about. The fact is that government benefits are not ownership rights. They are given at the discretion of Congress, as the Supreme Court has ruled. So what the government giveth, the government taketh.

A couple of years ago, a young Democrat told me that he was glad of Social Security because it wasn't subject to the vagaries of the stock market. That was a clever thing to say in the fall of 2008, but I'm afraid that as the government fiddles around with the entitlements in the next few years, probing the American people for the soft spots, this young chap, now older, will wish he had some sort of ownership rights on his government benefits.

In any case, it ain't gonna be pretty. Prettiness only obtains where people refuse the temptations of political power and limit their actions to peaceful cooperation. The whole point of the administrative welfare state is political power for the educated class and clientage for the great unwashed masses. On the one side the serpent. On the other side a million Eves. I need hardly remind my readers that the story of the Garden of Eden did not end happily.

The Liberal Perfect Storm

When I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 it was for reasons of national-security hygiene. I believed that the Democrats had been demagoguing on national defense and they needed to take the reins of power. They needed a rendezvous with reality. So Iraq was a mistake and Afghanistan was the real war; so Bush was a bumbling Texas cowboy. There was no way of resolving the question without putting the Democrats in charge of the national security apparatus and let them make some real decisions.

As we have seen, practically the entire edifice of liberal national-security doctrine has been vitiated. Iraq was a success, after all; Afghanistan is maybe important. Gitmo is still there; the Patriot Act is still in force. But the whole issue of nation building and democracy is back on center stage because it matters whether, e.g., Egypt goes radical Islam. The world is safe for democracy when the major states of the world practice democratic capitalism rather than thug dictatorism or some other pre-modern politics. So the liberal line on national security in the 2000s is pretty well blown to smithereens. Liberals didn't listen, didn't think conservatives had anything to say on national security, and now they are digging themselves out of a hole.

But now we see the liberals start to pay the price of ignoring conservative ideas on domestic policy for the last generation, as in:

• Economic Policy. The kernel of truth in Keynesianism is that, in a financial meltdown, the government must step in to prevent a breakdosn of the financial system. That means printing money and bailing out the underwater financial players. But the whole edifice of "stimulus" to get the economy going again is rubbish. What is needed after a meltdown is smaller government, a smaller weight on the productive enterprises of the nation. What we call "stimulus" is really handouts to economic actors in the hope that the economy will recover and provide them with jobs again.
• Liberal special interests. The fact is that liberals have been dealing themselves and their clients a ton of money over the last half century and it's got to stop. Conservatives have been warning that government employees are way overpaid for at least a decade. But liberals wouldn't listen. Now they are going to pay the price, big time.
• Entitlements. Everyone knows that the entitlements have to be reduced. But liberals have been demagoguing on Social Security and Medicare for half a century. Now it's coming up to crunch time and the people hurt by retrenchment will be the people that liberals have encouraged to rely on the government. Apart from the political chicanery here, there is a bigger issue. People get dignity and a sense of self worth by providing for themselves and their family. If government does all that for you then, unless you are a creative artist, you are denied much of the satisfaction of life. The entitlements need to be recast as proper savings programs. They don't need to be totally individualized, but they do need to designed, in form and in fact, as money that people save against old age and infirmity.
• Education. Education is a mess and has been ever since teachers started seriously unionizing. Again, the kids being hurt here are lower-income kids, the very ones that need education to convert from peasants into literate, numerate city slickers. For over a generation conservatives have argued that we need to break up the government monopoly in education and liberals have refused to listen.
• Welfare and the poor. After a generation of argument, President Clinton signed a modest welfare reform in 1996. But in the last two years President Obama has pretty well reversed the welfare reforms. And we can see, in the off-the-books problem, that work and welfare for the low-paid is an unjust, corrupt, cruel mess.
• Science and technology. Liberals think they are so smart on science, because they believe in evolution and conservatives believe in creation. But liberals have politicized science wherever they have touched it, from nuclear power to fossil fuels to transportation to global warming to the environment. And now the chickens are coming home to roost.

I could go on and on, but you get the point. Liberals are facing a perfect storm in the next few years, and it could all have been avoided if they had the decency and the humility to actually listen occasionally to their political opponents.

But still, I am surprised by the left-wing madness of the Obama administration. It's one thing to truckle to your base in the run-up to an election, but another thing to let the crazies take over the government. For that strategic error, the liberals are going to pay for a generation.

But then, the Greeks didn't fuss on about hubris for nothing.

Liberals Jump the Shark

In the end, I had to check Wikipedia about the meaning of "jumping the shark" and I learned that it referred to an episode of the TV sitcom Happy Days where a water-skiing Fonzi jumps over a confined shark.

Usually, this sort of thing occurs in a sitcom in terminal decline, when "a particular production effort has surpassed its relevance and reached a point of decline in quality that it is incapable of recovering from."

Hello liberal teachers in Wisconsin!

And now we read that President Obama and the Democratic National Committee are backing away from support of the demonstrating government workers in Wisconsin. Throwing 'em under the bus, eh, Mr. President?

I suppose that all political movements reach this point, where people demonstrate in the street, all riled up with indignation, utterly innocent of the fact that the once noble movement has become a tired, corrupt political conspiracy, a routine operation designed to fleece the taxpapers and line the pockets of the powerful.

Politics is peculiarly subject to this kind of thing, and I think it is because politics lives uneasily between the mailed fist of force and the velvet glove of inspiration. A political movement begins as a moral movement of renewal; it is full of its moral mission. And when political activists are out of power they only have the power of persuasion--assuming that they stop short of armed struggle. But the problem with government is that government is force. A political movement, once it gains political power, is tempted every day to use the arts of war instead of the arts of peace. It is tempted to roll over its opponents using its sovereign power instead of persuading them with arguments.

Conservatives have an answer to this problem. It is called limited government. There are many injustices and hardships in the world. But how many of them can really be solved with force? That is the question that conservatives ask. We don't ask ourselves that out of great moral insight, but out of practical concern.

Do we really want to get political power and government force into, e.g., the education of children? When we ask that question we are saying nothing against the importance of education. We are saying nothing against the idea of helping the poor to afford education. We are just asking, from a practical standpoint: do we want to do this by force. Because if government is involved then we are going to be educating children by force.

Well, our liberal friends crossed the Rubicon on that one decades ago. They are committed to force in just about every societal issue you could imagine. And now the whole edifice is wobbling.

