After Blair: It's the Culture, Stupid

We know now that the Third Way was the left’s backhanded admission that the Reagan and Thatcher years marked the end of left-wing economics.  No longer could center-left politicians propose to direct the economy from the top, backing winners and assuming that only an activist government could keep the economy from running off the rails.

In fact the opposite is true.  The government’s job (and it is a vital one) is to set the legal framework for enterprise and then get out of the way.

The years that led up to the Reagan/Thatcher revolution were the years of the Broken Economy, Andrew Neil writes.  People thought that the healthy growth of the nineteenth century and the immediate post-war era was a thing of the past.  We had entered an era of limits,they realized, and the job of the elite was to manage decline.

Baloney, said Reagan and Thatcher, using the ideas of Hayek, Friedman, and Mises.  The only area of limits, they argued, was the limited grasp of economics and capitalism on the part of the academic middle class.  And then they took power and showed ’em.

But now the center-left gets it, or at least the political cadre does. Or at least it sorta does.

So we won that one.

As a result the era of the Broken Economy is over.  Now we have entered the era of the Broken Society.  As Neil writes:

During the Blair—Brown decade social concerns -- what kind of society we have become -- have gradually replaced economic worries. People fear that we have become an increasingly fragmented, boorish, more violent society.

Now, as then, Britain is in a bigger mess than the United States, and the reason is the same now as it was then.  The British people are more in thrall to the power and the influence of the academic middle class than Americans in the United States.

But the problem, the breakdown of the family and of society at the bottom and the formation of a feral underclass, is the same.  And it issues from the same cause.

The cause is the progressive welfare state.  Today the government showers money upon the non-working poor.  It rewards poor people for failure and it utterly marginalizes lower-class males.

As Patricia Morgan argues,

[T]he state, by providing extensive welfare provision, by financing child-care services and by taxing families on an ever-greater proportion of their income, provides strong incentives for families to break up rather than to hold together, and to form family relationships that are hidden from the authorities. Government policy has crowded out voluntary welfare within families and caused otherwise law-abiding people to commit fraud on a very extensive scale.

The fact is, she argues, women cannot afford to bring up children on their own. Nearly all women need help in time or money, or both.  A mother can either get help from the father, civilizing him into a provider and a role model for her children. Or, in today’s society, she can get it from the state.

The result, we know, is the Broken Society of feral children and single parenthood that infects our inner cities and is always threatening to break out into the general middle class.

Today in Britain, conservative commentators are worried that Gordon Brown has the tactical advantage.  They worry that David Cameron’s conservatives are concentrating too much on wooing upper-middle-class voters with talk about work-life balance and global warming.  They warn that Cameron is creating an opening for Brown to pose as the friend of the middle class who will mend the Broken Society that threatens peoples’ children with street violence and a lousy education.

Maybe.  But the center left still does not understand that it is the very structure, the very nature of the programs that they have brought into government that are the cause of the problem. 

And anyway, if Brown actually fixed the Broken Society, that would realize the vision of the Conservatives.

But is it not likely the Gordon Brown in Britain, or Hillary Clinton in the United States will solve the problem of the underclass or of lousy schools. 

To solve the problem of the Broken Society will require that the left gives up its patronage and its power: over the poor, over education, over health care.  Before it does that it will try every top-down government program in the world.

But the conservative answer will remain the same.  There is such a thing as society; it is just not the same as the state.  The health of a society  comes from the strength of its little platoons, the civic society of voluntary give and take, of charitable giving.  It is precisely what big government programs crowd out.

And I don’t know a single liberal friend who gets it.

Can Government Deliver on Education?

Tony Blair, everyone’s darling, has resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and now Gordon Brown has been appointed by the Queen to serve as his successor.  Everyone is full of advice, of course.

Anatole Kaletsky advises him to concentrate on education. 

If Mr Brown really wants to show that he can think afresh and that he is in touch with the concerns of ordinary voters he should recognise that the people of Britain are far more worried about the daily disappointments of their children’s education — not to mention the physical threats they face on the way to school, as they run the gauntlet of outlaw gangs increasingly addicted to violence

Britain is the home of the “bog-standard” comprehensive school.  If you don’t know exactly what that means, you can still guess. 

But can a centralized government education system ever deliver?  Well, we shall see.

