Alien vs. Mama Grizzly

The problem with President Obama, writes Dorothy Rabinowitz, is that he's not really our president. He's a kind of "representative at large" to the world community.

[Obama is] wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion.

Well, nobody can say that about Sarah Palin. In fact, the hit on her is that she is too demotic and folksy. In fact a lot of people complain that she has only a vague hold on the all-important "issues."

We'll see about that. Anything that plays into the eternal liberal narrative that conservatives are stupid sets off my bullshit alarm.

The fact is that Palin is living up to the title of her book. She really is a rogue player, and she's not afraid to get out there and take risks when she endorses candidates and keeps herself in the public eye.

And that points to another difference between her and President Obama. It's pretty obvious by now that President Obama is slow on his feet. We saw that in the campaign, but it was explained away as a magnificent coolness under fire.

The question that the average pundit is now beginning to ask, as the BP oil spill continues, is whether that celebrated coolness is not in fact just a fear of making decisions, an inability to think on his feet and act fast in an emergency.

We know, from the commentary on the passenger jet that made an emergency landing in the Hudson River, that in an emergency people revert to their training. That's why they train pilots and airline cabin staff for emergencies.

Palin seems to thrive on emergencies and risk. Many national politicians have built support by endorsing and supporting candidates. They usually do in quietly, behind the scenes. But Palin's very public candidate endorsements and support have created controversy--e.g. her support of GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina. Robert Costa:

For Palin, policy ideas and values are important. So, smartly, is winning — especially when it comes to electing her hand-picked crop of Palinistas. “No matter your gender or politics, you have to hand it to her: Palin is fearless,” says Mark McKinnon, a former adviser to Pres. George W. Bush.

Who is President Obama, really? And who is Sarah Palin, really? There's lots of partisan narrative out there, crude attempts to define the other party's candidate as a lightweight, or as out of touch. And really, with a public figure, you can never separate the reality from the image.

What's the reality? The only thing a voter can do is pay attention. And watch the way the politician makes her moves.

Suppose the Liberal Luck Ran Out

Our liberal friends don't know how lucky they are. They've been wrong on pretty well everything (except civil rights between 1962 and 1965) but somehow the American people keep voting for them.

They were wrong on the Great Depression. FDR's economic policy kept the nation buried in misery for a full decade. They were wrong on Communism. It was an evil, just as evil as fascism. They were wrong on government welfare. Their cradle-to-grave welfare state has demolished the working class. In the 1970s their Keynesianism gave us the worst inflation since the Civil War. In the 1990s and 2000s their housing subsidies gave us bubbles and a banking crisis.

One big reason why liberals never seem to get the blame for their screw-ups is that they get to make their own weather. With bribed apologists in the academy, willing accomplices in the media, and immoralists in the commanding heights of the culture, they can spin everything to make themselves look good.

But now we have President Obama. Our liberal friends liked to make fun of President Bush as a fortunate son, a dim-witted scion who wasn't up to the job. Actually, George W. Bush had a baptism of fire with his failing oil firm, Arbusto, which must have taught him a lot about dealing with disaster, and helped him soldier through the dark days of the Iraq mess.

President Obama, on the other hand, really is a fortunate son. He's been eased along by helping hands his entire adult life. Now he is president at a tricky time when the president is really going to have to make some tough choices. He is going to have to make decisions that are going to anger his supporters.

The big thing he is going to have to face is big spending cuts for government. And that is really going to piss off his liberal supporters, who, working in government, have never had to deal with financial reverse.

Arthur Laffer, writing in Wall Street Journal, is predicting a "collapse" in 2011. More precisely, he predicts that the big tax-rate increases that take effect next January are already warping the recovery from the Great Recession. Businesses and individuals are pushing income into 2010 before the big tax increase. That means that 2011 will be pretty dismal, economically.

Maybe we are already seeing the dismal outlook, as the stock market has been swooning for the last month. We are, in early June, just a little over six months out from January 2011, and the market generally leads the economy by about six months.

If the economy is still sluggish in mid 2011, then look for the Obama administration to start proposing some really stupid stuff to goose the economy in time for reelection.

The problem is that there isn't much the Feds can do to goose the economy with Keynesian "stimulus." What do you think they have been doing for the last two years?

The Feds are already maxed out on borrowing. More borrowing would probably create angst in the credit markets and raise interest rates, and a continued easy money policy from the Fed is sure to be developing major inflation by 2012.

See what I mean? Some time in the next two years, the federal government is going to have to bite the bullet and implement real spending cuts to get its fiscal house in order. President Obama is going to be president, pushing spending cuts for liberal voters that have never faced spending cuts in their lives. Federal government employees will be losing their jobs. Teachers by the tens of thousands will be losing theirs. State and local governments will be going broke, and maybe cutting pension payments and health care benefits.

When the liberals run out of luck, it ain't gonna be pretty. The question is: what will the American people think? Will they feel sorry for well-paid teachers suddenly having to pay for health insurance? Or will they decide that big government and its supporters had it coming?

It all depends on who makes the weather.

Let's Not Think Big on Energy

Oh good. Big thinker Jeffrey Sachs, part-owner of the mess in post-Soviet Russia, and now director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, wants President Obama to think big on energy.

What the disaster truly makes clear, however, is the inadequacy of the administration's own approach to overhauling America's energy system.

Yeah. Like government and its bribed-apologist experts have a clue "overhauling" anything, let alone America's energy system.

