The War over Medicare Drugs

In case you hadn’t noticed, November 15 marked the start of enrollment
for the new Medicare drug plan. Naturally liberals and their willing accomplices in the media are pushing the idea that seniors are all confused about it and that the whole plan is a disaster.

Not so fast, writes Gary J. Andres. It’s true that the plan offers seniors choices. But choice is a conservative principle that is worth defending.

Market-oriented health care reform proponents have a huge stake in the successful rollout of this new program. If it thrives, the innovative changes provide new momentum for market-oriented,consumer-driven policies. If it fails, we move backward, to a government-run, one-size-fits-all program. We now stand at a fork in the road in American health care. Liberals understand that, but do conservatives?

Having choice in health care means, of course, that if you want to maximize your benefits under the new law you have to do a little work, and it’s true that older people are not as good at analysis as they might have been in their youth. But conservatives had better make sure that liberals do not get to define reality on the Medicare reforms. There’s a lot riding on the success of these reforms.

Maybe conservatives should take a little time out over the holiday season and have a talk with a senior. Let us all make sure that our elderly parents understand their options and choices under the new Medicare plan. A simple precaution like that could go a long way to cutting the liberals off at the pass.

Aside from the practical political aspect of this there is the bigger question. If Americans got to choose their health care arrangements, what would they choose? Liberals might be surprised. Conservatives might be surprised. We might all be surprised.

The Senate Goes Wobbly

With the United States Senate voting in one week to let federal judges rather than military commanders determine who is an enemy combatant and to send a sense of the Senate resolution to President Bush to tell them how he plans to get out of Iraq we must look at the possible consequence of “going wobbly.”

Here we are, what Lee Harris calls the western team arrayed against the “eternal gang of ruthless men.” What happens when come of our chaps go all wobbly and work to weaken the current western effort to contain the ruthless men?

We have a historical reference for the current situation, because the history of the twentieth century was largely the story of the western commercial empire battling against the ruthless secular religions of fascism, Soviet communism, and Maoist warlordism.

Except for the advent of Soviet communism, each eruption of the ruthless men could have been easily contained: the Hitler phenomenon in the mid 1930s, the Mao phenomenon at any time up to about 1947-48.

The comparison of the rise of Mao and the current eruption of Islamo-fascism is apt. Mao was a ruthless man who maintained an army in China for twenty years courtesy of the Soviet Union and the vacillation of the United States. When he gained power he used the entire wealth of China to try to project himself onto the world stage as a superpower. But it couldn’t be done. China was an agricultural country, and didn’t have the wealth to sustain a bid for global hegemony in 1950.

If the Islamo-fascists gain control of the Middle East they would, of course, obtain the oil income of Saudi Arabia, say about $180 billion a year. It might not be enough to sustain global hegemony, but it would certainly be enough to cause global mischief and disruption. It might be enough to conquer Europe.

For two hundred years the peripheral world has fought against the emerging global commercial empire, represented in the 19th century by the British and in the 20th century by the Americans. The Islamo-fascists are just the latest reactionary movement that has arisen to oppose it.

For a long generation, since the emergence of the McGovern wing, the Democratic Party has flirted with the reactionaries, only getting serious when they were in the White House.

Maybe we need to elect a Democrat to the presidency in 2008 to force the national Democratic leadership to deal with global reality and stop playing footsie with the Angry Left crazies.

If Republicans Don't Stand for Tax Cuts...

If there is one thing the Republican Party stands for it is tax cuts. That is because it is Republicans who actually pay taxes. Over 95 percent of federal income taxes are paid by the top 50 percent of taxpayers.

So why then is Republican US Senator Olympia Snowe
balking at the extension of the 15 percent dividend and capital gains taxes enacted in the great Bush tax cuats of 2003? Is it just grandstanding, or is she using the tax cut issue to push her pet project?

Republicans had better watch out, writes investment guru
Larry Kudlow. Even if the Democrats insist on disrespecting the investor (and risk-taking) class in their eternal drumbeat about tax cuts for the rich, the investor class might want to teach Republicans a lesson if they don’t deliver on an investor-friendly tax regime.

Republicans may be alienating their most natural supporters. In recent elections, nearly two out of every three voters were stock owners. Where will they turn if the Republicans they put into office no longer represent them?