Yes, but where shall we go, what shall we do? Andrew Biggs in NRO advises liberals to start reforming entitlements now, because it will only get worse.

And over the long term — well, if we don’t get on top of these issues soon, there won’t be a long term: All the entitlements will effectively fix themselves by going broke.

Like I keep saying, we conservatives don't have a dog in this race. It is the faithful Democratic voters that have organized their lives around government benefits that are going to be devastated by the default option, that of waiting until the entitlements go broke.

We care. We care that the Wisconsin demonstrators are cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Those government employees need, nay deserve, to have a soft landing from the impossible promises made to them by the politicians and the union bosses. That is what Gov. Scott Walker, (R) is offering them. It's a shame that they don't understand how generous and accommodating his plan is.

But if they don't appreciate now how generous the proposed soft landing is, then they will learn later.

Off-the-books Benefit Fraud

Back in December 2010 I wrote about "Off-the-books America", the growth of unregulated work and the curious disinterest of liberal America in doing anything about it. What is going on here, I wondered. "How can our liberal ruling class, that lives to regulate everything that moves, allow this to happen?"

I went on to describe a recent experience with an off-the-books fencing contractor, and did a bit of math to figure out why a small-time contractor might want to skip out on all the bother and expense of paying his taxes:

Suppose you are about to start on the bottom rung of the construction business, as a one-man residential fencing contractor. If you hire American laborers, they might want to work as formal employees. Let's just figure out what that would cost in Washington State, at the minimum wage of, say, $7.00 per hour. There's the FICA tax of 7.65%. There's the unemployment tax that, for a construction firm, is probably at the limit of 6 percent. Then there is workers compensation. That's presently at $1.30 per hour for Landscape Construction and Renovation, or 18.6 percent of the hourly wage! All told, we are paying the government 32.2% in payroll taxes! You think that a seat-of-the-pants start-up contractor is going to pay all that (let alone plow through the bureaucratic forms)? No, he's going to hire illegal workers, because they want to get paid in cash. Bank account? Forget it: he'll cash checks at The Money Tree.

Last week I got an email from a reader who told me that I didn't really know what I was talking about. He said that the real problem is all the citizens working off the books and the citizen-owned businesses that refuse to pay employees on the books. The worst two segments are the automotive industry, dealers and repair shops, and construction/landscaping industry, he wrote.

He wrote about his own experience trying to get an on-the-books job in the automotive industry.

In the automotive world, at least in the Southeast it is pretty hard to find a job as a tech on cars or motorcycles on the books unless you work for a branded dealership such as Ford or whoever, and in the buy-here pay-here car lots it is almost all cash paid to salesmen, car lot boys, retailers, repairs, body shops! Many of the independent repair shops pay either 100% cash no 1099 or nothing; some will pay partial on the books and off the books. I bet it is a good 60-70% of the independent shops that do this in central and east coast Florida. I have covered a 80 miles radius looking for a auto tech job on the books. It is hard to find any automotive tech job on the books there! Even places like Aamco end up paying some off the book pay.

Frankly, I felt there was something missing here because, as a student of economics, I don't believe that employers can force off-the-books employment on the entire low-income workforce. Something else must be in play.

I soon found out what that was. Over the weekend I talked to a friend, and he reminded me of his brother's bankruptcy. His construction business had failed, but in the bankruptcy process the state gets involved in unpaid taxes. He had employed a couple of off-the-books employees and the government wanted its taxes before it would accord him the privilege of relief on his debts.

Well, whaddya know! One of the off-the-books employees was claiming unemployment as he worked of the books, and another was claiming disability as he worked off the books.

So now we know what is really at the center of the off-the-books phenomenon: benefit fraud.

I know what you are thinking. Surely it can't be that hard to check up on employers to keep track of benefit fraud, or at least prosecute some employer every couple of months on the principle of shooting one person to scare a million? Exactly. How hard could it be?

So we are led to the most obvious reason why the government isn't chasing down off-the-books employment and benefit fraud. Our liberal ruling class of politicians, MSM journalists, and progressive activists condone the benefit fraud. After all, if you are a Democratic elected politician the whole point of elective politics is to rain down benefits and social gains on your supporters. Who cares if it's done through on-the-books benefits like Social Security and Medicare or double dipping by off-the-books workers claiming unemployment or disability?

When I first started my CCUWD project, the fight against the welfare state and its cruelty, its corruption, its injustice, its waste, and its delusion, I admit that I was playing with words. But the fact is that it's all true: it's worse than you think.

So we are left with the honest truth. The liberal welfare state is an abomination, and it shall not stand.

Suppose Alinsky Has It Wrong?

In the last three years of Obama, conservatives writers have loved to terrify the conservative base with Saul Alinsky and his Rules For Radicals. The Alinsky tactics, particularly in Rule #13--"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it"--are held up as a sinister force against which honest conservatives are helpless. Now we see President Obama using Organizing for America in the battle of Wisconsin, the effort by Governor Scott Walker (R) to roll back organizing rights for public-sector unions.

But Alinsky's rules are nothing more than common sense. Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) uses them in his battle with the education blob in New Jersey. In fact he is very good at it. Some clueless state worker will complain about having to pay for health care premiums out of a 2 percent raise, and Christie talks about the 9 percent of workers in New Jersey that don't have jobs. He makes the state worker look like a complete fool.

In other words, Alinsky's tactics are the tactics that anyone uses in a political fight, whether an election or a battle in a state legislature. You want to make your opposition look like fools.

But in my view the bigger issue is that the idea of organizing the poor and the oppressed, as a political principle, is a loser. Let's take a look, starting at ground level and then taking a bigger and bigger perspective.

Suppose you lose? The point of political organizing is to mobilize your supporters for a fight. That is what politicians do routinely at election time. The idea is to divide the electorate so that you get at least 51 percent and the other chaps get the rest. We have elections scheduled regularly, so that we can divide, determine the winner, and get back to business. But the problem with provoking a fight is that you might lose. And I would argue that the history of most left-wing organizing is that the radical suits provoke the workers into outrages, which don't really help. Then after the protests, the radical suits head off to their next gig and the workers are left just as badly off as before. In the Battle of Wisconsin, the danger for President Obama and his union base is that they might actually provoke a counter movement that overpowers their movement. Remember? That's what happened after the Sixties. The American people hated the hippies and the lefty agitators, and voted for Richard Nixon.

