2006: How Many Unsung Heroes Died?

The year 2006 saw the deaths of many famous people, from Robert Altman to Al Zarqawi, as Mark Steyn relates. It saw the death of a decent man, in Gerald Ford, a brilliant man, in Milton Friedman, and an evil man, in Saddam Hussein.

But what are you to say of the deaths of the countless unsung heroes, such as Richard Milward, “Schoolmaster whose history lessons, and whose goodness, inspired generations of pupils at Wimbledon College?”

According to the obituary in the Daily Telegraph he spent his entire working adult life teaching history at a Jesuit secondary school in Wimbledon, England. Sir John Keegan, the British historian, was one of his students and “left the College with a good history A-level and a place at Balliol [College, Oxford.]”

This was a man who contracted polio at age 15 and “suffered a crippling back condition for the rest of his life.”

How do we measure the contribution of a man like Richard Milward, unable to serve in World War II, unable to become a member of the Society of Jesus, yet devoting his life to teaching history and coaching cricket?

Just Don't Say the M-Word

American-in-London Janet Daley, like us at Road to the Middle Class, is hungrily devouring the new Tory research paper “Breakdown Britain.”

But, she says, we know all this. We know that the social breakdown and feral behavior we see all around us is due to one thing:

That is, [many young people] lack what were once considered to be the basic provisions of family life: two parents, a sense of belonging to a stable household (even if it was poor) and a belief that their lives were tied into some wider network of relationships with adults.

So why do we need a new report, when we know it already?

Now we have another report to say it all again. This time it has been commissioned directly by the Conservative Party, which is a hopeful sign. But I am not blown away by optimism. Not that I am disparaging the project. Iain Duncan Smith's social justice policy unit has done some splendid work: not only in reiterating all that evidence again about how much more likely the children of lone parents are to have poor outcomes in terms of education, mental health, drug abuse and criminal offending, but also in demonstrating how effective local voluntary organisations can be in confronting these problems.

We know all this. Why do we need to chew over it again.

And this very day Rich Lowry is saying the same thing. He is looking at presidential candidate John “Two Americas” Edwards anti-poverty proposals and he is saying: So?

Edwards' anti-poverty proposals aren't compelling because they fail to acknowledge a basic truth: It is impossible "to grow the middle class," as he puts it, without spreading middle-class values.

Tell you what, Lowry writes, there really are Two Americas.

In one America, by and large, women find a suitable mate, marry him and then have a baby. In the other America, by and large, women have the baby first, creating nearly insurmountable difficulties for themselves on the path to the middle class.

What a concept! But John Edwards “refuses to offer as the obvious solution the M-word that rhymes with carriage.”

The root cause of the social breakdown we see all around us is all tied to the liberal taboo around the M-word (rhymes with carriage).

So why do we have to say this again and again, and why is the M-word still taboo (except when we are talking about the gay M-word)? And why has nothing happened, nothing changed?

I will tell you why. It comes out in Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, the story of the Great Society programs of the 1960s.

The Great Society folks were supremely confident that their programs were going to end poverty as we know it. So they set up a whole bunch of assessment projects to measure the progress that was sure to come.

The only problem was that already by the end of the 1960s the results of the assessment progams were in. And the War-on-Poverty liberals knew that their programs weren’t working.

So what did they do? Did they say: OK chaps, sorry about that, a bit of a cock-up on the social science front. We’ll have to terminate all those programs. They simply aren’t working.

They did not. And we know why. The answer is political power. The Democratic Party derives its support from the people who benefit from government programs. They cannot afford to close them down for then they would lose political power.

That is why, ever since the 1960s, the Democrats have perfected the politics of personal destruction against anyone who dares to lay a finger on any of their precious programs.

People Have Needs, they say. You Just Don’t Care About Kids, they say.

So they do. But good people can disagree about how to get there.

Like the postmodernists say: It’s all about power.

