A Briton Talks About the Erosion of Liberty

Although the Brits don’t have a real conservative movement, they do have conservative politicians—like Alan Duncan, for instance, who visited the Cato Institute to talk about the erosion of freedom in Britain. As described by James Pinkerton it involves three problems.

First of all, there is Tony Blair. His style of headline government lowers the tone of debate: "the headline matters more than the deed." The danger of this sort of thing becomes obvious when the government gets to be good at spin but fails at the boring stuff of keeping people safe from criminals. It thows money at schools and hospitals without doing the boring stuff of reforming them.

Then there is the brute power of government, made more acute by the special powers we have given to government to prosecute the war on terror. This is a

trend that was visible even before 9-11: the short-circuiting of due process. That is, raison d'etat was displacing the rights of Englishmen.

Thirdly, there is the problem that, with all these powers, government doesn’t do anything very well. In fact it tends to encourage the opposite of what it intends. For instance,

The redistributionist welfare state was created to narrow inequalities, but in fact, in the way that it works, it ends up widening those inequalities. That is, if people are rendered ill-equipped to work, they will likely end up with even less earning power.

Duncan has written a book about it: Saturn’s Children: How the State Devours Liberty, Prosperity, and Virtue. Oh, and by the way, Duncan is gay.

Gay? In the Conservative Party? How did that work? “It just wasn't an issue -- no special privileges, no special penalties. Everybody minds their own business.”

Now It's Republicans Chasing Soccer Mom Vote

Yesterday House Republicans unveiled their “Suburban Agenda,” reports Laura Litvan of Bloomberg. It is a grab bag of close-to-home issues that Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) says will give surburban families a “chance to have a voice in Congress.”

The issues in the agenda include:

• Create tax easements for charitable donations for open space
  
• Establish local grants to protect undeveloped suburban green spaces
  
• Require the Justice Department to identify the nation's top three most-violent street gangs
  
• Let school districts screen potential teacher hires to ensure they're not convicted pedophiles by linking state and national databases
  
• Create tax-free savings accounts to help children save for their first homes
  

You can see what this is aimed at: Mothers. And it’s not before time for Republicans to target the Mom vote. Tax cuts and Roth IRAs are guy stuff. But the close-to-home issues are girl stuff.

Whether the federal government should be getting into such local issues is a good question. But Bill Clinton did it when he needed the Soccer Mom vote for his reelection in 1996, so why shouldn’t Republicans do the same to tip the balance in close suburban House races?

Letter for Letter, Mr. President

Most people seem to be bemused or insulted by the letter Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently sent to President George W. Bush.

But it certainly hit home among the Democrats and the media who seem to think that Ahmadinejad’s letter is an invitation to dialog.

Iranian expatriate Amir Taheri is the chap to provide background on a matter like this, and he doesn’t disappoint.

Ahmadinejad's move fits into a 14-century-long Muslim tradition, initiated by the Prophet Muhammad himself, of writing letters to "the rulers of the world."

The usual gambit is to “call on 'the infidel' to abandon their faith and submit to Islam.” And that is exactly what Ahmadinejad’s letter does.

In 1987 Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini offered to help the Soviets in their quagmire in Afghanistan if they would convert to Islam.

No thanks, responded Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the atheist Soviet Union.

But the call from Iran to convert to Islam provides the United States with a platform on which to articulate its own message in response, that the union of church and state in the Islamist movement is a disaster waiting to happen, a reactionary mass movement that will bring misery to the Middle East much as Communism brought misery to Russia and China, Nazism brought misery to Germany, and left-wing Latin American Bolivarism is in the middle of bringing misery to Venezuela and Bolivia.

So President Bush should respond to the Iranian leader’s letter, writes Taheri, and invite Ahmadinejad

to abandon Khomeinism and convert to liberal democracy. For, when all is said and done, the fight over Iran today is not about real or imagined nuclear weapons; it is about the kind of Iran with which the Middle East, indeed the whole world, can feel comfortable.

And it is about whether the Islamist dream of a new Caliphate is a vision or a delusion.

How Could Welfare Reform Have Gone So Right?

This year is the tenth anniversary of Welfare Reform, the Republican-passed Clinton-signed reform that put a cap on unlimited welfare benefits in the summer of 1996. How has the reform turned out?

It seems important to ask because the usual suspects have gone quiet on us.

Fortunately Kay S. Hymowitz at City Journal has written a report on the aftermath of welfare reform. And it really has been a stunning success. The number of people on welfare has plummeted from 14 million to 5 million (see graphic). There has never been anything like it.

What went right? And why were the “unreformed” so wrong, wrong enough that when Andrew Cherlin, family scholar addressed the American Sociological Association he said:

“[T]here may be something to the idea that long-term dependency on public assistance is detrimental,” he conceded, though he had always “rejected this idea out of hand prior to 1996.” Poor mothers “derive a basic dignity” from work. In fact, he continued, “as a result of what I have seen, I now think the term “dead-end job” is a label that often doesn’t fit the perceptions of low-income workers; and I will not use it again.”

