Brits Go for Election

Today British Prime Minister Gordon Brown drove to Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen to dissolve the UK Parliament. There will be a General Election in Britain on Thursday May 6.

On that day, most likely, the 13 year reign of New Labour will come to an end. Yet as of right now, it is not certain that the disastrous rule of Labour will terminate. The center-right Conservative Party is only 4 to 10 points ahead of Labour, and probably needs at least 10 points to get a majority in Parliament.

How is it possible that a Labour Party that has nearly wrecked the economy, running a substantial deficit in the boom years of the mid 2000s is that close to winning?

The answer probably is that Britain is a center-left country. People want and expect "public services," meaning mainly the National Health Service, and they have a horror of ever having to pay for those services themselves. As my daughter told me of the French a decade ago: "Dad, these people are married to the state."

But David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, has a bold agenda. He proposes to reform the school system with the Swedish Plan. It's a reform put in place by conservatives in Sweden that allows almost anyone to open a school and get government money for it. About 15 percent of schools operate under this plan, and that's all it's taken to put the fear of God into the other 85 percent.

Then Cameron has a plan to mend "Broken Britain." There's a vast underclass in Britain that has never had a job and never intends to. You can read about it in Inspector Gadget's Police Inspector Blog. About 15 percent of the adult labor force is on "incapacity benefit," i.e., have been certified as unable to work. The dreadful harm that this widespread idleness has had on Britain is almost incalculable, and the US is heading that way.

Will the Brits take the plunge and elect a Conservative government? Probably. But Cameron has to be careful. The Labour Party has built up a huge client state, including welfare and incapacity beneficiaries, teachers, health workers, and the regulatory state, the so-called "quangocrats" in quasi-governmental agencies. Asking them to vote for change is like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas.

My prognostication is that the Cameroons have been holding fire for several months, waiting for the short election campaign before firing their muskets in a devastating volley. I think we'll see substantial movement in the poll numbers over the next few weeks.

And then there's turnout. Just as Obamis in the US surged out to vote in 2008 while Republicans stayed home, discouraged, I think we will see that Conservative turnout will be substantial while Labour turnout will be reduced.

But there will be plenty of nail-biting before the result is announced on the first Thursday of May.

Obama's Sore Winner Tour is Working

Conservatives are busy trashing President Obama's Sore Winner Tour. The president of all the people is out there challenging his opponents to put 'em up or shut up.

Conservatives are sneering at this, pointing out how the president's approval numbers are still stuck in the mid forties.

But nobody is talking about Rasmussen's Presidential Approval Index. That's the poll computed as (Strongly Approve minus Strongly Disapprove). Conservatives were gleeful a month ago when the index was hitting the high negative teens.

Guess what has happened in the week or so since ObamaCare passed? The Strongly Approve number has gone up about 10 points, from the mid 20s to the mid 30s. The Strongly Disapprove number has nudged up, a bit. The index is now a mere minus 10. In other words, the president's base is delighted with his historic achievement.

Overall, of course, the president's approval number, i.e., Total Approve, hasn't really budged. The net effect of the ObamaCare win is to convert a bunch of Approves into Strongly Approves.

Presumably, the president's Sore Victor Tour is intended to solidify those Strongly Approve numbers, and carry the Democrats through the mid-term elections in November when the key to victory is turning out the base. Time enough to worry about charming the moderates back into the president's column in 2012.

Maybe it will work. Maybe the economy will be going gangbusters by the second half of 2011, and the voters will reward the president with a second term.

There's another narrative. The current liberal euphoria will dissipate by November and the Republicans will score a stunning triumph. The big government expansion and the tax rate increases will slow the recovery and the huge monetary stimulus will convert into inflation (we are talking here about the exact reverse of the Reagan policies of 1981-85).

How will it all turn out? Stay tuned.

Good News on Jobs

For the third month in a row, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Household Survey of the labor market is showing strong positive growth.

(Yes, I know that there were "jobs lost" in the January and February employment report, but that comes from the Establishment Survey and we don't put too much faith in that here)

Here are the numbers:

	Jan	Feb	Mar
Labor Force Change	+111,000	+342,000	+398,000
Employment Change	+541,000	+308,000	+264,000

This is good news. The Employment numbers show strong employment growth, although moderating month-on-month since the gangbusters half-a-million increase in the January number.

The Labor Force numbers are good too. They show that people are getting the word that employers are hiring, so they are returning to the labor force in ever increasing numbers and looking for work.

I think we can look for several months of good numbers based on what we see here.

The question is what happens in the future with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts Jan 1, 2011, and the deadening effect of all the increases in government spending courtesy of the Obama administration.

Here we don't believe that increased government spending creates jobs. We believe that the way to create jobs is to cut government spending and cut tax rates. Works every time it is tried.

The big problem is that about 8.5 million jobs were lost in the recession. At the current rate of about 250,000 new jobs per month, say 3,000,000 a year, we are looking at three years to get back to the jobs peak in 2007, and another couple of years to get back on trend. We are talking about the 5,000,000 jobs that coulda, woulda, shoulda been created but for the meltdown and the recession.

