Mr Populist wants Privilege and Subsidy

Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been getting nice coverage as moderates, even though their ADA ratings for 2005 are both 100 per cent perfect liberal.

Now millionaire lawyer John Edwards is getting a reputation as a populist. He’s running for president on the following five headline issues on his campaign website:

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  Provide moral leadership in the world
  



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  Strengthen our middle class and end poverty
  



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  Guarantee universal health care for every American
  



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  Lead the fight against global warming
  



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  Get America and other countries off our addiction to oil
  

So let’s just look at one issue. Ending poverty. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Jackie Calmes

[I]n an address in June at Washington's National Press Club...
he set a national goal of ending poverty in 30 years for the 37 million Americans living below the poverty line, lifting one-third of them above it in each of the next three decades. His "Working Society" agenda would mean a higher federal minimum wage, reduced taxes for low-income workers, universal health care, and one million new housing vouchers for working families, to help them find homes in neighborhoods with better schools.

But is there any indication that those proposals would do anything to end poverty? Let’s look at the economics:

1. Higher minimum wage: throws people out of work.
   
2. Reduced taxes for low-income workers: would help, but taxes on low-income workers are already heavily rebated by the Low Income Tax Credit.
   
3. Universal health care: doesn’t actually help much, because most of the uninsured are single people in their twenties.
   
4. Housing vouchers: but we already have that, big time.
   

In other words, John Edwards wants to increase the power of government over peoples’s lives with new subsidies and privileges.

If Edwards wants a “Working Society” he should propose a reduction in the disincentives for people to work. People in the lowest quintile work about half the hours that people in the higher quintiles. Maybe that’s why they don’t earn much money.

The way to strengthen the middle class is to make them independent of government and corporations, with their own jobs, their own savings, their own houses, their own health insurance, and a much smaller government taking money out of their paychecks.

But why would a Democrat help them do that? Why, with jobs, savings, houses, and smaller government, pretty soon they’d be turning into Republicans.

To Help The Poor

We are far too severe on good honest chaps like Ebenezer Scrooge who refuse to celebrate Christmas, writes Spengler.

[Dickens'] Scrooge is a vicious caricature of the Puritan position. Considering that America is the last Christian nation thanks in large measure to the accomplishments of the Puritans, we should reconsider Scrooge's point of view.

Christmas is a children’s celebration and Puritans, like “[t]he Jews[,] are too old to play at being children, and always have been.”

But Christmas is not just a time for childish joy, it is also a time when we remember the poor. And the Puritans, with their devotion to work, have something to teach us in that department as well. It is faith and work and enterprise that ultimately helps the poor.

But maybe you are not inclined to listen to the advice of the Puritans. You can, if you prefer, learn instead, as Thomas Sowell writes, from the studied unwillingness of progressives to show an “interest in economic history or in economics in general.”

Progressives show a remarkable interest in doing something about disparities in income and in ending poverty, but they resist what we might call a rational or empirical investigation into the actual record on eliminating poverty.

For instance, in the last twenty years the people of India and China have made startling progress in eliminating poverty.

An estimated 20 million people in India rose out of destitution in just one decade and more than a million Chinese per month have risen out of poverty. But have you heard any progressive intellectuals explaining how such a dramatic change for the better came about?

On the contrary, they are mounting an attack on Wal-Mart, a corporation heroically dedicated to selling the products of Chinese workers in the US retail marketplace at Always Low Prices, Always.

Progressives are in the business of complaining and denouncing -- as a prelude to seeking sweeping powers to control other people’s lives, in the name of curing the ills of society.

The last thing they want is to discover and discuss how millions of people rose out of poverty by entirely different methods, often by freeing economies from the control of people with sweeping power over other people’s lives.

Er, yes. Because progressives insist on doing for people what they ought to be doing for themselves. And progressives insist on doing it using other peoples’ money.

So how are a million Chinese a month rising out of poverty? The world wants to know.

But the great question remains, for Puritans and for progressives. What have you done to help the poor? Today.

How Certain Are You?

The forces of ant-religious bigotry have been developing a nice little meme lately about certainty. They have been telling all their freinds that they stand nobly for skepticism against the rigid certainties of religious fundamentalism and superstition.

Columnist Jonah Goldberg has a technique for dealing with these professional skeptics.

Whenever I hear people say such things, I like to ask them, "Are you sure about that?" When they say yes, which they always do, I follow up by asking, "No, no: Are you really, really certain that certainty is bad?" At some point even the irony-deficient get the joke.

That’s the point. There seem to be a lot of people in the United States right now that have pretty rigid opinions about the rigidity of people whose ideas they don’t like.

Of course, back in the Nineties conservatives made a pretty good book complaining about the slipperiness of Slick Willie.

But which is it? How certain do you get to be without being dogmatically rigid? And how flexible can you be without being a wet noodle?

The answer is: It depends.

Virtually every hero in human history has been driven by certainty, by the courage of their convictions. Sir Thomas More and Socrates chose certain death, pun intended, over uncertain life. Martin Luther King Jr. -- to pick liberalism's most iconic hero -- was hardly plagued with doubt about the rightness of his cause.

And the villains of the world, when they weren’t outrageously shifty, were monstrously certain. Think H-word, Stalin, Mao, Torquemada, Genghis Khan.

In our current American culture, of course, the rage against certainty is really nothing more than the Pharisaic disdain of the creative classes for the rule-following traditional classes.

Of course, we all feel disdain for the fools that surround us. If only we weren’t so sure.

Gerald Ford, RIP

President Gerald Ford, who died December 26, represented the minority Republican Party of the post-war era. While living a decent, play-by-the-rules life, Ford was part of a generation of Republicans playing strategic defense against the militant expansion of progressive politics and its product the government welfare state.

