Barefoot and Pregnant Dem Voters

Our liberal friends have dined out for decades on the proposition that conservatives are patriarchs that want to keep women barefoot and pregnant.  It's the usual mean-spirited insult, of course, that expresses the idea that conservatives don't bellieve women are the equal of men and don't want women out in the work force doing the things that men do.



But when I read President Obama on the fiscal cliff, reducing the entitlements crisis to the notion that:

it is very difficult for me to say to a senior citizen or a student or a mom with a disabled kid, ‘You are going to have to do with less but we're not going to ask millionaires and billionaires to do more.’

You see, what the president is cunningly omitting here is the context.  He is leaving out the $50-100 trillion unfunded mandate on entitlements, the difference between the government's promises on Social Security and Medicare and the funds available to deliver them.  There is not one word in his remarks, nor in any other Democrat's statements, to prepare the Democratic voters for their upcoming years of responsibility, years when the money just won't be there for Social Security and Medicare as we know it.



In other words, Democrats don't want their voters to get out in the world and get an education in public finance--which they could easily get at usspending-101.com for free.  No they just want them barefoot and pregnant, dependent on their government benefits until the next election.



Of course, politics is all about hypocrisy, projection and any pop-psych notion you can imagine.  But it is still galling.



There's a lesson here: conservatives need to understand that the overwhelming Democratic base is never going to "get" the idea of an entitlement crisis.



Thus when someone like Kevin Williamson urges conservatives to understand that, e.g., most Democrats are much more risk-averse than Republicans, he has a point.  Yes it's true that savings accounts and bonds and Social Security are attractive to the low-risk folks.  That's because they believe what authority figures have told them.



The problem is that government programs and benefits are a lot more risky that the average Democratic voter understands.  Bonds?  Superfragilistic as long as you have a government that will maintain the currency at par with gold.  Social Security?  Low risk, as long as the government doesn't default on its debt, and governments often do.



Let's just take a look at my situation, aged 66.  Social Security?  Yes, but what will happen down the road?  Bonds?  But what happens when the money supply expands to match the quadrupling of the monetary base since 2008?



My point is that relying on bonds and Social Security in 2013 is a risky bet.  It would be much lower risk, over the medium term, to rely on dividend stocks backstopped by a spot of gold.  Why?  Because in my view, it is harder for the government to loot people of their gold and their stocks than loot their bank accounts and their bonds denominated in dollars.



But when will people get that?  Only when the checks stop coming.



Back to Ben Franklin: Experience keeps a dear school, but they will learn in no other.  Risk-averse people won't warm to the Republican agenda until they have experienced for themselves the huge risks hidden in the supposed risk-free agenda of the Democrats.

Jonathan Rauch, Hypocrite

Comes now liberal writer Jonathan Rauch to argue that the one way of doing things is wrong. (H/T Dynamist).

Whenever anyone tells you, 'I've got it right. I've got the one true answer and everyone else is wrong and I'm going to enforce it,' that person is not only a menace to freedom but, more important, a menace to human thriving and human knowledge.

Golly.  Of course, Rauch doesn't mean it with respect to government programs.  He just means that in the university there should be a full and free discussion of ideas and that nobody should be allowed to get away with being "offended" by free speech.



Also, Rauch meanders on to say what a wonderful thing the conversation about gay marriage was, and how it "persuaded" the American people.  As if.  As if the "conversation" about gay issues, like the conversation about race, has not been at every moment about liberal bullying, liberals stigmatizing anyone that disagrees with them as bigots and racists and homophobes.



I wonder how many people in Washington State voted, like me, for gay marriage on the principle of Ben Franklin, that experience keeps a dear school, but they will learn in no other.



If you truly believe  that "the one true answer" is a problem then you have to believe that almost any government program is a disaster.  Because almost any government program says: Look chaps, we've been thrashing around with this problem, everyone going his own way.  Now we need to stop all that and force everyone to do it the same way, our way.



In Government's End, Rauch argued that government was stymied by special interest rent seekers which prevented government from being the flexible problem solver it could be.  But that completely misses the point.  It was 50 years ago that Buchanan and Tullock dissected government in The Calculus of Consent, and showed how the game of forcing others to pay for your pet projects works. Special interests are to government what eggs are to bacon.  As far as the system will allow, special interests will try to game the system to acquire rent.



The only political question, then, is how much do we limit government?  Within those limits, we should understand, it is a special interest feeding frenzy.



When you don't limit the government you get what we have right now, a government barreling to inflation and default.  Why?  Because there is no established limit to how much the government can take, and how much the government can give.



And that's because our ruling class, the educated elite, gets its power from cultivating the resentments and the envies of the average American into well manured, husbanded, and till'd government programs with lots of jobs and power for the ruling class.



So the ruling class, like Jonathan Rauch, can talk a good line about the horrors of the one way, but when it comes to the crunch, they are all in favor of more government, the one forced way for everything.

Getting Supporters to the Polls

Reporters and pollsters tend to talk about percentages when they talk about elections.  But real politicians talk about numbers.  They know that the name of the game is getting people enthusiastic enough to get out to the polls and vote.



Obviously there are two sides to this equation.  You want your supporters to be enthusiastic and you want their enthusiasm to rub off on the swing voters.  You also want the opposition to be demoralized so they won't bother to vote.



A look at the recent presidential elections in the US shows this enthusiasm at work.  Let's get the vote numbers from uspresidentelection.us.  First the Democratic vote.

	Presidential popular vote in millions
Election Year	1980	1984	1988	1992	1996	2000	2004	2008	2012
Dem Vote	35.5	37.6	41.8	44.9	45.6	51.0	59.0	69.5	65.6

Now let's look at the Republican presidential vote over the same period.

	Presidential popular vote in millions
Election Year	1980	1984	1988	1992	1996	2000	2004	2008	2012
Rep Vote	43.9	54.5	48.9	39.1	37.8	50.5	62.0	59.9	60.9

The politicians are right. It is the total vote count that is really interesting.  If you look at the Democratic vote, it has steadily increased every year since 1980, except for one.  The big years were the 2000s when the Dems went from 51 million in 2000 to 69.5 million in Obama's great year, 2008.  But then Obama lost 4 million votes in his reelection.



The Republican vote is different.  It has seesawed up and down.  It peaked at 54.5 million in Ronald Reagan's Morning in America year of 1984.  Then it dived down into the 30s, with the terrible elections in the 1990s when Ross Perot split the conservative vote.  But under George W. Bush and his "architect" Karl Rove the GOP vote almost doubled to 62 million in 2004.  Since then it has flatlined at about 60 million.



How did the Democrats manage their extraordinary climb from 35 million in 1980 to 70 million in 2008?  I'd say it has been mostly hard work, identifying supporters and building the infrastructure to get them out to vote, and also making it easier to vote, with Motor Voter and absentee voting.



What's the story with Republicans?  Is the flatline a temporary pause, or are Republicans just running out of white people?



Back before the election I estimated that the Dems would lose 5 million votes and the Republicans would gain 5 million.  Well I was half right.  The Dems lost most of the 5 million I prophesied.  But the campaign of Mitt Romney failed to pick up the 5 million it needed.



Maybe the only hope for Republicans is that Barack Obama is busily minting new Republicans as he fails to ignite the economy, year after year, with his redistributive economics.

Obama's Anecdotes

Classicist and farmer Victor David Hanson calls Obama's style "The Anecdotal Presidency" for the way that the president reduces our great national challenges to anecdotal fluff.  From deficits to immigration the president's response is a plausible but insufficient story: let the rich pay a little more; give the illegal-immigrant children of illegal immigrants a break.

The Obama presidency is one of anecdotes in lieu of solutions. It might be a comforting thought that jailing a reactionary filmmaker, or raising taxes on the suspect few, or providing amnesty to the college undergraduate, or taking away Ted Nugent’s guns will solve our mounting problems, but such anecdotes mean little in the real world of difficult choices that would offend friends as well as opponents.

We expect our politicians--or at least the politicians of the other party--to act responsibly to solve national problems, but I always come back to this.  Democracy is not the rule of the people, for the people cannot rule.  The only thing the people can do is to choose who will rule over them.  In our age these are elected politicians, experts in persuasion.  Their skill is not governing, it is running for election.



A chap like Barack Obama runs for election as someone who can get you free stuff, and it stands to reason to his supporters that if the rich paid a little more there would be enough for all.



