The Poor Suffering Millennials

Michael Barone seems to have opened a hornet's nest with his recent blog about Millennials. All he did was indulge in a mild dig at the ObamaCare provision to force health insurance to cover children up to age 26.

[C]hildren... should not be encouraged to remain dependent on parents for extended periods.

Maybe, he suggested, the ObamaCare bureaucrats should add some modest "terms and conditions" for 21-26 year-olds in the area of "late night activities" and "substantial alcohol consumption."

Millennials were not amused, and the outrage spilled onto Glenn Reynold's Instapundit.

As a baby boomer, I think millennials have a right to be upset. But think up millennials! What do you expect? The political system is bound to screw you guys. That's what politics is all about. It is a conspiracy of the old and well-connected against the young and inexperienced. As in:

Compulsory education. What would you do if you wanted to make youngsters tractable and demoralized? You'd lock them up in custodial facilities for their entire childhood and adolescence.

Academic education. Most people, studies show, learn by doing. So let's structure education to benefit kids that learn from listening to teacher and from books.

Child labor. Let's keep kids out of the labor force so they can't learn any practical skills.

Minimum wage. Let's make it really hard for people without skills to get a job. (But unpaid internships for the rich kids are OK).

Regulated labor market. Kill the common law "employment at will" concept, and tangle up the labor market with all kinds of laws to prevent employers from hiring and firing without cause. You wouldn't want an employer to take a risk on hiring some young uncredentialed nobody.

Mandated benefits. One way to keep inexperienced young people from competing in the labor market is to mandate all kinds of benefits from health insurance to unemployment to retirement. These are things that young people don't need and shouldn't have to pay for. They just make it more expensive to hire young people.

I could go on. We could discuss Fannie and Freddie, which crank up housing prices, making it hard for young people without family means to buy houses, and then devastate the economy with a credit crisis. But let's not get into that.

Let's just point out that the more power you give government the more it will discriminate against young people. That is simply because young people haven't had time to organize into special interests like older adults.

But, of course, the whole point of older adults supervising the education and indoctrination of young people is to make it hard for young people to fight their way out of their oppression. By the time that young people have figured it all out they are well into their 30s and they are getting ready to screw the next generation of young people.

Now you know why we baby boomers made such a fuss about overthrowing the "system." We didn't overthrow it, of course. We just made it worse.

Here's a concept for you, millennials. Join conservatives in smashing the cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful, and deluded welfare state that liberals have created over the last century to empower the educated elite and to oppress the young and the poor.

You won't regret it.

The Difference between Government and Business

I just finished reading this chilling blog on the gulf oil spill.

Briefly, it suggests that the "downhole" is damaged and that the oil is already leaking into the ground around the well. In due course the well head (weighing about 500 tons) will fall over due to abrasion in the downhole pipe and the well will start to disintegrate. Think lots more oil gushing into the gulf. Etc.

It's pretty obvious that a major cause of the accident was BP trying to cut corners and cut costs.

Well? That's what businesses do to stay competitive.

Congersmen are experts at expressing shock and outrage at this. So are lefty activists. Corporate greed, they call it.

In this they are acting like stopped clocks, right twice a day. But they say nothing when, e.g., John D. Rockefeller lowers the price of illuminating oil from $0.80 a gallon to $0.08. (In today's dollars that is $80 and $8).

On the other hand, it is clear that government suffers from the opposite problem. For instance we know, from numerous reports, that about half the kids arriving in college from high school need remedial classes before they are ready for college material.

What do public schools do about this? Nothing. And they will do nothing until the education system starts falling about our ears.

So here is my universal rule.

The difference between business and government is that business keeps cutting costs until something breaks. Government keeps doing the same old thing until something breaks.

As a complete right-wing nut-case (or right wing-nut case) I'm rather partial to the first notion. We humans proceed down the ages by trial and error. When we make a mistake, we fix it.

Obviously, BP has made a big mistake in the gulf. Today, it's time to fix it. Tomorrow it will be time to do "lessons learned," punish the innocent and let the guilty go free.

The second notion, if you like, is close to the "precautionary principle" beloved by environmentalists. Don't do anything unless you are sure it is safe. That is what government bureaucrats do by instinct because the only thing that can prevent you from getting your inflation-proofed government pension is a big mistake.

Since doing nothing can be just as unsafe as doing something, the precautionary principle is meaningless, except as a political prodding tool. But it is a universal tool for government proponents, since only people in business ever actually "do" anything.

Meanwhile we continue to refine the ancient art of scapegoating. We locate someone to take the blame for all our mistakes and disasters, and then stuff them into an oil well.

Ain't life great?

Big Government Doesn't Work

The great delusion of our modern age is that politicians and bureaucrats can run an economy just like the village Big Man in a remote village in New Guinea.

Earth to liberals: they can't. That's why President Obama, True Believer in politics and bureaucratic administration, is making such a poor fist of the presidency.

Today we have a couple of readings in big government folly. First of all, David Warren:

We learned a simple thing this week: that the BP clean-up effort in the Gulf of Mexico is hampered by the Jones Act. This is a piece of 1920s protectionist legislation, that requires all vessels working in U.S. waters to be American-built, and American-crewed. So while, for instance, the U.S. Coast Guard can accept such help as three kilometres of containment boom from Canada, they can't accept, and therefore don't ask for, the assistance of high-tech European vessels specifically designed for the task in hand.

Oh really. Who would have thought that the dear old Jones Act would still be doing its damage. (By the way, Obamis, here's a chance to blame Republicans. The Jones Act was passed in 1920 by a Republican Congress--and a Democratic president.)

