Is Government Force? Michael Moore Says No

We all know, or at least we’d better know by now, that Michael Moore thinks that government health care, as practiced in Canada, Britain, and Cuba is hunky-dory.  

(I know.  Have you asked a Brit about her wonderful NHS lately?)

Libertarian John Stossel got to ask him about this on ABC’s 20/20 TV show.  How come he could be so relaxed about government health care, Stossel asked?

"But government is force," I said to him. He was incredulous.

Michael Moore: Why do you see it as force?

Me: Because government takes money with force from people and gives it to others.

Moore: No, it doesn’t, actually. The government is of, by, and for the people. The people elect the government, and the people determine whether or not they’ll allow the government to collect taxes from them.

So now you know why liberals wax enthusiastic about the wonderful things that government does for us.

They have talked themselves out of believing that government is the agent of force and compulsion.  Don’t look at the tax collector, they say; look at the good results: a wonderful program to increase minority home ownership. 

But it’s force, says the conservative. 

No it’s not; it’s compassion, says the liberal.

Says Stossel:

Michael Moore may not have thought about it, but there are only two ways to get people to do things: force or persuasion. Government is all about force.

There’s a lesson here for conservatives.  We don’t spend enough time asking our liberal friends: But why do we have to do this by force?

Oh no we’re not, they’ll say.

OK. So the American people voted Bush into office to fight the war on terror and he spends a hundred billion dollars a year on the war in Iraq.  That’s not force.  It can’t be.  Liberals say so.

No doubt that has nothing to do with reports that people are refusing to pay their taxes because of the war.

Don't The Pols Get It?

Now that the Democrats are back in control of Congress we are hearing calls for increasing taxes on business and the rich.  A couple of senators, one of them a Republican, want to increase taxes on financial partnerships from 15 percent to 35 percent.

And then there are the genius Democrats in the House, according to Richard W.Rahn:

At the same time, House Democrats proposed an increase of 4.3 percentage points in the maximum individual tax rate.

This is at a moment when newly-installed Labour Party Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Britain has assured business and the rich in Britain that he won’t be killing the golden goose of low tax rates on financial businesses and the international “non-domiciled” rich.

What planet do these politicians live?  Don’t they get it?  Don’t they realize that the best way for them to get lots of lovely lolly to spend on buying votes is to make tax rates low across the board so that people expend their effort in making products and services and not on figuring out how to minimize taxes? 

But some people never learn.  One nice little train coming down the tracks is that business tax rates are much lower in places like Ireland and the eastern European countries like Estonia.  Businesses have noticed.

And then there is Sarbanes-Oxley, the financial reform act that loads up US corporations with tons of paperwork.

Some optimists think that the left learned its lesson about the economy in the Reagan-Thatcher years.  At times like this it seems hard to believe that they really “get it,” other than the need to get reelected.

Arnold Kling on Trust in Society

The big problem of the human race is the problem of extending trust beyond blood kin.  In traditional society you just don’t trust people who are not blood kin.  That works pretty well in an agricultural village but it begins to be a problem in the city.  So mankind has developed the radical notion of extending trust beyond the limits of blood kin.

As Arnold Kling puts it: 

A high-trust society is one where trust extends beyond one’s clan or village. Trust within families is something that can be taken for granted, even in a low-trust society. A high-trust society is one that has found a way for trust to extend to strangers.

All this was developing nicely in the nineteenth century with capitalism, which rewards trustworthy behavior with lowered costs and increased profits.  But a parallel movement was the development of “fraternal” associations in which men pretended to be brothers.  It was an ingenious way of dealing with the trust issue.  Why not say that people that you trust are your brothers (or sisters as the case might be)?  Then you can have the comfortable feeling that people you trust are virtual kind.

The nation state is another way of pretending that people who are not your kin, but who speak the same language are in fact kin.  Again, we talk about the mother country, pretending that we are all children of the same mother.

But then along came the progressives and the academic middle class with the welfare state.

The welfare state replaces the contractual and fraternal bonds of trust with the vertical relationships of patronage and clientage.  It lowers the level of trust in society.  This works well for liberals who become responsible for negotiating between the competing interest groups in the welfare state.  They like it because it gives them power.

But it infantilizes ordinary people. Instead of being responsible themselves for building trust with other people, which is an essential skill in the democratic capitalist economy, they become subordinates—at work and in society.

When we conservatives fix the Broken Society one of the big tasks will be to resume the building of voluntary fraternal organizations in which people interact as equals and build trust networks.

We know it can be done because ordinary people did it successfully in the nineteenth century before the academic middle class came to power and wrecked the voluntary fraternal sector.

BBC Scare Quotes for Climate 'Scepticism'

It’s truly amazing, when you think about it, that after all the scare stories and media advocacy that the BBC would find itself reporting the results of a public opinion poll on global warming:

The public believes the effects of global warming on the climate are not as bad as politicians and scientists claim, a poll has suggested.

What is more, the public is not at all sure that the motives of the climate change advocates are as pure and the driven snow.

There was a feeling the problem was exaggerated to make money, it found.

Maybe someone found out that global warming advocate Al Gore is set to make a fortune from carbon offset trading.

The BBC’s article really is a gem of a piece.  Here are some more quotes. 

[The polling firm’s] head of environmental research, Phil Downing, said the research showed there was "still a lot to do" in encouraging "low-carbon lifestyles".
People had been influenced by counter-arguments, he said.

