Riling Up the Republican Base

The art of politics is to divide up the electorate neatly into 51-49, with 51 percent for our side.  You want to fire up your base, encourage moderatew with your message of hope, and put the other base to sleep.

But Democrats seem to be working hard to fire up the Republican base.  First of all,  The Prowler reports, the Democrats are planning to reintroduce the Fairness Doctrine that requires  “both sides” of an issue to be aired on the public airwaves.  And the reason seems to be pure politics.

"First, [Democrats] failed on the radio airwaves with Air America, no one wanted to listen," says a senior adviser to Pelosi. "Conservative radio is a huge threat and political advantage for Republicans and we have had to find a way to limit it. Second, it looks like the Republicans are going to have someone in the presidential race who has access to media in ways our folks don’t want, so we want to make sure the GOP has no advantages going into 2008."

Look Democrats, if you want to do one thing that would really rile up the Republican base, go ahead, make my day.

Then there’s the Democratic plan to let the Bush tax cuts expire.  According to the Heritage Foundation:

As it currently stands, the House budget resolu­tion proposes to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, which could potentially cause the average taxpayer to face an additional $3,026 in taxes. Further, allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire could cause great damage to the economy, reducing both job creation and economic growth.

Last time the Democrats increased taxes, in 1993 the result was immediate.  The voters chose in 1994 a Republican Congress.

Maybe the Democrats are doing these things because that’s the only tune they know how to play.

But I’d say that the strategic thing to do would be to keep the Republican base fast asleep and discouraged.

After all, the Democrats spend something like $2.5 trillion in taxes a year on pensions, health care, education, and welfare.  Isn’t that enough to keep their supporters at home?

Let's Throw Good Money After Bad

Yes.  Give us a billion here and a billion there and we could really solve the high-school dropout problem.  That’s about what Education Secretary Spellings is proposing, according to Donald Lambro.

Back in the 1960s President Kennedy pointed out that four in ten youngsters did not finish high school.

"Forty-four years later, the dropout rate for African-American, Hispanic and Native American students approaches 50 percent. We are wasting not just lives but time," Mrs. Spellings said in an address to the National Summit on America’s Silent Epidemic

 Secretary Spellings has a solution.

Mrs. Spellings proposes Title I spending in President Bush’s No Child Left Behind reauthorization be increased another $1 billion "to improve and strengthen our public high schools serving low-income students."

Like that’s going to help.

Look, we know why kids are failing high school and high schools are failing kids.  It is part of the whole welfare state syndrome.

• Why bother to work in school when many low-income women can use the welfare system to get support?
• Why bother to work in school when women are available to you—without having to demonstrate the ability to get a “decent” job?
• Why bother to educate kids when your job is pretty well guaranteed for life?

And so on.  The problem is that we don’t know what kind of schools low-income parents want.  We don’t know what kind of schools would best prepare low-income kids for a productive life.

All we know is what the experts have told us and what the education monopoly has bullied us into funding.

Imagine that the auto industry had been run by university professors and union leaders for the last 160 years. 

That’s the point.  What schools need is what everyone needs: open competition for the votes of the consumers.

Traditional values down, but not out

Some political actors believe that the Democratic capture of Congress in 2006 represents the end of the traditional values movement in America, reports Cheryl Welzstein.

"Huge numbers of religiously observant Americans voted for Democrats, reversing a 14-year trend," according to the liberal People for the American Way (PFAW). "There are hugely hopeful signs that the pendulum in American public life is swinging back from the far-right extremes."

 Well, sorta.  According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life:

Most white evangelicals and white mainline Protestants voted Republican, although by slightly smaller numbers. White Catholics, who in the past have strongly supported Republicans, voted for Democrats in 2006 by a bare majority.
"Nonwhite" voters of any faith, who tend to vote Democratic, backed their party in higher numbers. The biggest Democratic surge came from three small religious groups that skew Democratic — white "unaffiliated," white "other faiths" and white Jews.

But there is definitely a big Democratic tilt developing in the youth vote.

Some observers criticize the traditional values movement for identifying too much with the Republican Party

Says Mark J. Rozell, a public-policy professor at George Mason University who studies religion in politics: "There are many, and I will include myself, that think that the religious conservative movement may have made a mistake some years ago by adopting a one-party strategy, that they should have done more to play the parties off each other.

That’s easy to say, of course.  But the reality is that the Republican Party is friendly to religious believers and the Democratic Party is friendly to secularists.  And that orientation is not likely to change much in the future.  What’s a believer to do?

Last November the voters threw the Republicans out for a number of reasons, and rightly so.  Throwing the rascals out is always the right thing to do.  In fact, the voters don’t do it enough.

Now it’s time for Democrats to demonstrate that they deserve the support the voters gave them.

Global Guerrillas for Breakfast

Alerted by the trend-spotting Instapundit to the new book by John Robb Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization I naturally proceeded to the blog by BNW author John Robb.  Right now he’s taking a look at the Fort Dix six.

