Politics Has Always Been Risky Business

The recent Scooter Libby case moves columnist John Podhoretz to mourn that anyone taking a top government job ought to have his head examined. 

If you were interviewing a candidate for such a job, he writes, you would have to tell the candidate that the chance of

having to hire a lawyer at some point during your employment with us around 40 percent.

Who would be so crazy to do that, when the lawyer fees alone might be enough to ruin you?

It’s certainly true that politics has gotten rougher in the last twenty years.  Maybe.  But then politics has been contested more in the last twenty years.  Conservatives and Republicans have been less and less inclined to go with the flow of more and more government programs and more and more inclined to contest the issue with their liberal and Democratic friends.

And now of course they can turn to usgovernmentspending.com and get the figures.  Just how much is enough for government health care or government education?  $700 billion? $800 billion?  A trillion or two?  When would liberals cry Uncle?

Liberals and Democrats have noticed this.  They wonder what ever happened to the gentlemanly Republicans they used to know.  They remember the Ev Dirksen and Jerry Ford show on TV.  Now there was a pair of decent Republicans! Now they are all so coarse and rude—and, you know, religious.

But the fact is that politics has always been a rough game.  In our day the worst that can happen to you is disgrace and imprisonment.  But in the good old days it was treason, attainder, execution, and banishment, spiced by the occasional episode of torture.  And all because you joined with the wrong people or excited the suspicion of a powerful peer of the realm.

So it’s true what J-pod says:

Every single person who has worked in the highest reaches of the U.S. government in recent memory has worked intimately with someone who has gone to jail, been convicted of a crime or been impoverished by legal fees - someone they know to be a fine person, a dedicated person with a family, who is the farthest thing from a criminal and yet whose name is dragged through the mud and whose reputation is trashed.

 But it was ever thus.  That’s why they call fame a bitch goddess. 

Barone on Gore's Secular Faith

It’s an inexhaustible topic, the solipsism of the baby-boom generation, the idea that the world revolves around the wonderful evolved people who came to consciousness in the 1960s.

And that goes for Al Gore, baby-boomer almost, and his global-warming belief system, writes Michael Barone.

Gore and his followers seem to assume that the ideal climate was the one they got used to when they were growing up.

We’re told in effect that the climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s was, of all those that have ever existed, the best of all possible climates. Not by science. But as a matter of faith.

The trouble is that the climate of the earth has always fluctuated—in all times scales.  And in the past climate has changed a lot faster than it is doing right now.

Writes Barone: “Even The New York Times bridles” at Gore’s exaggerations.

After Gore won the Academy Award for his film on climate change, the Times printed an article in which respected scientists — not Republicans, not on oil company payrolls — charged that Gore has vastly exaggerated the likelihood of catastrophic effects.

 It comes down to a matter of spirituality, the baby-boomer word for religious faith.

The natural human yearning for spirituality has produced in many people educated in secular-minded universities and enveloped in an atmosphere of contempt for traditional religion a faith that we vulgar human beings have a sacred obligation not to inflict damage on Mother Earth.

Of course, Gore and his pals do not intend to change their ways.  It is the great unwashed, you and me, who will make the great sacrifice to propitiate the climate change gods.

Welcome to usgovernmentspending.com!

Here at the Road to the Middle Class we are frequently disturbed by the lack of comprehensive data on government spending.  We want to know important facts like:

• How much do we spend on education?
• How much do we spend on welfare?
• How much do we spend on government pensions, from Social Security to federal pensions to state and local pensions?

It is difficult to get information like this, because most of it is split up between federal and state-and-local programs. And our rulers like it that way.

But now we have usgovernmentspending.com.  Now you can find out what the great heads of government spending cost us all: federal, state, and local.

Want to know what the Big Three are?  No it’s not the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.  Right now, in 2007, here are the Big Three Government Programs:

1. Government Pensions: $873 billion
2. Government Health Care: $844 billion
3. Government Education: $745 billion

Go ahead, check out the details at usgovernmentspending.com. The thing is: all three big programs are a mess:

1. Governments have way overpromised on pensions.
2. Government health care doesn’t really give us much in the way of additional life expectancy. Some third-world nations have a life expectancy almost a long as the US.
3. Government education over the last 160 years hasn’t budged the literacy rate of 90 percent.  Maybe it’s even gone down.

Our liberal friends love to remind us of General Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex.

They would do well to think about the beam in their own eye—actually three beams: the government pension complex, the government health complex, and the government education complex.  Those guys make the Pentagon contractors look like pikers.

Britain's Labour Proposes Tax Cuts

In Britain this week they had a Nixon Goes to China Moment.  The Labour Party finance minister Gordon Brown proposed marginal tax rate cuts.

He cut two percent from corporation tax, from 30 percent to 28 percent, and he cut two percent from the “basic rate” of individual income tax, from 22 percent to 20 percent.

For conservative commentators like Simon Heffer it was the last straw.  For months they have been complaining that the Conservatives under  “Dave” Cameron have been making a bad mistake by holding back on proposing tax cuts and instead talk about responsible stewardship and balancing public and private needs by “sharing the proceeds of growth.” 

This strategy was in ruins, Heffer complained.

It crashed spectacularly, and at a velocity nearer the speed of light than of sound, at about 1.15pm yesterday, when Gordon Brown announced he was cutting tuppence off income tax.

 But did it?  Is it not a good thing when the left-wing party proposes tax rate cuts?

The problem that the British Tories have had for the last ten years is that whenever they proposed tax cuts the Labour Party (and the chattering class) immediately accused them of turning their backs on schools and the National Health Service.

