Bail-out for the Banks but not for Detroit?

If we can spend $700 billion on a bank bail-out why not spend a measly $25 billion on the auto companies?

The simple answer is that we can’t let the banks go broke. We tried it, sort of, back in September when Lehmen Brothers went belly up. The fallout from that nuclear explosion is still irradiating us.

But the bankrupty of an industrial corporation is not so bad. The railroads went in and out of bankruptcy with regularity in the 19th century. And the world didn’t end when the Penn Central went bankrupt in 1970 (in a recession, of course). Corporations go bankrupt when they run out of equity. In crude terms, the stockholders get handed their heads and the bondholders get to own the company.

When you look at the balance sheet of General Motors, today, November 18, 2008, you see Total Assets of $110 billion, Total Liabilities of $170 billion, for a Total Equity of minus $60 billion. That negative equity is mostly an Accumulated Deficit of $61 billion. No much to go on.

The best solution for General Motors is to go into bankruptcy. Then the creditors can get together and decide what to do to get something out of the wreck. And then the politicians could decide what they would be prepared to do to help out. General Motors could keep operating, of course, during all this.

A lot of people are going to have to take a haircut over the failure of General Motors. Right now, too many of them are still in denial. So they won’t agree to a haircut until General Motors actually goes broke.

The haircut can’t start until General Motors declares Chapter 11.

Those Pesky Russkie UHIs

Last week was great fun for global warming deniers. There was an almighty cock-up on the monthly temperature front as NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies released a “record” month temperature for October. Trouble was that the temperatures for a bunch of stations in Siberia were for September, not October. Not our fault, said the chaps at GISS. Blame the chaps at NOAA.

(Gotta love those government bureacrats and their CYA antics.)

But the real fun ensued later as the bloggers at Climate Audit and Watts Up With That started taking a look at the Siberian stations in question with help from Google Earth. The little Siberian towns where the temperature stations are located all have district heating systems, where steam is distributed from a central power station to heat the buildings in the town. What about the urban heat island effect from all that?

Then an alert commenter came in with the coup de grace. All the heat that is generated in a city, big or small, escapes into the environment, wrote Willis Eschenbach (04:05:35).

That’s why it doesn’t matter if the steam pipes are insulated or not … the main heat loss is from the houses and factories that are heated by the steam. All of the heat piped around the town ends up warming the environment.

Of course. The whole argument about the size of the urban heat island (UHI) effect is moot. Of course it’s there, and of course it is substantial. You just have to do an energy budget on a city, and figure that almost all the energy it uses, in electric generation, in space heating, in transportation, all of it, pretty well, is discharged to the environment.

And it ain’t chump change.

The Social Liberal/Economic Conservative Chimera

Why don’t conservatives just give up on the social conservatism, a lot of people argue? Then they could pick up the votes of all the social liberal/economic conservatives out there.

That would be a good idea, writes Jonah Goldberg, if indeed there was a great reservoir of social liberal/economic conservative votes out there. But the record is that they ain’t there.

Economically conservative social liberals are the “jackalopes of American politics,” in the words of the National Review Institute’s Kate O’Beirne. The press keeps telling us they exist out there in huge numbers, but when you go looking for them, they refuse to emerge from the bushes.

That’s because most people like that are really Democrats. They are really inviting Republicans to give up and become Democrats just like them. The truth is that social conservatism and economic conservatism go together.

For example, in Congress and in state legislatures, the more pro-life you are, the more likely you are to be a free-market, low-tax conservative. The more pro-choice you are, the more likely it is that you will be remarkably generous with other people’s money.

This makes sense. If you value life and big families then you will build up a social safety net around you of people related to you by blood who are likely to feel an obligation to help you if you need help. But if you don’t have children, don’t get married, don’t keep up with your family, then you are much more likely to feel the need for a government safety net. And why not? Everyone needs a safety net. So socially liberal people naturally gravitate to the economically liberal party—meaning the welfare-state party

In my view the famous social liberal/economic conservative crowd are people that are relatively well-off. They are active enough in the economy as business owners or as well-paid professionals to have faith in the economy to sustain them. They are rich enough that they don’t need to cultivate family ties as a practical way of maintaining a strong safety net. For them, their wealth and their income-generating potential serves as a safety net.

They are rich enough that they can afford to be socially liberal.

PJ's Lament

Poor old P.J. O’Rourke is singing the blues. In a post-election lament in The Weekly Standard he writes we’ve only ourselves to blame. “We blew it,” he writes.

The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We’ve had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.

It’s true. If there was a mistake to be made in the last 20 years, conservatives and Republicans made it. And made it in spades.

Only trouble is: That’s always the way. That’s what humans do. We make every mistake in the book, all the time. That’s why we’ve developed these outsized brains of ours. So we can figure out how to climb out of the holes we dig for ourselves.

So let’s think this through again. Given that we conservatives are all fallible mortals, and given that we are battling against the progressive educated class, the ruling class of the modern era, how much better could we have done?

OK, all right. We could have done a lot better.

The main thing is to learn from our mistakes, and do better next time.

