Changes at Road to the Middle Class

We've decided at Road to the Middle Class to surrender to progress and go to Google's Blogger for our blogging platform.  

The reason is two-fold.

• The RMC comments feature never really worked very well.
• It's much easier to manage the blog and to post using a fully-featured blogging platform instead of home brew.

So now roadtothemiddleclass.com changed.  New blog posts are now hosted at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.  Comments are hosted at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com. 

But this doesn't mean much change to you, the user.  That's because, through the magic of xml feeds, you can still read the latest blogs on the home page of christopherchantrill.com  as though nothing had changed.

And you can still click the "comments" link at the bottom of each blog post.  And you can still click the "more" link on recent blogs to see the full post.

The difference is that now, when you want to see a full post or you want to comment and you click on a link, you'll be redirected to americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.  

But what do you do when you want to get back to christopherchantrill.com?  No problem.  Just us the menu across the top of the page at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com, just as you would at  roadtothemiddleclass.

Sounds simple.  But you may encounter problems.  If you do, be sure and make a comment below, or email us.  Then we can fix the problem.

"They Don't Like It Up Them"

Everyone enjoys dishing it out. If you are in power it is great fun tarring your opponents as negative and unpatriotic. But you hate their pre-revolutionary rage. If you are out of power it is great fun to poke at the corruptions and abuses of the government. But you hate the way that the government uses its power to reward its supporters and shut up its opponents.

In the British sitcom, Dad's Army, Corporal Jones expressed this universal hypocrisy as: "They don't like it up them."

So you'd expect our liberal friends to be outraged that there exist people in the United States not exactly enamored of President Obama. Even Camille Paglia, conservatives' favorite liberal, is outraged now that Obama Derangement Syndrome is rearing its ugly head.

I was utterly horrified to hear Dallas-based talk show host Mark Davis, subbing for Rush Limbaugh, laughingly and approvingly read a passage from a Dallas magazine article by CBS sportscaster David Feherty claiming that "any U.S. soldier," given a gun with two bullets and stuck in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, would use both bullets on Pelosi and strangle the other two.

I agree. It is tasteless, and worrying in its violent intensity. But where were you, Camille, when your chaps were actually making movies about the assassination of President Bush? Not as outraged as conservatives, I'd imagine.

Camille had just seen the 1960s movie, Seven Days in May, a liberal fantasy about US military chiefs staging a coup. And she is outraged that Obama is not being given his due:

I am generally happy with Obama's eagerness to tackle long-entrenched social problems, although there is sometimes a curious disconnect between what he says and what he does. The degree to which Obama is or is not a stealth socialist remains to be seen. But it's about time an ambitious young leader shook up the stale status quo.

Notice what she is saying between the lines. It's time that someone shook up the status quo, but based on current form, it doesn't look like Obama is the one. Even so, She is not giving up on him yet.

Personally, I have been surprised by the vigor of the anti-Obama grass-roots, especially because it seems to be genuinely spontaneous, rather than "astroturf" planted from on high.

But then I was surprised by the 1994 Republican revolution too. I thought it would be the off-year in Clinton's second term before people would start wanting to throw the rascals out.

Let's not rush into any premature judgments. The next item on the agenda is the special election in California May 19, when voters are being asked to raise taxes. Hugh Hewitt thinks that the voters may be about to send a loud raspberry to their California state government leaders. Then we'll see.

"They don't like it up them."

It's Obama's Budget Now

Years ago, back in the 1980s, neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol said: Enough of this green-eyeshade conservatism, where conservatives carefully balance the budget after every Democratic bender. Conservatives should go to Washington to cut taxes and when it's time for the Democrats to return to power they should make sure that the government is broke.

The last green eye-shade Republican was President George H.W. Bush. He raised taxes in a recession and got tossed out by a rebellion in the Republican ranks.

But President George W. Bush was smarter. He left the federal government absolutely flat broke, and left his successor with a bunch of nasty choices.