Suppose you're wrong? The universal presumption on the left is that political power is the only way that the poor and the marginalized can get justice. The system is rigged against them by the corporations or the money power or discrimination, and the only way to end it is by political action followed by legislation to give the workers the social gains they are being denied by the injustice of the system. This goes back, of course, to Marx's immiseration theory and beyond. Obviously, from this point of view, if the bosses are making lots of money they are doing it on the backs of the workers. Thus the only way for the workers to get their fair share is by force. This theory dies a hard death; Deirdre McCloskey in her Bourgeois cycle has a good recent rebuttal. How can you get from $3 per day to $120 per day in two centuries by docking the workers of, say, $1 per day in wages? You can't make the arithmetic add up. That's because the prosperity of the modern era comes from innovation that benefits everyone.

Is politics the answer? The really big question overhanging everything is the modern faith in politics. And make no mistake, a faith in politics is a faith in force. It says that the way to get ahead in the world is by force, because government is force. Leaving aside the Biblical warnings about force, that he who lives by the sword will die by the sword, and Christ's final Temptation for power over all the nations of the earth, the record of political power is not that good, particularly if you look at recent American groups that have sought political power. There is the educated class, that now is the ruling class in America. It has brought us big government and now presides over us all with a disgusting corruption that it represents as high-mindedness. There is the working class, that spent the 19th century building authentic social institutions, and then wrecked itself when tempted by the educated class. There are African Americans, that were tempted by liberals right after the civil rights era and now are trapped in the liberal plantation. There are the feminists foolishly pursuing the chimera of comparable worth and proportionate representation in government and now the sciences. And now we have gays chasing the chimera of gay marriage. All these groups are in various stages of finding out that in pursuing political power they are drinking from a poisoned chalice. The point of human society is not to grab your pound of flesh, or hunker down like a dog in a manger, but to openly and generously contribute to the greater good.

President Obama doesn't know it yet, but the chances are that his Alinsky tactics will unite the majority of Americans against him. Chances are that he will go down as the president that led the Democratic Party and the progressive movement into the political wilderness for a generation.

I just hope that when the liberals and the Democrats finally reach the Promised Land they will have learned something from their years in the wilderness.

Between Freedom and Administration

When a corporation declares bankruptcy, it is common to say that it is operating "under administration." It is a polite way of saying that the corporation is no longer free to direct its own affairs. It operates only at the pleasure of its creditors acting through the courts. Administration means subjection.

In a similar way, Jean-Francois Revel, writing The Totalitarian Temptation in the bleak years before Ronald Reagan when it seemed that democratic capitalism was dying and that communism would take over the world, or at least participate as full partner in the future, wrote of the essential fragility of the totalitarian state. It must act with force and severity because it does not serve the hopes of its citizens, he wrote. Totalitarian states are fragile and brittle; their administrative structure makes them rigid and slow to adapt to changing conditions and needs.

The democratic state, on the contrary, ever since its birth in the three branch theory of Montesquieu in the 18th century, is a system that disperses and devolves power into separate and flexible institutions. From the three-branch state of executive, legislative, and judicial powers, Revel suggests six new powers that have arisen since the 18th century: business power, union power, media power, police power, military power, and diplomatic power.

Now I like to work from Michael Novak's three-sector model: political, economic, and moral/cultural, so it immediately appears to me that his nine-power model is clearly deficient in the moral/cultural realm. He leaves out, as a Frenchman well may, churches, fraternal associations, charitable groups, cultural associations, organizations that are not formed either for economic enterprise nor for political purposes.

But his differentiation of the executive power is interesting and useful. The chief executive is commander-in-chief, but under democratic capitalism there is a clear separation between the civilian leadership of the armed forces and the uniformed armed services themselves. This separation is intended as a separation of powers to prevent military dictatorship; it keeps the army out of politics and hopefully keeps the armed services from too much meddling by the politicians. The police power is also a deliberate separation from the unified executive. The idea is to limit the power of the executive to use the police power for political purposes, to criminalize and weaken the opposition. Notice that the separation of military and police power from the executive is a big deal to our liberal friends, and a credit to them.

Yes, but what about separating the administrative power from the executive, so that the operation of government departments is kept at a distance from elected politicians and their desire for the power to reward their friends and punish their enemies with government largesse.

This, perhaps, is the next stage in political evolution. It is easy to see why our present ruling class, the educated elite, has little interest in curbing the executive's influence over administration. Administrative centralism is the very life blood of the modern state. Our modern educated youths organize their lives to succeed in the system of administrative centralism, with its credentialism, its ticket punching, and its social power. A vast media empire is devoted to the boosting of the cultural and political power of the high fliers that go to selective colleges, establish reputations as political or foundation staffers or young academics, and then become honored experts, mandarins in the administrative welfare state, and the authors of the complex administrative initiatives that are offered in season to mitigate the administrative failures of a previous round of administrative innovation--the consequences of the law of unintended consequences.

The effect of the system of administrative centralism is similar to its extreme version, the totalitarian state. It solves every political problem with compulsion, with a new schedule of administrative regulations, and new subsidies and penalties. Each new ratchet of compulsion rigidifies and fragilizes. It sets society up for a fall, for the whole point of practical politics is to stop people going off and doing things without permission.

But the lesson of the modern era is that humans are social animals that can achieve amazing things when you give them the dignity and the freedom to innovate and serve their fellow humans without the club of administrative centralism. The whole apparatus of prices and ownership and credit and profit is a spontaneous human social organism that strongly encourages people to serve the needs of their fellow humans. The differentiated universe of social cooperation is a vibrant organism of life; the centralized administrative pyramid of the unified state is a mechanism of lifeless automation and compulsion.

The great challenge of the next generation is a moral/cultural one. It is to proselytize a new faith in freedom and dignity, and to marginalize the false faith in unity and compulsion. For the lesson of the 20th century is that centralization and compulsion through political power is a temptation of Satan himself. That was what Satan famously offered Jesus Christ: power over all the world.

But Christ said No; get thee behind me, old chum. And you can see why, not just from a moral point of view, but a practical point of view. Everything that political power touches turns to stone. Olease, for God's sake, keep politics and compulsion out of it; we humans are social animals, not regimented ants.

