The Universe of Hope

If you want real Hope and Change, don’t expect it from a politician. You are committing a category error. Everyone agrees that soldiers and politicians are the fighters, businessmen and workers are the workers, and teachers, clerics, and writers are the prayers. It’s the job of the teachers and clerics in the moral/cultural sector to be in charge of the hoping.

So if you want to ponder the question of hope, the Christmas (or Hannukah, or Divali) festival is a good one to anchor your thoughts.

All these mid-winter festivals are about light or about new-borns. Light is hope, for it lets you see, and birth is hope because every new-born is a reckless expression of hope.

In fact, life is hope. Every living thing, from an irritable amoeba to a little plant struggling in the desert; from a bird flying around on a snowy day looking for food to a young human adolescent yearning to be grown up and free, every living thing is an impersonation of hope. Where there is life, there is hope, and where there is hope there is life.

But hope is not a dream. You cannot just sit back in a reverie and hope. That isn’t life. That’s just deliquescing. Real hope is a dream put into action. It is the young love of a human couple translated into marriage and children. It is the dream of creativity translated into step-by-step actions towards a goal.

And, of course, real hope often involves sacrifice. Maybe it is the sacrifice of the parent for the welfare of the child. Maybe it is the sacrifice of the soldier who dies that others may live. Maybe it is the impossible sacrifice of Christianity: God sacrifices his Son so humans don’t have to sacrifice theirs in expiation of their sins.

What is Hope? All you can do is have faith in Hope. Probably it will all come clear when Pope Benedict XVI issues his third encyclical, which should be due a year from now. Remember? The first was issued on December 25, 2005 and called God is Love. The second was issued on November 30, 2007 and called Saved by Hope. The third one? Something about Faith, I shouldn’t wonder, although, as the Holy Father writes, Hope and Faith are pretty much one and the same thing. But then you could say that Hope and Love are pretty much one and the same.

Faith, Hope, Love. There’s something about all three. Just thinking about them fills you with Faith, Hope and Love. Try it for yourself.

Merry Christmas from all of us at Road to the Middle Class.

NYT: Bush to Blame for Mortgage Meltdown!

Let’s say it up front. President Bush was not early enough or firm enough in calling a halt to the housing boom/bubble. For some years, it is clear, Bush just kept on the policy of mortgage-at-any-cost (especially to minorities) which has been the policy of the US government for decades.

But you’d have to have your head in a liberal bell jar to write a news story about the housing crisis and not mention “Community Reinvestment Act.” You’d have to try really hard not to mention the word “Dodd.” You’d have to try really hard not to mention the bullying of the banks by federal housing officials.

But The New York Times reporters Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Stephen Labaton managed it.

They introduce Franklin Raines as a helpless victim of Bush’s policies:

[Raines, once] Fannie’s chief executive, has fond memories of visiting Mr. Bush in the Oval Office and flying aboard Air Force One to a housing event. "They loved us," he said.

But the reporters don’t mention the congressional hearings in 2004 when Republicans were accused of being racists for criticizing the performance of Raines at Fannie Mae.

“It was not until 2003,” the Times complains, “when Freddie became embroiled in an accounting scandal, that the White House took on the companies in earnest.”

Well Geewillikins, reporters and reporterettes, if the White House had succeeded in reining in Fannie and Freddie back in 2003, we would all be home free.

But they didn’t. They couldn’t. And the reason is Democrats in Congress like Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA). And the reason is the law: the Community Reinvestment Act that more or less forced banks to loan money to poor credit risks.

There’s a good side and a bad side to this sand-box journalism and blatant bias. The good side is that these journalists probably really don’t know what they are talking about. That means that New York Times readers won’t either. As political partisans, we gotta love that.

But the bad side is that the educated elite of the nation—let alone the ordinary Americans who get their news from the educated elite—still don’t have a clue, and may never have a clue about what hit us.

If you can’t get off the Democratic talking points of greedy banks and lax “de-regulation” then you haven’t learned the lesson. And that means that ordinary Americans are going to be forced to go through the whole thing again.

But who cares, as long as the good guys get reelected?

Yes. We are conservatives, and we do care.

The Corruption and the Temptation

Up until the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt the Democratic Party was split between the “honest graft” wing and the squeaky clean liberal or progressive wing. (Let’s leave the Southern Democratic Party out of this.)

Liberals were embarrassed by the corrupt city machines, and the ward heelers were contemptuous of the egg-head liberals who were full of ideas but couldn’t get anyone to the polls.

