Don't Take Freedom For Granted

It's Thanksgiving, the holiday when we count our blessings. And it's the time also to count the second greatest of them all. We are talking about the trio of blessings: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Marriage activist Maggie Gallagher has something to say about this.

Freedom may well be a right, but the most important thing about freedom is that it is a good.

What's the difference? Rights are what you are owed. Goods have to be made. Freedom is a gift. We didn't make it by ourselves for ourselves. We have to be grateful for it.

We owe the simple debt of thankfulness to those who came before -- who suffered, celebrated, fought and died to create the society we now enjoy. That's history. And we owe it to those who created our freedom to pass on the gift.

Then Gallagher gets to the pure Burkean moment.

That is patriotism: the debt that we the living owe to the honored dead, which we can pay only by caring for future generations yet unborn.

I would say rather: "That is conservatism." Modern conservatism is the self-conscious articulation of the unarticulated Way of the ancestors. And the central point is the argument made by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Let us run the actual quote:

Society is indeed a contract. But it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature.

It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible worlds, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place.

The great gift of Edmund Burke, as the founder of modern conservatism, lies in this articulation of the unspoken wisdom of the ages. The social contract we live under is not just between the living. It is "between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." And this is not just an artifice, a trick of social control. It lies at the center of life and its purpose.

For if we humans survive and thrive it will be because we have maintained the gossamer thread that is the contract between the generations. Between us the living, between those already gone before, and those yet to come.

That is why we are thankful, on this day of all days. We are thankful to have received the gift of life and the gift of freedom. From those who have gone before.

Thank Goodness It Wasn't Any Worse

Many conservatives are railing today at the financial bailout of Fall 2008. After the failure of Lehman Brothers Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson engineered a $700 TARP fund to prevent the contagion from spreading. And conservatives hated it.

I maintain that a banking bailout was the right policy, and a banking bailout--designed to prevent a meltdown of the credit system--is the only kind of bailout that makes sense in an economic crisis. If the credit system goes, then everything goes.

Today, at Thanksgiving 2009, it looks like the worst is over and that the economy will survive its worst crisis since the Great Depression.

That is something to be thankful for.

But it is clear that the national elite has not learned the proper lessons from the crisis. We have seen no effort to reduce the subsidization of debt. We have seen not effort to get the government out of gunning the economy. We have seen no effort to reduce the politicization of the economy.

The lesson of 2008 is clear. Government can't be trusted with monetary policy. It can't be trusted with credit policy. It can't be trusted with economic policy. The reason is simple. The only thing that politicians and activists and lobbyists are interested in is power. Their interest in monetary policy extends no further than printing money when the government gets in a jam. Their interest in credit policy extends no further than subsidizing their supporters. Their interest in economic policy extends no further than apologies for government domination of the economy.

The only thing that government can do is fight against enemies foreign and domestic. To this end, of course, it needs complete access to the nation's wealth when it is actually fighting a war. But after the war the resources should be surrendered back to the private sector.

Because politicians know nothing about money, credit, and business. And they like it that way.

The best way to celebrate future Thanksgivings would be to give thanks to the day when we got the government out of the economy.

"I have also felt really tired"

The dam has burst on the politicized climate science operation, the Hockey Stick Team, run by Phil Jones at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and Michael Mann of Penn State University.

The release of a decade of emails between the principals of the Hockey Stick Team shows that the team was not really doing science. It was doing politics. Roger Tracinski's piece on the release of the CRUTape letters is as good a review of the situation as any.

What does it mean? It means that Steve McIntyre, the Canadian statistical expert and proprietor of Climate Audit (and now CAMirror), is vindicated. It was years ago in the early 2000s that McIntyre started looking at the Mann Hockey Stick paper, MBH98, and discovered what was to him a startling lack of due diligence.

Since then Steve has plugged away, "auditing" the work product of the Hockey Stick Team, exposing all the shoddy work and trying, with increasing success, to get access to their raw data and their methodology.

On November 22, 2009, in a comment, Steve McIntyre responded to a commenter asking him about the data in the CRUTape Letters.

Sure, I’ve nibbled at it, but I’ve spent more time on the mail so far. It’s hard to know where to start. I also have felt really tired.

Yes. I imagine after a decade of work, and after years of battling against calumny and obstruction, there is a "Nunc Dimittis" feeling about this moment. For you folks without a religious education, it means: "Now let thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word." In the large sense, McIntyre's work is done. He has got the world to pay attention to his voice crying in the wilderness. Now the consequences will play out according to their own momentum.

Because now the Hockey Stick Team has been exposed. The Team members have fiddled with the data; they have politicized the scientific publication process; they have had troublesome people fired.

And all the world knows it.

The Hockey Stick Team has had millions of dollars to play with. Other climate researchers have had billions to spend.

But one thing we can say today for sure. We do not have a scientific basis for spending trillions of dollars battling climate change. We just do not have the knowledge to justify it.

Especially now that we know that we can't trust the scientists doing the research.

Now It's Obama's "Boob Panels"

The current flap over breast-cancer screening illustrates the utter folly of the government-expert model for health care.