Well now. So let’s look at what happened, so that we can remind ourselves when people forget about what was achieved in the Great Welfare Reform of 1996. We will remember; we were there.

There were four major “concerns” of opponents to reform, according to Hymowitz.

• First, would welfare leavers find jobs?
  
• Second, would they sink even deeper into poverty?
  
• Third, would their children be harmed?
  
• And fourth, would the states take advantage of the wide flexibility the bill gave them on implementation to join what many anticipated would be a “race to the bottom”?
  

The answer is no. No, No, No, and No. Welfare leavers did find jobs. And they did not sink deeper into poverty.

[F]our years off welfare, only 4 percent of working single mothers — and only 8 percent of high school dropouts who were single mothers — were earning minimum wage or less.

So welfare mothers found jobs, and are overwhelmingly doing better than minimum wage. What about the children? The result is amazing. Child poverty rates went down after reform and “by 2001, they hit all-time lows for black children.”

Finally, what about a “race to the bottom?” The news is good there too. States spent a lot of money on work support for the former welfare mothers instead of abandoning them to their fate.

Given how wrong the social services experts were about welfare reform, someone needs to do some serious thinking.

It is not simply that they were wrong in making a few isolated predictions; after all, there were bound to be legitimate questions about how to transform welfare and about what would happen afterward. It’s that those predictions rested on a scaffold of moldy assumptions not just about poverty but about what kind of country we live in, how human beings decide to live their lives, and what role government plays in those decisions — in other words, about our politics in the deepest sense.

Said Bill Clinton, who signed the welfare reform bill:

“I’ve always known poor folks... I’ve just never thought they were helpless.”

It’s good to know you were on the side of the angels, Mr President. But let Hymowitz have the last word.

Human beings tend to do pretty much what they are expected to do. When the culture expects self-sufficiency, people will try to achieve it. When the culture sends mixed messages about self-sufficiency, as it did during the old welfare regime — particularly to the minority poor — some will not try to become self-sufficient.

As helpless as some people may seem they are, after all, the survivors: descendents of people who struggled to survive since the dawn of life on this planet. It is well to keep that in mind.

Republicans Finally Get Serious on Tax Cuts

Finally it looks like the Congressional Republicans are doing what we elected them to do. Cut taxes. Again.

It’s been well said, and it ought to be said again. If the Republican Party is not for tax cuts, what is it for?

If the Democrats, the party of FDR, are for “bold, persistent experimentation,” then the Republican Party is for “bold, persistent tax cuts.”

Anyway, Andrew Taylor reports in the Washington Post that Republicans are ready to move on stage one of a two stage tax cut plan. Stage One is presumably being run under the reconciliation process and so is filibuster-proof.

The bill devotes $21 billion to a two-year extension of the reduced 15 percent tax rate for capital gains and dividends, currently set to expire at the end of 2008.



And it would keep 15 million families from being hit this year with the alternative minimum tax, which was designed to make sure the wealthy paid taxes but is ensnaring more upper middle-income families because it was not indexed for inflation. The cost of this one year AMT "patch" is $34 billion.

Wow. $34 billion for a one year AMT patch. That baby really is starting to bite. The question is: How to make lefty rich trust-fund babies in the blue states to realize just how much of a friend George W. Bush is to them when he cuts their AMT?

Stage Two has some interesting features, obviously designed to be difficult for Democrats to oppose.

The second bill, expected to cost perhaps $30 billion, is to contain a number of widely backed tax breaks, among them a tuition tax deduction, a tax break for teachers who buy their own school supplies and a research and development tax credit for businesses.

It will also include another window to allow people to transfer assets from traditional IRAs into Roth IRAs. Democrats don’t like that because although it give the Feds a one time tax boost it results in less revenue in the long term.

Republicans should give Democrats every opportunity possible to come out against tax cuts. It’s only fair.

Third Way Democrats Propose "Politics of Opportunity"

How is it possible that Americans in opinion polls agree with Democrats but keep voting for Republicans? That is the question that the folks at Third Way are asking. What’s going wrong, they ask in a new study, The Politics of Opportunity conducted by Anne Kim and Jim Kessler?

Martin Frost reported on the report on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh mentioned it on his show on Wednesday.

What they discovered was

several key disconnects between the way progressives view the American economy and the middle-class, versus the way the middle-class feels about the nation’s economy and their role in it. Americans are optimistic about the nation’s future and their own; progressive messaging is not.

Let us repeat that for our readers, big and strong:

Americans are optimistic about the nation’s future and their own; progressive messaging is not.

That’s better. And even that statement doesn’t quite address the problem. It is not just “progressive messaging” that is pessimistic. It is progressives themselves.

Kim and Kessler go on to define five disconnects between progressives and the middle class.

• Pessimism vs. Optimism
  
• Economic Decline vs. Economic Strength
  
• Economic Security vs. Individual Opportunity
  
• Most progressive economic ideas don’t benefit the middle-class
  
• An off-target critique of conservatives
  

Yeah, that does pretty well cover the waterfront. So what do they propose?

