DeLay Hammers Lauer

You have to hand it to former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.  He believes that politics is a contact sport and he doesn’t believe in truckling to the media.  Why should he?  It wouldn’t buy him anything anyway.

So when the Today Show invited him to come on and answer questions about the Republican scandals—Foley, Abramhoff, Ritter, and Craig—DeLay wasn’t buying it, as Brent Bozell III reports.  Retorted DeLay to Matt Lauer:

Well, I hate to say this Matt, but you just showed the problem, the double-standard, and you just participated in it. You listed a whole lot of scandals that involve the Republicans, but you didn’t mention one Democrat.

No! Do tell!  He went on to administer a little “larnin’” on young Matt Lauer.

There’s a difference between Republicans in trouble and Democrats in trouble, DeLay told him.

You see the Democrats re-elect the people with their problems. Republicans kick them out.

It’s fun to watch the tape on YouTube as Matt Lauer tries to have the last word and Tom DeLay won’t let him.

What’s not to like?

Yet There's a Welder Shortage

Everybody knows that the industrial sector is shrinking leaving behind a creaking Rust Belt.  The “good jobs with good wages” that sustained New York, Ohio, and Michigan are gone for good.

Then how come there is a shortage of welders?  Bill Steigerwald asked Joel Kotkin about that.  It’s a myth, Kotkin says.  Certainly the old industrial belt is in trouble.  But there are plenty of manufacturing jobs.  In fact there’s a skills shortage. 

[I]f you ask business people what is it that would really help them, they say “skills.” Machinists. Welders. It’s not like there’s a Ph. D. shortage, generally speaking. But there is a welder shortage, there’s a plumber shortage, there’s a machinist shortage. But nobody wants to talk about this.

What’s the problem?  We’re Americans aren’t we, a can-do people in a can-do country? Says Kotkin:

Cities that have lost their industrial base don’t want to talk about it, and many cities that still have it are almost ashamed of it. In one of the great historical ironies, the places where they are not ashamed of manufacturing are places like Houston and Charleston and Charlotte. But the places with the great industrial traditions, it’s almost as if they are ashamed of their lineage.

And it’s not as if the manufacturing jobs aren’t helping people move up.

One of the women I interviewed in Charleston had been working in retail making under $10 an hour. Now she’s working in manufacturing and she’s gone up to $15 or $16 an hour. She’s got some health care benefits. She’s got a skill. She feels she’s got a future.

Now there’s a concept.  And it’s not rocket science.  If you want a thriving city you need infrastructure and training so that $10 clerks can move up to $15.

You need roads that go in and out. You need modern industrial space. You need reliable electricity. You need shipping facilities. You need workers who are relatively skilled, trainable and reliable.

But Democrats aren’t interested in that any more.  They don’t like polluting jobs—call it a kind of “gentry liberalism” if you like.  And that extends to the politicians and the media.  Here we are, building fancy stadiums and light rail.  And we are looking after big headline companies.  But what about the little guy,

somebody who’s got 15 people working for him in a shop somewhere in the suburbs and would like to get to 30? What are his issues? Are they tax issues? Are they training issues? Are they regulatory issues? You’ve got to go ask! I don’t see anyone interested in that anymore.

That’s because in today’s cities the pols only need to keep the public employees happy—and the rich contributors, and the young and hip.  They don’t want to descend to the building of buses and tollways that can move people and trucks.

Instead we want to build a cute little light-rail line, so that maybe we can convince a couple yuppies to take the train to work for a couple weeks.

The real crime is that Republicans have failed to exploit this opportunity.  You’d think that they—we—could earn the votes of the would-be welders and manufacturing workers by working for highways, infrastructure, and good jobs.

Hmm, that’s odd.  That’s just what Republicans have been working for.

A fat lot of good it does us.

But the opportunity is still open.  The Democratic Party is the party of public employees, government benefits, and gentry liberals.  The Republican Party is the party of the rest of us.

Conservatives on Horn of Dilemma

Hey, this isn’t hard, insists Janet Daley in London’s Daily Telegraph.  When it comes to the great public services delivered by the welfare state you have to make your choice. 

You either believe that the state should administer the delivery of these services by controlling them from the centre, or you do not.

But, she complains, the British Conservative Party wants to have it both ways, or rather three ways, at once.

On the one hand Tory leader David Cameron want to return the right of teachers to teach.  On the other hand he wants to mandate the grouping of children by ability.  And he wants to mandate the teaching of reading using “synthetic phonics.”

Then there’s the question of who to decentralize power to: the teaching professionals or the parents.  Cameron obviously has to appeal to the government teachers.  But he also wants to return power to parents.

It’s easy to tell conservative reformers to get a clue.  But their task is gigantic.

And it starts with the basic problem that most people instinctively do believe that someone should sit at the center of society and just decide the big quesions of education and health care. It can’t be that hard, can it?

Over 160 years ago Tocqueville already understood that the natural tendency of democracy is to have the government do it.

We conservatives, who so blithely order our leaders to introduce “choice,” should get a clue ourselves.  We are asking them to do the impossible.  Well, almost.