Candidate Obama had promised the moon to his supporters: health care for those disinclined to pay for it; yet more money for government education, and lots of lovely grants and renewable energy for environmentalists.

But the trouble is, what with the recession and the bank-bailout and the auto bailout and the state-and-local government bailout, is that there just isn't the money there for all that stuff.

So if President Obama was smart he would have entered office realizing that, like it or not, Democrats had to put on the green eye-shades and get the government's finances back on an even keel. He would have said: I tried. I tried to find the money for the vital investments we must make in the Democratic faithful. But the money just isn't there. Those Wascally Wepublicans left the nation in the lurch, and I must get us out of the ditch.

Then, after a couple of years of cuts, he could go for broke with lots of lovely new programs for the Democratic faithful just in time for the next presidential election.

Instead he kept to his original spending agenda, piled a trillion dollars of extra pork on top, and still promised to fix the economy.

The numbers don't add up, and you can see why if you look at the full FY10 budget, released by the Government Printing Office yesterday, and loaded on usgovernmentspending.com last night.

Take a look at the numbers. The Defense budget is not going to go down, despite the fervent yearnings of our liberal friends. Tax collections are cratering, particularly the corporate income tax. And of course, health care costs are going to continue to climb ever upwards.

What is needed is retrenchment. But retrenchment goes against the very DNA of a Democrat.

But here's the rub. If the Democrats don't do it, then someone else will. The Tea Party movement is a movement of ordinary folks that are just fed up with the liberal gravy train. They know that there's a lot of loot swilling around, and they know that they aren't getting their share. And they are damned if they are going to fork out more money so that liberals can continue to enjoy their government sinecures and pensions while they look uneasily at their 201k accounts and put off retirement.

They weren't born yesterday. They can see politicians preparing to raise taxes, and they can see the poor helpless poster boys being rehearsed backstage.

Here's my guess. When President Obama comes to the American people asking for more taxes, they are going to tell him to get lost. And Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, and any other Democrat that doesn't keep their head down.

But meanwhile, check out the facts at usgovernmentspending.com and usgovernmentrevenue.com. They are fresh and new with the latest budget data.

Politcal Power and Money Power

One of the themes of the Democratic Party since its founding by 1812 war hero Andrew Jackson is a trust in political power over economic power. It means nothing to a Democrat to ride roughshod over property rights in the service of some greater end than mere money-making.

The trouble is that there is a big difference between political power and economic power.

Political power is all about power. Economic power is a reward for service. Unless a business learns to serve the consumer it cannot wield economic power. Its economic power lasts so long as it serves the consumer.

It is when business gets enmeshed in politics that its troubles begin. Because politics is not about serving the consumer, day in and day out. Politics is about power.

The auto companies are a sad witness to the destructiveness of political power, for the auto companies are host to a political entity, the United Auto Workers union. And the union has systemically looted the auto companies for over half a century ever since World War II. And they have done it with the encouragement of Democratic politicians.

Today the auto companies are bankrupt. So what does the Democratic Party do, led by President Obama? It straight-arms the secured creditors and gives a large minority interest in the company to the United Auto Workers union.

Rich Galen pointedly asks how this is different from the expropriation of oil service companies by President Chavez of Venezuela.

The "state firm says lower oil prices mean the contractors are being paid too much" so Chavez went for efficiency and simply seized the services companies and now the state-owned oil company owes them … nothing.

Well. It is certainly politically efficient to dodge paying the piper. But as the Fram oil filter guy says: You can pay me now or you can pay me later.

The problem with political control of the economy is that politicians and their aides know nothing about running successful companies.

That is why Fannie and Freddie were such a disaster; they were run by men and women from the Clinton administration that knew nothing about mortgage banking. But they did know a lot about lobbying Congress.

