What New Deal?

Rumor has it that Obama’s advisors are planning some sort of a Big Bang program in January. As Rahm Emanuel told the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council:

You should never let a crisis go to waste. [It lets us address long-term problems] in the health care area, the energy area, the education area, the fiscal area, [and] the tax area.

You can see what is coming, given that President-elect Obama represents the progressive educated elite. What is coming is an intensification of the power of the progressive educated elite expressed through the power of the political sector. They want to enact a hugely dirigiste program that puts government even more deeply into every area of American life. It’s a “new” New Deal.

That’s all very well, but as Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. writes in the Wall Street Journal, how about Obama cleans up the festering problems of the old New Deal that are just now wiping out the economy.

His real problem is the crack-up of the world FDR built.


Fannie Mae was a New Deal creation, subsidizing the securitization of mortgage debt. FDR’s successors piled on the subsidies for housing debt and incentives directed at low-income borrowers. Kaboom.


Then there’s the UAW, born in 1935. For decades the UAW steadily traded away domestic auto market-share to imports and transplants to keep its aging membership toiling away toward their golden pensions and collecting wages and benefits twice those of their competitors. It worked for a while.

But now Kaboom. Rahm Emanuel thinks that the answer to all these failed government policies is more of the same.

Of course, the problem wasn’t so much with the original New Deal policies, but the fact that the powers granted to the government and to its favored interests were so shockingly abused. The bright young men of the New Deal may have designed some useful programs. But then the bright young men went on to the next new thing, and the programs got taken over by time servers and placemen.

The same will happen to Obama’s government-centric ideas—assuming that they even work in the first place.

In my view, the increased centralization of health care, energy, education, and so on will hasten the day when the whole project of the progressive educated elite hits the buffers.

And the people that get hurt will be the trusting independent voters who just voted innocently for Hope and Change.

Not Your Father's GOP

Kathleen Parker is a conservative columnist who went off the reservation during the recent campaign with an article praising Christopher Buckley for endorsing then-candidate Obama.

Then she got some hate mail.

Now she’s got an article in the Washington Post that urges Republicans to get G-O-D out of the party.

The fact is that a number of elite Republicans don’t really like the idea of the Republican Party as the party of the aspirational white working class.

You’ll find, if you investigate, that a common denominator in aspirational groups is a belief in God. It goes back at least to the Protestant Reformation. And so, if the party of Lincoln becomes the party of Palin and Joe the Plumber you can expect a lot of God stuff. And that’s a problem to people like Parker.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.

I’ve heard this from a number of conservative friends, professional types with money in the bank. And I understand. Enthusiastic Christians like the Christian conservatives of today’s conservative movement have always been an embarrassment to established conservatives. Their naivete, their faith, their certainty—well they just aren’t out of the top drawer.

Sorry. Count me out of the exodus. If the Republican Party ceases to be the party of the moneyed professional class and becomes the party of the aspirational working class, then I’d rather stay than quit.

In my view the aspirational working class has taken it in the chin these last decades. The political elite has made it more and more difficult to be independent and aspirational and we know why. Ordinary people are only interesting to a political elite if they are useful to its program of power. In the present western world, ordinary people are useful to the elite if they are victims. They are useful if they are frightened. They are useful if they are dependent.

The aspirational working class is composed of people that used to be victims. They used to be frightened. They used to be dependent. But now they are climbing. Now they are succeeding. They’d like the nation’s politics and culture to recognize their achievement and honor their culture.

It seemed like it was only yesterday that the political elite loved the white working class to pieces. That was when they were the principal victim group that the elite wanted to sponsor. But the elite has gone on from class warfare to race politics and gender politics—that’s where they mine for new victims today. Today the white working class is an embarrassment, with its bitter embrace of God and guns.

Anyway, so what if the Republican Party becomes the party of working-class and middle-class aspiration? There might be more people interested in that kind of party than you might think, God or no God.

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.