The problem for investors is that they really don’t have an alternative. Ever since the early 1980s the Democrats have set their face against the supply-side menu of low tax rates. They persist in a vision of the economy as an enlargement of the federal budget. You take money from the taxpayers to fund programs for Americans.

But that is not how the economy works. The economy is a world in which people make goods and services for other people in society so that they can get in exchange the things that they want: food, housing, transportation, health care. The results are in on how to make the economic system work better. You create a level playing field without hills of privilege and subsidy and the valleys of high tax rates and punitive regulation. The more you enact privileges and subsidies—the more that Congress does what comes naturally—the more you distort the relationship between producers and consumers, and the more you leach prosperity out of the system.

In Europe the Fire This Time

Here’s the best piece yet on the French mess. Columnist
Minette Marrin tells about the little village near
Montpellier in which
she used to have a house.

For years we were the only foreigners and while nobody
paid us much attention, everyone was pleasant enough. By the end we
were on friendly terms with quite a few people.

I say by the end, because we left. We sold the house a few years ago
because the atmosphere of the village had gone sour. There was
something almost frightening in the air. It is strange to me that
people have been so surprised by the past few weeks of burning and
rioting in French cities, including Montpellier. It has been obvious
for at least 10 years, even to a
foreign visitor, that something was badly wrong.

What went wrong? Well, first the Marrins noticed a lot of new people, North Africans, hanging around. And they noticed how much the local people hated them. Of course, as tolerant Brits the Marrins took a high line with all this. Until their house was burgled. Until their car wheels were slashed.

Then they sold up and left.

For as long as any living American can remember the European educated elite has had a grand old time wagging their heads at the race problems in the United States.

So it is odd that it has taken the French so long to wake up to the alarming failure of their much vaunted un-Anglo-Saxon society to accommodate its Muslims.

Or maybe it is not surprising. After all, the European educated elite at no time ever thought to analyze the race problem in the United States with a view to learning lessons for their own continent. They analyzed it in the spirit of anti-Americanism, as a way of sneering at the uncouth snaggle-toothed yahoos of North America.

Now it is too late. Now a frightening storm has descended upon Europe. Now it is going to take a war to set it all straight.

Trying to Explain the French and the World

Does it seem cynical that, in the misery of the recent French riots, all the commentators are projecting their ideas upon the suffering French and deftly demonstrating how their ideas show exactly how the French got into their mess and how they could get out of it?

Not really. That’s what humans do. We try to understand the world according to the template that we carry around. We keep at it until our template utterly fails us. And even then we may still continue to worship it.

For economist Arnold Kling understanding the world means attacking the social model of Berkeley cognitive scientist and
liberal George Lakoff. Lakoff divides the world into people that want government to act like a “strict father” and those that want it to act as a “nurturant parent.” You can figure out which US political party is the Daddy party and which is the Mommy party in this formulation. Lakoff believes, as a liberal, that the correct government model is the nurturant parent one.

Kling, as an economist and a libertarian, asks the obvious question. Enough with this parent stuff, already. Why not junk the parent model and have an America without a parent. Just as we have separated church and state, why not separate family and state?

To the traditional Left and Right, one question raised by the riots is how the French welfare state affects Muslims and other minorities. The Right worries that it provides too much support for "alien" immigrant "parasites." The Left worries that it does not provide enough education and employment opportunities.

To libertarians, the welfare state is something that is economically ineffective and morally wrong for everyone, not just for ethnic minorities. Families and non-coercive institutions, such as charities and churches, ought to provide for basic needs. Education and health care ought to be primarily the responsibility of families, not of the state.

But the bigger question is: Why do most people, excepting a tiny minority called libertarians, want the state as parent, differing only in their preference for a Mommy state or a Daddy state? How can we explain this?

We can turn to a model that does a better job of understanding what is going on than the models of Lakoff and Kling. It is called Spiral Dynamics.

In the Spiral Dynamics model there is no binary opposition, between Mommy and Daddy state or between family and state, but a hierarchical model of people in different stages of existence. First of all there are red impulsives, people that experience the world as a cockpit of power and themselves as the victims. But some of them climb out of this power hell and become blue purposives. They believe in the One Truth and, in our western model, the love of the Lord Jesus Christ. The children of blue purposives often rebel against the totalism of One Truth. They discover that you can change the rules, if you want. Life is a game, they believe, and they become orange creatives. But the children of creative egos often rebel against the life of the ego. They believe in sharing and caring, the demolition of power structures and hierarchies. They become green communitarians.

