Not "Battle" but "Conversation"

I'm afraid that Arthur C. Brooks is missing the point in his new book The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America's Future

Not that there won't be a battle over the future of America.

In his book, trailed in The Washington Post in "America's New Culture War: Free Enterprise vs. Government Control," Brooks argues that Americans support free enterprise over government control by 70% to 30%. And he writes that it is not just money and materialism that drives the private sector but "earned success."

Earned success is the creation of value in our lives or in the lives of others. Earned success is the stuff of entrepreneurs who seek value through innovation, hard work and passion. Earned success is what parents feel when their children do wonderful things, what social innovators feel when they change lives, what artists feel when they create something of beauty.

There's just one problem with "The Battle" and "earned success." It is boy stuff. What about the girls?

The key challenge for conservatives is not to appeal to men. Men are already voting conservative and Republican. It is to appeal to women, particularly the single women who vote 70-30 for Democrats.

Free enterprise is a sublimation of the warrior code into the non-violent pursuit of victory in the pursuit of market share. Battle is the way that men go about social competition. Free enterprise vs. big government is a battle-oriented way of looking at our national problems.

We conservatives need to learn girl talk. We must propose not a "battle" but a "conversation." Men assemble on two sides to fight a battle to decide a conflict. Women gather for a conversation to "share" their dilemmas and negotiate a fair outcome.

Conservatives need to "share" with their liberal friends that big government is a terrible way to resolve dilemmas. Take education for instance. Every woman knows that her child is different and special. So why do we turn education of children over to big government and its one-size-fits-all philosophy?

Conservatives need to advance the idea that abortion doesn't just terminate the life of a child, but aborts the future. Abortion makes it harder for a woman to find love, for abortion makes the argument that sex is nothing special and should be available on demand.

Conservatives need to discuss with women how children suffer in any home that isn't headed by their married biological mother and father. Any other arrangement means more abuse of the children in it. When it's mother and boyfriend, the abuse may be six to 30 times the abuse in a married, biological home.

Men think in terms of strategic concentration. Women think in terms of sharing the wealth. Want to share the wealth? Much better to do it in a large extended family or through charitable kindness than in the wasteful corruption of Chicago-style big government.

"Earned success" is also a boy concept. Women don't "earn" anything; they don't have to. A man knows that he must prove himself before he can contribute to society. A woman is valuable and precious just because she is. She works and cares and loves and gives. What the world must do is give back to her, for there is nothing sadder and nothing angrier than a woman whose love and care has been spurned and wasted.

Yup. There's going to be a battle royal in the next few years. But conservatives need to see beyond that.

What we need is a great national conversation with women. We need to discuss with them how big government diminishes the future of their children and pollutes their lives with conflict and cruelty.

Should be a slam-dunk, fellas. I mean, it should be easy for everyone to share and come to agreement.

Sometimes Footwork Can't Save You

This year it looks like there's no place to hide. Moderate Republican US Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) thought he could switch to the Democratic Party and win a sixth term to the Senate. But he was wrong, and was defeated in the Democratic Primary by Rep. Joe Sestak two weeks ago.

Democratic Rep. Parker Griffith (R-AL) thought he could switch from the Democratic Party and keep his seat in north Alabama as a Republican. He was wrong, and was defeated last night in a Republican Primary by "long-time conservative Mo Brooks."

Is it possible that we are looking at a Perfect Storm this Fall? You never know. Here are three reasons why our liberal friends are probably looking at the worst night of their lives.

People don't like the powerful. Our liberal friends have done a remarkable job over the years pretending that it is evil banks and corporations that run the country, and that they are plucky Davids trying to slay Goliath. Sorry chum. But they are deluding themselves. It is liberals that occupy the commanding heights of politics and culture. We are spending 45 percent of GDP on government these days because of liberals. A trillion dollars a year on pensions, a trillion a year on health care, a trillion a year on education, and a half-trillion a year on welfare. You could look it up.

Liberals "have misused the King's press damnably." Shakespeare's Falstaff said it first. At least he was honest. The Greek-American said it better. You don't have power unless you've abused it. And how. I don't think that our liberal friends really understand the damage they have done with their power and their government programs: smashing the low-income family, devastating urban neighborhoods, smashing the nation's finances, politicizing everything (and thus dividing the nation), wrecking education, messing up health care with a rat's nest of subsidies and regulations.

Sometimes, it's time. One of the consolations of religion is that it promises that the evil will get their deserts. Maybe not in this life but in the next one. Abuse and injustice in this vale of tears roll on from year to year, and it seems that the heavens themselves ought to cry out for justice. Sometimes you don't have to wait till the next life for the Last Judgement. All of a sudden, along comes a Perfect Storm. The floodwaters rise, and years of sediment are washed away in a single night. So far, 2010 is shaping up as a year like no other.

Of course, after the Perfect Storm, the problems are still there, maybe worse than ever. But at least the old order has been shaken to its foundations.

Our problems are not that great. We simply spend too much on government and on its supporters. Just about every dollar spent on government is a waste. But the people getting their dollars from the government are well organized. In normal times they can face down the reformers that want to reduce the weight of government on Americans and American businesses.