But, the big problem really has nothing to do with us. Try as we might, there’s not much we can do to promote truth, freedom, and the American Way if the American people really prefer the “free” services of the nanny state.

So cheer up P.J.  Things could be a lot worse. The Democrats could have won 60-40 in the presidential election and be up 65-35 in the Senate.

President Bush a Conservative?

Is Bush really a conservative? That’s what some conservatives were asking back in 2000 when then Governor Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative.” And conservatives are asking it again as conservatives go out into the wilderness following the presidential win of Sen. Barack Obama.

According to Jonah Goldberg there are two sides to the argument.

In one corner, there are a large number of bright, mostly younger, self-styled reformers with a diverse — and often contradictory — set of proposals to win back middle-class voters...


In another corner are self-proclaimed traditional conservatives and Reaganites, led most notably by Rush Limbaugh, who believe that the party desperately needs to get back to the basics: limited government, low taxes and strong defense.

Maybe, writes Jonah, the two sides will see how much they have in common when Bush is out of the way.

But blaming Bush is besides the point. In 2000 the voters were tired of plain-Reagan conservatism. With the budget in balance they wanted government to step out a little, and Bush responded as a good politician must if he wants to be elected. And in the cold-cock era with Democrats stopping all genuine reform of their welfare state including the dreaded Fannie and Freddie Bush had limited ability to enact conservative reform.

In four years, or maybe eight years, Americans will once again say that it’s “time for a change.” Then there will be another chance for conservative reform.

But the big prize, in my judgment, is a generation away. That moment will come when women decided that men make better husbands than the nanny state. When they do that then it will bring the whole edifice of the welfare state into question: the government pensions, the government health care, the government education, and the government welfare.

Today all that stuff costs a little north of $3 trillion per year. In a generation from now? Well, let’s not think about that.

But when women turn that corner, and they will, then we will really be able to talk about a conservative era.

Honoring Our Veterans

This world is not a world of peace and justice. It is a world of violence and plunder. Thus it is that governments are organized amongst mankind, to defend against the destructive forces in the world, to defend against enemies foreign and domestic.

Those most particularly called to defend us are the young men and women of the armed forces, the young and strong that are called upon to defend the old and weak.

The veterans of our armed forces were called upon to make sacrifices that may have cut them off from the fulfillment of a normal life: a decent job, a happy marriage, and flourishing children.

So on this day we honor our veterans, those who have stood in the line between order and chaos, between free exchange and brutal plunder.

Many of them have seen horrors that will haunt them all their days; many of them suffered wounds that will diminish their lives forever. And some, too many, have made the ultimate sacrifice, and died that we might live.

There is no recompense that society can give to its veterans for their sacrifice. What they have lost in our nation’s service is lost forever.

But we can show them our respect and honor, and always keep in our minds the service and sacrifice they have rendered up to our great nation, to fight that we might live in peace.

Defining the Modern Foundation

I’ve been reading liberal Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor recently, for a very simple reason.  I want to know the best that liberals can think.

Then I want to write about how liberals every day in every way betray and corrupt their principles in the vanity of their corrupt and hypocritical rule.

So let’s look at this quote from the end of Sources of the Self and tease it out a little.  Taylor is talking about the “moral imperatives” of our “modern culture.”

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.

He means that the central driving forces of our modern culture are our faith in freedom, in helping others, and in valuing and honoring the trajectory of ordinary life, the life of work and family, of marriage and children.  This last item is new, because in the old days ordinary life was considered rather demeaning.  Only the higher life, the courageous life of the warrior or the bios theoretikos of the philosopher was worthy of respect.

Taylor marshals three sources of meaning that underpin the moral imperatives.  They include the inheritance of Judeo-Christian religion.  In his formulation, perhaps the most significant contribution of theistic religion has been the banishment of magic to the periphery.  There are no longer good and evil spirits wielding their power in the world.  Only God.

Then there is the influence of modern science, what he calls “disengaged reason,”  Everyone knows how science permeates everything we think and do. 

And finally there is “Romantic expressivism.”  All of us, even conservatives, are driven by the Romantic notion of the creative individual, creating something new, breaking the mold, making a mark, challenging the status quo.

We conservatives believe in a balanced faith in all these notions and symbols.  Our liberal friends do not.   We conservatives believe in a balanced faith in freedom, in helping others, and in the trajectory of ordinary life through youth, marriage, children, career, and old age.  And we believe that life should be lived as far as possible outside the orbit of force and compulsion.  Our liberal friends believe in universal compulsion.

We conservatives believe in a balanced application of religious values, of science, and of creativity.  Our liberal friends do not.  They believe in self-expression in a consuming cult of creativity, in science when it supports their creative life, and religion when it agrees with their secular pursuit of power.  All these things are for them alone.  Other people must do what they are told.

We all agree on the same things.  It’s just that liberals don’t believe in living up to their principles.  That’s because they have the power, the interior lines on political and cultural power.  As George Maroutsos says: You don’t have power unless you’ve abused it.  Power without abuse is just responsibility.

Excited?  So was General “Chesty” Puller when it was reported that his Marines were almost surrounded.  We’ve got them just where we want them, he growled.