A chap like Mitt Romney, or any Republican, runs as someone that will fix the profligate government, and it stands to reason to his supporters that if we just cut a little from all the waste, fraud, and abuse that there would be plenty of money for the government to discharge its proper responsibilities.



Which is right?



Well, neither.  The result of a chap like Barack Obama is that the government gets into real fiscal difficulty and confiscates the wealth of the people through inflation and debt default to try and pay its bills.  The result of a chap like Mitt Romney is that the government's affairs become so comfortable that people think we can safely increase government spending and subsidies.



And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

Merry Christmas, Suckers

The official liberal myth is that liberals, through selfless concern for the poor, have lifted the unfortunate out of misery, the brutality of the time clock and the speedup, the 12-hour day, the unsafe workplace.

Another way to tell the story is that the new ruling class of liberals gets its power by tempting the poor with free stuff.  Liberals don't care about the poor; they care about political power and comfortable sinecures that liberal politics delivers to them.

The latter story fits with the description of democracy in Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.  Democracy cannot be the rule of the people, Schumpeter writes, because the people cannot rule.  All they can do it vote to elect the people who will rule them, and it follows that the people competing for the right to rule will become experts, professionals, in the art of getting elected.  Thus it is that democracy is really the rule of the politicians, professionals whose lifework is getting elected to public office.

Conservatives like me profess to be puzzled that Democrats seem to be uninterested in "fixing" the entitlements.  After all, it is Democratic voters that have the most to lose if the government runs out of money.

But the Democratic disinterest in entitlement reform makes complete sense if you think of the Democrats as elected politicians.  All they are interested in doing is saying the right things to get elected.  What comes next is beside the point.  Now humans are beings that like the idea of getting "free stuff."  They are also beings that hate the idea of giving up "free stuff."   So you tell me what would happen to Democrats that told their supporters to cinch in their belts.

Now comes an article in The New York Times that worries about the poor and college.  It turns out that many poor students rack up a pile of student debt and then don't graduate.  Golly, who could have seen that coming!

And it all filters down to the dreaded problem of rising "inequality."

Thirty years ago, there was a 31 percentage point difference between the share of prosperous and poor Americans who earned bachelor’s degrees, according to Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski of the University of Michigan. Now the gap is 45 points.

While both groups improved their odds of finishing college, the affluent improved much more, widening their sizable lead.

 Golly.  Why could that be?

Likely reasons include soaring incomes at the top and changes in family structure, which have left fewer low-income students with the support of two-parent homes. Neighborhoods have grown more segregated by class, leaving lower-income students increasingly concentrated in lower-quality schools. And even after accounting for financial aid, the costs of attending a public university have risen 60 percent in the past two decades.

The charming innocence of these liberals.  Thank goodness they haven't read Coming Apart by Charles Murray.  Or they might cotton on to the idea that their administrative welfare state has done wonders for the income and prospects of well-born liberals.  But it has hammered the very people it is supposed to help.  As in:

Item: The poor, through the workings of the welfare system, experience extremely high and variable marginal tax rates.  That's because as you generate more wage income you lose your welfare benefits not gradually, but chunk by chunk.

Item: We now learn that the people that have been hurt the most in the real estate crash are African Americans.  And no wonder.  It was the "redlining" of minority neighborhoods that the Community Reinvestment Act and the subprime real-estate loans were supposed to fix.  The result was that many people got loans that didn't have a hope in hell of servicing them.

Item: The wonderful and compassionate entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment insurance have the perverse effect of sterilizing the savings of the poor and the near poor.  The money that normal people would save against a rainy day, or starting a business, or putting a big down-payment on a home, or sending a kid to college, is sequestered by liberal program administrators to be given back later.  Meanwhile, liberal politicians have the use of the money in bribing the voters with "free stuff."

It was well said by the neo-Marxist Jürgen Habermas that the administrative welfare state is a system of internal colonization.

One day an American politician will figure out how to explain all this to the suffering American people.  My guess is that we already know this politician; he is already beginning to be a household word.

Will he make his move in 2016?  Or 2020?  Who knows?

But never forget the Instapundit Rule: "Something that can't go on forever, won't. Debt that can't be repaid, won't be. Promises that can't be kept, won't be."

Obama the Great Divider

Just in time for Christmas, Hugh Hewitt has a piece on Obama the Great Divider.  Obama has successfully eliminated Speaker Boehner as a negotiating partner for his second term, he writes.

Having managed to lose 4 million votes between 2008 and 2012, the most partisan and relentlessly negative president of modern times doubled down on all of his least generous instincts and went "full Lee Atwater," embracing completely the advice that if your opponent is on the ground with a broken arm, step on it.



Atwater, of course, intended his counsel for the period before elections, but the permanent campaign requires permanent pummeling.

President Obama is the guy that sent the bust of Winston Churchill back to the British Embassy.  Perhaps the most famous apothegm attributed to Churchill is this:

In War: Resolution; In Defeat: Defiance; In Victory: Magnanimity; In Peace: Good Will.

Now why would the pugnacious Churchill propose such a dictum?  Because he was a good guy?  Because he had a weakness for a good turn of phrase?



I suggest that he proposed it because it is good practical advice for anyone in high politics.  When you are fighting you need courage and perseverance.  When you are victorious in war you want to co-opt the losers and discourage them from forming a new head of rebellion.



President Obama seems to think that he doesn't need the goodwill of the loyal opposition, and maybe he is right--for now.  And he has the advantage of a cultural elite that is completely in the tank for him.



But what happens down the road when things turn bad for him and his party?  When the politicians he has humiliated get their chance to stab him in the back?



The central idea in the politics of the left seems to be the act of protest.  It supposes that the left is a powerless group of the marginalized desperately reaching for a moment of publicity in which to announce their grievances to an uncaring world.  In other words, it is 1825 and the workers are working twelve hours a day underground in ill-ventilated mines.



In fact, of course, the left, in its liberal instantiation, is the ruling class of today, not a ragged band of the powerless.  It would, if it were sensible, try to co-opt its adversaries in order to reduce the effectiveness of the opposition.



My guess is that liberals are still reeling from the experience of the Reagan administration.  Here was something inconceivable: an amiable dunce that won the Cold War and ended the stagflation of the 1970s.  If it was real, it would mean that the administrative welfare state of the liberals was a mistake and a chimera, and the whole project was based on a delusion.  So liberals have closed their minds to the idea that Reagan was right, and have returned to their government expansion project like a dog to its vomit.



So now we have President Obama, determined to complete the liberal agenda against all odds and against all opposition.



Here is the problem for liberals in this policy.  It means that conservatives don't have a dog in the fight.  It means that there is nothing in the entire sweep of government policy that reflects conservative ideas and sentiments.  Given our druthers, conservatives would not continue Social Security: we would replace it with a genuine private-sector based savings program with maybe some sweeteners for the low-paid.  We would not continue Medicare and Medicaid, but move to a consumer-based rather than third-party-based healthcare insurance scheme.  We would not continue the government monopoly education system, and we would reform the welfare system at a minimum to reduce the high marginal tax rates on the poor.



Why then would conservatives consent to pay taxes for all these liberal programs?



When you are utterly shut out of the government spending racket and you don't have any dog in the fight then you start to rail at the injustice of it all.  You start to look for alternatives.  You start to gather a head of rebellion.



Churchill's dicta are the practical politician's way of preventing rage from breaking out in the opposition.  President Obama's way is the ideologue's clumsy way of riling up the opposition.



Most likely the near term result will be that the president will leave office in 2017 with the Democratic Party in ruins.



And don't forget the Instapundit Rule: "Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be. Promises that can’t be kept, won’t be."

Plan B Failure a Disaster? Or What?

The MSM consensus on the failure of Speaker Boehner's "Plan B" last night seems to be that Boehner was humiliated and the Republicans are in disarray.



So now the president and the Democrats can go to the country and crow that Republicans want to increase taxes on the middle class.



Who knows?



The basic correlation of forces is still what it was after the election in November.  The American people have chosen not to go for reform of the welfare state.  Not yet.



The logical result of that is to increase taxes, but not not too much, and keep all the rent-seeking spending going for now.



I was watching a Peter Robinson UncommonKnowledge interview of John O'Sullivan and Jonah Goldberg last night.  Someone said that you only get to curb the spending and the rent-seeking after a military defeat or a civil war.



It's obvious really.  The spending and rent-seeking in the modern administrative welfare state represents the real power balance in the western world.  If you want to change it you have to have the power to move the current power-holders and their supporters off dead center.  Realistically, you can only do that when the current power-holders are off their balance.