But if Labour now thinks that tax rate cuts are a good idea, then tax rate cuts are on the table—for everyone.

Anyway, the British people don’t seem that impressed by the proposed cuts.  According to an overnight opinion poll:

Seven out of 10 people believe Gordon Brown’s give-and-take Budget has left them worse off or will make no difference to their family finances[.]

Place your bets.  How much am I bid for a tax cut?

Plain Old Patronage: A Theory of Government

In the excellent TCSDaily, Arnold Kling proposes a theory of government.  He calls his idea “The Arbiter With The Golden Scepter.” 

People get into disputes, he writes. 

In order to resolve these disputes peacefully, people must submit disputes to an Arbiter, who makes impartial decisions in light of common law.

But of course, it is one thing for an Arbiter to issue a decision. The problem is to enforce it.

In order to ensure that the Arbiter’s decision is final, and that the loser does not resort to violence, people have to give the Arbiter overwhelming power to quell violence. I call this overwhelming power the Golden Scepter.

This, of course, is the contract theory of government upon which our own constitution and government is based.  It assumes that the people forming “a more perfect union” get together from a state of nature without government to write a contract to govern their relations.

But anthropology teaches us something different.  People do not start out in a Hobbesian state of nature.  They start out in families.

And in families it is usual for the father to resolve disputes.  In the old days the father had the power of life and death over all members of the family.  That is what patriarchy means: rule of the fathers.

Of course, even in those days, fathers went to bed.  And in the interval between going to bed and getting up in the morning, they often found that they had made the wrong decision.  So they changed their minds.  Nobody knows how this happened, although Agatha Christie in her Autobiography hints at how it worked in the notoriously patriarchal Edwardian age.

The movement of the progressive peoples, wrote Sir Henry Maine in Ancient Law, is from status to contract.  So it is, but in the movement from family and clan to city, government grows from an outgrowth of fatherly justice to an organized entity with its own interests, interests separate and distinct from the interests of fathers.

And so we find, as Maine found in Roman society, that government slowly supplants the power of the father with the power of the government.

It takes over something else besides the power to resolve disputes.  It takes over the power of patronage. 

Yes.  You noticed.  Patronage and patriarchy both start with the Latin root patr-, as in pater, father.

Our modern welfare state is a living testimony to the fact that people still want to live under a father.  They want to enjoy his patronage, to receive his favors, to nestle within the circle of his power.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the people to rage most bitterly against the patriarchy are the ones who insist on the fatherly embrace of the welfare state.

So Arnold Kling’s Arbiter with the Golden Scepter is really just a father.

When do you think that the people of the welfare state will grow out of their adolescence and choose to live as free human beings, free from the protection and the power of the father?

Good Old-fashioned Democratic Politics

If you are a Republican the worst fear about Democrats taking over Congress was that they might have changed.  They might have given up their old ways of badgering businessmen and solving every problem with government spending.  What would Republicans do then?

But not to fear.  The Democrats running Capitol Hill are the Old Democrats of spending, subsidy, privilege, and micro-managing regulation.

Democrats are trying to add $24 billion in pork to President Bush’s $95 billion request for Iraq, reports Donald Lambro.

Most of the added money stuffed into the emergency supplemental bill, expected to come up for a vote today, is for the kind of costly, pork barrel, special interest, vote-buying handouts Democrats promised they would end if they won control of Congress.

Since the Democrats haven’t changed their spots the political space traditionally occupied by Republicans and conservatives is still available. Even though the Republican Congress sadly betrayed the trust of their supporters in recent years and created an opening for a new, moderate Democratic Party, the Democrats have decided they like their old ways best. 

So let’s get back to the important work of formulating ideas and policies to reform the corrupt welfare state and its steadily deteriorating performance in pensions, in education, and in health care.

The American people are counting on us. 

Globalizing Health Care

Here at the Road to the Middle Class we are not so sure about the 15 percent of GDP spent on health care.  When it comes to improving life expectancy, expensive bio-medicine isn’t exactly outperforming sanitation and baisc OB-GYN care  to keep infant mortality down.

And then there’s the regulation and the licensure and the special interests, not to mention the herioc end-of-life care that doesn’t relieve suffering and doesn’t extend life.

So it’s good to see the chaps at Democracy Project doing a bit of thinking. They don’t like

the status quo or various extensions of the status quo such as proposals for a single payer system, mandating employee coverage, mandating employer coverage, health spending accounts[.]

Everyone, Democrat and Republican, wants to give the present system a few tweaks.  But nobody is thinking big ball.

The problem with our health care system is over-regulation. Yet, all the Republican solutions and Democratic solutions involve extending or reshaping the regulation.

Why not sidestep regulation altogether?

This can be accomplished through overseas medical treatment.

 What, medical tourism, risking life and limb in third-world countries?  Well, not so fast.

Back in the 1950s, many Americans believed that goods "made in Japan" were of low quality. As it turned out, by the 1970s "made in Japan" meant better quality than U.S.-manufactured goods. There is no reason why health care can’t be provided in the third world.

What makes you think that medical care in say, India, won’t be competitive with the US in 10 years or so? 

The beauty of it is that it would force the US health care industry to start cutting costs and improving quality.  Just like the US auto industry had to do.

We’ll find out, along the way, just how privileged and subsidized our vast health industry has become.  And we can expect our doctors and nurses and adminstrators to go screaming to Congress for relief from medical “dumping.”

But we won’t pay a blind bit of attention to their screeching.