Announcing "An American Manifesto"

After a year and a half of President Obama and his Democratic Congress Americans are looking at each other in and wondering.

Surely there is a better way to imagine America than the liberal vision of competing victim groups and the presumption of helplessness.

Surely there is a better way to govern America?

Surely we can imagine a better future for our children than an ever-enlarging government.

Surely American deserve better than a government that does less and less with more and more.

It is time to create "An American Manifesto." It is time to imagine life after liberalism and start to create it. It is time to believe in a new America without a thousand liberal interest groups. It is time to imagine an America without a million laws. It is time to believe in an America built upon friendliness, bound together with kindness, and healed with forgiveness.

If we want an America like that, then we have to step up and build it. Liberals can't do it. They wouldn't know how to start. Conservatives must do it. But we can only do it if we reach out to moderates and independents. We must offer them the hand of friendship, and say: there's got to be a better way.

So let us join together, conservatives, moderates, independents, and even a few enlightened liberals. Let us reason together and draft An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism.

Is Dodd-Frank the New Smoot-Hawley?

Eighty years ago, at the twilight of the great Republican age from 1861 to 1933, the Congress passed and the president signed the tariff bill to end all tariff bills.

We are talking about Smoot-Hawley, the Tariff Act of 1930. It was sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Reed Smoot (R-UT) and in the House by Rep. Willis Hawley (R-OR). It raised tariffs on imports to near record levels and is credited with helping to put the Great in the Depression of 1929-1933.

Smoot-Hawley was signed into law in June 1930. In November 1930, in the mid-terms, Republicans lost 52 seats and control in the House and the GOP lost eight seats in the Senate, but not control.

For us today, there is something almost menacing and Dickensian about the compound word "Smoot-Hawley." It seems to ooze narrow-minded folly and blindness.

Is it possible that history is repeating itself?

It is telling that the stock market started to swoon back in April 2010 about when it became clear that the Dodd-Frank finance reform bill was likely to pass. Why? Well maybe the market is starting to price in the uncertainty and the costs that the complex Dodd-Frank bill is likely to insert into the US economy. Various analysts have looked at the bill (JP Morgan Chase reportedly has 100 teams working on it) and they all seem to agree that it will introduce a vast new infrastructure of regulation and political meddling.

In other words, the Democrats are going for another Big Push at what they have been doing for 100 years. Regulating, politicizing, bureaucratizing. That's what they know how to do. That is, apparently, the only thing they know how to do. So they are doing it. Seems just like old times and a rerun of the Sen. Smoot and Rep. Hawley show in another era.

Well, at least the American people got rid of the protectionist Republicans in short order.

The question is: what will the American people do with the Smoots and the Hawleys of our time?

Sen. Dodd (D-CT) and Rep. Frank (D-MA) were both enthusiastic supporters of politicized home mortgages in the last hurrah of Fannie and Freddie, before they became a $400 billion black hole. Fannie and Freddie were at the center of the reckless credit binge of the last ten years. Now they want to regulate the finance industry more closely, but do nothing about Fannie and Freddie.

Chris Dodd, in case you have forgotten, was famous as a "friend of Angelo" Mozilo, CEO of Countrywide, the deceased mortgage mill that fed mortgages to Fannie and Freddie.

It would be appropriate if our modern day Smoot and Hawley blindly set up an electoral disaster for the Democrats in the House just like their political role models. After all, experts are already predicting a 40 seat swing to Republicans in the House, and big wins in the Senate.

The point is that politicians then and now are venal and blind to everything except the next political power play. They know nothing about economics. They know nothing about justice. They know nothing about finance.

What politicians know how to do is divide the people and get elected. And they know how to reward their supporters.

That's why limited government is such a good idea. The more power you give to politicians the more they will abuse it. You may think that this program or that program will benefit you, and therefore the nation at large will benefit. Remember "what's good for liberals is good for the country?"

But the power you give to your guys can be turned, with the change of parties, into a scourge to cut your back to ribbons.