That is why the oil industry in Venezuela is a disaster. It is run by Chavez appointees, men who may be brilliant at political activism. But they are lousy at getting the heavy oil of Venezuela out of the ground and off to market.

The tragedy of expropriation politics is that the very people who cheer at the expropriation of the hated capitalists are the people that suffer first when the capitalists lose confidence and the economy tanks.

And that is what will happen to the US as the Obama administration continues its random walk through the economy making decisions based on short-term political expediency instead of long-term consumer needs.

Conservatives and Young People

What hope do conservatives have, given that young people voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama? After all, the youth is the future, and if they reject conservative ideas for liberal ideas, well...

That is what Hugh Hewitt is worrying about, and he asked Mark Roberts from Christian Biola University to write about it. Writes Roberts:

Losing the youth vote year after year is a sign of approaching party senility.

Then Roberts goes on to propose development of "middle-brow" institutions that can speak to young people.

We either need to be part of or fund the equivalent of middlebrow institutions such NPR and public television to discuss the entire culture from a conservative point of view. A political movement in a republic cannot be healthy if it loses the class of people who are not professional intellectuals, but who care deeply about the life of the mind. Such folk will produce much of the popular entertainments consumed by the rest of us.

Yes, but who's that "we?" And don't we need the young people themselves to develop the middle-brow institutions?

Actually, the miracle is that any conservative ideas get a hearing and any conservative politician gets elected. Given that the left controls the schools and the media your average young person would be a force of nature to get through twelve years of schooling without internalizing the lefty world-view.

In the current situation, conservatives are stuck with a raiding strategy. We can only swoop down and conquer when the liberal agenda has failed. That's how Ronald Reagan got elected. In 1980 it was pretty obvious that something was wrong. When Ronald Reagan came up with a solution that seemed to work, he got the votes of young people.

Here in the United States we've had a cultural drumbeat for the last ten years against conservatives as mean-spirited and narrow-minded. Bush Derangement Syndrome amplified anti-conservative rhetoric up to a level that could damage people's hearing.

And of course, young people are receptive to anti-authority rhetoric. Always have been.

But don't forget that right now the Dems are in control, in the White House and in the Congress. So if you are a real anti-authority figure, you'll be anti-Obama and anti-Pelosi, right? I dare say that we'll see a lot of conservative entertainment media seeping up through the cracks, now that video is so cheap to produce, and now that the official hypocrisy is all liberal.

The other big problem for conservatives is the schools. As long as the schools are government schools they will be trying to turn out graduates that love big government. The solution here is to educate children away from the schools.

The more I think about it the more obvious it is that the purpose of the education system is to raise nice dutiful little liberals who will take their place either as elite transgressive creative artists or as bureaucratic placemen and women in the administrative state.

But conservatives want to raise children who are courageous and adventurous. Obviously you can't raise such children if they are stuck in school for twelve years sitting on their butts watching environmental agitprop like Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth.

It is pretty obvious. Adventurous adults need to be raised to adventure while they are still children. They need to be self-directed. They need to have a healthy attitude towards risk. They need to be trained in the four aspects of competence: knowledge, skill, experience, judgment.

There's no need for conservatives to worry about becoming irrelevant. What we need to do is have the courage of our convictions and live our lives as a demonstration of our convictions.

Here's a prediction. If conservatives have the courage of gtheir convictions and make their lives into a witness to their convictions there will be a consequence. Young people will notice.

Barack von Schlieffen

There are reports this week about the secret plan for health-care reform. Bill writers are apparently not leaking as they beaver away to produce a plan that will utterly transform health care in America as we know it.

And that is saying nothing about the grand plan to transform energy production and use with the Obama administration's cap-and-trade plan.

For those of us with a little historical memory there is something eerily familiar about all this. But what is it?

The "It" is, of course, the Schlieffen Plan. It was the audacious plan of the Great German General Staff to take out France in six weeks with a stunning right hook through Belgium so that they could turn their armies eastward and deal with the Russians.