And that means that it doesn’t matter how long it takes. Until the day that the welfare-state liberals cry “Uncle” we are going to stay right here, chewing over the same reports and findings and unescapable truths and spitting them out into the public square.

The left has a phrase for what we are doing. It is called: Speaking Truth to Power.

David Cameron Exposes "Breakdown Britain"

For over a year people in Britain have been wondering if the new leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, is for real.

He began by demonstrating that he would be different, by bicycling to work and by installing a wind turbine on his house.

So much so that traditional Tories have been completely put off by him. But he has brought the Tories into a lead over the Labour Party in the opinion polls for the first time since the early 1990s, whatever that is worth.

His strategy has been to appeal to the secular metropolitan voters who have deserted the Conservative Party for the Lib-Dems, the center party in Britain. He wants to make the Conservative Party acceptable to voters who have bought into the idea, bruited in the left-wing media, that the Tory Party is the “nasty” party. As we know, metropolitan secular elites are the most enlightened people in the world, and it will certainly help the Tories if “enlightened” people decide that the Conservative Party is no longer beyond the Pale for “people like us.”

But now the Conservative Party is starting to put rubber on the road, and the most clear sign of this Breakdown Britain, an interim policy report lead by former party leader Iain Duncan Smith. A summary of the talking points can be found here (pdf).

Breakdown Britain is a devastating report of social disintegration in Britain. It is like Charles Murray’s Losing Ground on steroids.
It contains the following sections:

• Breakdown Britain - an interim report on the state of the nation
  
  
• Volume 1- Economic Dependence and Worklessness
  
  
• Volume 2 - Family Breakdown
  
  
• Volume 3 - Addictions
  
  
• Volume 4 - Educational Failure
  
  
• Volume 5 - Consumer Indebtedness
  
  
• Volume 6 - Third Sector
  

By “Third Sector” the Conservatives mean the non-profit, social enterprise sector that is neither business nor government. In his introduction of the report Conservative leader David Cameron openly attributed F.A. Hayek as the inspiration for the focus on the Third Sector. He said:

To me those 700,000 [non-profit] organisations prove that there is such a thing as society. It's just not the same thing as the state. The term "the third sector" was first coined by the liberal economist Friedrich von Hayek, the intellectual guru of Thatcherism. In Law, Legislation and Liberty Hayek wrote that "it is most important for a healthy society that we preserve between the commercial and the governmental sector a third, independent sector."

This is a vital distinction that conservatives have been trying to bring into the public square for the last half-century. When we say “society” we do not just mean “government.”

It is worth noting that Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism also writes of three sectors, the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector. And we can assume that he is talking about the same thing.

If you take a look at the talking points link you can find some pretty horrifying statistics.

8.2 million people in the UK have an alcohol disorder and over a million children are living in
homes with alcoholics.


Some 10.7 million people in Britain suffer relationship problems as a result of debt.


Levels of giving [to charity] among the wealthier members of society are surprisi
ngly low.


Children from white working-class backgrounds are the most under-performing ethnic
group [in school]; just 17 per cent of disadvantaged white boys attain 5 or more A*-Cs at GCSE [i.e. graduate from high school]
compared to a 56 per cent national average.

This sort of comprehensive policy analysis by a political party is impressive. You can see its purpose.

Firstly, it is setting up the idea that the Conservative Party is thinking seriously about the problems of the British nation.

Secondly, it provides a narrative, a framework of thought, for Conservative Party activists and politicians, and also conservative opinion makers in the media.

The contrast with the U.S. Democratic Party, just restored to power in Congress couldn’t be more clear. Democrats have done no thinking in the past twelve years when they have been out of power in Congress. The results will start to show up rather quickly in 2007.

Is David Cameron for real? It is beginning to look as if he really is.

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.

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:

• 
  Provide moral leadership in the world
  



• 
  Strengthen our middle class and end poverty
  



• 
  Guarantee universal health care for every American
  



• 
  
  Lead the fight against global warming
  



• 
  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.