Derb Admits He's Bored With Election

The federal government makes such a mess of everything that there’s not much any of the candidates can do.  And they are good candidates. Writes John Derbyshire:

I even like some of these guys. War hero... confident and successful businessman/governor... tough no-nonsense mayor... laid-back, witty showbiz type with good conservative creds... There’s plenty to like, almost an embarrassment of riches.

Leave aside the mess in housing, the declining dollar, the mess in Iraq.  There’s immigration.  What can a president do about that?

I think we’ve arrived at a point where the president may propose, but the courts, the federal bureaucracy, the interest groups, the lobbies and trial lawyers, and the ACLU, and CAIR, and MEChA, and LULAC dispose.

So what’s the point?  Better wait until things get really screwed up.

I may be bored, like Derb, but I’m not idle.

Right now, I’m loading up data on state and local government spending into my usgovernmentspending.com site. As the billions roll by, year after year, you ask: What are these people doing with all that money?  It's just wasted, isn't it?  Every last billion.  It's all about government doing what people could be, should be doing for themselves.

And there's another thing. This is a democracy, and the way democracy works is that the other chaps get to have a go.  Especially when the other chaps are mad as hell.  So it's time for the Democrats to get back to the White House.

in the bigger picture we are playing out the string on the welfare state right now. We know, from the Reagan era, that the Democrats are not ready to talk about reform yet.  We need another decade of welfare state ineptitude and waste and self-dealing to play out before we conservatives will get the chance for another wave of reform.

It's happening in Britland right now.  Ten years ago, the Labour Party was elected on the theme of "education, education, education."  What do you think has happened?  Britain has dropped in the OECD league tables, according to the Daily Telegraph.

In reading 15-year-olds in the UK dropped from seventh in 2000 to 17th... In maths, pupils fell from eighth to 24th... In science, secondary school students in the UK dropped from fourth to 14th.

And so, wonder of wonders, the Conservative Party is rising in the polls, and leader David Cameron is starting to look like a man who could be Prime Minister.

The point is that there is a flow in the tide of events, and the best thing is to be ready when the tide is flowing in your favor.

When the tide is ebbing, it’s best to anchor and wait for the tide to turn.

Chavez Loses Vote--Just

Let’s give one cheer for the failure of President Hugo Chavez to make himself president-for-life.  Venezuelans voted down his proposed constitutional “reforms.”  As Frank Bajak reports:

Foes of the reform effort - including Roman Catholic leaders, media freedom groups, human rights groups and prominent business leaders - said it would have granted Chavez unchecked power and imperiled basic rights.

It’s a sad fact of the modern age that the folks just arriving in the city from the farm—the working class, if you like—experience life as a battle against the powerful. 

So they vote for leaders who will fight for them against the powerful.

Unfortunately nearly all such leaders end up fighting the economy and leading their people to economic ruin.

Because whatever the working class may think, the market economy gives them the best prospects for a decent life—both in the short term and in the long term.

What workers should be doing is voting for politicians who will dismantle all the economic privileges that have been put in place to help the existing elite.  But they don’t.  They think that the answer to their economic struggle is to vote for a guy who will give them privileges.

When you make a mistake like that in this world, it ends up costing you big time.  And it looks as thought Venezuelans are already beginning to experience the inevitable result of a government that meddles recklessly with the national economy.

What is unconscionable is that media, educational, and cultural elites won’t tell the people the truth: that privileges, subsidies, and government handouts harm the people they are supposed to help.

Why won’t they? Probably because they too are clueless about the extraordinary system of democratic capitalism that we have built in the last two hundred years. After all, if you wrote for a living, taught school for a living, or acted in movies or TV what would you know about the reality of making products and services for the consumer?

So Bush Was Right on Stem Cells

One thing you can say about President Bush.  He makes a decision and then accepts the consequences.  Back in 2001 he decided to restrict the use of federal funds in research on embryonic stem cells.

As we know, Democrats decided that they had an issue.  So they dragged out helpless victims and Ron Reagan to argue that stem cells would help the blind see and the lame walk.  Presidential candidate John Edwards got in on the act, as you would expect.

Obviously the only thing that stood in the way of a medical miracle was the president and his fundamentalist Christian morality and the theocrats who supported him.