Recently the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force issued new guidelines for women getting mammograms to screen for breast cancer. It recommended that regular screenings not start till the age of 50.

Unfortunately, the government has been running a PR campaign for decades advising women to seek regular mammograms from the age of 40. Naturally the breast cancer activists are all in a tizzy, and now the White House has gotten into the act trying to damp down the firestorm. Reports Fox News:

The White House went on defense Wednesday about new government findings that advise against routine mammograms for women under 50, saying the guidelines are merely a recommendation and that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that produced the report out this week has "no power" to deny health care coverage.

Well, no. Of course not. No power. Not today. But this is just another outbreak of the "death panel" syndrome. Of course this is just an advisory from a government task force. But you can easily put two and two together and predict that down the road, when ObamaCare is desperately trying to reduce health care costs, that it will start to make the findings of advisory panels mandatory, and that the "boob panel" will decide when and where women can get mammograms.

This is not rocket science. It issues from the very concept of rational government by experts. You set up a bureaucratic program based on rational, scientific findings. You implement the rules uniformly, nationwide.

The problem here is with the whole concept of government health care. In a world of freedom women pay for most of their health care at the point of delivery. Women that believe themselves to be at risk of breast cancer based on family history or other causes pay to get regular mammograms. They discuss the risks with their doctors and they understand that there are risks associated with regular X-rays. No problem here, unless you can't afford a regular mammogram. In that case, you are dependent on the kindness of strangers.

But in the liberal government model, mammograms are a "benefit," paid for by the government-mandated health plan. Whether you like it or not, mammograms are included in the standard benefit package mandated by various government advisory panels. Or they are excluded by order of one of the government expert advisory panels. Now everyone is dependent on the kindness of strangers.

Only trouble that politicians and activists and experts are not kind. They have other interests: power, notoriety, fame, science. To them, any one woman worried about a strange lump in her breast is roadkill, unless she can be used as a helpless victim, a prop in a media report on New Hope for Cancer Sufferers. Even then she is roadkill.

So the solution is not to have dozens of advisory panels mandating this and that. The solution is to have a free and prosperous citizenry that can afford to pay for their own preventative care, if that is important to them, or not, if it is not.

This is important. You can spend you money on cancer screening, or maybe you want to spend it on better schooling for your child. Either way, you are taking a risk. Maybe you should spend the money on screening. Maybe the special enrichment program you send your kid to turns on a lightbulb and changes a life.

It's not a very hard concept to visualize. Not unless you mind is clouded by the idea that government experts make all these decisions: who should have breast examinations and where; which kids have enrichment programs and how.

The concept is called freedom.

ObamaCare: To Pass or Not to Pass

With the news that Harry Reid is scheduling a vote on ObamaCare in the Senate this Saturday it looks like the battle is being joined.

The question is this. If you believe that universal government health care is a terrible idea, is it best to pass this bill now or defeat it now?

Some commentators suggest that Bill Clinton's presidency was saved because Congress failed to pass HillaryCare. The argument is that, after the 1994 election, there was nothing left for conservatives to fight for. So Clinton got re-elected proposing S-CHIP and midnight basketball for the Soccer Moms.

If we want to reverse the life-by-government-bureaucracy model we have to have, in my view, a decisive battle as envisaged by Clausewitz.

I think we need to look at the question of the welfare state as a war. The only way to turn the tide, and start moving western civilization away from the bureaucracy model towards a civil society model is with a demonstration of political power, so that liberals receive such a shock that they will be afraid to propose their government takeover ever again.

To get that effect we need a two to three election cycles where Democrats get defeated in droves. I'd say that it would take a 2010 election with 50-60 losses in the House of Representatives and a 2012 election with 35-40 losses. You want a 55-45 GOP Senate in January 2013. You need to have President Obama defeated in 2012 by 55%-45% or better. You need every Democratic incumbent running for reelection besieged by angry protestors all the time, waving signs reading "Unjust!" "Cruel!" "Corrupt!" on and on, day after day, week after week.

The point is that you don't get that kind of energy and rage unless ObamaCare goes into law and the tax increases start in 2011 (and don't forget the Bush tax cuts that are scheduled to expire Jan 1, 2011).

There's no escaping the conflict. We have to decide this once and for all. This is the question:

Shall the United States become just another social democracy with a vast liberal-run administrative bureaucracy calling all the shots, or shall Americans live as free citizens making the key decisions about they lives without the constant supervision of liberal government officials and activists?

You can't decide that without a political donnybrook ending in a decisive outcome: clear victory or decisive defeat.

Win or lose, let's get it on!

Liberals Get Catty with Palin

When a woman walks into a room, according to lefty art critic John Berger in Ways of Seeing, she defines what can be done to her and for her.

And that tells you a lot about Sarah Palin's problem. She is having a dickens of a problem getting liberals to stop raping her. Ever since she was introduced as a vice-presidential nominee it has been open season on her person and her family.

So it's not surprising that she does a lot of score-settling in her new book Going Rogue. And it's not surprising that the indefatigable AP assigned 11 reporters to fact-check her book. And it's not surprising that WSJ house liberal Thomas Frank should use his column to sneer at her.