First of all, they propose a new message: “A new era of middle-class opportunity.” Then they propose a three point framework to advance progressive ideas:

1. Keep the American economy strong
   
2. Promoting middle-class aspiration
   
3. Helping individuals manage risk so they can pursue their aspirations
   

Who can argue with that? The whole point of Republican economic policy since 1980 has been precisely to grow the economy, promote middle-class aspiration, and introduce a measured amount of risk into peoples’ lives, getting off the dangerous Democratic policy of socializing all risk so that the whole nation is at risk if the Democratic suits screw up. It is Democrats who have been actively opposing the common-sense policies that Republicans have been patiently pushing for the last generation.

And now these Third-Way Democrats want to sweep away a generation of demagoguery? Who do they think they are?

The report finishes off with a number of bullet points on how to demagogue Republicans. Here’s one. “No investments in infrastructure.” The United States is only No. 12 in internet infrastructure penetration.

That’s an interesting point. The United States used to be big in infrastructure. It built roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals. Then the liberals came along in the 1960s and wanted to spend money on social programs. Infrastructure, they said, would end up paving over the whole nation. And liberals started opposing highway construction. And the national investment in infrastructure started to get crowded out by the War on Poverty.

Now liberals want us to forget a generation of folly and opposition and believe them when they tell us that the US is lagging in the Internet. Please!

Still, let us look on the bright side. If Democrats could really came up with sensible ideas on the economy, ideas that catered to aspiration rather than pessimism, then Republicans could retire for a well-earned rest.

We could declare victory in the Reagan Revolution and figure out what to do next.

The Agony of Turning From The Mainstream of Life

Christian talk-show host Hugh Hewitt is properly annoyed by Andrew Sullivan’s drive-by column in Time, My Problem with Christianism. Writes Sullivan:

Are you a Christian who doesn't feel represented by the religious right? I know the feeling. When the discourse about faith is dominated by political fundamentalists and social conservatives, many others begin to feel as if their religion has been taken away from them.

Is it really true to say that the “discourse about faith is dominated by political fundamentalists and social conservatives?” Where is this going on? On the TV News? In the universities? In the schools? In the courts? In the Congress? On talk radio?

And just who is this religious right anyway? Pat Robertson? Jerry Falwell? Rick Warren? Just who did you have in mind?

Come on, Andrew. The main discourse about religion in the public square is coming from secular liberals who won’t shut up about the Taliban religious right. But the religious right seldom gets a chance to actually occupy bandwidth in the national conversation and get its story out. At least, the mainstream media always makes quite sure that no religious right utterance gets into the public square without rebuttal.

We understand Sullivan’s rage, of course. All political issues, all religious issues, all cultural issues for Andrew Sullivan are viewed through the lens of gay marriage. There is only one issue, and that is gay marriage. There is only one acceptable opinion: to be for gay marriage.

We tolerant conservatives do feel Sullivan’s pain. We understand his problem. It is shared by many people on the left who have been led away from the mainstream of life by the left’s ideas and agenda. They are the disaffected faculty in the university. They are the childless liberal women who still demand an absolute right to abortion. They are the childless liberal couples who have put work, or career, or spirituality, or activism, or the environment before children. And they are the gays and lesbians who imagine that by grabbing the Holy Grail of gay marriage that they will be able to return to the mainstream of life.

They will be disappointed. You do not get to live in the mainstream of life by getting the state to certify that you are mainstream. Would that it were so.

If you want to live in the mainstream of life then you need to fall in love, get married, sire children, and then raise them. Breeding, they used to call it with derision.

The mainstrem of life is rather mundane and frustrating when you are in the middle of it. You fantasize about the career you might have had, or the adventures you might have had, or the torrid love affairs you might have had.

One day as you paddle along in the mainstream of life you discover that your children are all grown and you realize that you are too old to start again with that exciting career you might have had, or the life of adventure you might have had, or the thrilling love affairs you might have had.

But if you are a liberal and you have spent half your life sneering at the mainstream of life, and then you suddenly decide that you want into the mainstream of life, what do you do? You call on sympathetic judges in Massachusetts to certify you as mainstream, to change the world with a stroke of a pen, as liberals have done all our lives. You demand that Americans admit you into the mainstream of life.

And then you get nasty.

But is really doesn’t matter what you do, or how loudly you shout and scream. You can write nasty articles calling “fundamentalist” Christians “Christianists” if you like. And then you can disingenuously claim that you are not saying that “Christianists“ are terrorists. But it still doesn’t change anything. Go ahead. Say it.

The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist... And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all.

We understand exactly what you are doing, Andrew Sullivan. You are trying to marginalize decent American Christians as extremists and bigots.

Because, decent and tolerant as they are, ordinay American citizens just cannot stomach the idea of letting liberals rip the institution of marriage to shreds. Not yet, at least. And there is no reason why they should.

Ever since the 1960s liberals have been talking down marriage. It was old-fashioned. It was middle class. It was oppressive to women. Now all of a sudden they have rushed back. We want to be married, after all, they cry!

Only, being liberals they can’t leave well alone. Ordinary marriage isn’t good enough. There must be change! There must be accommodation of the marginalized! GLBT! Polyamory! And anyone that disagrees is a bigot.

Will this nightmare never end?