But last week the New York Times reported that two scientists. James A. Thomson and Shinya Yamanaka, had found a way of making stem cells equivalent to embryonic stem cells without using embryos.

As Charles Krauthammer puts it:

A decade ago, Thomson was the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells. Last week, he (and Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka) announced one of the great scientific breakthroughs since the discovery of DNA: an embryo-free way to produce genetically matched stem cells.

He highlights a quote of Thomson’s:

If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough.

Really?  I thought only knuckle-dragging Bible-thumpers had a problem with embryonic stem cell research.

It all points up the fact that President Bush is a serious man who is not afraid to make serious decisions.

When you make serious decisions it helps to have a serious politico-religious world view.  For most people, that means taking a fully worked out politico-religious system—such as, for example, Christianity—and using it as a guide.  President Bush, who had a less than perfect youth like many well-born baby-boomers, became a serious Christian when the time came to grow up.  Obviously this belief system—and we all have one—informs his decisions about government policy.

The reason why this is helpful is that Christianity, like Anglo-Saxon law, is an accumulation of centuries of actual human experience in dealing with serious decisions about life and death.  Over the centuries hundreds of lawyers and judges have worked on our great edifice of law, adapting it slowly in the light of new cases and conflicts that come up for adjudication.  The same thing is true with religion.

In our modern era we have a lot of people who want to throw up all the accumulated wisdom and start from scratch with a new system better adapted to modern times.  Unfortunately—and you may have noticed this—starting over means making all the mistakes of our ancestors all over again and learning from them the hard way.

In the twentieth century the hard way added up to about 200 million human deaths in world wars and terrors.

Anyway, now it turns out that President Bush was right.  We don’t need to use human embryos in stem cell research.  After all the fuss, the president looks like a serious man who thought seriously about an issue, talked to all the experts, and made a serious decision. 

Quite often, more often than you might think, when you do that you get to be right.

What Should Harry Do?

Yes, what should Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) do?  In case you forgot, here is Clifford D. May on Harry Reid. 

Pity poor Harry Reid. Back in April, the Senate Majority Leader proclaimed the war in Iraq “lost.” Two months before General David Petraeus had in place the reinforcements he needed to implement his bold, new strategy — which included a “surge” of operations against al-Qaeda forces in Iraq — Reid also said: “The surge is not accomplishing anything.”

Now, some conservatives take a very dim view of Harry Reid, but you can understand why Nevadans vote for him.  Reid is good at getting Federal land around Las Vegas made available for development: homes, schools, shopping centers, that sort of thing.  And good at getting his percentage out of the deal. Percentage or not, Reid provides Nevadans what they need: homes, schools, etc.

But Harry Reid, along with many of our Democratic friends, is not much of an expert when it comes to judging military operations.  So he kinda jumped the gun on declaring the Iraq war “lost.”

Oh well, nobody really minded except a few crazy right-wing nutcases.

But what should Reid do now?

May kindly offers a few sound bites for Reid to use when he decides that it is time to walk back to reality.

Say that President Bush should have foreseen that toppling Saddam would create a vacuum... Say it took Bush too long to [replace] Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top generals in Iraq... Say the credit for turning the situation around in Iraq goes to American men and women in uniform.

And so on.  But when should Harry Reid do this?  Here’s a suggestion.  Wait until after the primaries this winter.  Then, when the Democratic presidential nominee has been well and truly chosen and the crazy left doesn’t matter any more, then it will be time to make a principled tack back to the center.

Whaddya think?

Middle Class Benefit Most from Welfare State

We have been banging on for weeks here about the middle-class S-CHIP chiselers, liberal slackers who get to be first in line when there is free government money going for expensive things like health insurance.

This week in Britain the Civitas think tank issued a report on how the middle class in Britain get first in line in the British National Health Service (NHS). 

In Quite Like Heaven? Nick Sedden writes about the advantages that the middle class has in navigating a big bureaucracy for things like hip replacements.

Higher socio-economic groups are more likely to have family or friends who work in the health services, and even if these contacts are not directly used to gain access to services they act as an important source of advice on how to work the system … at least one study-of hip replacement utilisation has found evidence of the effectiveness of the "sharp elbows" of the middle class in the welfare state.