Politics is about power, and the first thing that a politician needs to do is to demonstrate that it is dangerous to mess with her. There are various ways to do this. You can do it the Clinton way, with a bimbo patrol to teach bimbos that it is really dangerous to mess with the Man. Or you can do it the Chicago way, like Barack Obama, and surface secret court records at election time on your opponents' messy divorces.

Most likely Palin can't go that route; she doesn't have a Chicago/Arkansas-style political machine. She's probably got to do it the hard way by building her own powerful base of supporters, in other words, a Palin army. Politicians respect armies.

So it makes complete sense that she should try a little king-making in NY-23. And it's a no-brainer to go on an extended book tour, complete with bus, long lines at book stores and adoring crowds. Guess what: she started her book tour in Michigan, the state she wanted to visit but the McCain campaign wanted to abandon.

Judging from the AP's report on Palin's visit to Grand Rapids, MI, Palin is well on her way to building a base.

"She's a person of faith, she has a family, she has gone through a lot of the trials and tribulations we have. I'd vote for her in a heartbeat," said Lana Smith, a dispatcher at a bus company who took the day off work and had been waiting in line since 5:30 a.m.

It looks like Palin is really getting to the "bitter" people that Obama talked about in 2008 to a roomful of rich San Francisco liberals. And it looks like, pace Thomas Frank, that those What's the Matter With Kansas folks--the the deluded boobs that ought to be Democrats but aren't--still don't get it.

I mean to say, a bus company dispatcher supporting an eevil country-club Republican? What's the matter with America?

But that is what defines American exceptionalism. In the most religious and open-hearted nation in the world, most people, even modest people with routine jobs, think of themselves as rugged individualists. What a country!

(Note to liberals: I know it sounds crazy, but trust me, it makes complete sense. Anyone who has the generosity and the compassion to help others with their own money would have to be a tough, self-sufficient religious individualist.)

Terror and American Justice

Conservatives have their knickers in a twist over the decision by the Obama administration to try terror mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and associates in civil court. Consider the 11/14/2009 editorial in the Wall Street Journal:

Attorney General Eric Holder... called his decision to move their trial on war crimes from a military courtroom at Guantanamo Bay to American soil "the toughest" he has had to make. Other words come to mind. For starters, intellectually and morally confused, dangerous and political to a fault.

The Journal's editors sneer at the idea that trying KSM & Co in a NY courtroom has anything to do with returning to the rule of law after Bush illegalities. After all, the Obama administration finds it OK to try the USS Cole bombers with military tribunals. The decision flies in the face of common sense.

Most Americans, we suspect, can overlook the legal niceties and see this episode through the lens of common sense. Foreign terrorists who wage war on America and everything it stands for have no place sitting in a court of law born of the values they so detest. Mr. Holder has honored mass murder by treating it like any other crime.

But if you read The New York Times editorial of 11/13/2009 you get the reverse argument.

Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. took a bold and principled step on Friday toward repairing the damage wrought by former President George W. Bush with his decision to discard the nation’s well-established systems of civilian and military justice in the treatment of detainees captured in antiterrorist operations.

From that entirely unnecessary policy (the United States had the tools to detain, charge and bring terrorists to justice) flowed a terrible legacy of torture and open-ended incarceration. It left President Obama with yet another mess to clean up on an urgent basis.

You get the point.

Of course, as a card-carrying conservative, I'm with the Journal on this. I think that the trial is political, in that the Obama administration, after riding liberal outrage all the way to the White House, needs to give its supporters the red meat they desire. In my view the Democrats were probably in on the early decisions on the treatment of unlawful combatants in 2001-2002 and probably nodded them through. But then they changed their minds.

Nevertheless, I think that we need this trial. There are a number of issues on which liberals are determined to disagree with conservatives, among them the argument over Keynesian or supply-side economics for fighting recession and growing a healthy economy, the argument over the use of US military power, and the argument over the welfare state and its compulsion.

In my view, the conservative side on these great issues has been proved again and again. Keynesian economics is rubbish; it merely rubber stamps what politicians like to do: spend money and play favorites. US military power is a force for good, and we want it to promote democratic capitalism against its enemies. The welfare state is a murrain upon the poor and one of the greatest injustices of all time.

But liberals clearly have not been won over by argument, or by the successes of conservative government in recent years: the Reagan boom, the end of the Cold War, the success of welfare reform. Therefore I think that they need to be able to implement policy their way one more time and then let the American people judge the worth their ideas and their governance, one more time.

It will cost a fortune; it will cause untold misery in the world. But I just don't see any other way. And it looks like the Obama administration is shaping up as a gift to America, a stark demonstration of the folly of liberalism.

In my view, the American people are in the middle of a huge reassessment about the nature of the political parties in the USA, and they are discovering that they never liked liberals. I think we may be heading towards a staggering mid-term election in 2010 that will blow the doors off politics-as-usual.

But first liberals have to have their civil trial in New York to demonstrate their opposition to torture and Bush lawlessness. And their corrupt stimulus. And their unjust health care reform bill. Then we shall see.