Obamacare Inflection Point

Never mind all the bloo-hah about too fast or too reckless. The problem with Obamacare is that Democrats don't like it. Here's Donald Lambro quoting Democrats:

"I don't like the idea of raising taxes in the worst economic crisis since World War II," said Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas, chief negotiator for the Blue Dogs. He warned his party last week that "there's no way they can pass the current bill on the House floor. Not even close."

In the Senate, Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid said he could not vote for a bill financed by a tax on employee healthcare benefits, warning that his party could lose 10 to 15 Democrats if such a tax ended up in the bill.

So, now the question is: what do we do next? Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) has some ideas. First of all, he lists the three dishonest selling points in the Obama campaign.

1. People can keep their existing health insurance. No they won't, not with a "public option."
   
2. Quality won't be compromised. Oh yeah? With the government in the middle between patient and doctor?
   
3. The massive new benefit won't cost anything to the middle class. Here, I gotta bridge I want to sell you.
   

Well, this is baloney, Jindal says, and the Democrats know it. So let's abandon the partisan game of three-card Monte, and let's try a bipartisan approach,

Here is Gov. Jindal's proposal.

• Transparency: posting prices and outcomes on the Internet.
• Consumers should benefit when they lower their own healthcare costs by better health care shopping or by healthier lifestyle.
• Medical lawsuit reform.
• Insurance reform. Make insurance more portable and cover more pre-existing conditions.
• Pooling for small businesses, self-employed, etc.
• Pay for performance in bringing down the 75% of healthcare dollar that goes for chronic conditions related to lifestyle
• Tax credits to the poor to help them buy health insurance policies.

There. That wasn't that hard, was it. But it reflects the reality of real life. In real life you get to improve things a little bit at a time. You don't get to be the savior of the nation, Mr President.

The best thing is to keep saviors confined to religion and the moral/cultural sector. It's best to keep them out of politics.

If Taxes Start to Bite Dems

It was easy for Democrats to persuade economically conservative/socially liberal voters to turn up their noses at the socially conservative President Bush. But now that Obama is talking tax increases, things are not so simple. Democrat officeholders are starting to worry about their rich voters.

Could 2010 be a replay of 1994? Stay tuned.

Why the Hurry Mr President?

President Obama took office promising a era of transparency and openness in government.

Well, you could understand that he would want to violate that pledge when pushing through the trillion dollar stimulus package. When you do your traditional post-election payoff to supporters you really don't want to let too much of the sausage-making see the light of day.

But in the case of health-care reform and of energy reform the president is proposing an utter transformation, a revolution, in the way America does business on health care and energy taxing and regulation.

It cannot be, Mr President, that this sort of thing is rushed through in the dead of night. It cannot be that it is passed on bare partisan majorities.

Because when you stiff-arm your agenda through, Chicago style, you are not obtaining the consent of the governed. You are setting up conflict for years to come.

The great culture war in which we live was not started by the religious right. It was started by liberals ramming their agenda through Congress and the courts. It was intensified by liberals refusing to debate their opponents honorably when opposition arose.

If you liberals ram through your agenda on health care and on "cap and trade" you will be not just doing an unjust thing, you will be making a strategic error.

The reason that Democrats got elected in 2008 was partly due to the natural political cycle: throwing the Republican bums out after eight years of Bush. But it was partly due to the intense partisan campaign conducted against President Bush right through his administration, representing him as a mad-dog partisan when he wasn't.

But now that Bush is gone, people can revert to their natural political selves. And people are naturally conservative. This is a center-right country.

The time is going to come, very soon, when liberals are going to find themselves in strategic retreat. The question will be: are they willing to lose gracefully, like conservatives in the years after the New Deal through the 1960s? Or are they going to be intransigent like the South on slavery in the 80 years between the founding of the United States and the Civil War.

It's time for thoughtful Democrats to start thinking about this. Chances are that 2009-10 will be a great high-water mark for Democrats and liberals, before a long withdrawing roar.

With the hyper-partisan health and energy agenda, the chances are that Democrats are putting themselves in the same overstretched situation as the German Army in the summer of 1942, just before the Red Army began its counter-offensive on the left shoulder of the Nazis' great salient into the southern Soviet Union.

The city around which the Red Army made its counter-offensive was called, at the time, Stalingrad.

Those Liberal Feelings

It's liberal feelings versus conservative values. That's the mantra you hear from a number of conservatives these days. Conservatives are steadfast and true, with their lives founded on timeless rational values. Liberals are skittering all over the lot, depending on what they feel today.

But I disagree. It is liberals that are guided by disengaged reason, proposing relentlessly rational schemes for the bureaucratizing of everything into a comprehensive universal set of rules.

It is conservatives that believe in life and love, mothers and babies, fidelity and families. What could be more emotional than that?

The truth is, of course, that humans operate at many levels; that is our magic. We are instinctive, we are emotional, we are rational.

The point of conservatism is grounding. We believe in embodied reason. We believe in the one and only fleshly life that we are given, and we experience ourselves as connected in a web of responsibility between the dead ancestors and the generations yet unborn. We feel the tug of the past and also of the future.

That is why conservatives cannot get away from the burr under the modern saddle, abortion. For abortion cuts the cord between the generations. It privileges the adolescent present, the whims of the moment against the claims of eternity.

In the modern world of disengaged reason people have come to believe in the metaphor rather than the reality. Our liberal friends believe in the generation of creativity rather than creating a new generation. They seek immortality in creative work of originality, rather than in the creation of children to carry their genes into the future.

Well, nature takes care of things like that. If you don't have children you won't have immortality, not unless you are Einstein. The way things are going, there won't be any liberals by 2100. Just as there won't be any Europeans.