Just look at the commanding heights of the poltical sector. Government pensions are a mess, and about to bankrupt the states. Government health care is a mess as people massively overuse health care that is "free at the point of delivery." Government education has been on a decline for a century, as nobody values education that is free, and the failures lead to more and more regimentation and compulsion and the universal incarceration of children in government educational facilities. Government welfare is a joke, a program that could not have been better formulated if its intention had been to destroy the culture and the families and the work skills of the poor.

So what do we do? What is the first step back to freedom and dignity and away from administration and compulsion? Stay tuned; the best is yet to come.

From Goldwater to Reagan Redux?

It's pretty obvious what President Obama is doing in his budget. He is running for reelection and he is challenging those mean-spirited Republicans to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. So he is doing nothing about entitlements, hoping to set up the Republicans for a fall as soon as they touch the third rail of American politics.

And maybe it will all work out for him, as Republicans appear willing to accept the challenge he has flung down. As Robert Costa and Andrew Stiles report:

As of Monday early afternoon, House Republicans were officially undecided as to whether they’d take on entitlements when they write the budget this year. Fiscal-hawk extraordinaire Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, danced around the issue in a meeting with reporters... [J]ust as he was reluctantly deflecting the question, House majority leader Eric Cantor was dropping a bombshell in a pen-and-pad briefing with reporters elsewhere in the Capitol: Republicans, Cantor said, are all-in on entitlement reform.

Let's be candid about this. Democrats are going to demagogue this. They are going to try and do a rerun on the 1964 Presidential election when they successfully framed Barry Goldwater as a mad bomber that would get us into nuclear war. The result was the Vietnam War and the liberal belch of 1965 with Medicare and Medicaid and the War on Poverty.

The liberal belch of 1965 is what set the stage for the current entitlement crisis, because Medicare and Medicaid are now set to eat the budget.

As we know, President Obama and the Democrats have doubled down on the current system of administrative centralism with ObamaCare--which they claim, and presumably believe, will bend the cost curve down even as it ups the bureaucratizing and regulating of the health care field, and increases the number of people with subsidized access to health care.

Frankly, I suspect that President Obama and the Democrats are going to win this one, this time. They will demagogue the proposed Republican fixes to health care entitlements and President Obama will win election. But then the long-term will start to bite and by 2016 the American people will be in full revolt against everything Obamian and Democratic. We will see nasty inflation, we will see sky-high interest rates; we will see pervasive cronyism and out-front liberal corruption; we will see escalating problems with health care.

Then in 2016 the Goldwater moment of 2012 in which the liberals win by pure demagoguery will turn into the neo-Reagan era of 2016 and the sunny uplands of 20 years of growth and prosperity. We don't know who the Reagan will be, but this is America, the exceptional nation, and this is a nation that finds its Washington, its Hamilton, its Lincoln, and its Reagan in its hour of need.

So I say to the House Republicans: go ahead. Put your proposals on the table. Realize that many of you in the front ranks will fall the to musket balls of the Obamis and their willing accomplices in the media. Understand that in the strategic picture your sacrifices will lay the groundwork for the victory of 2016.

And if, despite the best efforts of the Obamis and the Democrats, Republican reforms go through in the next two years, well, sometimes virtue is rewarded in this life rather than in the next.

Can Obama Do a Clinton?

The conservative reaction to President Obama's budget is fear. Fear that Obama will do a Clinton on the Republicans and set up a government shutdown that the voters will blame on mean-spirited conservatives.

What we need, says Thomas Sowell, is a Rocky Marciano, who knows how to take the punches but has the patience to wait for the opportunity to land the big one.

On the other hand, Daniel Foster has House Majority Leader Cantor stepping up to the plate with this comment:

Your question about the budget itself and the entitlement inclusion, yes, we will include entitlement reform provisions in our budget, again, unlike the President, and unlike Harry Reid who doesn’t even admit there needs to be any reform of Social Security.

We have to look at the bigger strategic picture. And that includes preparing the battlefield. Republicans and conservatives need to get the line out that the sooner we do entitlement reform, the less it will hurt, and the less it will hurt the poor and the elderly. The battlefield preparation may involve tactical defeats, which is a polite way of saying that there will be casualties. Bright, promising politicians will be defeated before they have a chance to realize their potential.

The outline of the future is clear; it has been worked out by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-IL). He proposes to convert Medicare from a defined benefit to a fixed subsidy. Senior citizens will get an annual amount to apply to the health insurance of their choice. Left unsaid, I suspect, is the obvious follow-on, that Congress will eventually demand that richer Americans will get less of a subsidy that poor Americans.

Yes, but what about the poor and Medicaid. My solution is Wal-Mart-care. Think of health care today as a world of corner stores and department stores. Very nice, and all that. But most people don't shop at corner stores and department stores any more. They go to the big-box stores.

Wal-Mart is already putting in-store clinics into its stores. It already has a fixed monthly fee for all-you-can-eat generic drugs. Expect that the genius of American innovation will find new ways to deliver health care on the big-box model.

Meanwhile, what are we talking about when we say that Republicans just don't know how to play the sound-bite wars? Who was it who came up with "death panels," who talks about "common-sense conservatism" and even "common-sense constitutional conservatism?" And now Sarah Palin has described President Obama's policy as "a bullet train to bankruptcy."

I tell you. The future is so bright, I gotta wear shades.

President Obama Behind the 8-Ball

With the release of the his FY12 federal budget President Obama is reaching a do-or-die moment.

The key to the budget is the new estimate of the deficit for FY11, the current fiscal year, from $1.2 trillion to $1.6 trillion. You can see the problem here, using usgovernmentspending.com's Federal Budget Analyst.

Budget	FY 2012 Deficit $ billion
FY2007	204.9
FY2008	53.8
FY2009	94.8
FY2010	929.4
FY2011	1,266.7
FY2012	1,645.1

No, it ain't pretty. And it's all the consequence of the two strategic errors made by the Obama administration in 2009. Let's list them:

1. Orthodox Keynesian Stimulus. Stimulus has a point when you are trying to rescue the banking system from a meltdown. But the idea that you can stimulate the economy with government spending is laughable. Liberals just can't wean themselves away from the notion, and this time, it is going to cost them big time.
2. Full-on liberal agenda. Obama and his chaps just put the pedal to the metal in 2009 with gigantic expansions of traditional liberal special-interest spending plus ObamaCare, a huge weight on the economy, and all the educated class agenda on high-speed rail, clean energy and taxing and regulating conventional fossil fuels. It was a gigantic mistake, and liberals will be paying for it out to the horizon.