Maybe a financial meltdown would have the same effect as a war.



At any rate, if the economy isn't doing too well by the end of the Obama administration then you can expect the American people to be in a nasty mood.



And nobody will remember the details of Boehner's Plan B.

Robert Bork and Liberal Paranoia

The other day I mentioned to a liberal enthusiast for public transportation that, in my view, personal transportation is guaranteed in the Constitution.  Of course, I admitted, it's probably not right there in the text.  But I'm sure that I could find it in a "penumbra."



It was penumbras in the Constitution that empowered the US Supreme Court to find a right to privacy and thus a right to abortion, back in the day of Roe v. Wade.  The idea of penumbras comes from the dominant liberal approach to the Constitution, developed by the Progressives at the turn of the 20th century, that modern conditions required a "living constitution" that could adapt to the new world.



Conservatives have come to regard the "living constitution" doctrine in less flattering terms.  Conservatives regard it as giving liberals a free hand to interpret the Constitution any way they want.  So it stands to reason that some conservative would come up with an opposing doctrine, that the constitution means what the writers originally meant, and that if you want to change the Constitution you need to do it the hard way, by formal Constitutional Amendment.



The recently deceased Robert Bork was a principal architect of this "originalism."



Bork was a law professor at Yale for a couple of decades and then President Reagan appointed him, in 1981, to the US Court of Appeals.  In 1987, right after the Democrats had retaken the US Senate, Reagan nominated him to the US Supreme Court.  Democrats, led by Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden and liberal lion Ted Kennedy, saw their chance and they took it.  They successfully calumniated this mainstream conservative judge as a conservative extremist and defeated his nomination.  Thus the tactic of personal calumny became neologized as the verb: to Bork.



This week The New Republic has run a piece regretting the tactics of 1987 but condoning the result: keeping a very conservative judge off the Supreme Court.

It’s a good thing that the man who Bork became after his defeat wasn't confirmed to the Supreme Court: If he, instead of Anthony Kennedy, had been the swing vote between 1987 and 2012, America would indeed have been a more illiberal place.

Right on liberals.  Still, there is room for regret.

But it’s bad for the country that Bork was Borked in the way he was. American courts, judges, and constitutional law have been paying the price for the past twenty-five years, and the future looks even more bleak.

You will not be surprised to learn that the commenters at TNR were not so circumspect.  They parroted the sentiments taught to them over 30 years ago by Sen. Edward Kennedy and others, that Bork was a dangerous extremist that should never have been nominated to the Supreme Court.



But here's a more telling commentary on Robert Bork and conservative jurisprudence, from John O'Sullivan:

At one point in the 1960s, Bob Bork and the other conservative law professor in Yale Law School approached its director to argue for the appointment of a third conservative to the faculty. They were told that although their candidate had excellent credentials, the selection committee had decided with agonized regret not to appoint him. They were afraid that the 60-strong faculty might be “swamped” with conservatives.

So who, really, are the pathologically paranoid ones in America?



If liberal professors are going to get their knickers in a twist over the prospect of 3 conservative professors in a faculty of 60, you can begin to see the problems that America is going to have, when it is time to show its liberal ruling class the door some day between now and eternity.

Think Like a Democratic Voter

If you are a Republican or and independent voter, the current fiscal cliff negotiation seems like a exercise in futility.  We solid citizens understand that a deal must be done on entitlements--principally Medicare--and that "something must be done" about runaway spending.



So we say, like the Wall Street Journal edit page, that the "budget talks are drifting in a drearily familiar Washington direction: Tax and spending increases now, in return for the promise of spending cuts and tax and entitlement reform later."



Some conservatives think that this amounts to a monstrous betrayal by Speaker Boehner (R-OH), but I think that we are asking too much of the Speaker and his Republican colleagues.  They are trying to move the Democrats, and the Democrats know something that we ordinary middle-class folks don't know.  To understand where the Democrats are coming from you have to think like an ordinary Democratic voter.



The average Democratic voter reckons "we are owed."  I got into trouble with an African-American acquaintance over this.  Never heard anyone say that, he said.  Yeah, so those chaps muttering about reparations are just talking about nothing.



But really, that's what the average Democrat keeps getting told.  You are owed.  That's what egalitarianism and redistribution means, if it means anything.



You can tell, from the outrage of the public employees of Wisconsin last year and the outrage of the unions in Michigan this year that the average rank and file Democrat never thinks about where the money comes from.  They are just owed.  Rush Limbaugh had a running joke for months after the 2009 stimulus, riffing off an interview of African Americans lining up for some free stuff.  Where does the money come from, a reporter asked?  Obama's stash, came the answer.



Which confirms my argument that government is nothing more than a looting expedition.  That's what a stash is: a place to hide the proceeds of piracy and plunder.



Think of the average Democrat voter.  She or he lives off the government teat.  She has a government job, most likely, and is plugged into various liberal government scams from health care to housing.  Now the point to remember, which we ordinary middle-class folks don't get, is that a voter like that has all her eggs in one basket.  Suppose she is a teacher, a nurse's aide, a social worker.  What in the world will she do when the government has to cut spending by a trillion a year?  It is unthinkable.



Then there are the Social Security and Medicare recipients like me.  Better not touch our benefits: we earned them: We are owed!



So which Democratic politician is going to be the one that addresses the Democratic faithful in some high-school gym and says: sorry about all that, but there is no more money?



Now the irreducible truth about the first four years of the Obama administration is that the federal government was spending about $1 trillion more each year than it was collecting in taxes.  Thinking in terms of my looting metaphor, Obama was distributing $1 trillion more in benefits to his supporters from his "stash" that he was collecting in his predations upon the private economy.



And that's how he got reelected.  There could be more money available in his stash if only the rich would give a little more.



And don't forget, we are talking about people that have put all their eggs in the government basket.  If you are a private sector person you have probably moved around a bit from job to job: you understand your skills and your marketability.  But a woman with a government job would probably have to take a massive pay cut if she had to get a job in the private sector.  If you have retired you have Social Security plus your 401k plus your savings.  But the government worker has only her government pension.



If you are a Final Glide American you have carefully organized your life to land on the government aircraft carrier secure in the knowledge that you are owed.  It is unthinkable that your benefits could ever be cut.  After all, you are living on a fixed income.  You have nowhere else to turn.



When the money runs out and the government can no longer spend more than it collects in taxes, then there will be an almighty fight over the remaining spoils.  It might be a good idea for the prudent if they can afford to walk away from their government benefits.  If only to avoid stray bullets.



Meanwhile, I'm not sure that it matters what deal Speaker Boehner cooks up.  It will all end in tears, anyway, because the Democrats cannot afford to tell the truth to their supporters.

The Beautiful Dream of American Exceptionalism

President Obama taught us all a lesson a while back.  When asked about American exceptionalism in 2009 he replied:

"I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."

Yeah.  In other words, it's a nationalistic fantasy.

But, of course, the president is wrong: the United States is an exceptional nation.  It was founded upon an idea, the rising idea of its age, of republican self-government, on the Axial Age concept of the "responsible self."  From that idea came the whole exceptional package: limited government under law, separation of powers, the "Dutch finance" of Alexander Hamilton, the whole idea of civil society, of a middle ground of free association between the government and the individual.

But there is one brute fact about exceptions.  They are exceptions to the rule.  If the United States was born as an exceptional nation, then it stands to reason--and experience--that the United States will eventually become ordinary: "regression to the mean" is the official term.

Our liberal friends, of course, think that American exceptionalism is a bad thing: nationalism, anti-intellectualism, the gun culture, Babbitry, boosterism, the money culture.  They want to get back to being a normal nation, like the Europeans and their social democracy.

The libertarian "instapundit" Glenn Reynolds likes to quote the science-fiction author Robert Heinlein at this point:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck."

The point is, of course, that "extremely small minorities" are people like Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs; they appear for a moment, like a blinding flash of light, and then they are gone.  Sometimes they are revered; often times, as in the case of a Rockefeller or a Morgan, they are reviled.  Then the world reverts to the mean.

I like to say that the United States is founded upon the exceptional idea of "Dutch finance" in which the government bases its finance on promoting the health of the rest of the financial and credit system.  The normal way of government finance is "French finance" where the government games the financial system to ward off the consequence of its overspending.  Dutch finance builds a strong nation; French finance leads to sovereign default, hyper-inflation, riots and revolution.