A man who lost his father and his name in divorce, Ford married a divorced woman and then shared his life with Betty Bloomer Warren Ford, fathering four children and fifteen grandchildren.

Serving as president in the edgy 1970s, a decade of folly that included the retreat from Vietnam, wage-and-price controls, a vast increase in government social spending, the turn of the Democrats from an American party to a trans-national party, and a double dose of inflation, Ford was the completely normal man, who always did the right thing.

Now he is gone, at 93 past the age when life has any savor. We shall look in vain for a politician with the decency that he projected and practiced all his life.

The Popeye Moment on Single-Parent Families

And while we are at it, let’s get serious about single-parent families. As the climate enthusiasts like to say, the science is in.
Single-parent families are a very bad idea. So why don’t CNN and Fox News run single-parent horror stories 24-7? They could, you know, without breaking a sweat. And I’ll bet there are enough single-parent horror stories out there that they could change the story every hour if they had the budget for it.

Now that would be something.

Janice Shaw, director and senior fellow of the Beverly LaHaye Institute, the policy institute of Concerned Women for America, thinks that, when it comes to single parents, it is time we had a “Popeye Moment,” the point in a Popeye cartoon where Popeye says: "I've had all I can stand. I can't stands no more."

Are we there yet on single-parent families? Why not? It’s not just a moral question, or, if you prefer a question of rational ethics. It’s a safety question.

Children are much safer living with their married biological parents than any other arrangement.

Sorry, that’s not quite true. Adopted children living with their married adoptive parents are even safer than children living with their natural married parents.

Which is an argument, if we needed one, for getting tough on non-performing single parents. If you can’t get your act together, fast, Ms. Single Mom, then we are going to put your kid up for adoption. Fast.

That’s another subject on which the science is in. The worst thing you can do to a child is to have her hanging around in foster families while her single parent leisurely gets her life together.

A kid needs a permanent home. Fast.

You see, when a single mom doesn’t get her act together, fast, it shows that she just doesn’t care about kids.

Is Racism a Fact or a Faith?

Let’s talk about racism. Well, it’s the day after Christmas, and time to take up weighty subjects.

Asks Shelby Steele, author of White Guilt:

A recent CNN poll tells us that 84% of blacks and 66% of whites think racism is a "very serious" or "somewhat serious" problem in American life. Is this true?

Since it’s Steele asking the question, you know what the answer is going to be.

[W]e must acknowledge one of the most profound achievements in recent human history: the death of white supremacy. Here was an event far more world-altering than the collapse of communism, and yet, out of a truly extraordinary historical blindness, it has gone utterly unnoticed.
...
It was defeated by revolutions in the last half of the 20th century that spanned the globe from India to Algeria to the United States. It was defeated by the people who had suffered it. And even if it survives in some quarters as an idea, as a speculation, it now stigmatizes anyone associated with it to the point of ruin.

That is why when a comedian like Michael Richards uses the N-word in a comedy routine, he gets handed his guts for garters. Obviously, racism still exists, but racists have a pretty hard time of it these days. That is, of course, white racists. Racism florishes in non-white lands, including most particularly the lands of the House of Submission.

So the question is whether racism is a fact or a faith.

The great mistake Americans made after the civil rights victories of the '60s was to allow race to become a government-approved means to power. Here was the incentive to make racism into a faith. And its subsequent life as a faith has destroyed our ability to know the reality of racism in America. Today we live in a terrible ignorance that will no doubt last until we take race out of every aspect of public life -- until we learn, as we did with religion, to separate it from the state.

Now that’s an interesting concept, the separation of race and state. And it is not some vague constitutional penumbra, but actually written into the constitution as an Amendment. Actually, two Amendments. And then it was written into law in the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.

There is none so blind as he who will not see.

Fonz Moves In On British "Panto"

If it’s Christmas it must be time for “panto,” the deliciously vulgar British holiday entertainment. Its eternal subjects are Cinderella, Aladdin, Peter Pan, Dick Whittington and His Cat, and Mother Goose. The leading man is always a girl in tights and there is always a “dame” part, played by a man. Only in Cinderella there are two dame parts, the two Ugly Sisters.

Another thing about the pantos is that there is always audience participation, a pleasure very thin on the ground in our modern age.

Still, as Michael Henderson relates, it’s a wonder that panto works at all.

Men dressing up as women, risqué jokes in front of young children, unfunny catch-phrases, audience participation in nonsense songs, and the willful stupidity of performers who can't see what is visible to everybody else. And you expect people to pay good money to watch this every Christmas? No wonder you lot lost the colonies.

Well, I remember with some pleasure the pantos I saw as a child in London. But I remember that I did not like the idea of the leading man, Aladdin, played by a girl in tights. What was the point of all that female leg, I fumed. Little did I know.

Panto is experiencing something of a boomlet these days. Sir Ian McKellen appeared in one last year and now we Yanks are getting in on the act. The Fonz, Henry Winkler, is appearing as Captain Hook at Wimbledon this season.

On a whim, I decided to Google panto and immediately found that all the British newspapers have a panto article running today.

The Times’s Janice Turner strongly disapproves of panto going upmarket. She went to a panto at the Barbican and declares

This will be the last time I attend “posh panto”... It looks like panto, it just doesn’t feel like panto.

And off she goes to tell her readers exactly why the downscale panto at Wimbledon is much better than the posh panto in the City and the West End. Among other things,

At Wimbledon the dancing girls are comely and well drilled, at the Barbican they are chunky and half-arsed.

And really, how dumb can you be to put good money out to see chunky and half-arsed dancing girls?