Sachs understands, at least, that the current Obama policy approach is flawed. The American people can see that it is a rat's nest of favors and subsidies to special interests. So that's why a bold plan is needed.

That is where the government - and the President - must come in: to promote, in a systematic and aggressive way, the best alternatives for clean energy and then to speed their adoption as they prove their economic and environmental merit.

Franky, Mr. Sachs, I doubt it. For all the talk about consensus and imminent disaster required massive government intervention, the fact is that we haven't a clue about the "best alternatives" or even the meaning of "clean energy." We don't know if CO2 concentration is a problem. We don't know what the climate is doing. And we don't know which technologies will be the winners.

The best thing to do, right now, as Iain Murray writes in National Review Online, is to stop the crony capitalism that induces companies like BP--"Beyond Petroleum"--to get cozy with the government. Look what happened after the Exxon Valdez spill.

After the Exxon Valdez spill, legislators and industry got together and agreed to a cap on damages in exchange for an increase in tax payments. Generally, damage caps create what is known as “moral hazard,” lessening the consequences — and thus increasing the likelihood — of a potentially damaging act.

Isn't that special! Special privileges and exemptions in return for tribute.

What we need to get us to the energy future is a lot of people trying different stuff. That's because nobody knows what the future will demand. Nobody knows what the best alternatives are. Sure, there are a ton of promising ideas out there. But who knows which are the good ideas and which are the good ideas that work.

Fortunately, we have a wonderful system for exploring the future and rewarding the people that get it right. It is called capitalism. Free enterprise capitalism, not government-corrupted crony capitalism.

Government's role is an important one. It is to play the role of impartial judge. When you get "people trying different stuff" you can be sure that they will make a ton of mistakes. Some of those mistakes will be messy, like BP's mistake in the Gulf of Mexico. When people make a mess, they must clean it up. No need to send down the US Attorney General with criminal complaints and perp walks. Just make sure that the law operates properly so that people damaged by a spill or a gas release get compensated fairly and justly.

Conservatives have a great role to play here. It is to play interference against politicians, against experts like Jeffrey Sachs, and against politicized corporations like BP.

The future will almost certainly be significantly different from the future planned by government and its experts. It will almost certainly be different from the future imagined by today's big corporations. That's because, in the nature of things, today's power elite won't want futures that diminish their power. Politicians want to spend money on programs that will get them reelected. Experts want national crises that require more research. Big corporations want solutions that will allow them to leverage their current market advantages against small upstarts.

The beauty of capitalism is that it doesn't give a damn about politicians, experts and big corporations. It just rewards the chap who had the right idea at the right time. And the other people? The chaps with the right idea at the wrong time? The chaps with the promising idea that wouldn't scale or couldn't be reliable or inexpensive enough? Well, they probably had a grand time trying.

The encouraging thing is that whatever stupid crony-capitalist or public-private partnership policy or grand strategy that Obama comes up with, he'll probably botch it.

And then the decks will be cleared for ordinary technologists and businessmen to do something sensible.

Canada and Welfare State Cuts

I checked out a TV in the guest room yesterday and in two minutes saw an ad for AARP's Medicare Supplement insurance and an ad by a lawyer advertising his services in applying for Social Security Disability benefits--the benefits "you deserve!"

It shows how central the welfare state must be in the lives of the TV-watching classes.

AARP's Medicare Supplement business is one of the untouchables in national politics.

And Social Security's Disability program already covers about four percent of the working population. I read an article a while back that predicted that the disability rolls would reach seven percent. Expect that number to be reached when we fully emerge from the current Man-cession in the next couple of years.

What will happen to the welfare state in the years ahead? Obviously we will hit a crisis. And liberals will suddenly realize that they need to trim the welfare state or go out of business.

In Canada, liberals reached that point in the 1990s, as Fred Barnes reminds us.

Canada was called an “honorary member of the Third World” by the Wall Street Journal in 1995, and for good reason. Out-of-control spending, soaring debt, and the government’s bite of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) growing at a furious pace—those trends prompted the Journal’s harsh putdown.

The liberals in Canada's Liberal Party realized that something had to give. So they implemented draconian cuts in central government spending.

The results have been remarkable. In two years, spending declined 8.8 per-cent. The size of the national government dropped from 16 percent of GDP in 1994 to 13 percent. As debt shrunk, once-gigantic interest payments fell dramatically.

That’s not all. Canada’s version of Social Security was put on a sound financial footing. Only one large government entity with soaring costs has been left unreformed: the single-payer health care system.

Now Canada is trying to do something about its health care system, satirized a while back in the movie The Barbarian Invasions. According to Reuters:

British Columbia is replacing block grants to hospitals with fee-for-procedure payments and Quebec has a new flat health tax and a proposal for payments on each medical visit -- an idea that critics say is an illegal user fee.

Well, you can see that the Canadians are not that serious about cutting health care costs. Not yet.

But you can see the problem. Millions of people, like the folks watching those TV ads about government benefits, have organized their lives around the government's IV. If anyone tries to change the bottle of joy-juice, or even reduce it, it will produce enormous rage and resistance.

So, just like in Canada, we really need the liberals to get out in front. It is liberals that must carry the news to their supporters that the glory days are over. Will they? Would President Obama lead such an effort in 2012 after a chilling defeat in the November 2010 mid-terms?

Because if President Obama doesn't lead off, then it will be eight or ten years before another Democrat can lead his party towards a welfare state that recognizes limits on government largesse.

By that time we'll really be in trouble.

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.