As usual, the only place we can really look for help on the future is the stock market, which is always trying to look to the future. It has pretty well recovered to 2008 levels before the meltdown. But it is not forecasting right now a gangbusters economy in the year ahead.

Beyond Fascist ObamaCare

What famous politician said the following memorable sound bite:

Tutto nello ObamaCaro, niente al di fuori dello ObamaCaro, nulla contro lo ObamaCaro.

I'm not sure how ObamaCare translates into Italian, but here's my translation into English:

Everything in ObamaCare, nothing outside ObamaCare, nothing against ObamaCare.

Well it wasn't Benito Mussolini and it wasn't Barack Obama. In fact nobody said it. Except me.

I am saying it to make a point. The point is that ObamaCare is fascism. With ObamaCare everyone is brought into the orbit of the government's health care plan. You may not be interested in the government's health plan, but the government's health plan is interested in you.

Everyone in the US is going to have to conform to the dictates of ObamaCare. Nobody is going to be able to get outside ObamaCare.

And nobody is going to be allowed to be against ObamaCare. That was the whole point of the Democratic leaders' march across the street to the Capitol on the day that ObamaCare passed.

Let's talk about liberals and fascism.

Our liberal friends have been rather quiet about Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, a 400 page tome in which Jonah makes the inconvenient point that while liberals may not be Fascists, their politics and their governing philosophy is fascist. Liberals always want a comprehensive and mandatory government program for everything that they care about. And they always put themselves in charge of the governing apparatus charged to administer the program.

Jonah points out that, if you take out the sharp uniforms and the marching and the secret police, liberal politics is indistinguishable from fascist politics. That's why he put the manifesto of the National Socialist German Workers Party in an appendix at the end of his book. He wanted his readers to see how close liberal platform comes to an actual fascist manifesto.

But we conservatives want something different. We do not want unity; we do not want government-enforced conformity. We want limited government, limited political power to give space for something more than the state. We are delighted that liberals should choose, for instance, a collective form of health care provision in the State of Washington with Group Health Cooperative. Wonderful idea. Go for it liberals. We just don't like it when liberals force everyone else into a Group Health Cooperative. Because when the government runs it and forces everyone in, it's not a group and it's not cooperative. It is simply government force, another instance of the liberal culture of compulsion.

Michael Barone just put out a piece in which he presents the current political situation in stark terms.

Over the past 14 months, our political debate has been transformed into an argument between the heirs of two fundamental schools of political thought, the Founders and the Progressives. The Founders stood for the expansion of liberty and the Progressives for the expansion of government.

Tea Partiers take the side of the Founders. They believe in liberty. The Educated Class takes the side of the Progressives. They take the side of government.

Not coincidentally, the 20th century, the century of the Progressive movement, was also the century of fascism. Fascism and Progressivism come from the same mold. They both believe in the supremacy of government and top-down administration.

The United States was founded upon a different idea, and the next months will determine whether that idea still flourishes in the hearts and minds of its citizens as it did in the mind of Abraham Lincoln.

We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth... The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.

The way begins with the repeal of the fascist ObamaCare and the introduction of true health care reform that is as large-minded and practical and generous as the American people themselves.

Crossing a Line

Ever since ObamaCare passed last week I have had the feeling that the Democrats have crossed a line.

You can do the normal comparison: suppose a Republican president had done that?

Suppose a Republican president had pushed an unpopular bill through the Congress on a strict partisan vote with a bare majority of his own party in favor and a bipartisan minority opposing? Suppose the president had used questionable arguments in his speeches: that despite enlarging the scope of government, things would stay the same for most Americans and overall cost less per person? Suppose that angry Democrats had got up at the town halls of Republican congressmen and been summarily removed by the cops? Suppose a Democrat had been elected senator from Utah in the middle of all this on a platform to be the vote to stop it? And suppose after it passed the Republican president piled on with partisan rhetoric, such as President Obama has used, accusing Republicans of aining to oppose his plan from the beginning?

Yeah. The rage on the left would be deafening. And if that weren't enough, it would be strongly amplified by the mainstream media. After all, think of the stink the left made over the Iraq War, for which President Bush received a bi-partisan majority.

There is a feeling of impotence here, a feeling of helplessness. It's a familiar feeling. It seems that it's ok for the left to break the rules, but woe-betide the conservative who even thinks about it.

Shelby Steele has a good line on all this in his article "Obama the Good."

Of the two great societal goals—freedom and "the good"—freedom requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good, limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today's liberalism is focused on "the good" more than on freedom. And ideas of "the good" are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering. The great political advantage of modern liberalism is its offer of license on the one hand and moral innocence—if not superiority—on the other. Liberalism lets you force people to buy health insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence at the same time.

When you present the political divide this way, the necessary conservative strategy falls out naturally.