Some people only learn this the hard way.

To help make the connection with Smoot-Hawley, there seems to be a Dickensian flavor to the very names of the legislators proudly sponsoring our 21st century Regulation of Abominations. Dodd-Frank sounds awfully close to that venal law firm of Dodson and Fogg that made life so difficult for the admirable Mr. Pickwick.

Let's hope for the early end to Democratic power. But let us also hope that the aftermath of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, the disaster of 1929 to 1939, the valley of the shadow of death, is not visited again upon the American people.

Worst Administration in History

You can always tell a liberal. You just can't tell her anything.

With the stock market in retreat this morning and the headlines full of a weak recovery, the Obama administration is trying to sell Americans on the idea it is pro-business.

Oh yeah? You mean the administration that passed the biggest government takeover in history, ObamaCare? The government that passed the biggest subsidy of government jobs in history, the stimulus bill? The government that passed the most opaque financial reform bill in history, Dodd-Frank, that creates 243 new rule-making processes at ten federal agencies?

You mean that administration?

None of this had to happen. It wouldn't have happened if the Obamis at the White House and the Reid-Pelosi machine politicians and the policy professionals had stepped back and fashioned the Obama agenda around a bipartisan formula.

If they had listened to the Other America, the 80 percent of America that is not liberal.

It wouldn't have happened if President Obama had governed according to the mandate he got from the American people, which was to form a moderate, post-partisan, post-racial administration and mend the broken, corrupt game in Washington, DC.

But he didn't, and now he must reap the whirlwind.

What a pity that the liberal mainstream media didn't do its job. What a pity that the administration got blindsided because it got so much toadying coverage from the elite media.

How did we get here? We got here because liberals never listen. Business is corrupt, they say. Wall Street is greedy. Conservative think tanks are bought and paid for by Big Oil. The American people are racist.

It's a closed system. Everything can be explained. Everything is the fault of the other guy.

Well, we are about to witness the biggest political meltdown in our life-times. I am calling for an 80 seat shift in the House of Representatives. Not because I think that we'll actually see such a move--I'd say 60 seats is more realistic--but because I think we need to set a challenging goal.

We need to give liberals a gigantic blow upside the head. For their own good, you know.

Pat Buchanan hauls out a quote from Eric Hoffer today.

Every great movement begins as a cause, eventually becomes a business, then degenerates into a racket.

Actually, he's wrong. According to Wikiquote, the real quote is:

Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.

You can say that again.

Actually, it's obvious. Anyone trying to start a political movement is probably trying to increase the amount of force in society. Force usually ends up in a racket, a corrupt racket to take other peoples' money and give it to your supporters.

As a political movement turns into a racket, the leaders and the supporters have to turn off their consciences and keep telling themselves that the crimes they are committing are really the very essence of innocence and idealism. So they block their ears and eyes and pretend that everything is all right.

Liberals have been doing that for the last generation and more. That is why they have to demonize everyone that opposes them--as racists, sexists, homophobes, deniers. That is why they have resolutely refused to listen to the voice of conservative reform.

The net result is the worst administration in history. Now all we need is a monumental rejection at the polls.

Then we can get to work making American great again.

The Democrats' Regulatory Solution

From the beginning of the financial crisis of 2008 Democrats blamed "deregulation." Without the proper regulatory safeguards greedy Wall Street bankers made risky loans and hid their losses in off-balance sheet shenanigans.

Never mind that the regulators were found to be asleep at the switch.

So their solution is Dodd-Frank, a 2,300 page bill of financial re-regulation that will, according to the Wall Street Journal edit page, require 243 rule makings from ten different government regulators: FDIC, the Fed, the Treasury, etc.

On the same day, libertarian John Stossel complained that we've become a "nation of a million rules."

Not the kind of bottom-up rules that people generate through voluntary associations. Those are fine. I mean imposed, top-down rules formed in the brains of meddling bureaucrats who think they know better than we how to manage our lives.

