Vanity of Vanities

Jane Austen’s last complete novel, Persuasion, is about vanity. Principally, it turns around the vanity of the novel heroine’s father, Sir Walter Elliott. This empty vessel (Latin: vanus: empty) is remarkably proud of his title, his lineage, his good looks, and his splendid mansion, Kellynch. He provides a suitable contrast to the heroine, Anne. “[N]one so proper, none so capable, as Anne,” as the hero Captain Wentworth, puts it.

The spectacle of Sen. Barack Obama (D-NY) expatiating on his embarrassment that few Americans speak French, or his proposal that American kids should be forced to do community service remind us about the unseriousness, the emptiness, the vanity of the modern liberal.

Decades ago our liberal friends set upon a serious program, to bring material benefits to the other half. They would provide a safety net to people that had none, and they would lift up the forgotten man to a decent standard of life.

Today it is easy to criticize their program.We can say that their safety net was no safety net, but an an umbilical cord to the welfare state and permanent dependency. We can look at free education today and ask what happened. We can look a Social Security and say: if only we had put Fidelity and Vanguard in charge of this. We can look at the ruins of the working class, now the underclass, and shake our heads at the follies of the liberals.

But fifty, sixty years ago, only a couple of prophets, men like F.A. Hayek, were saying that the welfare state was a Road to Serfdom. No serious person thought that.

But today’s liberals are no longer serious. They want to fiddle with health care. But Americans have basic health care, the kind that saves the lives of mothers and babies. They want women to be able to abort their babies. No serious person could ever do that. They want to carve out benefits for gays and lesbians, who being childless, are not really the most important item on the docket. They are more eager to battle Americans that don’t agree with them than Islamists who want to take over the world.

Anyone can now see that liberals, in the late summer of their power, have become empty, vain, unserious.

We have not experienced, directly, the un-seriousness of liberals in full political power for nearly a generation, not since the un-serious presidency of President Carter. Maybe it’s time for a refresher course.

More Capital Needed at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Yesterday, shares in Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored Federal National Mortgage Assocation were down 16 percent, while shares in the government-sponsored Freddie Mac were down 18 percent. There was concern on the market that both needed “to raise more capital amid larger-then-expected losses.”

So the brilliant managers at the government’s mortgage mills are going to need a bailout too. Only, you can bet that the shareholders of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae won’t get the haircut that the folks at Bear, Stearns got.

The idea of government-subsidized mortgages was to make housing more affordable to the average American. Something seems to have gone wrong.

Here are the numbers. In 1950, when per-capita income was $2,000, the median house price in the US was $7,350, according to the Census Bureau, or 3.7 times income. Today, with per capita income around $47,000, the median home price is about $220,000, or 4.6 times the median house price.

So with all that subsidy and help from our elected officials, houses cost more than they did half a century ago.

That is what you call progress.

The Trouble With Faith-based Initiatives

Back when President Bush was pushing his idea for faith-based organizations to have access to government monies it seemed like a good idea. But many conservatives warned against it, because whatever the government touches the government controls.

Think the Catholic adoption agency in Massachusetts that decided to get out of the adoption business rather than be forced to accept gays as adoptive parents.

A number of conservatives have had their doubts in the years since. Now Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has come out in favor of faith-based initiatives. Writes Rev. Robert Sirica,

Barack Obama has announced that he likes President Bush’s program of public funding for religious charities. In fact, he wants to expand the program.

Yes. Think about it. Think what the liberal government managers will do, and think what the liberal activist groups will do with faith-based initiatives.

The point is, of course, that government is the last place in the world that you would look for giving people a hand up. Government is about power and patronage. It is not about faith, love, and charity. When government helps people it thinks immediately about binding those people into supporting it at the next election.

But votes are all that the liberal politicians care about. Fraser Nelson wrote recently about the people in the welfare ghetto of east Glasgow, Scotland, where 50 percent of the adult population is on “incapacity” benefits and male life expectancy at birth is 54 years:

I once had the job of signing up the good people of Glasgow East to the electoral register — at the time, regarded as an invitation to pay poll tax. Gang graffiti scars the walls, police are virtually unseen. This no-go-zone status is new, and cost billions to achieve. Houses there are in good condition, money is being spent. But it has funded a hideous social experiment, showing what happens when the horizontal ties which bind those within communities to one another are replaced with vertical ties, binding individuals to the welfare state.

Liberals like to talk about the “safety net” afforded by government programs, but the metaphor is misleading. In a safety net, the people are the knots, supported by horizontal ties to work, family, church, and neigborhood. In a welfare state, the only tie is the umbilical cord to the welfare state placenta. Cut that one cord, and you are dead.

Maybe umbilical cord is the wrong metaphor. Maybe the reality is that the vertical tie by which dependents are bound to the welfare state is a rope.

Clark's McCain Put-down

You and I can only guess at the tactical political calculations of presidential campaigns.

So we just shake our heads and wonder at the attempt by Gen. Wesley Clark, an Obama supporter, to brush off Sen. McCain’s military experience as mere by-play. As Jake Tapper quotes,

“He hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn’t a wartime squadron,” said Clark, who did command NATO allied forces during the war in Kosovo.



And the corker: “Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” Clark added.

You have to assume that remarks like that were poll tested by the Obama campaign and run by focus groups. Unless. Unless the Obama campaign is just an amateur operation that just shoots from the hip.