Under President Obama the US is heading as fast as politically possible down the path of French finance. That is the meaning of unsustainable entitlements; that is the meaning of cheesy "fiscal cliffs;" that is the meaning of trillion dollar deficits.

And it will be the "little people" who will end up "eating the paint off the walls."

All exceptions come to an end.  But it is a bitter thing to be living through the end of one so glorious and luminous as the American Exception.

Fifty Years of "The Calculus of Consent"

The bible on political is The Calculus of Consent by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, first published back in 1962.

Wow!  That means that we are celebrating its golden anniversary.  I wonder why I wasn't aware of this until today.  It's not as if people haven't been celebrating.

But I have been reading the book, so you don't have to.  No sex, no plot twists, you see.  Nothing to keep the reader's attention, except a devotion to learning.

In Calculus Buchanan and Tullock analyze the behavior of electors and politicians using the normal economic assumption that people seek to maximize utility, and with occasional resort to game theory.

Since I've just finished the chapter on special-benefit legislation using general taxation and the chapter on general-benefit legislation using targeted taxation, I thought you'd be interested to know what Buchanan and Tullock have to say.

In the case of special-benefit legislation, (e.g., getting the whole county to pay for a few peoples' road improvements) the average individual voter is going to get screwed unless he is able to bargain for compensation from the majority.  Since this is usually called "corruption" except when legislators do it informally in the process known as "logrolling" you can see that special benefit legislation is a bad deal for the average person.

In the case of general-benefit legislation, let us just quote from the book:

If the dominant majority is able to impose the full costs of general-benefit projects on the minority, it follows that all projects yielding any benefits at all to the majority coalition members, and costing no more than the maximum taxable capacity of the minority, will be adopted without question... [F]or all such projects a member of the majority coalition may secure some net benefit without cost to himself.(p.166-7)

As in "the rich pay a little more" Mr. President.

So Buchanan and Tullock judge that: "There is nothing in the operation of majority rule to insure that public investment is more 'productive' than alternative employments of resources".

An interesting claim in Buchanan's and Tullock's analysis is that "side payments" (or logrolling or graft or bribes) tend to reduce the amount of over-investment.  In other words, when the majority has to pay off the minority in order to get its project passed, then the value of the project to the majority is reduced, and the less "productive" investments won't get passed.  This seems to go against common sense.  You would think that, if side payments were forbidden, that it would be harder to pass special interest legislation.

But you can see why limited government is a good idea.  If there is no identifiable benefit from public "investment" then maybe we should all get together and limit the ability of organized minorities and dominant majorities from imposing costs on their fellow citizens.

Try telling that to President Obama.

Who Are the 1%?

When the president calls for the rich to pay a little more, what does he mean?  Who does he mean?  That is what Mike Bauer, from David Horowitz's shop, wants to know.  He sent me the following questions:

1. What number and percentage of Americans earn over $250K?
   
   


2. What number and percentage of Americans have a net worth over $250K?
   
   


3. What number and percentage of Americans earn over $1M?
   
   


4. What number and percentage of Americans have a net worth over $1M?

The simple answer is: it does not compute.  Because as soon as you start asking about "number and percentage of Americans" you get into questions of persons, households, adults, residents, income-taxpayers, "undocumented workers," and all the rest.  Despite the best efforts of governments to make their peoples "legible" it is still hard to know what is going on.



But Question 1 is fairly easy.  The IRS has lots of tax stats here with lots of Excel spreadsheets.  Here's one: 10in01pl.xls.  It says that 2.7 million 1040 tax returns out of 143 million reported $250,000 adjusted gross income or more.  So that works out at 1.9 percent.  Unfortunately, the spreadsheet doesn't go above $250,000.  So to answer Question 3 we'll have to find another one.  Here is 08in05tr.xls, which has the income that qualifies you for the ought point one percent.  Its last year is 2008, but it took $837,708 to get in the club.  Back in 2007 at the height of the evil unsustainable Bush boom--engineered by greedy bankers with which community activists and Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do-- you needed $1,039,732 to get in the 0.1% club.



Now wealth for Questions 2 and 4..  The data isn't so easily available on this.  But the Census Bureau has Table 721 on Family Net Worth, and the median family net worth in 2007 was $120,000.  Then there is Table 717 on top wealth holders.  It shows 2.7 million with wealth over $1.5 million.  Now the Census Bureau has 115 million households for 2007-2011.  So you can say that 57 million households had more that $120,000 net worth, and 2.3 percent have net worth more than $1.5 million.



So let's get back to the four questions:

1. What number and percentage of Americans earn over $250K?
   
   Answer: 2.7 million and 1.9 percent.
   
   


2. What number and percentage of Americans have a net worth over $250K?
   
   Answer:  About 25 million households and 25 percent.
   
   


3. What number and percentage of Americans earn over $1M?
   
   Answer: 142,000 and 0.1 percent.


4. What number and percentage of Americans have a net worth over $1M?
   
   Answer: Over 3 million households and 3 percent.

Of course, Americans in general have suffered more in the Great Recession than these numbers suggest. Minorities and women hardest hit. And it will get worse, much worse, as the Fed's money printing starts a huge bear market in bonds and a huge inflation in consumer prices.

The Canon of Limited Government

The foundation of the human condition is simple.  Humans are social animals.  We are groupish; we do things together.  In that we are like the chimpanzees where, according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, the males work together to defend a food-bearing territory, and we are unlike the orangutans, where males are solitary except during the mating season.

It is said that if you put a group of Americans into a room to solve a problem they will do so, and they will solve the problem by trying to take care of everyone's concerns.  My own experience bears this out.  When I was sent into a room years ago with eleven other Americans to try a man for first-degree murder the question turned on two female teachers that weren't quite ready to go "beyond a reasonable doubt."  It took gentle persuasion to get to unanimity, helping the two holdouts to agree with the rest of the jury by satisfying their own doubts about the defendant's guilt.

But there is a serpent in the garden.  "Men like power and will seize it if they can," writes Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct.  Humans are not just social animals, from the Latin "socius" or companion.  Humans are political animals that like power.  So it is that politicians are dividers.  You can put a group of Americans into a room together, and they will likely work out a solution to their problem.  It follows that it takes a politician to keep Americans divided and get them to fight.  That is what an election is all about, to reduce the seizure of power from a real civil war into a civil war by other means, a vigorous exchange of insults and anathemas between two political armies arranged on the field of battle.  But of course a political election has winners and losers, unlike the consensual persuasion of Americans-in-a-room, and the winners get to occupy the seat of government and impose their will on the losers.

Which reminds us that government is force.  The word comes from the Latin "gubernare," to steer.  It is not true, as a video at the 2012 Democratic National Convention proposed, that "government's the only thing we all belong to."  We all belong to the human race; we all belong to society; we all belong on the Earth.  We belong to the government in the same way as soldiers belong to the army: both have the power to force us to do things.  Is that the best that we can hope for?  To belong to an organization with power over us?  Of course not.  We have another name for the "thing we all belong to" when you remove the force: we call it society: from the Latin "socius."  Thus David Cameron's catchphrase: "There is such a thing as society; it's just not the same thing as the state."

Let us return to Nicholas Wade and complete his maxim about men and power: "But if they can't rule, their next preference is that no one rule over them."  That is the calculus of power.  It's great to rule, and men like it when they can get it.  But if they can't rule, nobody else should either.

But how can you decide: between power and the absence of power?  The answer is that government should be limited.  There's nothing remarkable about that.  If we don't like other people seizing power over us, the solution is to go into a room together and hammer out a social contract that limits everyone's power over others, and limits the power of every group over other groups.

And as we know, humans are social animals; we are groupish.  If you put humans into a room together to solve a problem...

Internal Colonialism in America

No, I am not talking about slavery or the Trail of Tears.  I am talking about the colonial regime of today's liberals, ruling class of the administrative welfare state.

Nor am I channeling some way-out right-wing whacko.  I am amplifying what Jürgen Habermas and James C. Scott have written.  And they are good card-carrying global lefty academicians.

The idea of "internal colonialism" is that the modern administrative welfare state acts towards its native citizens the way that colonial regimes once acted towards their "natives."  It treats them like children that aren't really competent to decide their own affairs.  It organizes the education of the nation's real children, because what about the children of illiterate parents that can't make the right decision for them?  It organizes unemployment relief because who can expect the workers to do it for themselves?  It organizes health care for grannie and pensions for grandpa--after all, who can trust their health care to insurance companies or their money to the Wall Street casino?