Yet the US Congress and the Obama administration have faith that all those bureaucrats are going to look up from their rule-makings and come together to stop the financial king pins from folly when the next big boom comes.

The great illusion of our age is the faith in rules. It's natural, of course, because we have demolished the old system, the penumbra of culture that stopped people from violating the rules. In the old days of face-to-face community people had a sense of shame and obligation. They had an invisible dog fence. They didn't need a real fence to control themselves.

The less admirable side of our culture of rules is that is pure politics. Our modern governments use the financial system to give government a cheap source of credit, and to hand out subsidies to favored supporters. Inevitably, this process gets out of control. Fannie-Freddie started out as a way of spreading mortgage risk in the depths of the Great Depression. It ended up as an out-of-control program, cheered on by politicians like Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), that sprayed trillions of dollars of mortgages at people who couldn't even afford a down payment.

The great task of conservatives, after the current regime has sunk into failure, will be to revive a workable capitalism. It must be built on trust and character, not bureaucratic rules.

The new economy must have less debt. It must be fail-safe enough not to need elaborate regulatory groins and breakwaters. And it must keep the politicians and the activists at arms length.

That's a tall order. But it is essential. Capitalism is too important to be left to the bureaucrats and the politicians.

Palin Trumps Race Card

Ever since the dawn of time--well the 1960s, anyway--Democrats have been playing race cards from the bottom of the deck in the national game of bridge. And they have won rubber after rubber with their cheating.

Yesterday, July 13, for instance, the NAACP played the race card on the Tea Party, passing a resolution accusing it of tolerating bigotry. No doubt they expected Tea Parties to scurry and hide under rocks, as people usually do when accused of racism.

But today, July 14, 2010, is a day that will live... Well, it will mark the turning point on race.

Today Sarah Palin used her Facebook page to blast the NAACP and its resolution.

I am saddened by the NAACP’s claim that patriotic Americans who stand up for the United States of America’s Constitutional rights are somehow “racists.”

Then off she goes, talking about a nuisance suit she just won over a "spurious charge of racism," Tim Scott, "poised to become the first African-American Republican Congressman from the former Confederacy since Reconstruction", and Todd's Yupak Eskimo family. Wow. Seems to me that Palin had a few shells in the ready-use locker and was just waiting for this opportunity.

Now, I'd say, the boot is on the other foot and a shocked NAACP is finding itself on the defensive.

It has taken a while, but liberal commentators like Michelle Cottle of The New Republic are beginning to acknowledge that Sarah Palin is an extraordinary political talent. There's a reason for this, of course. Palin has come up the hard way in politics, starting out as a city councilwoman in 1992. If she weren't good we wouldn't know about her.

Who could blame the white Tea Partiers if the race-card argument were true? Ordinary middle-class whites, as I blogged yesterday, are the chaps that the political elite has forced to pay for its race-based affirmative action programs. If lower-income whites (who have nine-to-one odds against admission to selective colleges compared to lower-income blacks) were the darlings of the liberals, as they were in the 1930s, they would be in the streets, led by the liberals, demanding justice.

Instead lower-income whites have borne the insults of an overweening elite for nearly two generations. Finally they have taken to the streets. It is not over race, but over the simple idea of freedom and out-of-control government debt. As Sarah Palin writes, Tea Partiers are people

who simply want government to abide by our Constitution, live within its means, and not borrow and spend away our children’s futures.

Yeah. That just proves they are racists.

Meanwhile Sarah Palin has scored a hit, a palpable hit.

Screwing Lower-class Whites with Diversity

We've known for decades that the folks really getting screwed by affirmative action are "poor whites." Not professional-class whites. Not liberal whites. Just the God-and-guns whites.

But nobody does anything about it.

There's a recent update on "diversity," the name given to affirmative action after the Supreme Court decided the Bakke case. It's a study on admissions at eight selective colleges by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford of Princeton, reported by Russell K. Nieli. Yep, poor whites get royally screwed as we knew. But here's another category that get pushed to the back of the line: students with extracurriculars in JROTC, 4-H, and Future Farmers of America.