The welfare state is something like 100 years old and in Britain and the United States centralized government education is about 150 years old.  And it shows.

The great promise made by the academic middle class a century ago for its education and welfare state project was that they, the educated and the experts, could make government actually do something to help people.  Don’t trust those dangerous businessmen, they said.  They don’t care about people.  But we do.  Trust us, they said.

And the academic middle class believed themselves.  Yes, they could make government into something it had never been. They could make it deliver.

Let’s face it.  Government is really a patronage and clientage game, always was, always will be.  As long as politicians stick to rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies they know what they are doing.  But when it comes to actually running something, like education or welfare, or immigration (and yes, immigration is just as screwed up in Britain as it is here) government seems to be a complete disaster.

Therein lies our opportunity.  We conservatives should recognize that there is a real possibility that we are entering an end game on government education.

You can put all the funding you like into education (and we have) but it really doesn’t matter.  That’s because it really doesn’t matter if the principals and the teachers in a government education system do their job.  They still get paid and the politicians pay more attention to them than to the voters.

Expect the concept of government education to be tested to destruction in the next twenty years.  Then we should be ready to grab the chance to do some real reform. 

Because we conservatives care about kids.

After all, there’s a difference between conservatives and liberals.  Conservatives have more children.

Flip-flopping: Do We Care?

Apparently there’s a lot of heat about flip-floppers in the Republican presidential race.

Particularly over Mitt Romney.  And people like eyeon08 don’t like it.

But Patrick Ruffini calls for a reality check.  Of course the candidates are flip-flopping.  They are trying to win the support of the Republican base in 2007.  So they are trimming their sails to catch the wind. 

But don’t worry too much that they’ll tack back.

After his public conversion and being pilloried as a flip-flopper, do you seriously think that Romney can walk back his pro-life position without destroying himself? Does anyone actually think that Romney would be so stupid as to advance public funding of elections after running as the enemy of BCRA [McCain Feingold campaign reform]? If Romney runs and manages to get elected as a conservative, why would he revert to a non-winning position?

Ruffini takes a look at recent presidents and finds that they governed pretty well as they campaigned.

Slippery as he was, Clinton ran as a Third Way Democrat and governed that way. Bush the Father was the mixed bag we expected him to be. Once he became pro-life, he stayed pro-life. But no one expected him to be Ronald Reagan ("kinder, gentler nation") and he wasn’t. And what you saw was what you got in Ronaldus Maximus.

So let’s relax and sit back and let the politicians continue with their sweet talking.  Will we or won’t we?  Well, honey, Ah’m not sure that Ah’ve even thought about that.

The Fix Is In

As the Senate voted 64-35 to take up the immigration bill, we the unwashed have to feel that there is something going on that we aren’t a party to.

OK, so Julie Hirschfeld Davis says that the victory of the president and the bill’s backers was a sometime thing.

Their victory was fleeting, though, giving way just hours later to stalling tactics by GOP foes. Conservatives succeeded in delaying until Wednesday consideration of a package of amendments designed to pave the way for a final vote on the bill.

But is all this real, or just kabuki, as Michelle Malkin writes?

More and more, I am beginning to think that the events of Hurricane Katrina are representative.  They represented a failure of government at all levels: federal, state, and local.

We can expect more such failures.  Government is never very good at anything, but the more that it sucks into its orbit the worse that it does.

And today we have a government that just doesn’t care.

This immigration bill is not about doing anything or solving anything.  It is about “doing something,” and that is different.  It won’t really secure the border because that is too hard and governments don’t do hard things.  It won’t solve the illegal immigration problem because the lure of the US economy is just too great. 

The American people will pay for this, of course, good and hard.  And the suits will just ride off into the sunset. 

Michael Novak on Hillarynomics

We’ve already cast a jaundiced eye on Hillary Clinton’s “on your own” speech at a technical college in New Hampshire in which she castigates the “on your own” policies of the Bush administration and proposes her “we’re all in it together” economic plan of taxes, spending, and regulation.

Now Michael Novak takes a look at the economic policy of the future Clinton administration revealed in her speech.  First he takes a look at the vision of the Bush administration.

Bush has set forth a realizable dream of universal ownership for all Americans -- the dream of owning their own personal Social Security accounts, their own medical accounts, their homes or apartments, and their own investment plans. He proposes this as real, life-changing help for the poor, by way of independence and self-determination, in local communities of caring. Senator Clinton transforms this vision into the spinning, hellish “on your own” society.