The reality, of course, is that nobody looks after other peoples' money--or anything else--better than they look after their own.  So the administrative welfare state is in the process of degenerating from a paternalistic welfare state into a naked grab for loot.

But how does the welfare state really compare with a real colonial regime, like the British in India?

The British started by establishing trading posts in the early 18th century, and then started meddling in local politics, because, after all, commerce may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in commerce.  By about 1800 Britain was a real power in India and Edmund Burke had made a scandal of Governor Warren Hastings and his looting of various Indian princes.  So we may say that 1800 marked the transition from a buccaneering era into a more avuncular era.  But then came the Great Mutiny of the Indian Army in 1857 that was experienced by the Indians as the Great Uprising.

The Great Uprising failed, let us say, because India was not yet a nation.  It hated the British, but it was not unified and organized.  But 1857 marked the beginning of the end, as the British became simply imperial overlords, expert in keeping India divided and subservient--for a while.

At the turn of the 20th century the Indian National Movement started to become a real power.  It was led by men like Mohandas Gandhi, a man from Gujarat who traveled to London to become a British barrister.  Then there was Jawaharlal Nehru; he went to Harrow, the same British public school as Winston Churchill, and then university at Cambridge.  When these men returned to India they understood the British through and through and they led the Indian National Movement to victory; they knew how to make British power in India into a worldwide scandal and an embarrassment to the British.   It was political idealism at its very best: that is why Gandhi's brilliant non-violence tactics have been emulated across the world.

When you look at liberal colonialism in America, it is clearly a horse of a different color.  It begins not in the messy buccaneering of Clive and Hastings but in a political ideal: to reform political corruption and make US politics more rational.  That is how the Progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century experienced itself.  America should have a proper central bank, progressive income taxes, and a social safety net, they said.  Ordinary Americans just couldn't do that on their own.

But then came the 1930s in which the Progressives utterly failed to make the central bank mitigate the Crash of 1929.  And then they administered the US into a ten year Slough of Despond by waging war on business.  A disaster like that requires a world-class coverup, and the Progressives became liberals, converting the failures of Franklin Delano Roosevelt into wonderful successes, and cementing their dynastic power by combining their movement with the big-city machines into a nation patronage operation.  So now the Progressives had graduated from being rational reformers into a ruling class with an agenda of maintaining their power.

The 1970s were a serious reverse for the liberal ruling class.  Their civil rights agenda ended in urban riots, their adventures in Vietnam into an unpopular war, and their social revolution into serious backlash.  So Ronald Reagan got to be president and show that it didn't need to be that way.  Anyone with eyes to see could tell that there were unintended consequences of administrative liberalism that even the liberals didn't see coming.  Liberals might think of themselves as the evolved, the educated people.  Others weren't so sure.

So liberalism entered its third phase.  The first Progressive phase was one of idealism and high-minded reform, the second New Deal phase one of benevolent dictatorship.  But in 1990, after the Reagan revolution, liberals opted for trench warfare and would do anything to keep their cultural and political power.  The party that passed the civil rights acts in the 1960s became the party that whipped the black vote into a monolithic bloc.  The party of the working man became the party of universal entitlements.  The party that urged us to rise above small-town narrowness cynically divided America any which way to win the next election.

Obviously, when a political class has descended to trench warfare to hold onto its power then it is entering a period of strategic retreat.  The only question that remains is whether its retreat is accompanied by scorched earth, whether it wrecks the nation in the process of losing its power.  In the Anglosphere the last two transitions of power have been benign: the landowners gave up power without a fight, and the bourgeoisie surrendered power to the working class even as it mucked up the economy.

But will liberals do the same?  Will they give up their internal colonial empire without a knockdown drag-out fight?  That is the great question as we head past the current "fiscal cliff" to the badlands of sovereign default and economic ruin.

Cliffhanger Budgeting

Back in 1995 Bill Clinton discovered the advantages of cliff-hanger budget battles.  He shut down the government rather than agree to the evil Republican appropriations of the newly elected first-Republican-Congress-in-40-years.



And he won!  He got the American people to agree that it was Congress that shut down the government, not his veto.



So it is not surprising that President Obama has used and perfected the same tactic.  He got himself a cliff-hanger debt crisis in the summer of 2011 and now we have the "fiscal cliff" crisis of December 2012.



Part of the game plan is to have some poor victim group that will suffer if the crisis isn't resolved.  This time it's the folks on long-term unemployment benefits.  Wouldn't you know that they are scheduled to expire four days after Christmas!



For years and years people used to complain about the venal process of Congressional appropriations, the deals, the log-rolling, the Iron Triangles.



But now it seems that we have got to a worse place, a world in which Democrats in Congress don't bother to obey the law (the Budget law that Democrats passed in the 1970s to put a curb on President Nixon) and all appropriations are rolled into a single continuing resolution and a crisis between Congress and the president.



You have to wonder: is this really the world that Democrats want?



Who knows?  Like I wrote in my American Thinker piece this week: despite appearances, the Democrats are hurting. They are no longer the confident ruling class they used to be.  That is why they have to cheat.  And that is why they have to resort to transparent shenanigans to get elected, dishing out more and more entitlements and benefits to keep their support.  That is why they have to stage big publicity crises to panic the American people into more spending.



Now even liberals like Nicholas Kristof are discovering the rotting culture that the administrative welfare state promotes.



But really, liberals are not going to stop doing the Obama, dancing to get the biggest state with the biggest entitlements that the politics of the moment can obtain.  That's what they know; that's what they do.



And that's why big government never goes quietly into the good night.  It always end in default, riot, and mayhem, when all of a sudden the game is up.



But the Obama years do the impossible.  They make the old Congress of powerful committee chairmen and old bulls seem like a kinder, gentler age.

Queen Hillary?

I suppose that it's to be expected.  That the media would be doing a boomlet for Hillary Clinton for President in 2016 in the lame-duck days of December.



Don't even bother, you Rubios and you Ryans, because Hillary has it all sewn up.  First woman president, and all that.



But let us not forget the head winds facing a three-in-a-row for the Democrats.



First there is corruption.  The modern Democratic Party is built on a coalition between the 19th century big-city political machines, the chaps that organized the Irish immigrants into US politics, and the goo-goo Progressive reformers.  It was a match made in heaven.  The Progressives would come up with the ideas for big government and spending other peoples' money, and the machines would deliver the votes.  But it is horribly corrupt.  People on the outside looking in really don't like that.



Then there is cruelty.  The Progressive-machine coalition exists by promoting a soft form of civil war: class war and race war, and the war on religion.  The result is that the Democratic Party has been busily making enemies of whites, middle-class achievers, and Christians for the last couple of generations.  That is how you get social conservatives and Reagan Democrats turning up, unannounced, in the Republican Party.



Let's talk about injustice.  The fact is that government is always and everywhere a system of power and domination.  What moderns want with enlightenment reason is to dominate nature and other men.  It was a couple of lefties that wrote that.  Big government means big injustice, and it's getting worse all the time.  We don't get to see it that clearly because the mainstream media is running interference for the Democrats and the liberals, but sooner or later it is going to pop onto the national radar.



Then there is waste.  Everything the government does, from the Pentagon down to the littlest program, to kill barred owls in order to save the spotted owl, is pure waste.  Now there is no question that we need the Pentagon and the police, because all human societies need protection from enemies foreign and domestic.  Otherwise you get the modern equivalent of the Vikings sailing up the rivers in the fall, just after the harvest.  But everything else is something that we ought to be doing for ourselves or for each other without the government forcing us to do it.



Finally there is delusion.  Yes, our liberal friends busily tell each other that they are the reality-based community.  But every ruling class sustains itself by telling itself lies.  The Brits told themselves that they were really bringing India into the modern age.  Liberals tell themselves that they are the most evolved, educated Americans, and that only they know to do the right thing for anti-intellectual America.



Underneath all the propaganda and the hoopla these irreducible facts are working away.  Just like the Soviet Union, our Democratic friends look unbeatable right now.  They have the best propaganda that money can buy and Chicago bullies can intimidate.  But then one day the whole thing collapses.



That is the faith that sustains us, and that is the reason that 2016 may be too late for Hillary Clinton.

"Internal Colonization"

Marxists may be terminally annoying, but they continue to produce compelling critiques of modern society.

Whereas liberals are totally useless.  Being the ruling class, liberals produce nothing but shoddy apology.