Er, isn’t the polling firm that did the study supposed to kinda take a hands-off attitude towards the encouragement of public opinion?  Or does the modern polling firm first whip up public opinion and then sample it.

And isn’t the whole point of a political conversation the full and free ventilation of arguments pro and anti?

So let’s pull the vice-president of the Royal Society, Sir David Read, into the argument.  The Royal Society is Britain’s academy of eminent scientists.  Said he:

People should not be misled by those that exploit the complexity of the issue, seeking to distort the science and deny the seriousness of the potential consequences of climate change.

Couldn’t agree more, old chap.  I am sure that you have never been guilty of that.  Then he goes on.

The science very clearly points towards the need for us all - nations, businesses and individuals - to do as much as possible, as soon as possible, to avoid the worst consequences of a changing climate.

Sorry, old chap.  The science doesn’t point to anything of the kind.  The science just says that since about 1850 there has been a moderate increase in global temperature and that there is a good chance that the increase is due to “anthropogenic forcing,” in short, due to man.  Speculative science has a lot of theories about what might happen if the warming continues.  I think it is fair to say that the quality of this science is rather less solid than the rather clear evidence of moderate warming.

The science says nothing about what we should do about it.

The Broken Society in Germany

Yes, yes.  For decades we have been worrying about little girls in school.  Feminist organizations have been gussying up studies showing how girls are hopelessly shortchanged by just about everything. 

Now the real results are coming in, according to The Economist.

In eastern Germany, that would presumably be Brandenburg and Pomerania, the girls have left to go west, and they have left the boys behind.  Why is that?  Because the girls do better in school. 

Girls are more studious than boys, so they get better qualified and migrate west to find both partners and jobs. The boys lack role models at home, where fathers are often unemployed, and at school, where teachers are mostly female. Young men now account for 65% of German high-school dropouts.

Well, now.  That’s interesting, isn’t it?

And it illustrates one of the basic facts of life.  Women will do what they are told.  If you tell them to pay attention to kinder, kirche, küche, they will beaver away in the home.  If you tell them to get an education and get a job, off they will go and dutifully do it. 

Men are different.  Men don’t like to do what they are told.  The big problem always is how to socialize men so that they contribute to society instead of hanging around in gangs, robbing and raping and killing.

For the last generation or so, ever since the well-born Simone de Beauvoir complained that women were The Second Sex, we have been acting as though women were the problem, not men.

We will pay dearly for this mistake.

Correction.  All humans will pay dearly for this liberal mistake.

A Father Speaks

In these diverse postmodern days what should a father do?  The father of teenaged girls, that is.

Doug Giles has some ideas.  You see, he doesn’t get with the “hip and groovy dad” bit that lacks a strong “opinion regarding their [daughters’ dating life.”  No sirree.  Says he:

Yes, seeing that I’m still the Alpha dog of the Giles castle, that I still pay the bills, buy the SUVs, pay for College and secure their condos, then by God, I’m still makin’ the rules.

How about ten rules about all this, or as we say in judgmental America, Commandments, for young swains to observe when they are swaining around the house?

1. Know what?  I don’t like having you around.
2. You’d better have a life.  Ideally you should be pursuing a “noble goal at Mach2 with your hair on fire.”
3. No touching my daughter.  Certainly not in my house.
4. You will “look me in the eye, shake my hand like a man and turn off your cell phone.”
5. You are the boy; I am the man.
6. “Our family is old school.”
7. You can earn my favor with gifts: cigars, for instance.
8. Forget the dirty jokes.
9. You will keep your word—even in small things.
10. Three things: “Look good,” “read” so that you can converse intelligently, and “serve... round the house, in our community, in our nation and with our wonderful world.”

Really, what’s not to like?

Steyn on Immigration and the "Pork-filled Rooms"

How does he do it?  We are talking about Mark Steyn, of course.  His post-immigration-bill article fairly gushes with Steynisms, as in:

• [T]he people... declared their independence from the United States Senate... "No legislation without explanation."
• [Cooking] up the "comprehensive" immigration bill’s "grand bargain" behind the scenes in the pork-filled rooms[.]
• Sen. Trenthorn Lotthorn, Lottissippi Republican[.]
• Gulfport is a port in the Gulf emirate whose grateful people Sultan Trent has ruled o’er lo these many years.
• ["]I’m not proposing an electrified goat fence," the Lottly Goatherd added.

But, characteristically for Mark Steyn, there is a serious point beneath and the fun and frolic.  A serious discussion of the issues. “Time and again, the remote insulated emirs were offered the opportunity to rise above their condescension and declined to do so.”  But the fact is they have nothing to be condescending about.

There are immigration laws on the books right now, and they are flouted with impunity by "sanctuary cities," states and the federal government itself. The political class tells us a nation on permanent "orange alert" at ports of entry can’t enforce its borders, and a broken immigration bureaucracy that can’t process existing levels of applicants can reliably handle another 20 million.

Tell you what, Senators.  Why don’t you get down to work on oversight hearings on why the law isn’t being enforced?  That’s your job.  Why don’t you get down to work on oversight hearings about why it is so important to have orange alerts in the airports while keeping the borders wide open?  That’s your job.  Why don’t you get down to work on the failure of the immigration bureaucracy to process the existing levels of applicants and develop an assessment of the utter chaos that is likely to ensue if it tries to handle another 20 million?  That’s your job. 

Yes.  Work is hard.  That’s why you get paid to do it.