The basic problem for President Obama is that Americans are frightened. They are frightened that the big spending and the big deficits are going to hurt the economy and take away their jobs and their retirement.

In that, the American people are right.

Maybe the economy, with the inflationary QE2 and the Fed printing money like mad, will improve enough by 2012 to get President Obama home for reelection. But maybe not.

In any case, the Liberal Hour is over. Whether President Obama gets reelected or not, the American people are souring on big government programs, especially as they feel, rightly, that they don't benefit them. That means that a second-term Obama would be in office, but not in power. And that would mean a mid-term election which could reduce Democrats to numbers not seen for over a century.

Beyond Blame

If we want to understand who to blame for the current cock-up in government, it is easy: our liberal friends.

It is liberals that have championed the neo-feudal welfare state and its politicization of everything.

Yes, of course, years ago liberals had noble thoughts about helping the helpless. But because their social vision did not extend beyond the administrative model of the absolute monarchs, their noble initiatives have inevitably descended into simple patronage politics. Politicians bid for the votes of the voters by dangling benefits before them. Inevitably, they offer more than the economy can deliver, and so, at some point, the government runs out of money to tax, borrow, or print.

So far so good. But there is a question ultimately more interesting and more uplifting than the tawdry question of blame. After all, all governments are a mess, stumbling from one disaster to another. All governments. Even in its heyday in the 19th century, the British Empire was a succession of disasters. First there was the mess of the Crimean War. Then there was the Indian Mutiny, called, in India, the Uprising. Then there was Gordon in Khartoum, followed by the Boer War. What a mess!

No, my question is: what is it about the belief system of our liberal friends that led them into the blind alley of the administrative welfare state? What was it that allowed them to imagine that their big government would be any different from the big governments of history? What made them believe that the vast expansion of government would be anything other than a moral and cultural disaster? What made them think that you could have liberation, dignity, and justice with a big overweening government? After all, the whole point of a good belief system and its moral universe is to help its believers and practitioners avoid the common pitfalls of self-delusion and hypocrisy. A good religion should be a prop, and help you live a worthy and a meaningful life. It should not lead you into a reactionary political system and a swamp of hypocrisy.

In my view the big problem is that our liberal friends cannot see that their moral and political enthusiasms are, in the strict sense, religions. They think that they have grown beyond the superstitions and the narrowness of religious belief. In fact they think that religion is on its way out as people come to rely on science and reason instead of fanciful belief in gods and spirits.

In fact, of course, the history of the modern era is the story of one secular religious movement after another. You can start with the French Revolution and its cult of Reason. Then there is Romanticism, a belief that there is something deeper than reason that explains the nature of life. There is socialism in all its variants, the nostalgic idea that we can return to the Garden of Eden of perfect, eternal community. There is Comte and his Religion of Humanity. There is fascism, the nostaglia for the tribe and the kindred. There is Nietzsche and the Ubermensch, the extraordinary individual. There is the cult of creativity, the transformation of the natural generative urge into a metaphor of non-physical creation. There is the puritanical environmentalist movement that seeks to purify and save a polluted and corrupted world. It goes on and on.

Our liberal friends fail to understand that the meaning of life, its telos, is always a mystery. We do not know our human purpose, if we have a purpose. We do not know how we should act in order to survive and flourish. We do not even know if human survival is warranted. What we have is faith. We believe that certain ways are the best way to survive, to flourish, and to create a moral society. In the day-to-day social life we try to work out what is best for us, best for our families, best for our larger social groupings, and best for the world. In the arena of national politics, liberals believe in certain liberal folkways and conservatives believe in certain conservative folkways. It seems pretty certain that the other guys have got the wrong end of the stick and are likely to bring the nation to disaster. And because government is almost always a train wreck in progress, the governing class must bear the weight of the blame.

In the United States, over the last century, the educated class of liberals, progressives, creatives, secularists--whatever you want to call them--have dominated politics and culture. It is their ideas that drive the government, with its trillion dollars a year in government pensions, its trillion dollars a year in government health care, its trillion dollars a year in government education, and its three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year in government welfare. It is liberals that dominate the universities, liberals that dominate the entertainment media. They have caused the current crisis because they lacked the self-consciousness to realize that they, just like everyone before them, have a religion. It's a secular religion, for sure, but religion all the same. When you take your religion and you breathe it into all the organs of government, legislating morality with that secular religion, then you break down the separation between church and state, between the political sector and the moral/cultural sector. Of course, you don't believe that. You think that only right-wing preachers and right-wing politicians can create a theocracy.

But it takes a remarkably narrow and pinched understanding of the modern age not to understand that, in socialism and communism, and now in environmentalism and the climate change movement, we have what we have often had in the past, militant religions enthusiastically pursuing a vision to save the world from sin.

"Turmoil in their Ranks"

The chaps at The New York Times are eager to report that all is not well with the House Republicans. In "House Republicans Battle Turmoil in Their Ranks" Tom Hulse reports that:

Under pressure to make deeper spending cuts and blindsided by embarrassing floor defeats, House Republican leaders are quickly discovering the limits of control over their ideologically driven and independent-minded new majority.

For the second consecutive day, House Republicans on Wednesday lost a floor vote due to a mini-revolt, this time over a plan to demand a repayment from the United Nations. Earlier in the day, members of the party’s conservative bloc used a closed-door party meeting to push the leadership to go well beyond its plans to trim about $40 billion from domestic spending and foreign aid this year, demanding $100 billion or more.

So? What's not to like? There is a word to describe this situation. It is "democracy."

The elections of 2010 sent 63 new Republicans to the House of Representatives. It's the biggest turnover in a couple of generations. Obviously, it will change the game in Washington. But how? That is what Republicans are discovering as they stumble into the future.

A couple of years ago, after Democrats had won 55 seats in the House over two election cycles, they reckoned it gave them a mandate to crank federal spending up to 24 or 25 percent of GDP. On reflection, it is probably fair to say that they were mistaken. On balance. That's because the vast majority of Americans are worried about jobs and worried about deficits. They see big government as a threat to their livelihood.