In the event, in 1914, they muffed it.

The question that General von Schlieffen did not ask is: What do you do with a defeated France and a defeated Russia after you are done whipping them? The Germans had already beaten France in 1870 and then stood around embarrassed for nearly a year while the French refused to capitulate.

In fact the Schlieffen Plan was an admission of failure, that Germany had weakened itself by becoming the strongest nation in Europe. If the Germans had merely taught France a short, sharp lesson in 1870 they could have gone home and returned to being merely the most advanced nation in the world, with the best philosophers, the best composers, the best scientists, and the best engineers, and the best universities.

Our liberal friends have a word for this deemphasis of "hard" military and political power. They call it "soft power." So then why are they not following their own advice and going slowly on their plans for health care reform and energy reform?

Because they must sense that time is running out on their project. They feel that strange and awful forces are gathering to plot their downfall. And they are right. Here are a few markers:

• The vast administrative apparatus they have built up in health care, in education, and in welfare is starting to crack. Designed over a century ago, it just doesn't do the job in the 21st century. Major reform is needed, but liberals can't allow reform because they might lose power.
  
• The liberal hegemony over the business and financial sector is a failure. Remember, all this regulation of business and government central banking was put together because you couldn't trust businessmen like Rockefeller and bankers like Morgan with the power to make or break the nation. But the recent credit crack-up demonstrates that the political hacks in charge of the financial system are clueless and the banking welfare queens that government financial welfare has created are as mindless and irresponsible as the underclass clients of the social workers.
  
• Liberal hegemony over the culture is a failure. Liberals are unmasked. In their personal lives they just want to fritter themselves away on projects of "creativity" while abandoning the real work of creating families and children. There is a simple word for a culture like this: Dead end.
  

So it makes complete sense that the Obama administration is executing the political equivalent of the famous Schlieffen Plan with its audacious left hook through health care and energy. The Obamunists sense that their liberal hour is coming to a close. It's now or never for them.

But liberals should remember what happened to Germany after its desperate effort to break out of its encirclement. It led to the utter defeat and humiliation of Germany, because the whole world ganged up to defeat the Bloody Hun.

Tea Parties: Astroturf or Sown by the Wind?

Our Democratic friends were very quick to brush off the Tea Party movement as "astroturf," which is liberal-speak for a movement that pretends to be grass-roots but is instead manipulated by string pullers from on high.

Liberal Harvard professor Theda Skocpol has written about this in Diminshed Democracy. She finds that the US used to have lots of membership associations that were represented by an elite cadre in Washington. Today’s activist groups, especially on the liberal side, are typically cadre with few members.

But it’s pretty clear that the Tea Party movement is not a fake movement pretending to be grass roots, like, e.g., ACORN. Here’s an article in the Wausau Daily Herald by Meg Ellefson, organizer of a Tea Party in Wausau, Wisconsin. She makes it all perfectly clear.

I organized the Wausau Tea Party in about two weeks, with donated goods and services from individuals and small business owners... I’m just a regular mom who lives in Rib Mountain, who is fed up with our government and motivated to plan a tea party. I am not involved in Wisconsin politics, nor have I ever been affiliated with any candidate’s campaign in Wisconsin.

Ellefson was pretty clear about her concerns:

Wisconsin tax payers are fed up with government’s out-of-control spending and excessive taxation without representation.

This spring our Democratic friends are clearly engaged upon a massive dash to implement their agenda before anyone can wake up and oppose it. Hugh Hewitt today writes about the secret talks to develop the Democratic health reform plan.

I have the feeling that the Democrats are making a strategic mistake. The rush to push things through and make them a fait accompli before opposition can develop is telling. It tells us that they know that their ideas are really not popular.

Maybe their strategy is right. Maybe they can cram their agenda down our throats, and keep it there. But maybe they will provoke instead a movement of rejection that will change the face of politics in America.