Exactly.  I had a friend in Britain whose 80-ish mother needed a hip replacement.  No deal, they said; we’ll put you on a waiting list.  Getting the procedure done in a private hospital would have cost a bundle, so my friend complained to her Member of Parliament.  One thing led to another, and her mother got her hip replacement.

It is well said that when you can’t compete on price then the only thing left is footwork and connections.  As the Daily Telegraph puts it:

[T]he fault lies in a system in which the purchasing power of money is absent, leaving social know-how as the only currency.

When the middle class pays their own way then it makes sense to put the squeeze on them to be generous and help the poor with charity and know-how.  But when there’s a government system then you get the middle class using its skills selfishly to get to the head of the line.

And as we know from Arthur C. Brooks in Who Really Cares? secular, liberal people give less to charity than conservative, religious people.

Mendacity, the Mark of Decline

Remember the good old days when Tennessee Williams wrote about the mendacity of the white South?  In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof the corrupted South had to lie.  They lied about the shameful homosexuality of Brick, the star college athlete and heir.  They had to lie about Big Daddy’s cancer.  And they made a virtue of it.  As Big Daddy tells Brick:

Boy, I’ve lived with mendacity. Now why can’t you live with it? You’ve got to live with it. There’s nothin’ to live with but mendacity. Is there?

That was back in the high noon of American liberalism when the idealistic New Dealers could sneer at the corrupt racists and bigots all around them.  Liberals were idealistic and ethical; they would never lie.  They would never need to.

But now the vortex of mendacity centers around a corrupt liberalism in terminal decline, and nowhere more so than in the university, writes Michael Barone.

Barone fingers the lie about race for starting the rot.  Colleges started admitting minorities to campus who didn’t “meet ordinary standards.”  Of course, the colleges couldn’t admit that.  And to compound the lie, they decided that nobody else on campus could tell the truth either.  Hence the speech codes t“which prohibit speech deemed hurtful by others.”

They were instituted, it seems, to prevent [the minority] students from feeling insulted and to free administrators from criticism for preferential treatment.

But it was still a lie, and the lie deepens and corrupts all the more as it gets entangled in Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Then there’s the cheap mendacity of partisan attack dogs like Media Matters.  Never mind about whether they are fair and honest when they ruthlessly take comments out of context.  They can’t even be straightforward about their very identity. 

Is Media Matters an “avowedly political institution,” as Byron York suggests?  Or is it “a nonpartisan, progressive nonprofit that is unaffiliated with any political party or candidate” as Media Matters insists?

And is it worth insisting on the distinction just for the sake of a stinking non-profit designation?

It really is beside the point to take pleasure in the decline of liberalism or even to mourn it.  Everything in this world begins with soaring hope and high ideals and ends in shame and rotting cancer.

But for those of us who yearn for the moderation of a Burkean world of ordinary life and modest reform, the decline of liberalism does come as a relief.

Revived Libertarians

Since the shock of 9/11 we haven’t heard much from libertarians, not until Ron Paul ran for president.  Ron Paul will lose, of course, writes Patrick Ruffini.  But he might win by losing.  That’s what Pat Robertson did in 1988.

Pat Robertson’s 1988 campaign signaled that Christian Conservatives had arrived in the GOP. Ron Paul is doing the same for libertarians.

So, on Ruffini’s view, Ron Paul could be a positive force for Republicans rather than splitting the libertarians off into a third party.

That would be good, because the GOP needs a consistent libertarian force, a third corner tugging in the direction of smaller government while the social conservatives tug in the direction of virtue and the national security conservatives tug in the direction of a strong nation state.

The fact is that you can’t have a state with lots of freedom unless the people are self-regulating.  Until the millennium, that will mean religious people.

So if libertarians want a government that doesn’t write a new law to regulate every problem, they need a populace that is self-regulating and doesn’t need constant supervision.  Goes together like ham and cheese. 

Then the only thing needful would be for libertarians and national security conservatives to find common ground.  How about reciprocity in foreign policy?

The key principle is one of reciprocity. If you behave peacefully and embrace the norms of a libertarian society, we leave you alone. If you seek to destroy a free society, we will destroy you.

Ron Paul has attracted a lot of young voters.  That’s worth its weight in gold.