We will see this again and again. One reason is that in open source warfare, the barriers to entry are nearly zero. Anyone can participate. All you need to do in order to join, is to act.

And frankly, young men like to create mayhem.  It’s what evolution designed them for.

Open source warfare is what we are seeing in Iraq, in Srk Lanka, in the Niger Delta, in Somalia, and in southern Thailand.  Loosely organized terror gangs form and reform to execute spectacular violence on our vulnerable interconnected world and “hollow out” nation states by negating their monopoly on violence.

For instance in this item Robb reports on the Tamil Tigers air force.  It is just a couple of light planes and it only has hand-held bombs.  But it’s cut tourism by 35 percent in Sri Lanka.

The current surge in Baghdad is doomed to fail because it will not be able to drive out the terror gangs.

It ain’t pretty reading.

Married Mothers Day

Why is it that liberals have made a world with their welfare state in which single mothers are subsidized and married mothers are penalized?  It’s something to think about this Mothers Day. The fact is that married mothers are essential, writes sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox.

[M]arried mothers serve our nation’s neighborhoods, children, and even themselves better than any of the dizzying array of alternatives to married motherhood.

But why? What’s the point of married mothers?  Look at the consequences

• Crime.  The children of married mothers are much less likely to get involved in crime.
• Psychological wellbeing. Children of married mothers are much less likely to experience “serious emotional trouble.”
• Relationships. “[M]others are much more likely to have poor relationships with their children when dad is not in the picture”

It’s all in a “recent report, Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-Six Conclusions from the Social Sciences.”

And of course, there is the modest fact that children are flat out safer with a married mom.

So what’s the problem?  Why do we persist in subsidizing single parenthood?  Is it because of the anti-marriage prejudice of feminists?  Is it because of the money and jobs in all those government programs, not to mention the votes of all the grateful recipients?

Seriously, I’d like to know the answer to this.

A Decade of Blair

First the good news.  The ten years of Tony Blair have been the most successful for a left-of-center party in Britain ever.  Well, at least since W.E. Gladstone, the Liberal Prime Minister in the nineteenth century.  As Prime Minister Blair told his constituents today, according to George Jones:

He said expectations had probably been "too high" in 1997, but he insisted living standards had improved under Labour. "There is only one government since 1945 that can say all of the following: more jobs, fewer unemployed, better health and education results, lower crime and economic growth in every quarter. Only one government, this one."

So it might seem odd that the British people have recently voted heavily against the Labour Party.  And it’s not just about Iraq.

There are those who contest the idea that health, education and crime have improved on Blair’s watch.  In contrast to Blair’s sunny report:

• Education is a mess.  The government keeps dumbing down the high-stakes tests, the A-levels and GSCE tests, and violence is endemic in inner-city schools.  The vast underclass gets almost no education.
• The National Health Service is a mess.  The government has vastly ramped up spending in the last ten years but productivity has gone down, and the staff are demoralized.
• Vast numbers of workers on disability.  About 15 percent of the work force.
• Property crime may have gone down now that everyone has a home security system.  But gang violence and street intimidation is up.  Crime is up 2,300 percent in the last century.  And the murder rate is up.

And then there are the burgeoning problems of single-parent families, a growing feral underclass, and uncontrolled immigration, all of which are probably worse than in the United States.

The worsening social conditions are probably hitting the Labour Party’s natural supporters worse than anyone.  But the Conservative Party hasn’t been trying to attract their votes, instead trying to win back the social liberals who deserted to the LibDem Party in the mid 1990s.  The only party that is really going for the votes of the disaffected is the racist BNP.

Stay tuned.  The problems aren’t going to go away any time soon.

Iran and the Chimera of "Self-Sufficiency"

Ever since the dawn of the modern age movements have erupted again and again calling for a return to “self-sufficiency.”

That’s what mercantilism was all about.  That’s what socialism is all about.  And that is what the current regime in Iran is all about.  We don’t need no stink’n trading.  We can make it all here ourselves.

So in Iran, Amir Taheri writes:

Mr. Ahmadinejad insists that the only way Iran can preserve its "Islamic purity" is to reduce dependence on foreign commerce.
"Whatever we can produce we should do ourselves," the president likes to say. "Even if what we produce is not as good, and more costly."

Er no, old chum.  The central insight of the modern commercial era is the law of comparative advantage.  Everyone should do what they do best, and hire out everything else to other people.

It is the exact opposite of the idea of President Ahmadinejad and the rest of the self-sufficiency enthusiasts. 

Generally speaking, the record shows that countries that follow the path of self-sufficiency, or “autarky,” are countries following the path of self-impoverishment.

Of course, for the rest of us, it is no bad thing when thug dictators follow ruinous policies of national impoverishment.  Go ahead Chavez; go ahead Ahmadinejad.  Make my day.

But you have to feel sorry for the people in Venezuela and Iran and the rest of the thug-dictatordoms.  Because they get to pay the price for the follies and the delusions of their leaders.