Then there's Gerald P. O'Driscoll in the Wall Street Journal on the failure of regulation in the Gulf:

By all accounts, MMS operated as a rubber stamp for BP. It is a striking example of regulatory capture: Agencies tasked with protecting the public interest come to identify with the regulated industry and protect its interests against that of the public.

Of course it did. If BP followed all the rules to the letter it would never be able to drill a well.

Let's turn to the financial meltdown:

Boston University Professor Laurence Kotlikoff counts over 115 regulatory agencies for financial services. If more hands in the pot helped, financial services would be in fine shape.

Who knew? 115 financial regulatory agencies, and still we got a meltdown.

Then O'Driscoll hauls out Hayek. Friedrich Hayek, you'll remember, was the chap who identified the Knowledge Problem. To run a central-planning economy, he argued, the planner must know everything out there in the economy, so he can make decisions that usually would be made on the spot by local actors with local knowledge.

Of course, that is impossible. No planning manager, no central planning agency can possibly know enough to run an economy. The result, on a nationwide level, is the Soviet Union. On a tin-pot dictator level, the result is Venezuela, where thousands of containers of food have been discovered rotting in Venezuela's ports. Venezuela has a government food distribution and retail system.

On an industry-wide level, writes O'Driscoll:

Regulatory practice represents islands of central planning in otherwise decentralized market economies.

And the result is failure, just like at the national level. And that is why we are reading over the weekend that we won't be able to keep our health insurance as President Obama promised. Over 50 percent of health insurance plans won't meet regulatory requirements.

"Regulatory capture" is just a theory. The "knowledge problem" is just a theory. If you don't believe the theories then you have to wait for experience to confirm or deny the theory.

Conservatives maintain that these theories have already been amply proved by experience, again and again. But our liberal friends don't seem to agree.

It looks like only one thing will persuade our liberal friends of the validity of these theories: to be out of political power for a generation.

What "Mama Grizzlies?"

Gov. Sarah Palin is being too modest when she talks about "her mama grizzlies."

The only mama grizzly I see on the political radar is Palin herself.

Yeah. When that mama grizzly charges...

Conservative war-horse Pat Buchanan seems to have an eye on Palin. As a papa grizzly and political fighter who goes back to the Nixon years, you could say it takes one to know one.

It was Pat who noted, back last fall after Palin had introduced the gentle idea of "death panels" on her Facebook site, that "the lady knows how to frame an issue."

Pat, the political operative, is telling it like it is.

Now Pat's reacting to the Super Tuesday results. He muses on the MSM writing off Palin as a quitter. It reminds him of Nixon's famous farewell in 1962 when he quit politics after losing against Pat Brown, father of Jerry, in the race for governor of California. And how President Nixon ended up taking the oath of office a mere six years later.

So Palin quit as governor last year. Now look at her.

And though the media have painted Palin as a ditz, no politician in memory has conducted a more brilliant pre-presidential campaign, if that is what she is about, than the lady who calls herself "the Mama Grizzly."

Yes. She just happens to have picked a winner out of the pack in South Carolina. Nikki Haley may well be governor of a state with a key primary in 2012.

Palin endorsed Terry Branstad, a moderate, who will run for governor of Iowa in November. Iowa, let's see...

But then Palin backed John McCain against J.D. Hayworth in Arizona.

There's only one way to make sense of this mama bear's cuffing. She's backing people who will owe her in 2012. Big time.

She's aiming for the White House. That's not me. That's veteran Pat Buchanan's judgement.

Dems Whistling Past the Graveyard

Democrats are still hanging onto the narrative of January 2009, that Obama represents a "subversive force inside the governing establishment", according to Matt Bai in a New York Times Magazine thumbsucker piece. He came to power by bringing 15 to 20 million new "surge" voters to the polls in 2008, who believed that he represented something new.

But now top Democrats are upset that Obama is not being partisan enough. Pelosi & Co. want him to unload on the Republicans and fire up the base.

But that's not what brought out the 20 million "surge" voters, explains Obama's strategist David Plouffe. He is trying to organize these voters in new ways, getting past the tried and true labor-union GOTV and TV ad strategy.

Oh well, Matt Bai sums up: "[T]he one thing [Obama] will never really embody is the status quo."

Oh really? I'd say that the big takeaway this year for everyone except the Democratic Party faithful is that Obama is same-old-same-old Big Government liberal.

Why would anyone think that? Oh, I don't know. He's supported down-the-line mainstream liberal agenda items like Big Government health care and Big Government stimulus and Big Government energy policy. And he's bumbled the response to his Katrina moment. That's transformational?

Look, it was tempting for Democrats to believe that they had done something exceptional in 2008. America's first black president was a milestone. But they forgot that they got into power by being not-Republican at a moment when that is just what the American people wanted.

Having got into power, the Democrats governed exactly like the Democrats that everyone had been voting against for a generation. Sure voters wanted change in 2008. That's what you do after you've got fed up with the chaps in power.

Here's the bigger challenge for the Democrats, as divined by American Thinker contributor and recovering liberal Robin of Berkeley. She reports that her lefty Jewish friends are getting exactly what they wanted in Obama.

But her liberal Jewish friend Laura is "shell shocked."

It's no wonder that polls show Obama's support plummeting among liberal Jews. They thought they were getting a patriotic American who'd unite this country, not someone who would tear it to shreds.

Now, when I talk to Laura on the phone, she sounds shell-shocked. While she hasn't put two and two together yet (I'm working on it), she describes a spooky feeling of nameless dread.

"Nameless dread?" Anyone seen the panic button? If I were a Democratic operative I would be scared to death about shell-shocked liberal Jewish voters suffering from "nameless dread." The very best I could hope for would be that the shell-shocked wouldn't turn out to vote.

But the real danger is that I could be losing a voter like that forever. Especially if she happened to be friends with a recovering liberal like Robin of Berkeley.

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.