Now the Republicans have swept to control of the House. These Republicans represent people who think that "something must be done" about wasteful spending and big deficits. So they are starting on that project. The GOP leaders, not surprisingly, are rather less gung-ho than the freshman class. They remember the Gingrich years and the firestorm they went through when they tried to cut spending with President Clinton in the White House. What we are seeing is the Republicans come to a consensus about just how tough they are going to get on spending.

In any case, all this is penny-ante stuff. The real story is the long-term budget outlook. As this chart from usgovernmentspending.com shows, the real question is health care: Medicare and Medicaid.

Obviously, the growth of Medicare and Medicaid cannot go on like this forever. They run into Herbert Stein's law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Somehow, in some way, the growth in government health care spending will stop.

Years from now we may look back on the budget battle of 2011 and see the seeds of the Great Repudiation--of big government.

Or maybe not.

Don't Think MultiCulti is Dead

Everyone is nodding approvingly at British Prime Minister David Cameron's attack on multiculturalism at Munich. Douglas Murray points sensibly to the double standard in multiculturalism.

In Britain, for instance, this meant that if you were a white English girl born into a white English family and your family decided to marry you against your will to a randy old pervert, the state would intervene. But if you had the misfortune to be born into an "Asian-background" family and the same happened, then the state would look the other way.

Now that the great and the good agree that "something must be done" about extreme Islamism, the tolerance for non-Western cultural practices seems like folly.

But let's not be in a hurry to declare multiculturalism dead. Look for the next version of the cultural attack on democratic capitalism to rise out of the ashes of multiculturalism.

It is important to understand that the cultural double standard is a constant on the left. It is the Schwerpunkt of their war on democratic capitalism. It started in the 19th century when the left declared that, because the working class was exploited, they couldn't be expected to conform to middle-class morality and culture. The working class had its own authentic culture and we ought to respect it.

Notice how this political program works for the left on several levels.

1. By rallying to the support of the working class, in the middle of its struggle out of rural indigence, the left earns the grateful support of the working class.
2. It discourages the working class from adopting the culture and mores of the competent, disciplined, rule-following middle class. This keeps the working class in a kind of working-class cultural and economic ghetto, and thus easily led by the left.
3. It supports the main left-wing narrative of exploitation. If the working class is confined in a ghetto, that proves the left's assertion that the working class is deprived of a fair participation in the capitalist economy and therefore the government should have the power to loot the private sector to pay reparations to the exploited working class.

And so on. The same strategy works for any group that the left defines as marginalized and exploited. But it is a cruel and unjust strategy. The mores and the rules of middle-class democratic capitalism are not a cunning trick to keep the middle class in power and evil corporations profitable. They are the culture that has made the world what it is today, where ordinary people can apply themselves to serving other people economically and make a decent living out of it. On the margins, of course, some people by innovation jolt the economy into the stunning leaps from horsepower to steam power to gasoline power to nuclear power. That is what gets us from a $3 per person per day economy to a $100 per person per day economy.

For the past generation the left has been playing their game with the Moslems that are immigrating in their millions out of hopelessness in their native countries to the vibrant economy in the West. They are encouraging the Moslems to believe that they can have their pre-modern traditional culture and their western wealth as well, just as they encouraged the working class a century ago.

But there is no way for the immigrants to the city to have their cake and eat it too. Sooner or later they must submit to the culture and the rules of democratic capitalism if they want to make it in the city.

And no left-wing lies will change that.

It's Not Just the Money

The video of Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) explaining to a black policeman why he's going to have to pay for a third of his health care costs out of a 2 percent pay increase will become a classic.

It's a classic on many levels, including the demonstration of political skill. Christie walks out his ground, getting applause from the audience as he goes, building the case for spending cuts. He includes the case of municipal employees that got $900,000 on retirement from cashing in their unused sick leave. But still, the policeman didn't care. All he cared about was that he was looking at a big increase in his health care costs and he wasn't being made whole.

It's the basic problem of all government programs. Everyone signs up when there's free money going, and everyone acts outraged when the free money gets taken back.

But there's a bigger problem that I'm trying to understand. It is this. If you look at government operations, they are utter failures from top to bottom, starting with foreign policy. That's understandable, because foreign policy is always a fight between the good guys and the thug dictators. Wars usually start with the most appalling losses and retreats.

Then we get to ordinary government programs like education. There's a fuss right now about for-profit colleges. The Government Accountability Office has investigated 15 for-profit colleges for encouraging applicants to commit fraud when applying for federal aid. Investor Steve Eisman is also railing on the for-profit vocational college industry.

OK. Let's investigate fraud and prosecute it wherever it is found. But why just the for-profit colleges? What about government colleges? How well are they doing? And what about K-12 education? How well are the public schools doing in the inner cities? Where are the undercover investigations exposing the shoddy practices of the public sector education industry?

The discouraging truth is that it is almost impossible to criticize a government program until it breaks. That's because every government program is protected by a special interest lobby, and if you dare to criticize the program you will find yourself accused of slandering teachers or farmers, or policemen, or firefighters.

That's a shame. The truth is that all productive activity should be constantly adjusted and improved to deliver better service. You get that in the private for-profit sector, because if you don't you go out of business. But in government you get a slow death. A program may start out full of promise and hope but it descends inevitably into a producer protection racket. All that matters are the paychecks going to the government workers. And if the service isn't any good, that is just an argument for more funding.

In the end, we are going to have to pull all service-type activity out of the government. That's if we have any notion of getting health care, education, pensions, and welfare that works.

But it will take a revolution to get there.

ObamaCare and the Bigger Question

Why do liberals believe that the only way to improve the delivery of health care is by more compulsion? That is, after all, the assumption behind ObamaCare.

There are millions of people without proper health insurance, say liberals, the millions of the uninsured. We propose to correct this with a system of subsidies paid out of taxes and mandates and administrative regulation. In other words, faced with the problem that many people lack the means to acquire the middle-class approach to health care, government should force the nation to supply health insurance to them.

The liberals get to this position through a political narrative of inequality and oppression. They observe that many people cannot afford the social goods of health care and education. They conclude that the reason is injustice. It may be that a minority--racial or ethnic--has been historically marginalized. It may be that employers exploit their workers with low pay and limited benefits. It may be privilege, that certain groups have access to desirable social goods because of their parents' social and economic position. It may justs be that skilled people can afford more than unskilled people. Or there is the poverty-line argument. It takes a certain amount of money for a family to afford the basics of food and shelter, and society should assist those people that fall below that standard.

