A Christmas Story from the Land of the Elves

At Christmastime it is right and proper that we step back from the hurly burly of everyday life and think a little. For instance, we could think a little about the land of the elves, writes Robert Cole.

Once upon a time in the far off Land of Cold Commerce there lived some elves. Lots and lots of elves.
Some of the elves wore overalls. Some wore white collars and some wore blue collars.

You can see where this is going. “Some of the elves thought that they had power.”

The Elf Lord of Nevele thought he could change things. Long, long ago he’d granted the elves of Knab independence and robbed the Elves of Snoisnep of tax relief. He’d given the working-class elves credits, but not enough credit for being able to look after themselves as elves.

It seems that this particular land of the elves is on the other side of the Atlantic. The Elf Lord of Nevele is Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchecquer at No. Eleven, Downing Street. Of course, he wants to be a bigger Lord, the Lord High Elfship of Number Ten. Anyway, one day, the Spirit of Business woke up from a very long nap and

Light shone all around, scales dropped from the eyes of the elves and they began to hear with a clarity never before known.

Yeah, like we should be so lucky.

Anyway, guess what happened. People started to think of themselves not as workers or capitalists or Elf Lords of this and that, but as “all of these types of people simultaneously.”

They realised that it was only by behaving with mutual consideration, and by having respect for the fragility of the interwined relationships that supported them all, that they could thrive.


The Land of Cold Commerce became a Warm Weald of Wealth. Things began to make sense. And everyone lived happily ever after.

Ah, yes. And God bless us every one, eh, Bob Cratchit?

Will "Kos" Lead Democrats Off a Cliff?

Who is Markos Moulitsas and what does he want? That is what Democrats must be asking themselves as “Kos” has propelled his Daily Kos into the stratosphere as the No. 1 liberal blog in the nation, and that is what writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells wonders as he interviews Moulitsas in Berkeley, California for Washington Monthly.

Wallace-Wells finds that Moulitsas is a tactician. He doesn’t really seem to know what he wants, except that he wants to win, wants Democrats to win. But the trouble is that all the Democrats he supports tend to lose. In 2004 he raised money for 13 Democrats and every one of them lost. All through the fall of 2004 he was confidently predicting victory, and, well, you know what happened.

But he seems to represent a real constituency.

The younger-than-35 liberal professionals who account for most of his audience seem an ideologically satisfied group, with no fundamental paradigm — changing demands to make of the Democratic Party.

Moulitsas and his supporters don’t have a coherent political philosophy. They just want to beat Bush and the evil neo-cons. And the Democratic leadership feels like placing “a gaudy bet” on Kos and his chums.

But the more that the Democratic Party turns to Moulitsas for help, the more the limits to his movement become apparent, the less the raw animus of many liberals for the Iraq war seems likely to translate into any lasting liberal movement.

Wallace-Wells paints Moulitsas as a fanatic, a slight man with a high pitched voice:

He speaks in twenty-minute chunks, so you don’t need to ask questions so much as provision buckets to catch the flood.

For a conservative, this all seems like great fun, it feels like the Democrats digging themselves into a hole. The great prosperous middle of the nation will never turn to a fanatic like Kos who wants to enroll them into a mass movement. Go ahead, Democrats, we chuckle, wrap yourself around this fanatic and see where it gets you.

Of course, if things really go south, then all bets are off. America might rally to a tactical ruthless Democratic Party.

But before then “Kos” is more likely to lead the Democratic Party off an electoral cliff. After all, back in the 1980s the secret weapon of the evil neo-cons was Ronald Reagan, a man who offered America radical change with a smile and a bob of the head. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Kos and his chums don’t understand that the Democrats are not hungry revolutionaries with nothing to lose that can afford to take big risks to win a great prize. Democratic voters have a lot to lose if things go the wrong way: their government pensions, their first-dollar health benefits, their government jobs, their government subsidies, for a start.

Is the Worm Turning in NY Subways?

Studies show that state and local government workers earn about 40 percent more than workers in the private sector. That is what Steve Malanga reports in City Journal.

So why do unions like the transit workers union in the New York metropolitan area get away with striking when their semi-skilled bus and train operators get paid around $50,000 a year with full health benefits and pensions at 55?

Maybe they aren’t going to get away with it for much longer. According to Ryan Sager comments on the TWU website were running 4-1 against the strike until the union took the comments section down. Wrote one person on the TWU site:

My annual salary is less than half than the lowest paid transit worker in the system, and now I am going to lose at least one if not more days of pay due to the strike . . . Thanks for that — and happy holidays.

The fat salaries and benefits of government workers will only last as long as the average voter puts up with them. When the day comes that the average voter turns against the overpaid, under-challenged government worker then the public employee unions will suddenly find that their good friends the municipal politicians will be nowhere to be found.

Politicians always go where the votes are. Nothing personal, you understand.

Unsustainable Medicare

As commentator Bruce Bartlett writes, the federal budget is dangerously out of whack. Never mind the gross federal debt of $9.9 trillion. The real number is the unfunded liabilities on Social Security and Medicare. On President Bush’s watch

Social Security’s indebtedness has risen to $5.7 trillion, Medicare Part A is now up to $8.8 trillion and Part B has grown to $12.4 trillion. In addition, there is now another Medicare program -- Part D for prescription drugs -- that George W. Bush rammed through Congress. The unfunded liability for just this one program is $8.7 trillion, for a total of $35.6 trillion.