(This is not impossible. The only campaign I served on was a very amateur operation, as it was bound to be when it ran mostly on volunteers.)

But let us assume there are adults at the Obama campaign. They must think that they have to take down McCain’s advantage as a combat veteran with actual service in the military. It is true, of course, that service in the military does not immediately transfer to “national security” experience. But we know that McCain has made national security a key concern as a United States Senator. You are really taking a big risk to try impeach his credentials as a serious actor on national security.

So I reckon that the Obama folks reckon they are toast unless they can take McCain out on national security. That means that they are looking at polls and focus group results with negative results on Obama’d electability that you and I can only guess at.

But hey, with the help of the mainstream media, maybe they can do it!

Or maybe, given the fact of evil right-wing swift-boating extremist bloggers, they can’t.

New Hope for Global Warming Deniers

There are some of us, and we are few, who reflexively recoil from the latest liberal enthusiasm.

(And why is it that every liberal enthusiasm involves a dip into your pocketbook?)

So we grab at hopes that the liberals are wrong—again.

Last week there was a straw to grasp for us global warming deniers. A couple of astsro-physicists published a paper on sunspots and the solar cycle.

As reported by Andrew Bolt the phsysicts are predicting that the sun may turn quiet with very few sunspots in the next 20-30 years. Some scientists believe that global temperatures typically dip by 1 to 2 degrees during these episodes.

The theory is that the convection currents in the sun are driven by the rotation of the Jovian planets, Jupiter and Saturn. They represent the biggest mass in the solar system after the Sun, and cause the sun to “wobble” around the center of the Solar System.

If this is true, and if Cycle 24 is really a quiet cycle, and if the climate cools by one or two degrees... Well, it could dent the current global warming “consensus.”

Author Ian Wilson comments on his paper.

It supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 - 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the World’s mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 - 2 C.

Well, it means new hope for global warming deniers.

But go ahead, AlGore. You can crank up the thermostat in your energy-guzzling house if things get a little chilly. We won’t mind.

Conservatives Obtuse on '60s Civil Rights

Why was it that Sen. Barry Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act? A majority of Republicans in both Houses of Congress voted for it. But Mr. Conservative voted against.

William Voegeli tells how it came about.

The fact is that Bill Buckley and the National Review crowd were so anxious to roll back the New Deal and Big Government that they were blind to the need for federal brute force to end the power of the segregationist South. They hoped that the South would evolve away from Jim Crow. And they wrote cringingly embarrassing stuff about whites being for now at least “the advanced race.”

When the Civil Rights Act came up for passage two young lawyers, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, briefed Sen. Goldwater to vote against the bill. The rest, as they say, is history.

Eventually, Bill Buckley realized that he had been wrong.

Asked by Time in 2004 whether he regretted any positions he had taken in the past, Buckley said simply, "Yes. I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary."

It was, writes Voegeli, “a textbook example of letting the best be the enemy of the good” and conservatives have paid for their sorry obtuseness in spades, as blacks have never after 1960 voted more than 10 percent for a Republican presidential candidate and liberals have seen the civil-rights template as the first, best, and only appropriate way to deal with social problems.

Yes, but, conservatives may retort.

But nothing. With an African American man the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party in 2008, liberals can be justly proud of their courage back in the 1960s.

President Johnson in 1964 is said to have told an aide that Democrats had probably lost the South for a generation, and he probably thought they would lose the presidency as well. In other words, he understood that passing the Civil Rights Acts would have untold consequences, many of which could hurt his party. But he did it any way because it was the right thing to do.

Whenever conservatives get a little cocky about their noble virtue versus the eternal perfidy of the liberals, it wouldn’t hurt to remember their foolishness and pusillanimity back in the decisive decade of civil rights.

Heller and "Select Militias"

The big takeaway for me on the Second Amendment case of District of Columbia v. Heller is the description of its history.

Justice Scalia writes intriguingly about what the framers and the people of the 18th century thought about the right to keep and bear arms.

Their memory was the attempt by governments to disarm the people they didn’t like. In the late 17th century their memory was of the British kings Charles II and James II and their “select militias.”

Between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Kings Charles II and James II succeeded in using select militias loyal to them to suppress political dissidents, in part by disarming their opponents.

You can imagine that folks didn’t have a very rosy memory of that time. In the runup to the American Revolution a similar thing occurred, according to Scalia. This time the British king was George III.

In the tumultuous decades of the 1760s and 1770s, the Crown began to disarm the inhabitants of the most rebellious areas. That provoked polemical reactions by Americans invoking their rights as Englishmen to keep arms.

Governments don’t disarm the populace out of a noble desire to preserve peace. They do it out of a desire to weaken their opponents.

The situation really isn’t that different today. Liberals want guns out of the hands of conservatives. They see right-wing militias under every bush. Liberals are in charge of education, culture, and the government bureaucracy and they instinctively know that it is not in their interest to have the average conservative householder armed and dangerous. Neither side is going to give up, not without a fight.

Glenn Reynolds makes this point in the New York Post today.

But winning in the Supreme Court is just the beginning of the story. Even the biggest civil-rights victories have taken years to percolate through the lower courts, often in the face of foot-dragging or outright resistance from lower-court judges, states and municipalities.

Seems like the National Rifle Association is still going to need our support.