The power of this model is that it can accomodate both the binary world of Lakoff, his strict vs. nurturant parents, and the world of Kling and his separation of family and state. Strict parents are blue purposives believing in the One Truth. Nurturant parents are green communitarians, visualizing world peace. And libertarians are orange creatives, believing that you can settle everything with agreed-upon rules.

But what about men of power, you ask, like Mao, Stalin, and Hugo Chavez? They don’t appear in the models of Lakoff and Kling. But we can understand them in the Spiral Dynamics model. They are red impulsives that worship power. Their natural modus operandi is to organize helpless victims into political armies in their march to power.

As things get serious in the years ahead, it is going to be important to have the best model, the one that understands the world as nearly as possible. It may be a matter of life and death.

Spiral Dynamics is not that model. But it is a start.

Steyn on Europe: It's the Demography, Stupid

Don’t order the casket for Europe just yet, but it is time to start taking measurements.
That’s what
Mark Steyn is saying about Europe. It’s the demography, stupid. It’s all very well to have the finest in Euro Social Models and to boast about it to your hick American cousins, but what happens if nobody has any children except
the Muslims on welfare? You really want to know?

It’s Au Revoir to the Euro Social Model. That’s what.

OK. We all knew that. But the New Hampshire philosopher introduces a new concept into the public square, an ambitious and decisive idea that may change the world as we know it.

American firearms owners have a popular slogan: ’If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.’ Likewise, if you marginalise religion, only the marginalised will have religion.

In fact, American gun owners do not say that. They print bumper-stickers that read:

WHEN GUNS ARE OUTLAWED ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE GUNS

So how does Steyn’s concept translate into a bumper-sticker?

WHEN RELIGION IS MARGINALIZED ONLY THE MARGINALIZED WILL HAVE RELIGION

Not quite snappy enough, is it? Let’s try again.

WHEN RELIGION IS KILLED ONLY KILLERS WILL HAVE RELIGION

How about that?

Wait Till Next Year

Everyone is busily projecting the results of this week’s election out to 2006 and 2008, wondering if they point to a Democratic revival or to continued Republican dominance. Especially significant, especially for Democrats, is the gubernatorial election in Virginia in which the Democrat Tim Kaine beat the Republic Jerry Kilgore by 52% to 46%.

Liberal Thomas Oliphant sees the seeds of Democratic revival, a chance to increase taxes and government services. For

a red state is not always what it seems. Instead of being increasingly populated havens for megachurch social conservatism and low-tax conservatism, these [outer Virginia] suburbs demonstrated that they are also places where middle-income adults flock in a desperate search for affordable housing and where they show a deep concern about threats to open space and wetlands, gridlocked traffic, and quality public education.

Conservative Fred Barnes sees the world differently. He thinks that the Democrat won in Virgina because he ran a campaign on local issues.

Virginia is a Republican state with a habit of electing Democratic governors. And it’s really not hard to see why. Democrats run on state issues like education and roads. Democrat Tim Kaine stressed these in handily defeating Republican Jerry Kilgore in Tuesday’s election for governor. Mr. Kilgore ran on what voters, at least here in Virginia, perceive as national issues: guns, immigration, gay rights, death penalty. That strategy failed.

Barnes points up the real challenge for Republicans. We want to reform education and local government, and the Democrats want to preserve the status quo, the vast patronage machine of welfare state programs, jobs, and benefits that they own.

Average Americans are right in the middle. They move to the ex-urbs to get away from liberals and the poor, buy a house they can afford, and send their children to half-decent schools. They grumble about the bumbling inefficiencies and corruption of the government services that they use. But they have no stomach for the radical reforms of education and the welfare state that Republicans long to enact.

Republicans only get a chance to reform the welfare state when it breaks. We got to reform welfare, finally, when everyone except die-hard liberals agreed it was broken. Rudy Giuliani got to clean up the crime wave in New York City when everyone except die-hard liberals agreed that something had to be done.

Until things fall apart, we radical Republican reformers must play a waiting game.