Karl Rove and Bush's Legacy

On his last day at the White House, long-time Bush aide Peggy Noonan asks Bush to offer a hand to his adversaries. With the qualified success of the “surge:”

It would be good to see the president calming the waters. Instead he ups the ante. Tuesday, speaking to the American Legion, he heightened his language.

It might.  But I’m inclined to believe that that opportunity was spurned 6 years ago when Democrats decided that they weren’t going to concede the 2000 election, not even after the US Supreme Court ruled on it.  It’s Prisoners Dilemma stuff.  If the other guy stiffs you, you have to stiff him back.

Anyway, I’m not convinced that the Democratic leadership is as left-wing and mad at Bush as they want their base to think.  They know that, whatever the mess in Iraq, we are still in a conflict with fundamentalist Islam for the long haul.

And Bush knows they know it.

Bush to Help Subprime Borrowers

Obviously some sort of assistance to financially strapped homeowners was coming down the pike, and today President Bush is outlining his proposals, Ded Riechmann writes.  Bush will:

- Urge Congress to pass legislation that would give the Federal Housing Administration more flexibility in assisting mortgage holders with subprime mortgages.

- Pledge to work with Congress to reform the tax code to help troubled borrowers rework their loans.

- Call for rigorously enforcing predatory lending laws and strengthening lending practices.

That last item is the classic government ploy of shutting the barn door after the horse has escaped.

Fortunately Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke stands ready to prevent the mortgage crisis from spilling over into the rest of the economy, according to Jeannine Aversa:

The Fed "will act as needed to limit the adverse effects on the broader economy that may arise from the disruptions in financial markets," [he said.]

All I can think is the words of Ludwig von Mises.  A recession, he wrote, is the period of liquidation of the mal-investments of the previous boom.

Actually, you could gussie this up a bit.

• A recession is the period of liquidation of other peoples’ mal-investments made in the previous boom.
• A depression is the period of liquidation of my mal-investments made in the previous boom.

This way of thinking says that neither Presidents nor Feds nor principalities nor powers can end the business cycle.

How to Reclaim the Streets

In the old days, we all know, adults used to correct children who misbehaved.  They corrected their own children and they corrected other peoples’ children.  In public.

But in our day, this ancient practice has become controversial.  Partly it is because all men approaching children are assumed to be sexual predators, and partly it is, as Theodore Dalrymple writes in the London Spectator, that many

parents regard their children as being inherently beyond reproach and will, for example, take the side of their children in any disciplinary dispute with a teacher or other person in authority.

The result is the response of three 10-year-olds to Lord Phillips of Sudbury, who reproved them for cycling on the sidewalk in Sudbury, England.  As Boris Johnson relates, the young sprigs did not respond respectfully to Lord Phillips attempt at correction. 

The 10-year-olds shrieked at the noble lord, who has been married since 1968 and who has three children. They called him a "pervert, a poofter and a paedo".

When one of these little innocents knocked Lord Phillips’ bicycle to the ground he was moved to respond.

He asked a passer-by to call the police, saying to the child: "If you think you can behave like this, you are dead wrong." To which, the boy replied, with a chilling grasp of the changed relationship between children and adults: "I am going to have you for holding me."

When the police arrived they reproved the noble lord for attempting to exercise authority in any way.

There is the problem of modern youthful misbehavior in a nutshell.  If we are to reclaim the streets there cannot be the slightest doubt in the mind of a young sprig that any adult has the right to correct him for misbehavior.  And there cannot be the slightest doubt that ordinary citizens have the power, police or no, to arrest troublemakers.

When modern government restrains citizens from keeping the peace it is wrong, dead wrong.

The Three Principles of Government

Now that I’m getting into the guts of Montesquieu’s  The Spirit of Laws, it is time to start dealing with the principle that he asserts underlies each form of government. 

Republics (both democratic and aristocratic) require Virtue, meaning the ability to see beyond your own interest to the general interest; Monarchies require Honor, an unwritten code followed by the nobility in protecting their interests from the monarch; Despotisms require Fear.

The first thing that a conservative like me thinks on reading that is: what about today?  We conservatives think in terms of rules. Virtue to us is the life lived according to the rules.  Honor is the instinctive patriotism we all feel.  Fear is what policemen do to criminals.

What do liberals think?

• Liberals don’t believe in government by virtue, and they do not expect it of their followers.  In fact in the aftermath of the New Deal they constructed a political philosophy that asserted that the good state was the precipitate of the competition of interests.
• Liberals don’t believe in government by honor.  Honor, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History is the courage of the soldier staying in line during battle.  But liberals believe that the height of courage is to be an anti-hero that steps out of line.  Dissidence is the highest form of patriotism, and all that.
• Liberals don’t believe in government by fear.  At least they say they don’t, but they use fear freely in controlling their institutions like schools and colleges where conservatives fear to tread.  And now they are jailing people who defy land-use regulations.

So what do our liberal friends believe in?  We looked at that earlier this week in looking at the failures of education.  We determined that liberals believe in liberty, the notion of “I shall,” and socialism, the notion of “You must.”  They do not understand the conservative notion of “We should.”  We also know that liberals believe that compassion for others justifies government compulsion.

In fact, I believe, liberals believe in anything that gives them power.  They appeal to virtue when it suits them, honor when convenient, and fear when they can get away with it.

And I suspect that they do it in all the wrong places.