So let us look at Jürgen Habermas, a neo-Marxist who has brought the old Marxist idea of alienation to fruition.  The old Marxist idea was that modern labor under capitalism was alienating because labor was no longer social labor, working to create use value, but abstract labor, working to produce exchange value.

On top of that, Marx claimed, the actors in the capitalist market "reified" their activities.  They did not think of their relations as person-to-person, but thought of their activities in terms of thing-to-thing, an exchange of commodity for money.  That is what he meant by "commodity fetishism."

Habermas restates all this in terms that make sense to the average bear like me, by dividing the world up into "system" and "lifeworld."  Instead of abstract labor we have System.  Instead of social labor we have Lifeworld.  System is the market, and Lifeworld is the person-to-person relation.  More than that, System is the world of rational and strategic action.  You do almost everything in the market for gain, and it is very rational: sell, buy; make, create; up, down.  But the Lifeworld is not like that.  It is social, cooperative; it is language based, not reason based.  It is not up or down, but tries to create a consensus, a sharing.

Following Horkheimer and Adorno in A Dialectic of Enlightenment Habermas makes another important step.  He understands that the state, just as much as capitalism, is a rational system.  Both systems are based on "instrumental reason," trying to make things happen in the world by rational means.  And that means that government and business are both trying to "dominate nature and other men."  This means that government's project is the "internal colonization" of society.  Just as the European nations of the 18th and 19th century went around the world colonizing less powerful societies, so the modern state attempts to colonize its people with its experts and its bureaucrats, its regulation and its spending.

This is a punishing critique of the modern state, and a warning about its power.  We should be just as careful about government power as about business power.  Conservatives tend to worry about government power; liberals worry about corporate power.  But Habermas warns about all system power.

There is a difference between the two systems, beyond the analysis of Habermas.  It is that government is all about war.  When we say that government's primary job is to defend against enemies foreign and domestic we really mean that it is government's job to wage war on enemies foreign and domestic.  In other words, government is at loose ends unless it has an enemy to fight.  William James famously articulated this truth just before World War I when he advised that, since war was now unlikely, we would have to gussie up the "moral equivalent of war" to mobilize people to do important things.  We can see the truth of this in the periodic campaigns that government comes up with: War on Want, War on Poverty, War on Drugs, Whip Inflation Now.

But this gives conservatives and limited government advocates an opening.  When deciding whether to start a new government program we should ask ourselves: is war the best way to do this?  Because every government program is about force.  It does not say, wow, saving for retirement is really a good thing, why don't we all save from our wages!  It says you must pay 15 percent of your wages to the government in return for a pension, or else.

So then you ask: if saving against a rainy day is a natural human thing to do, why do we force everyone to save?  If insuring against sickness is a natural thing to do, why do we force everyone into Obamacare?  If everyone can see the importance of getting an education, why force everyone into a compulsory government plan?

The answer comes easily from Habermas' idea of "internal colonization."  Because we, the ruling class, want to rule.  We don't want you running off and saving your own money; we want to force you to bank the money with us.  We don't want you running off educating your kid according to your crazy ideas; we want your kid indoctrinated with ruling class ideas.

But why do people put up with this?  Simple: there is an obvious attraction to colonialism.  If you go with the colonial masters you get to enjoy the free stuff, and maybe sup at the master's table--below the salt, of course.

But for some reason the colonized peoples of the 19th century didn't like the overall package.  They preferred to rule themselves according to their own way rather than truckle to their European colonizers.

The question for us is whether we continue to truckle to our native-born internal colonizers in return for all the free stuff.  Or whether we rise up and declare that we would rather live in our own way, backward and flawed, rather than ape the ways of our colonial masters.

Of course, today the question is moot, as President Obama takes us into the miasma of internal colonization on steroids.

But when the Obama years, "the years the locusts have eaten" are over, we will visit the internal colonization question again.

Nobody knows what answer the American people will give.

Republicans' Only Hope?

Everyone is full of advice to Republicans on how to enlarge the coalition.  "Be nice" seems to be the consensus, especially "be nice" to Hispanics.



But really, can Republicans ever compete with Democrats when it comes to sharing out the loot?



The irreducible fact of the US two party system is that, at least since the Civil War, the Republican Party has been the party of the "typical American" and the Democratic Party the party of the hyphenated American.  Typical Americans think that the system works pretty well; hyphenated Americans have a beef with the system.



This plays into the two basic narratives of the modern era: the Invisible Hand narrative and the Exploitation narrative.



As Michael Barone writes in The New Americans Americans tend to start out as embattled, exploited immigrant communities; as they begin to succeed they feel less embattled and thus become less likely to "fight" for their rights.  But some groups--think Jews and blacks--retain their sense of apartness longer than most.



The fact is that blacks and Hispanics are the latest additions to the American stew and they typically feel that the deck is stacked against them, and reckon their chances better with the share-out-the-loot party.  That is likely to continue for a while.



But history tells us that, despite everything, immigrants get fed up with the loot party.  It happened with the Reagan Democrats in 1980.  No doubt it will happen again when the "blue social model" starts to run out of other peoples' money.  For instance, what happens when the money starts to run out for state government pension systems?  Is is a "blue civil war," as Walter Russell Mead suggests, as Democratic Party supporters fight over the disappearing spoils?



Probably the more likely near-term outlook is denial.  After all, it's what liberals famously accuse everyone else of.  As amateur observers of liberal psychology, we should think of this as "projection."  And it is clear that President Obama's "rich pay a little more" policy is nothing but denial.



But nobody should expect the Democrats' blue coalition to cry "uncle" and back off on its loot philosophy until long after disaster is staring it in the face.



Meanwhile we should expect some groups to peel off from the Democratic coalition: perhaps the upper-income professionals, social liberal and economically conservative, that will overlook the down-market social conservatism of the Republican Party as the Obama taxes start to bite.



And let us not forget the big takeaway from the 2012 election: white voters that didn't turn out.  Who were they?  The likeliest argument is that they were working-class whites demoralized by the Romney-is-an-uncaring-plutocrat Obama ads.



So thank goodness that the GOP's leading contenders for 2016, Rep. Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Rubio (R-FL), are lifetime professional politicians that never went near the planet Pluto or ever learned how to run a business.



Still, it's a shame.  Businessmen are the people that converted the $3 per day economy of 1800 into the $120 per day economy of today.



Why in the world would the average person be afraid of chaps like that?

Poor Having Fewer Babies

Few things have worried the bourgeoisie more than the excess birthrate among the poor.  It probably started with worry about all those starving children, but by the turn of the 20th century and Margaret Sanger and all it reduced down to the problem of the unfit.  That's what Planned Parenthood was all about, remember.  And it worked.  To this day Planned Parenthood maintains a heavy presence in lower-income neighborhoods.

The interesting backstory to this is told by Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms.  It turns out that before 1800 in England the poor had less surviving children than the rich, for obvious reasons.  Since the Gerald O'Hara rule then applied, that "land is the only thing that lasts," primogeniture dictated that the younger children of the rich, the landed warrior class, were kicked downwards into the professions.  And the younger children of the professions were downwardly mobile too.  And so on until we get to the landless laborer.

But that all changed with the industrial revolution.  The poor started having more children than the rich and the children of the poor moved up in the social scale: an upwardly mobile society.  Hence the Sangerite panic a century later.

But now, according to Ross Douthat in The New York Times, the poor and the immigrants are having less children:

American fertility plunged with the stock market in 2008, and it hasn’t recovered...

This time, the birthrate has fallen fastest among foreign-born Americans, and particularly among Hispanics, who saw huge amounts of wealth evaporate with the housing bust.

But here's the clincher:

Among the native-born working class, meanwhile, there was a retreat from child rearing even before the Great Recession hit. For Americans without college degrees, economic instability and a shortage of marriageable men seem to be furthering two trends in tandem: more women are having children out of wedlock, and fewer are raising families at all.

 So all the worriers about the survival of the unfit can go home.  The unfit are having less unfit babies.  Back to the good old days of the pre-1800 downwardly mobile society.  But I don't think this will end well.

You only have to read Charles Murray's latest book, Coming Apart, to see why.  Life is peachy-keen among the educated class: that's you and me.  We get married, we have children, we get divorced less than average.  But in the lower orders, things are not good.  Fifty percent of children are living with one parent, and working-class men are leaving the workforce.  All the statistics show that children of single parents present more pathologies than children of two-parent families.  My favorite is that children of single parents suffer six to 30 times more from physical abuse than the children living with their married biological parents.  And then there are the men.  Single men do worse than married man, much worse.