Conservatives must delegitimize the use of force to achieve "the good." It really isn't too hard to figure out. If you use force to achieve the good what you get isn't good, it's just force. That's why all the big-government programs from mandatory health care to mandatory education to government welfare always fail. Force is force. It isn't good. It isn't just. It isn't equality. The only legitimate use of force is to defeat force.

The great enlightening experience of the last 500 years is that you don't need force to keep society functioning in the day-to-day business of making a living. You can trust "the market," properly reinforced to penalize cheating, to deliver material goods in abundance. Thus you can leave moral questions to the moral/cultural sector and the social instincts of love and hate, guilt and shame, the velvet glove of moral suasion rather than the mailed fist of government power. The political sector can thus concentrate on real threats of force from enemies foreign and domestic, rather than on the chimera of the evil corporation, which threatens non-one.

Government is force. Politics is power. All the rest is "narrative." Let that be the conservative cry.

The March of the Subsidy State

Politics is a business of command and control. You spread your net of political control as far as you can; your purpose is to control an unruly world and unjust world.

Unfortunately, the world won't be controlled. So the dance of control ends in a death spiral, a frantic attempt to control everything that succeeds in commanding nothing.

That's what we see in every area of government activity. Today, President Obama is signing the health bill amendments; it includes the federalization of student loans, a long-time goal of Congressional liberals. No longer will the banks source student loans. Now the Department of Education will do it. There will be billions in "savings," we are told.

Thus does the Subsidy State march onwards, as the Wall Street Journal explains.

The story begins in another progressive heyday, 1965, when the federal government launched a program to make college "affordable" by offering a taxpayer guarantee on student loans. College has if anything become even less affordable since, as the subsidies have merely driven up the prices that colleges charge.

Now the government has taken the student loan program over completely. It won't make college any cheaper. And it will ratchet up the costs for the ordinary taxpayer.

Subsidy is a cruel policy. It takes a free and voluntary activity and subjects it to the rules and power plays of politics and special interests.

There was a time when children went to school for a couple of years while they learned their letters and their numbers. Parents paid for schooling, even poor people. Then children went to work.

Now we force children to school for twelve years, and when they are done, in many cases, they need to learn to read and write.

Yet everyone agrees that education is so expensive that we need the government to provide it.

Not so. Without the subsidies, people would sent their children to inexpensive neighborhood schools run buy the neighborhood women. Then most ordinary children would begin internships or apprenticeships, or maybe just work. They would develop a network of work and life contacts that would serve them for the rest of their lives.

Rich bitches, of course, would still go to college prep schools and go on to selective schools where they would meet the selective people with which they would network for the rest of their lives.

Some day we are going to have to unwind this cruel system of subsidy and "free" services that we call the welfare or entitlement state. Yet with every addition and accretion that our Democratic friends make to this monstrosity, the price of reform, and the size of the eventual disaster ratchets up another notch.

The tragedy is that it will be the poor that suffer most. They already do, with the annihilation of the low-income family and the utter failure of inner-city schools.

But who cares about that when there are millions of votes to win and trillions of dollars to spend?

Shoot the Messenger

The day after ObamaCare passed, big corporations started reporting the impact on their balance sheets or, if you prefer, their profits.

And day after that Democratic committee chairmen announced that the CEOs of the big corporations would be hauled up before Congress to do some 'splaining. Naturally, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) was first out of the gate.

It really does make the point better than any conservative blow-hard or politician.

Government is force. Politics is power.

How dare, how dare the big corporations have the nerve to announce that Obamacare is going to cost them, big time.

Of course there's a Catch 22 involved. The CEOs are criminally liable if they don't immediately report material information like ObamaCare. But the big bullies in Congress will still harass them for messing with their narrative.

Naturally, Congress isn't content merely to bully the CEOs in prime time. Writes Byron York:

Waxman is also demanding that the executives give lawmakers internal company documents related to health care finances -- a move one committee Republican describes as "an attempt to intimidate and silence opponents of the Democrats' flawed health care reform legislation."

And the CEOs can't fight back because Congress regulates them. A big corporation just can't afford to anger the powerful folks in Congress.

Yet there are people who worry about corporate power. We can't have corporations swinging big bucks around to influence elections, they opine.

To which I always reply: who is giving money to whom? Who is bullying whom? Who is doing the cringing? Who is collecting money to be spent by others on buying votes.

The myth of the monster corporations, endlessly retailed by our lefty friends, is the biggest crock since Marx and his labor theory of value. Corporations do not bestride the world like colossi. They are cringing babies, currying favor with political bullies, and wheedling for subsidies and handouts.

And politicians love it. They can bully the corporations when they feel like it. They can hit them up for contributions. They can ride in their executive jets. They can milk them for tax money. And they can fool the voters into believing that, all along, they are fighting for the people against the powerful.

What's not to like, if you are a politician?

What's not to like is that, every now and again, the corporations blind-side you with the facts on what the politicians are doing to the economy.

But not to worry. Just haul the corporations up to a committee meeting and tell them they are rip-off artists. The mainstream media will report your abuse of power as a noble act of political courage.