Liberals may be driven by feelings, but their feelings are curiously disengaged, learned responses to the world taught to them by their government teachers and government university professors. These learned feelings teach them to honor the principle of rational government control, that whenever you have a feeling, it should lead to a government program.

As for me, I don't get it. I don't understand how anyone could live in that kind of a culture without going mad.

I say: Give me the life I am given, and the glorious divine madness that is conservatism.

And to heck with liberal rational control and its mindless rational government programs!

Rationing Smashioning

The New York Times is hauling out bioethicist Peter Singer this weekend to sing the praises of rationing, according to NRO.

Not that Obamacare has anything to do with rationing. Oh no. President Obama has specifically told the nation's governors not to talk about it.

Come on. Mr. President. We weren't born yesterday. We understand that underneath the massive pushing and shoving on your health care plan is a direct route to rationing.

If you have a government program that gives out goodies then you have to have rationing.

All resources in this world must be rationed. The most just method is to ration goods using the price system. In this system the poor get less than the rich. That's unfair, of course, so many people try to help the poor out with charity.

There are other ways of rationing. You can force everyone to stand in line for resources on a first-come first-served basis. Everyone pays for resources at work and then stands in line for them. Problem is, as the Soviet Union showed, you get less of every kind of resource. Where's the justice in that?

Of course there's a third method. The government can sequester all resources and give them out as a reward for political loyalty. That seems to be the method preferred by the Obama administration. That is, if the stimulus plan is any guide to its political philosophy.

But which is the most just? It's a good question. It depends whether you are rich or poor, or, like Peter Singer, an academic that gets paid for thinking up bioethical policies for government programs.

The War on the Poor

Radical thinker Ivan Illich called it the "war on subsistence." He looked on both liberal programs and conservative industrialization as a deliberate effort to obliterate traditional ways of living.

You can see the process working in the descriptions of Third World education in The Beautiful Tree by James Tooley. The west comes into a Third World country with money and expertise and gets the government to implement a universal, compulsory education system. But it doesn't work. The newly middle-class teachers don't give a damn about the poor, who they regard as ignorant and uninterested in education. And the government just uses the western money to build a patronage system.

But in the Third World it turns out that the poor do want education. They want it so much that they turn away from the "free" government system and spend their own money on school fees at below-the-radar private schools.

The schools that they patronize are, of course, by middle-class standards, dirty and inadequate. There are often no bathrooms for the children, and no playground. And as for computers, forget it. But the schools, operating on a shoe-string, almost equal middle-class private schools in academic performance, at least according to James Tooley's research.

This is not the first time that the poor have been shafted like this. Ever since the middle of the 19th century the middle class have been on a mission to clean up "slums." The middle class hates the ramshackle housing that the poor build in the industrial cities. The slums operate outside the rules and the proper planning and land-use laws. For one thing, there is a lack of basic sanitation, water, sewage, and garbage, darling.

But the poor build and live in the slums for a simple reason. They are cheap. An immigrant to the city can get a job in the city and live cheaply in the only way that he can afford. Unless she is to become a government benefit recipient.

The welfare state model insists that everyone live and work at a middle-class standard. Middle-class rules for houses. Middle-class rules for education. Middle-class rules for health care.

But when you insist on middle-class rules you force the poor to become dependents. Because the poor can't afford to live by middle-class rules. Not if they want to live in proud independence.

This is the great challenge for conservatives. If we want to replace the welfare state with something better we have to figure out how to let the poor live in proud independence. Can that be squared with basic decency in the life of the poor?

The way that the modern poor live is by camping out in industrial society, living in old dilapidated housing, working in the informal economy, cadging health care where it's free or nearly free. The standard response to this by progressive people has been outrage. How can we allow the poor to suffer so? But it is clear that the progressive response, to dish out benefits controlled and organized by the middle class, has turned the working poor into the underclass, has destroyed the lower-class family, and has turned the progressive class into a corrupt political elite.

There's gotta be a better way. And it's up to conservatives to find it.

Palin Puts Down a Marker

In the Wall Street Journal liberal columnist Thomas Frank is sneering at Sarah Palin's victim strategy--as if the Clintons didn't take it to the bank in the 1990s and in 2008.

But meanwhile Sarah Palin has emerged from resigning as Alaska Governor with an op-ed in the Washington Post. You could say that this action says, as clearly as possible: I'm still in the game!

Now if you were a politician aspiring to bigger things, to the leadership of your party and even the presidency, what would you do first? You don't yet have a full-strength organization staffed up with policy experts. But you are expert in certain issue areas.

It's a no-brainer. You write an op-ed attacking the president's energy policy. It allows you to play to your strength, as a practical reformer from an energy state. And it allows you to attack the president's big-tax, big-government policy.

So that's what Sarah Palin did. She wrote an article which demonstrated her competence in energy policy. And she got off a zinger to rile up the troops.

The ironic beauty in this plan? Soon, even the most ardent liberal will understand supply-side economics.

Nothing like a little red meat for the base. But it will probably be a constant theme in Palin's rhetoric. For our liberal friends running the Obama administration have shown that as far as they are concerned the supply-side notion, that marginal tax-rates are important, is nothing but "voodoo economics."

But really, Sarah Palin is right. The only way that liberals will come to believe in supply-side economics is the day that it hits them upside the head.

Palin is also right to follow the Reagan strategy. In the years after the 1976 election Reagan cranked out endless radio commentaries and traveled the nation speaking to Republicans. With her first op-ed, it is clear that she has a similar strategy in mind.

Will it do the trick? Who knows. But one thing going for her is that the relentless scorn from our liberal friends will play well with moderate women around election time.