Says Instapundit: "Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money. Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be. Promises that can’t be kept, won’t be."

But that misses the main point.  If the lower orders are doing worse then that amounts to the failure of the welfare state.  The whole point of the welfare state was to tax the rich in order to help the poor.

It goes deeper than that.  It means that the welfare state has turned out to be profoundly unjust.  Sooner or later the lower orders will bust out of their welfare-state ghetto with rage.  You'd like to think that they would focus their rage on the people that tempted them with welfare state goodies and in the process wrecked their families, their work ethic, and their prosperity.  But they probably won't.  They will probably go after the Mitt Romneys of the world, the uncaring capitalists that create the jobs in this world, on the prompting of some latter-day community organizer.

That would be a shame.  For all of us.

Who is Going Over the Cliff?

The problem for any spectator of events is that of discrimination.  Which events are important and which events are mere noise?



That's the question after the late election.  Who is in more trouble, the Republicans or the Democrats?  It depends, in the end, on what the American people want.



Do they want a land of freedom where people launch themselves into the world to try and serve it?  Or do they want a land of power where people fight to get their fair share?



Of course, there is a bit of each of these in all of us.  We want freedom for some things and we want to force our way in others.



Is the Republican Party finished as a national party?  Probably, except that the experts are always predicting the end of the Republican Party, and it always refuses to die.



But look at the Democratic Party.  For years and years it represented Everyman, the working stiff who went off to work everyday with his lunch-pail to build the houses, dig the coal, smelt the steel and produce the products.  Now it represents everyone who is not really working gainfully, from college professors to government employees to all the crony capitalists that feed at the government trough.



In my view the Democrats made a fateful decision back in about 1990 when it seemed that the Reagan revolution had dealt a fatal blow to the party.  That's when they really kicked the race thing into gear, and the secular thing, and the effort to boost the Hispanic population and vote by turning a blind eye to illegal immigration and passing the Motor Voter Act to make it easy to register to vote.



Meanwhile there's a problem.  While Democrats have been desperately demagoguing their way back into power they have allowed all their social programs to develop into corrupt monstrosities: Social Security corrupted by fraudulent disability claims, Medicare a bottomless pit that will eat the budget, welfare a yearly trillion dollar incentive against work.



When you see  gigantic areas of corruption you have to think end-of-an-era.  When you see the annual staged budget crises, Debt Crisis followed by Fiscal Cliff, you have to think that things are worse than we know.



But how and when does it all change?   Who knows?



And it's all such a shame.  This great nation is bulging with possibilities and potential.  Instead we are diverted by cunning stratagems and pummeled by political slugfests.



At least we know this.  The Democrats have opted for cheap money and higher taxes.  That always ends in a cliff.  That's a shame, because the American people deserve better.

The World According to Medicare

When you are 66, like me, you start to think about what life will be like when you are really old.  Yeah,  I know: you young 'uns think that 66 is really old already.



No, I am talking about people in their 80s that are falling apart.  It could be dementia; it could be physical problems, like balance or glaucoma or a heart condition.



Life looks very different to you and the people that look after you when you get to that age.



Whatever the situation, you and your nearest and dearest must deal with the immense frustration that you are less that a full human being.  You can't get around.  Or you can't be left alone.  Or you can't communicate properly.



Of course, the same applies to children.  But with children there is this:  every day they grow and become more competent and independent.  With an older person the opposite is true, and this is very frustrating for all concerned.



Then there is the expense.  In the old days, people took to their beds and then fever or something soon took them off.  You nursed the invalid or you could afford a slave or a servant to care for them at a minor expense.  Today we have technology and government and institutions, and they are very expensive.  There has to be a better way.



The trouble with the expense is that we all have to turn to government: for medical costs, for care-giving, for drugs.  Nothing wrong with that, of course, except that government is force, and anything rendered unto government ends up as force: one-size-fits-all, bureaucracy, guidelines, and crony capitalism.  There has to be a better way.



Some day in the future, people will look back on our age and marvel at our stupidities:  the way we confine children in child custodial facilities, the way we barrack the sick in hospital factories, the way we warehouse the aged in "independent/assisted living facilities."  It's as though the gang system of the slave plantation and the factory had taken over the whole of society.



Wouldn't it be great if baby boomers like me could find a better way to deal with old age other than big budgets, big government and big warehouses.



Don't hold your breath.  The defining principle of the baby boomers has always been: we break it; you fix it.

Obama's Great White Whale

You expect politicians to have hackneyed political ideas, and President Obama doesn't disappoint.

It's been obvious all along that his central concern is "inequality" and a post-election piece by Zachary Goldfarb points that up.

As Obama did in legislative fights during his first term, he also will be striving to reduce a three-decades-long wave of rising income inequality that has meant that fewer Americans have prospered while more struggle to get by.

Three decades, you'll note, takes us back to the beginning of the Reagan administration.  It means that the astonishing economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s was a mirage.  It's the basis of  "you didn't build that," of Joe the Plumber and "spread the wealth" and just about everything the president has done.

And the rest of the liberal political culture is not far behind.  That's what all the nostalgia talk about "good jobs at good wages" in the 1950s is all about.  Back then we had big corporations and strong unions and the working stiff made out well.  Today with outsourcing and greedy bankers and vulture capitalists like Mitt Romney the little guy is getting screwed.

That's the liberal line.

The conservative line comes out of people like Charles Murray and his Coming Apart.  The conservative line is that the mechanical liberal administrative welfare state hurts the very people it is supposed to help.  It encourages people in dependency, breaks up families, gives the children of the poor a lousy education, puts government under the thumb of government employee unions and business into the corruption of go-along-to-get-along crony capitalism.  Oh, things are going swimmingly for the cognitive elite, the people that are good at going to school and getting credentials and navigating bureaucratic hierarchies.  But if you are a meat-and-potatoes kind of person, one that learns by doing, and that lives in a face-to-face rather than a memo-to-memo culture--well tough luck for you.

But there's another troubling aspect to this, and it is coming out int he fiscal cliff crisis.  We learn from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that the basic fiscal-cliff proposal from the Obama administration is basically $1.6 trillion in tax increases.  If this is true, it means that the Obamis are not advancing a serious proposal for entitlement reform.  It means that, if there is any entitlement reform, it will be just a bargaining chip in the power struggle between the two factions of our ruling class.

This tells us a lot more than you might think.  Republicans and conservatives would like to reform the government entitlements so that they are self-financing, so that the federal government finances can get onto a long-term balance.  They want to get the government out of the middle of all this.  The Democrats don't.

When the Democrats stopped observing the Budget Control Acts after 2009 they opted for the annual cliff-hanger like the 2011 debt-default crisis, and now the fiscal-cliff crisis.  They are reducing policy to an annual national cage fight.

In my judgment this is a serious betrayal of the "little people," the welfare-state dependents that rely on those government programs.  It shows that the Democrats don't really care about them except for their votes.

Because when the crash comes, Arnold Kling's "sudden stop" when the government has to balance spending and revenue because it can't borrow any more, then the welfare-state dependents are going to be hurt the most: "women and minorities hardest hit" as the headline goes.  Eating the paint off the walls, as the Russians say.

But really, anyone that relies on a government to keep themselves in groceries deserves what they get.  Government is force, politics is for bullies.  If you cast your vote with the bullies, you get what you pay for.

I don't think that President Obama is really interested in the long-term fate of the dependent classes.  He has a facile answer for all that: "inequality."  Just lower the level of struggle for the struggling classes by making the rich pay a little more, and you can make America a better country.

There's another way of putting this.  Just let politicians do what comes naturally, dividing people by income and class and looting the producers to pay off their supporters, says President Obama, and all will be well.

Well.  The whole thrust of modern conservatism since Edmund Burke has been that you surrender society to "sophisters, economists, and calculators" at your peril.  He means, in our modern argot, that society cannot be reduced to system and administrative routine.  We humans are social animals, not mechanical animals.

Conservative Storytelling

Liberals tell their story better than conservatives.  That's the message from Lee Habeeb and Mike Leven.  Habeeb is a VP at conservative Salem Radio Network, home of Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager, so he should know.  Conservatives should tell our stories better.



No doubt.  And the liberal advantage goes back to the invention of the movie.  Even conservative icon Margaret Thatcher was affected when the movies came to Methodist Grantham in the 1920s.  What a world outside the dull Methodism of the old ones!