But in all cases, our liberal friends make the same leap. If there is a deficiency, it should be made up by a government program. Our liberal friends do not seem to understand what they are saying when they do this. They are saying that there is no way of providing social goods except through a lot of force and compulsion.

Oh really?

Many of the arguments that liberals make, of course, begin by assuming that force is needed. If you make the inequality argument, you are saying that only a certain degree of inequality is just, and that inequality in excess of that standard requires government intervention. The marginalization argument and the employer exploitation argument imply that discrimination, a veiled form of force, is abroad and probably can only be corrected by countervailing force.

The conservative argument is that, while exploitation and privilege certainly abound in the United States, they are not absolute barriers to a decent life. Uneducated immigrants and kids from single-parent families have a hard row to hoe. But they can and do get ahead. Indeed, they mostly do. In fact, we add, if you look at the numbers you learn that it is very difficult to be poor in America if you finish high school, get married, and don't have a child in your teens. That expresses the notion that even with a basic education, you can earn a decent wage in America to get food, shelter, and modest luxuries.

The question we wish to open is this. Why do we assume that "social goods" should be delivered through government? "There is such a thing as society, it's just not the same thing as the state," says Prime Minister David Cameron. In fact, as social animals, humans derive much of their feeling of self-worth and meaning from contributing to social enterprises, whether in a work team, a family, a church, or a benevolent association. Conservatives believe that it is part of everyone's duty to be aware of the needs of people they know, and to work to help them when they need help. These services are best delivered person to person, face to face. Failing that, it is best to deliver them through small, local organizations rather than big bureaucratic administrations. Failing that, it is better to deliver services through big non-profit associations than big government departments.

Why is that? Why is it better to help the helpless and the less fortunate face to face rather than through a big organization? It is partly because each person is an individual, and has specific and personal needs that are not easily accommodated to the rules and procedures of a large bureaucracy. It is also because people feel a larger obligation, both in giving and receiving in a personal face-to-face relationship. People feel more obligated to do the right thing around people they know. With a bureaucracy, they find ways to game the system, because nobody will know, and nobody will care.

There are some social goods, perhaps many social goods, that can only be delivered using force. But conservatives believe that, for the headline social goods of pensions, health care, education, and welfare, a sharply reduced government share would be beneficial to all: to those that must step up their help for their fellow citizens to those receiving help from their fellow citizens. It's the social thing to do.

Conservatives believe that ObamaCare will either get repealed or it will lead to a meltdown in health care. We believe that there has to be a better way than force.

A Jobless Recovery

The news that unemployment dropped to 9.0 percent last month is actually terrible news--for America and for the Obama administration. It means that the economy, now in a mild recovery for the last two years, still hasn't started to generate new jobs.

Back in the early days of the recovery in 2002 and 2003 after the tech bubble recession, Democrats like Nancy Pelosi would howl about the "jobless recovery." Now it's the Republicans' turn to howl, and Rush Limbaugh, for one, isn't slow to do so. You can see the situation from these two charts. The first one shows the US labor force for the last ten years.

It shows that the labor force is flat, continuing the flatness of the past three years. The second chart is total US employment for the last then years.

This shows the staggering bloodletting in the Great Recession. It shows we are still down nine million jobs from the peak of the economic cycle in 2006-07. It shows that the Democratic whining about a jobless recovery 8 years ago was ridiculous. In 2003 the labor force was climbing strongly, as people came into the labor force, and employment was climbing moderately. Contrast that with the current recovery, in which the labor force is flat, and the employment gain is also flat, and down nine million from four years ago.

Of course, conservatives have a simple explanation of the jobless recovery. President Obama and the Democrats thought, back in 2009, that all they had to do was pass a stimulus bill and jobs would magically appear. That's what Keynesian economics told them and that's what their tame economists told them.

Unfortunately, Keynesian economics is baloney. The government needs to keep its hands off the economy. It needs to promote a healthy credit market, which it has not done for the last century. And it needs to promote a healthy business climate, which it has not done from the start of the Obama administration.

If there is a good thing about all this, it may be that the overall losses to Democratic power in 2010 and 2012 will be so severe and so shocking that Democrats will abandon their inflationism, their interference in the credit markets, and their faith in Keynesian economics and come, grudgingly, to accept Reaganomics. But don't hold your breath.

Liberals Administering Prosperity

President Obama talked a Reaganesque line in his State of the Union speech about business and innovation. Here's his paean to business.

Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation. But because it’s not always profitable for companies to invest in basic research, throughout our history, our government has provided cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support that they need. That’s what planted the seeds for the Internet. That’s what helped make possible things like computer chips and GPS. Just think of all the good jobs -- from manufacturing to retail -- that have come from these breakthroughs.

Notice the "but". But government needs to step in to fund basic research, to plant the seeds of the internet.

Here's where our liberal friends smuggle their statism in the back door.

The internet, Mr. President, was invented through DARPA research because the Pentagon thought that the government needed a communications network that could survive interruption in nuclear war. In other words, the government invented the internet for reasons of defense. The government paid for semiconductor research because it needed lightweight electronics for ballistic missile guidance. In other words, the government was looking after its own needs, and its core responsibility of defense.

But this is an imperfect world. Politicians and experts aren't satisfied by the mundane tasks of defense. They want to save the world. That's how we get from defense research to climate-change research. But saving the world is not a government task. Saving the world is a religious task. It's the job of people with a moral mission, not a defense mission. Moral missions, of course, are much more fun. You can divide the world into the good guys and the bad guys, and you can lead a moral crusade against the bad guys. But never mind about that. Government doesn't just want to lead people on moral crusades; it wants to feed every child and put two cars in every garage.

The big problem, in other words, is mission creep. And when government gets into mission creep in the economic sector it starts building technological and economic white elephants. Mission creep leads to waste and corruption and to crony capitalism. Government doesn't make people more prosperous. It just gives money to its supporters, and stiffs the rest.

This really isn't hard. Government should stick to its basic functions and people in political life should stick to the dull and dutiful job of defending society from enemies that want to kill us or defraud us. The fun job of saving the world should be left to moral leaders. And the hands-on job of innovation and making new products should be left to businessmen, scientists, engineers, marketers, designers, salespeople, and investors.