It is going to be interesting to see what happens with Medicare over the years. What do America’s senior citizens really want from their government health care program? What are they willing to pay for it? What is the rest of the nation prepared to pay?

That is why the $35.6 trillion number is meaningless. So we’ve made a ridiculous promise that cannot be redeemed. As Herbert Stein said, years ago, If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.

The interesting thing is how the politics of this is going to work out and how the government will hide from the senior citizens of the day that it is not going to redeem its promise of abundant, affordable health care for senior citizens.

We can see how it works out in nations with government monopoly health systems. They restrict the provision of health care by rationing. How will it work out here?

The Joys of National Health Care

Our neighbor to the north has a government monopoly system of health care. In Canada you are not allowed to spend your own money on health care.

But Jacques Chaoulli, a French Canadian physician decided to challenge that, according to Anthony Dick. He argued in court that it was illegal to refuse medical care by putting people on waiting lists and at the same time to prevent people from seeking their own remedy by paying for needed medical procedures out of their own pockets.

Eventually, the Canadian Supreme Court agreed.

The question is, however, why ordinary people are so enamoured of a system that denies them the right to spend their own money to save their lives if the state won’t do it for them? Dick wonders about this too. The Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper recently went out of his way to argue against any private provision of health care.

“There will be no private, parallel system,” he recently promised at a rally in Winnipeg.

This longstanding hostility to private health-care alternatives cannot be explained away simply by noting that most Canadians have bought into the Left’s premise that taxpayers have an obligation to pick up the hospital bills of every citizen who ever gets sick. Something further is required to explain why some Canadians think sick people should be actively prevented from using their own money to purchase health care from private companies that deliver service better and faster than the government.

I believe that the reason is a dark and shameful one. People like the moral and financial cop-out of government health care. That way they never have to make the decision to spend their entire savings on a medical procedure to stay alive. They can just submit to the government system, and avoid the moral decision: Is my life worth more than my money? (Or is Aunt Millie’s life worth more than my money?)
The French Canadian movie The Barbarian Invasions takes a brilliant look at this moral universe.

It should not be surprising that people want to escape difficult decisions. We are human, after all. But should we really live in a society that forbids people from spending their own money on lifesaving medical procedures? What, as the left likes to say, does that say about us and about our society?

President Bush Rallies the Nation. Why Did He Wait?

There are many who must wonder. Why did President Bush wait until now to rally the American people to the war in Iraq?

In his speech to the nation on December 18, 2005, President Bush, as he has done before, laid out his policy. And as he has done before, he acknowledged that there are valid grounds for disagreements with his policy. He admitted that the war in Iraq

has caused sorrow for our whole nation -- and it has led some to ask if we are creating more problems than we’re solving.

That is an important question, and the answer depends on your view of the war on terror. If you think the terrorists would become peaceful if only America would stop provoking them, then it might make sense to leave them alone.

This was an honorable thing to do, to lay out the core of the anti-war case. Bush then continued, and laid down the facts that led him to the decision to take war to the terrorists. Finally,

My conviction comes down to this: We do not create terrorism by fighting the terrorists. We invite terrorism by ignoring them.

The advantage of this sort of talk was that it frankly admitted the difference in opinion, without demonizing the opposing point of view. Then he went on to point out that, right or wrong, we had to finish the job. For to give up now would be to invite disaster.

But why did he wait until now to make this speech? I believe there are two reasons.

First of all, he has wanted to avoid the real Vietnam syndrome, the perpetual “light at the end of the
tunnel”—continually invoked and continually failing to appear as promised. If you have listened carefully over the last three years to President Bush you will know that he has been very careful about what he has said and what he has promised. So he has been prepared to put up with the hail of elite criticism until he has actually achieved the victory in battle that points to victory in the war. A national Iraqi election in which all Iraqis participate is surely as big a victory as you could wish for.

Secondly, there is Bush’s pride. I think that President Bush is too proud to rally Americans unless he has real achievement to rally us to. He just won’t give his opponents the rope to hang him with.

Bush in Bubble Racks Up Another "W"

There he sits, the incurious President Bush, isolated from Congress and living in a fantasy bubble. And on December 15 he stumbled into another touchdown in the War on Terror, as Iraqis in their millions went to the polls to elect a national parliament.

But he doesn’t have a plan! But there weren’t any WMDs! But he won’t admit his mistakes! But it’s all about oil!

I know. It just doesn’t make sense, does it. We must get the international community involved, as Senator Biden (D-Del) insists. We must get the UN involved. Otherwise we could end up with a disaster on our hands.

The big story, of course is that the Sunni voters turned out in force to vote.

In Saddam’s home province, Tikrit, more than 80 percent of voters turned out, a local official said.

And, according to reports, in Ramadi Sunni militias actually provided security at the polls.

That is what the Bush administration has been working to achieve all along, to make the opportunity for power through ballots more attractive than the opportunity through bullets.

Even as the Bush strategy slowly, step by step, gets results, you can see the point of the Democrat attacks. Their accusations apply a necessary tarnish to the achievements of the Bush administration. Instead of glorious triumphs, they seem like messy foulups.

So when it is all over, Democrats can say, yes, we won, but we won in spite of the efforts of the Bush administration.

And it could work.