Here's what liberal admissions officers do to get their numbers right, with 5-7 percent black and appropriate Hispanic admissions (By the way, you can count Afro-Caribbean and African immigrants as "black").

Black: "Enormous advantage over whites given to blacks": +310 SAT pts advantage over whites.

Hispanic: "substantial admissions boost... which Hispanic students get over whites": +140 SAT pts advantage over whites.

Asians: "must do substantially better than whites": -140 SAT pts disadvantage vs. whites

If you start counting by class, then poor whites get clobbered in their chances for admission:

Lower-class blacks: "ten times as likely" to get admission as lower-class whites.

Lower-class Hispanics: "eight times as likely" to get admission as lower-class whites.

Lower-class Asians: "seven times as likely" to get admission as lower-class whites.

Then there's the penalty for conservative extracurriculars:

"Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, "has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions." Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.

Maybe these liberal college admissions administrators need to study up the law of the land, as promulgated recently by the US Supreme Court.

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

Justice is justice, but injustice cries up to the heavens for redress. One day, the heavens will call down the most frightful retribution on the monstrous injustice of liberal "diversity," the injustice that poor whites have borne for so long with such patience.

When They Start to Laugh At You

When they took Robespierre, the Terror of France, to the guillotine, the crowd is said to have mocked: "La bas à le Maximum!"

That was a taunt at the Law of the General Maximum, a program of wage and price controls passed by Robespierre and the Jacobins.

Robespierre had implemented the General Maximum because inflation from fiat paper money had increased prices and people wanted the government to "do something." You can imagine that the General Maximum had exactly the effect that all wage and price controls have had throughout history. It led to more inflation and general hoarding as people refused to bring price-controlled goods to market.

In the end, the Stalinist Robespierre was sent to his death with the name of his failed economic policy ringing in his ears.

President Obama, though a constitutional president, will also learn to fear the taunts of the people as his economic policy fails to produce a vigorous recovery.

The worst thing is that people are laughing at him. They are laughing at the stumbling mistakes of his administration. They are laughing at the over-the-top black racists calling for a race war on the "crackers." They are laughing at his hesitant response to the Gulf oil crisis. They are laughing at the transparent folly of his administration's suit against Arizona.

Of course, things are going to get much worse for the president. His ill-starred health reform will create conflict and rage when peoples' health insurance starts getting wigged around by incompetent regulators.

Think what else the president has to look forward to.

A new Republican House of Representatives will renew the budget battles of the 1990s. Only this time the American people will probably side with the House against the president. That's because Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton when it comes to political agility and talent.

In 2011 Sarah Palin will start dancing around the President like Squirrel Nutkin. Liberals will keep expecting her to self destruct, but she won't because Sarah Palin is a seasoned politician who knows how to play the game of politics. She worked her way up the hard way.

Will we have a double-dip recession, as everyone is predicting? Probably not, but the economy ain't gonna be pretty.

The tragedy is, of course, that the people who will suffer most are the young and the minority and the ill-educated. Exactly the people that Democrats profess to care about.

Why won't Democrats learn that the only way to help the helpless is to provide a solid productive economy without gimmicks? Ever since the 1930s Democrats have believed in economic gimmicks and subsidies as the way to help the helpless. The flaw in their program is that smart operators and crony capitalists always manage to crowd in before the helpless. It is the "little people" that get stuck with the underwater mortgages and the bankers that trouser the bonuses. That's how government always works. Goodies from the government spread outward from the connected to the less-connected and end up screwing the common people.

The end of a political dynasty is always an ugly thing. When people cease to fear the power of the elite they start to get rambunctious. But to the Old Regime the unkindest cut of all is the ungratefulness and the scorn.

Now liberals are going to get a taste of what it's like to be on the wrong side of history. You have to feel sorry for them.