When government tries to get into the business of innovation and basic research not related to its core functions, it makes a mess. That's because government is force, politics is power. Business is different. Business is about imagining and then creating products and services. Business is about listening to consumers and responding to their every whim. Leave business to business, and concentrate on applying force on them when they do something criminal. Otherwise, leave them alone, and above all, don't tempt them into crony capitalism.

Free Speech. Yes, But How?

Radio host Dennis Prager reminds us just how unfree we are when it comes to free speech. In America, you don't say anything that might offend left-wing ears, because it can get you into trouble.

In the past generation, the left has controlled so much speech and behavior that these controls are now assumed to be a normal part of life.

There's the telling point: "a normal part of life." And frankly, if you are a corporate exec, or an employee in a medium-to-large corporation, it would be disloyal to your employer to breach the left-wing speech codes. You might be willing to get yourself in trouble, but that is not the end of the story. For sure, your local HR department will be all over you like a cheap suit if you say the wrong thing. But your frankness can get your employer in trouble. And the fact is that most of us, the 80 percent of Americans who are not liberal, don't feel that our employer has it coming. We know how hard it is to create a profitable company, and we know how hard it is to keep a company profitable. So we really don't want to do anything that could harm our employer and get him in trouble with the PC police.

But the fact is that you can't say "Merry Christmas"; you can't talk about "innate differences between men and women"; you can't talk about black violence; you can't criticize homosexuality. It gets down to the bizarre. Apparently they are now Photoshopping out cigars from Churchill photos and cigarettes from FDR photos and Beatles photos.

What's to be done? Writes Prager:

If you love liberty, you must target the left and put its totalitarian tendencies in your cross hairs. We must shoot down political correctness and wage a crusade for truth and liberty.

That means that nice people have to get a little nasty. When you are around your liberal friends you have to short out the censor, and talk as if men and women are different, Christianity is a good thing, homosexuality is problematic, blacks have bought themselves a problem by living on the liberal plantation. And so on.

If you don't have the courage to violate the liberal speech codes you can try irony and code words. Just a couple of days ago, I exchanged greetings with an older couple, and we commented on the snow storms up north. "Global warming," I said. "Climate chaos" came the replay.

My own strategy is to turn the left's words against them, using their slogans to mean something different. And I always make it a point to talk about "girl stuff" and "boy stuff" when the opportunity arises.

But it still comes down to courage. We have to refuse to play the left's game. We have to "speak truth to power."

The Indictment

For the last century and a half everyone has been whaling on the middle class--the bourgeoisie, the factory owners, the booboisie--and tremendous fun it has been. As with most calumnies there was a grain of truth in the indictment of the middle class and everything it stood for. The bourgeoisie, dignified and free, had in the industrial revolution transformed society from an agricultural age to an industrial age. Millions of lives had been transformed; completely new ideas and practices had sprung out of the ground; untold wealth had been created. But there was a terrible cost. Millions of people found themselves toiling and working in satanic mills in squalid slums on the edge of want and starvation; if that was the bottom line of the industrial age, it needed radical surgery.

That was the judgment of a new class that emerged out of the revolutions of 1848, the educated middle class radicalized by the turmoil and the suffering of the high industrial revolution in Europe. These people were young, they were educated, and they were idealistic. They saw that the toiling masses that wove the textiles, mined the coal, forged the steel, and drove the railroad locomotives worked and lived on the edge of poverty in conditions little short of hellish. What was the point of the new age of rights and liberties, of inventions and manufactures, if they could not lead to concrete improvement in the lives of the masses? They decided that political revolution, or at least radical reform, was needed to create a better society.

A century before, educated young men like John Wesley and George Whitefield had chosen a different path. They had led farm laborers and mechanics into a social movement of aspiration and responsibility. They believed that the lower orders had the ability and the virtue in them to rise and to prosper even without political transformation. But the 1848 generation of educated youth believed that it was the system that prevented the workers from rising. To the youthful Karl Marx, the old agricultural order, in which the feudal lords had exploited the serfs, had given way to more of the same, a new system of oppression in which the bourgeoisie exploited the industrial proletariat. In response to this perceived injustice, the 1848ers constructed a political vision that would raise them, the educated class, to political hegemony as permanent guardians of the proletariat. Practical activists, they adapted the political structure of the absolute monarchs of the 17th century for their own use. These monarchs had needed expensive standing armies to maintain their power, and that required a revolution in the organization of the state. It needed discipline, loyalty, a rational organization, and money. The monarchs found they had to cut through or circumvent the web of institutions separating them from their subjects and tax them direcly. To do that they needed a state bureaucracy staffed by professional administrators. Just like its parallel military organization, the state bureaucracy came to control the individual citizen as the military bureaucracy controlled the individual soldier.

Sounds familiar? Yet that is exactly what the generation of 1848 decided, as they worked to build a system that could deliver rights, benefits and programs to the helpless workers. They needed a system of administrative centralism to control society and extract the resources they needed to right the injustices of an unjust age.

Of course, the 1848ers were wrong. The workers were not condemned to everlasting poverty. They began to prosper steadily in the second half of the 19th century, perhaps assisted by legislation. Maybe we never needed the 1848ers and the educated political class.

Too late: now we are stuck with them and their system unless we rise up and change it. Because their system of of administrative centralism is unjust.

The modern central administrative state is just as unjust as the state bureaucracies of the absolute monarchs, and for the same reason. A society in which the major activities of life have been brought under the direct administration of a political ruling class is necessarily unjust, for it collapses political society into an administrative organ that is nothing more than the instrument of its ruler.

Thus we can say that the administrative welfare state that the post-1848 educated class, now out liberal friends, have imposed upon the American people is an abomination. It is deluded, for it attempts to solve a problem that never existed. It is unjust, for it puts a thumb on the scales of justice to advantage politically favored groups over others. It is cruel, for it substitutes government compulsion for voluntary cooperation and responsibility. It is wasteful, for it rejects the efficiencies of the market for the rigidities of government. It is corrupt, for it favors its well-connected supporters and politically powerful interests over the unconnected and the unorganized.

The administrative welfare state, the regime of administrative centralism invented by the absolute monarchs and perfected by the post-1848 educated class, is the rule of injustice. Once it was royal injustice; now it is liberal injustice.

It is an abomination, and it shall not stand.