Of course, both of these tendencies are bad, very bad. The routine corruption of city machines was a continuation by other means of the rule of the “eternal gang of ruthless men,” the politics of piracy and plunder.

But the liberal approach to politics, if anything, is even worse. Liberals are determined to do good, and that’s a good thing. But they want to do good on someone else’s dime. They want to force other people to fund their programs of social welfare. It’s a matter of compassion, they tell us.

Earth to liberals. Compassion is where you give your money to poor people. Compulsion is where you give other peoples’ tax money to poor people.

There was once a famous person who had the liberal temptation.

Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.

The great political achievement of President Roosevelt was to submit to temptation, to turn the Democratic Party from a coalition of city patronage machines and ideological liberals into a single national political patronage machine, led and run by liberals, focused on using political power to do good.

But he also started the descent into corruption. And anyone can see that in full operation as the Obama administration takes office. It’s not about Hope and Change. It’s just about getting back the levers of political power back from the Republican yahoos.

The great world historical achievement of liberals is this. They took a federal government that was spending about three percent of GDP and cranked it up to 20 percent.

What do liberals spend all that money on? Well, that’s what usgovernmentspending.com is for. Let’s take a look.

United States Federal
State and Local Government Spending

Fiscal Year 2009

Amounts in $ billion



Pensions: $891.1

Health Care: $958.2

Education: $873.7

Defense: $806.1

Welfare: $467.7

Protection: $325.0

Transportation: $247.8

General Government: $193.3

Other Spending: $403.6

Interest: $361.7

Balance: $24.3

Total Spending: $5,552.4

Government, especially national government, is there to defend first of all against enemies foreign and domestic. You don’t see a lot of that going on in the top spending categories. Why is that?

The reason is pretty simple. Liberals are running, in the Democratic Party, a political operation. It is not particularly interested in defense. It is interested in its left-wing government programs and its raw political patronage.

The tragedy is that the people most benefitting from all these trillions are well-born educated liberals. The people most hurt are the program beneficiaries, anesthetized by the liberal mess of pottage, who aren’t getting to learn the skills and the trust culture of the city. They aren’t moving up into the self-reliant middle class. And that is a shame. It is more than a shame. It is a crime.

Some day the American people are going to ask conservatives to reform this corrupt regime of patronage and ideological cant.

Until then, conservatives must develop and sharpen their indictment of this cruel, corrupt, and unjust regime.

Music Really Is the Food of Love

Count Orsino in Twelfth Night was one of the most pompous lovers ever. What did the plucky Viola see in him?

But he knew the importance of music:

If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

There you have the two themes of sex. Music and death.

Being holiday season and all, the London Economist has a long and learned disquisition on the question of music. Is it related to sex or survival, they wonder?

No contest. It’s sex. The research proves it.

One reason for believing this is that musical productivity... seems to match the course of an individual’s reproductive life. In particular, Dr Miller studied jazz musicians. He found that their output rises rapidly after puberty, reaches its peak during young-adulthood, and then declines with age and the demands of parenthood.

Interesting isn’t it, how music has degenerated in the last half century from the romantic ballad into the drumbeat pulse of sex.

Music tracks the sexually active years. But cooking does not.

But uniquely human activities associated with survival—cooking, say—do not show this pattern. People continue to cook at about the same rate from the moment that they have mastered the art until the moment they die or are too decrepit to continue.

The question is: are singers the sexiest people alive, more so even than ath-e-letes? You’d think so. Think Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix. And that goes for the more sedate world of opera, with Maria Callas, Luciano Pavarotti (sexy despite his size), and Plácido Domingo.

The other thing that makes you sexy is dancing ability. That’s why they call Tango “vertical sex.”

The Kennedys Ain't What They Used To Be

Nobody could say that the Kennedy political machine didn’t practice nepotism. Old Joe Kennedy would probably have made Gov. Blagojevich (D-IL) look like a piker if we’d known about his shenanigans. (Why do you think we use that Irish word to communicate the notion of dodgy political footwork?)

But at least Jack Kennedy actually ran and won races for the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. And at least Ted Kennedy ran for the Senate in 1962.

But now we have the latest Kennedy scion, Caroline Kennedy Schossberg, campaigning for an appointment to the US Senate.

How about the idea that this political novice should actually run for a political office before she works the system to get into the Senate by the back door?

Otherwise, who can complain about Sarah Palin, a woman without political connections, who has actually won three different political offices in open elections? Indeed, she won the governorship by running against the Republican political machine in Alaska.