Democrats are always suggesting that Republicans just don’t care about people.  So Clinton reminds the students:

“We have sent a message to our young people that if you don’t go to college and you don’t have a high-paying job -- something like a basketball player or an entertainer, or maybe someone in a corporation -- that you’re thought less of in America.”

Only someone “who doesn’t know any craftsmen, manual workers, or independent electricians and plumbers (who nowadays can bring in more than a hundred grand a year)” could say something like that, according to Novak.

What the Irish saloonkeeper Mr Dooley should have said: “The fella what said that Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels underestimated th’ possibilities of Compassion.”

In short, the dream of economic reds is not a vision of an America driven forward by new entrepreneurs, new inventors, and those untamed “animal spirits” that are released by a good system of incentives. Rather, it is a vision of rule-making, curbs, limitations, bureaucratic selection among alternatives, new burdens on the private sector -- and larger powers unwisely given to the federal government.

The question is whether the $100,000 plumbers will vote for the economic redness, the dependency and victimhood of Hillary Clinton, or whether they will vote for independence and ownership.

Global Warming: 4 Legs Good; 2 Legs Bad

That’s basically what the Society of Environmental Journalists believes.  They have put out a convenient guide to climate change, writes Debra J. Saunders, and it helpfully tells you who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

So, the Society of Environmental Journalists put together a guide on climate change that lists a number of publications on global warming, scientists and seven environmental groups, each with positive descriptions. Under the "Deniers, Dissenters and ’Skeptics’" category are four listings — all negative.

Isn’t that special?  Of course, they don’t try to debunk the ideas of the skeptics.  Oh no.  They only criticize their associations.

The joke about all this is that, as Saunders writes, and others, like Nils Axel Mörner confirm, all the big money these days is going to research to support the global warming hypothesis.

Let us make this clear.  If you are an academician interested in the money and the kudos, you’d better shut your mouth about your doubts about global warming.  Otherwise you won’t get the grant you need to advance your career.

Single Payer Means Filthy Hospitals

Before we all collapse before the tightly reasoned ideas of Michael Moore and his documentary about health care, SiCKO, let’s take a look at what “single-payer” health care really means in practice.

It means filthy hospitals.  As in single-payer Britain.  It means an epidemic of MRSA and HAI (Hospital-acquired infection.

Writes Harriet Sergeant:

Cases of MRSA in England and Wales have increased by 600% in the past decade alone, according to government figures. Britain has one of the worst records in Europe. The danger of contracting a bug here is more than 15 times higher than the next safest countries.

 In US terms, with a population five times the British population, it would translate into 1,500,000 cases of HAI a year and up to 100,000 deaths from HAI a year.

What is going wrong in the hospitals of Britain?  It’s the old story.  No accountability and no delegated responsibility.

One former matron, now in audit work, pointed out the difficulty of disciplining a nurse for incompetence in the NHS today. Modern management is meant to “nurture” its employees. “You can’t bawl them out or they’ll sue you for harassment,” she explained.

Hospital cleaning in Britain is done by contract cleaners, which is fine, except that nurse supervisors have no authority to demand that the cleaners actually clean.

And nobody enforces standards.  Hospital rules require a nurse to put on gloves and an apron before attending to a patient.  But Sergeant saw a nurse come into a room and handle a patient without putting on gloves, right in front of a matron and an infection control manager.  Here’s the reaction of the hospital officials:

The matron tut-tutted. “You’ve got to have eyes in the back of your head with these girls,” she said. The infection control manager nodded sympathetically. “Doctors are far worse,” she added.

No why would these women be so cavalier about this?

Lefties like Michael Moore want a world in which people just get world-class health care without lifting a finger.

But what happens if the people delivering world-class health care subscribe to the same world-view, that everything should be arranged for them? Suppose they believe that they have no responsibility beyond sitting around and tut-tutting?

Someone, somewhere has to lift a finger.

The best way to ensure that someone does care about delivering service is to make sure that it is delivered by a private company.

One thing that everyone agrees on, from the wackiest leftie to the rock-ribbed conservative.  When a corporation falls down on the job, everyone agrees, it is not to be endured.