But then, along comes a year with a Perfect Storm.

Where the Liberals Went Wrong

So, the sea level hasn't started to recede. Nor has the planet started to heal. In fact, the planet is ripped open in two places, the Gulf of Mexico and Iceland.

And President Obama is staring into the abyss of presidential irrelevance, as his irresolute response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster has exposed the hollow man where his executive ability ought to be.

What went wrong?

The problem is the fundamental error at the heart of the liberal project.

The problem is quite simple. Everything that should be forced, liberals won't force; everything that shouldn't be forced, liberals force. The result is disaster.

Should we take a firm line against communism and radical Islam? No, no. Not so fast. Should we crack the heads of teenage hoodlums in the city? No, that would be racial profiling.

Should parents have the right to direct their children's education? Certainly not. They cannot be trusted, and must be forced to send their children to government schools. Health care? Force everyone to help the needy and the not-so-needy. Relief of the poor? Force is the only option.

Here's the error. Humans are social animals, not servile animals or mechanical animals. We are designed not for rigid hierarchies and clockwork precision, but flexible social interaction. We thrive not as subordinate ciphers but as interconnected members of a group.

Thus, to view society as a private sector and a public sector, of corporations and government, as we like to do, is a fundamental misunderstanding of human society.

Let us at least divide it into three, as Michael Novak does in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. There is the political sector, the zone of force. There is the economic sector, the zone of exchange. And there is the moral/cultural sector, the zone of... Er, yes. What shall we call it?

Shall we call it the zone of persuasion? The zone of feeling? Sentiment? Caring? Sharing? Yes, that's it: the zone of sharing.

You can see where the liberals go wrong. They want to make the zone of force the preeminent zone. OK, but look at the problems they create. Liberals bring everything under the color of compulsion. Sharing is compulsory. Exchange comes under the knout of political power. Persuasion is backed up by the power of the state. Caring comes to be defined by the amount of government spending.

The great challenge of the coming years, starting from right now, is to imagine a world of sharing, a world of social animals, in which the zone of force has been put back into its box. Where exchange is once more free and equal, and sharing is voluntary and free.

In the enlargement of the zone of force, liberals have collapsed the penumbra of moral action. It used to be that social force was limited, and people found themselves under enormous social pressure to be moral. But now, the moral and the legal are almost identical. So that means that the immoral has become almost always the illegal and the criminal.

Not a good idea.

We know why this has happened. It has happened because liberals have deliberately worked to loosen social ties and obligations. That is because liberals think that community obligations are often oppressive and marginalizing. People need to be liberated from the cramped norms of the family and the neighborhood--even the nation state.

But there's a price to that. Looser networks mean less social norms and more antisocial behavior and more force. As Leon Festinger found in his research: "norms are clearer, more firmly held and easier to enforce the more dense a social network is." And vice-versa.

Actually, "enforce" is an unfortunate choice of word here, and shows the liberal blindness on force and persuasion. Because in a social network, you usually don't have to resort to force.

What is the right word? Let's say this: Norms are clearer, more consensual, and more observed the more dense a social network is.

Well, it's a start.

Dems Bash Rich for Midterms

First it was President Obama, who told an audience in Quincy, Illinois:

“We're not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that's fairly earned. I do think at a certain point you've made enough money, but you know, part of the American way is, you can just keep on making it if you're providing a good product.”

Er, I don't think that has much to do with financial reform, Mr. President. As I see it, your financial reform package is designed to maintain government control over the finance industry. What has government domination of the finance industry done for us? Fannie. Freddie. Value of the dollar down 98 percent in 100 years. On that record we are supposed to increase the government's powers?

Then it was Hillary Clinton in a speech at the Brookings Institition urging governments to "increase their public revenue collections" to spur investment.

"The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues (the United States is), whether it's individual, corporate, whatever the taxation forms are," she said.

You mean increase taxes on job creators in a recession, Madam Secretary?

Then there is Robert Reich who says that "'investing' in 'people' through education and social welfare programs leads to job and economic growth."

You mean the wonderful system that gives us 15 percent of adults "below-basic" in literacy? And welfare programs that have cratered the low-income family?

If Clinton and Reich were correct, then with the massive increase in "public revenue collections" in the 20th century from about 7 percent of GDP to about 35 percent, we should be seeing a lot more jobs and economic growth. Actually, spurts in growth happened after the government lowered tax rates in the 1920s, 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s.

In fact, rich people pay rather more than their fair share of taxes, particularly income taxes. In 2006 the "top 1 percent of households earned 18.8 percent of income and paid 28.3 percent of taxes."

Democrats seem to be eager to argue for increased taxes in the upcoming mid-term elections this Fall. We will see what the American people think of that.

Big Government's Katrina

Republicans and conservatives naturally want payback on Katrina.

Famously, President Bush's failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina within moments demonstrated what Democrats had been saying all along, that Bush was a jumped-up frat boy who wasn't intelligent enough to be president.