But it's not just storytelling; it's hegemony.  Liberals get to force their stories down our throats and stigmatize our stories as racist, sexist, homophobic.  That is the key.  Liberals sit in the cultural catbird seat and they don't intend to give it up or anything else.



And anyway, the main consumers of cultural product, young people, want edgy stuff that annoys their parents.  How are they to tell that the real "parents" are the edgy liberals running their schools and their TV shows?



The reason conservatives are in such a world of hurt is that liberals have deliberately hitched up their efforts at cultural hegemony in the last couple of decades.  Let's say it goes back to the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was carrying all before him.  Liberals responded with the Clintonian New Democrat feint and with efforts to corral their supporters into ethnic enclaves. with naked racist appeals.  Along the way liberals taught themselves to stop listening to conservative critiques.



It is a mistake to imagine that the culture war is merely a matter of competing stories.  That's not the way the world works.  Each era has a dominant culture, the taken-for-granted stories about the way the world works and came to be.  That dominant culture doesn't really get challenged until it starts to fail.



The reason that Obama got elected and reelected is because liberals ran a full-court press to sell the idea that Bush had failed, and the American people bought the idea.  Never mind that the main reason for the Crash of 2008 was the popping of a 30-year real-estate bubble, and the biggest reason for the pop was the loans to people that couldn't afford to service them.  Nothing to do with greedy bankers and crazy derivatives.  Just bad liberal government policy.  And the fact is that liberals have the cultural power to push their narrative on the American people.



Liberals will find that their stories will cease to persuade when things start going wrong.  Oh they'll blame the insurance companies for the failure of Obamacare, and they will keep blaming class size for the failures of public education.  But in the end, people will stop listening and just say: things aren't working; we have to change.



At that point people will be ready to listen to another story.  It is then we will need conservatives with a story to tell.

After Patronage Politics Fails

Conservatives are full of foreboding these days.  The debt isn't $16 trillion; it's much, much worse.  The student debt problem is yet another case (after mortgage subsidies) of good intentions screwing the people it was meant to help.  Ditto Affirmative Action at the university.



The basic divide in this country is between two ideas of the individual.  There is the "responsible self," a notion that Robert Bellah attributes to the Axial Age when all modern religions got their start.  And there is the client self, the powerless peasant that attaches himself to a powerful patron.



Thus it makes sense that the average Republican thinks of himself as a "typical American" and the average Democrat thinks of himself as a hyphenated American.  If you adhere to the notion of the "responsible self" then you don't need and don't want to think of yourself as an embattled class.  But if you adhere to the idea of yourself as powerless, then you need to group together and identify a powerful patron, someone that will protect you and your group from a cruel and heartless world.



What I wonder is what happens when this breaks down, when the powerful patron can't or won't deliver.  In our terms, what happens when the entitlements run out.  What do the people do, and what do the leaders do?



The simple answer, from David Hackett Fischer in The Great Wave, is that you get default, revolution, and war.  The end game of the patronage/client business, when there is no more money, provokes people to seek an answer in the street.



Of course, the war and the revolution don't really solve anything.  Their contribution is to focus and concentrate the rage of the disappointed in a great battle.  After it's over the rage subsides, people accept the result, and life goes on.  The glorious principles to which people vowed solemn oaths lie trampled in the mud and blood, and people make do with what remains.



As the endgame unfolds in the near future we can expect that the client groups of the Democratic Party will lunge to grab more loot with tax increases.  And they will partially succeed.  The responsible selves of the Republican Party will try to tame the entitlements, and they will partially succeed.



Then we will come to the real default and the real disappointment.  All predictions and prophesies will disappear into the fog of war.



That's the whole point of war and revolution.  When you are brutally disappointed, you make one last violent gesture, to mix it all up and hope that after the confusion you come out on top at the end.



Medium term, you can see what is coming.  Barack Obama has set federal spending at about 25 percent of GDP.  Federal revenue has never really got about 19 percent of GDP.  When the current effort to make the rich pay a little more raises federal revenue to about 19.5 percent of GDP then the Democrats will call for a Value Added Tax.  Guess what.  That will fall on the middle class and the Democratic voters.



And what will the clients and the victims do then, poor things?

Does Kant Rescue Cause and Effect from Hume?

Perhaps the stickiest wicket that Kant faces in his Critique of Pure Reason is to roll back Hume's argument that there ain't no such thing as cause and effect.  For Hume, all we can say about events in the world is that B follows A.  We can never say that A caused B.

Since the Brits invented cricket, you can see that the German Kant would have to be really on his game to deal with the googlies from bowler Hume.  (Although I don't know if googlies had been invented yet).

In a way, Kant's whole transcendental machinery is designed to deal with Hume's challenge: what warrant can there be for any assertion of A being the cause of B?  The whole idea of the external experience of objects as appearances rather than things-in-themselves is the center of Kant's cunning plan to deal with Hume and his tricky bowling.

Kant makes his argument that, for any experience in the world, there must be a rule that predicts the occurrence of an event from a previous event, for if there were no rule in the mind connecting events then indeed all sequences of perceptions would be merely subjective, received impressions having no connection with any outside object.  On that view there would be no way to cognize any outside object.

The cunning trick is, of course, that we are not talking about events-in-themselves or outside-objects-in-themselves.  The events are appearances, impressions that the mind processes into unified judgments about what is going on out there.  If I see a boy in the neighbor's yard in the act of throwing a baseball towards my house I take note of that appearance.  If half a second later I receive the impressions of a crash and tinkle in the front room and a a boyish squeak from the neighbor's yard, I am justifying in applying a rule that baseballs thrown at my house are quite likely to hit my house and that the appearance (or hear-ance) of a crash and tinkle shortly after the appearance of the neighbor boy and his baseball justify my judgment that it was the boy wot done it.

It all revolves around the appearances vs. things-in-themselves game.  In the game of appearances I could always be wrong.  It's possible that I didn't see the other kid across the street and his baseball.  Or it could be that a meteorite came out of the sky and broke my window.

But none of that matters.  What matters is that Kant's transcendental machinery describes how my sensibility receives impressions from the outside world, which I process in accordance with my forms of intuition about space and time and then combine them into a manifold using the categories of understanding.  Then I apply judgement to bring the manifold to a unified experience of possible external objects of experience.  But those objects are only appearances, not things-in-themselves.

Good old Kant.  Gin clear, as always.  And four runs for the Königsberger against the best bowling in England.

Kant's Problematic Refutation of Idealism

Immanuel Kant came up with a wonderful idea.  Let's just say, he writes, that we can't see things "in themselves" but only as appearances.  In that one idea he elegantly avoids claiming that we can ever know the whole truth about life, the universe and everything.

Kant's idea is, of course, not much different from St. Paul's talk about seeing through a glass, darkly.  And it is echoed by the quantum mechanical dictum that you can't see anything in the sub-atomic world without disturbing it.  So you do not see an item "in itself" but only after you have nudged it, with some kind of electromagnetic or sub-atomic energy.  So whatever you are looking at, it is not the same as it was.

But Kant feels the need to demolish his predecessors with his Refutation of Idealism.  He wants to dispatch the Dogmatic Idealism of Berkeley and the Problematic Idealism of Descartes.

Problem is that most everyone agrees that Kant doesn't quite pull it off, thus violating the first rule of politics that if you come to overthrow the king you had better succeed.  Or else.

Kant wants to refute the Cartesian idea that the outer world is "doubtful and indemonstrable."  Kant crosses over Descartes' division between knowledge of internal and external states by setting out to prove that the "empirical consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me."  Kant's argument is based on the idea that I am conscious of my existence in time and the presupposition of something "persistent in perception" and so on.  

The commentators all seem to agree that Kant doesn't finish the job.  Actually, they begin with contesting the first premise of his proof: "I am conscious of my existence as determined in time."  They say he doesn't even start the job of refutation properly.  

Even a tyro like me can see the problem.  Way back in the Transcendental Aestshetic Kant declares that time is a form of intuition that resides in the mind.  So we are using an intuition cooked up in the mind to argue for the existence of the real world?  Come on Immanuel.  You can do better than that!  You are really arguing Descartes' point that the only thing we can be sure about is the thinking "I"!

Really, Kant should stick with the beauty and the elegance of his central creative insight.  We can't know things in themselves.  Everything we know about anything (including our internal self) is founded on belief.  We believe in an "I"; we believe in an external world.  And until our brains start to rot in old age, that belief seems to work for us.  It gets us food, shelter, and a new generation on the ground and out of the nest.  

There's a refutation of idealism for you: grandchildren!