Well, never mind. Democrats are Democrats, and Republicans are different, honey.

As the Brits used to say. Not really out of the top drawer, old chap.

Pushing on a String

At this stage of the business cycle pundits usually talk about the Fed pushing on a string. They mean that the Fed can’t actually make people start to borrow. All the Fed can do is print money and hope that economic activity starts to revive.

The usual response is that, of course, economic activity will revive; it always does. But until it does, who knows how long it will be before greed takes over from fear.

The worry is that the Fed is reaching the zone of “quantitative easing.” That was what the Bank of Japan used to do during the lost decade of the Japanese economy, after its big real estate boom left many of its banks insolvent and unwilling to lend.

Well, we solved that problem, didn’t we? We bailed out the banks by recapitalizing them. But do we know that the banks are out of the wood? After all, the banks depend on the quality of their assets, and that depends, in many cases, on the value of commercial and residential mortgages, and they depend on housing prices.

The Fed is working on that, according to the Wall Street Journal, and its action is already leading to a reduction in mortgage rates which will help to advance a revival in real-estate prices. But what’s really needed is not an increase in liquidity, but an increase in confidence.

Meanwhile, according to Larry Kudlow, the Obama team is planning a massive purchase of mortgage paper.

Team Obama is also drawing up plans for a massive purchase of mortgages in order to get long-term borrowing rates down to 4.5 percent — a full percentage-point drop.

But is that the prescription for recovery? What nobody seems to be suggesting is a tax rate cut, worries Kudlow.

But I still believe the best economic stimulus would be a move to cut tax rates across-the-board for individuals and businesses. No matter how much money the Fed prints, or how many roads or mortgages Uncle Sam buys, none of it creates new incentives for private enterprise, risk-taking, and investment.

Yes. It took Bush two years to get Congress to agree to tax rate cuts. And it looks like the same could happen with the firm of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi.

Were Talent-spotters Right on Obama?

Federal Appeal Court Judge and über-liberal Abner Mikva was an early patron of President-elect Obama, according to Tom Hundley. He “was among the first to spot the potential of the skinny young law school graduate with the odd name.”

"I use a Yiddish expression, yiddishe neshuma, to describe him," explains Mikva. "It means a Jewish soul. It’s an expression my mother used. It means a sensitive, sympathetic personality, someone who understands where you are coming from."

That’s cool, because there’s a national problem right in the cross-hairs of the national radar that needs just that sort of sensitive, sympathetic personality. It’s the Big Three auto mess. Michael Barone rather neatly describes how the mess came to be.

It all started with Taylorism, after the book on “the one best way” by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor’s brilliant idea was to measure worker productivity with time and motion studies and implement the one best way as a mandatory procedure for all workers.

Only one problem, of course. It treats workers like machines rather than people. So it provoked its nemesis, the Wagner Act of 1935, that legislated an adversarial relationship between business and labor. It worked great, for a while, as auto workers and steel workers won themselves fabulous wages and benefits.

Everyone thought that the new unionism was a wonderful idea, in particular liberal writers like John Kenneth Galbraith who made a fortune peddling conventional wisdom to a generation of liberals by telling them that he and they were intelligent iconoclasts that soared above mere “conventional wisdom.”

Well, it wasn’t such a great idea. It wiped out the steel companies a generation ago, and now it’s brought the auto companies to the edge of ruin, and brought the current generation of autoworkers to the edge of humiliation.

If President-elect is the genius that his patrons believe then he will use his yiddishe neshuma to lead the autoworkers and their union and their jobs back from the precipice.

But my guess is that he won’t. My guess is that he’ll choke on the chance to get the auto companies to reorganize and write Finis on the era of Wagner Act unionism.

The sensible thing for liberals to do would be to start a strategic retreat on their welfare state and its privileges, to preserve as long as possible the unsustainable privileges and subsidies they have awarded themselves and their servitors. But I don’t think they will.

My guess is that in the next few years the liberals are going to get themeselves suckered into the political equivalent of the Battle of Kursk. That battle, you will recall, was the last big offensive of the German Army on the eastern front in World War II. It seemed like a good idea to the German generals in early 1943 but by the time that Germans actually started the offensive the Russians were ready for them. So the greatest tank battle ever fought ended in failure. The Russians began a counter-offensive that didn’t stop until it reached Berlin two years later.

After all, Barack Obama didn’t run for president to sort out the labor union problem. He ran to lower the oceans and cure the sick. Much more fun.