Now everyone is saying that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is "Obama's Katrina."

But that would be a mistake. That would be missing the forest for the trees. As Rahm Emanuel said so succinctly: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

Blaming Obama would be missing a golden opportunity to have a national conversation about Big Government.

What Deepwater Horizon shows is not that Obama is incompetent. It shows that Big Government is incompetent.

It means that all the tens of thousands of programs we have built up over the last century are a waste. All the regulations and the permits in the world can't stop people from making an honest mistake. Or misreading data. Or cutting a corner. Or being in a hurry. Or just frightened to make a decision that will cost a lot of money and get them in trouble with their boss.

There's even a book about it: Normal Accidents: Living with high-risk technologies by Charles Perrow.

Humans advance by trial and error. We don't live by the precautionary principle, that we should really think through everything before we start messing around with sacred Mother Earth. We can't. Life is too short. So we push blindly ahead and every now and again we make a mess. Sometimes it's a big mess. Then we clean it up.

The great advance in the last century is in just how good we have got in keeping things clean and in cleaning up messes.

Peggy Noonan is right to point out that Deepwater Horizon is a disaster for Obama and his political philosophy. (Imagine if this happened on President Bush's watch!) So it is.

But that's why we needed the Obama presidency. We needed the American people to see that it wasn't George W. Bush who was the problem. The issue isn't competence of presidents, the delusional god of liberals.

The problem is that you can't run a complex world with hierarchical bureaucracies and regulations and permits and "Mr. President, is it safe?" Life is much messier than that.

Let's not pile on President Obama. Even if he deserves it. Let's concentrate on the bigger picture. Let's focus on the failure of Big Government.

The American people deserve something better than blundering Big Government.

Slow Growth Hurts Obama

It's hard to know exactly when the Bush economy becomes the Obama economy. But if I were an Obami I'd be hitting the panic button right now.

Why? Because the GDP growth estimate for the first quarter of 2010 has just been lowered to 3.0 percent. Already, therefore, the gangbusters growth of the fourth quarter, 5.7 percent, has moderated, according to AP.

The economy grew at a 3 percent annual rate from January to March, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That was slightly weaker than an initial estimate of 3.2 percent a month ago. The new reading, based on more complete information, also fell short of economists' forecast for stronger growth of 3.4 percent.

The usual guesstimate is that you need more than 3 percent growth to get the unemployment rate down. So 3 percent doesn't get that headline barometer on the economy down fast enough to make the Obama economy look like a winning issue, not in 2010 or in 2012.

Conservatives would say that it serves him right.

Obama's economic policy has been right out of the Keynesian playbook: print money and crank up government spending "stimulus." Next year Obama will be raising tax rates.

It's the opposite of the Reagan playbook, which was tight money, lower tax rates, and cut domestic spending.

So we are getting a laboratory test of the two competing recipes for cooking up economic growth. They can't both be right.

The reasoning behind the conservative policy is pretty simple. Government is a dead weight on the economy, so if you reduce government spending you reduce the weight. Tax rates affect economic behavior. Low tax rates encourage business activity. Easy money doesn't really help the economy. Business and savers need a solid monetary unit that keeps its value. Easy money creates a bubble economy in which the least sophisticated get burned, as we saw in the recent real-estate bubble.

We can expect more and more desperate measures from the Obama administration in the months ahead as it tries one thing after another to ignite growth. After November, of course, there's a good likelihood that the president will have a Republican Congress to deal with.

Wouldn't it be delightful if the president, against his instincts, agreed to tax cuts and spending cuts proposed by a Republican Congress--you know, with its foot on his neck, as we say these days--and then got reelected when the economy caught fire.

Because never mind whose idea it was, if the economy turns around before 2012 then it turns around on Obama's watch.

It's the Pensions, Stupid

When are we going to stop public employees from ripping us off?

O never mind that the average public employee earns about 50 percent more than the average private sector employee.

No, never mind about that. It's not the salaries. It's the pensions, stupid.

If you want the policy analysis, go to this briefing from the National Center for Policy Analysis.

If you just want the News at Eleven tidbits, Mark Hemingway is your man. He suggests you pop over to californiapensionreform.com. to check out the pensions in the great state of California. Warning: Not for the faint of heart.

[The site] provides a searchable database of all 12,201 public employees in that state earning six-figure pensions.

In case you were wondering, Bruce Malkenhorst, former city administrator from Vernon, Calif., earns a pension of $509,664 a year. Yes, you read that right.

Let's head for New York. Even The New York Times is getting into the act--actually reporting news that reflects badly on Big Government. Hemingway again.

The Times reported "13 New York City police officers recently retired at age 40 with pensions above $100,000 a year; nine did so in their 30s."

Well, isn't that nice.

Some day soon, some politician is going to ride the public pension scandal into national office.

Now I wonder who that would be? It would have to be a politician expert at framing an issue into a sound bite. It would have to be someone with some street cred as a common-sense conservative. And it would have to be someone with exquisite timing.

You'd almost think it would have to be a woman. Now, let me think...