Will the Dems Split?

Like Aunt Em, I have waited all my life for the Democratic Party to split. Now, finally, Michael Barone has reported on a possible split between gentry liberals and public-sector unions. But because I am a realist, I can't get too excited about it.

Actually, what he reports is not a split but the public-sector unions beating the pants off the gentry liberals in places like Washington DC. In the mayoral primary last week the tony liberal areas voted for reform Mayor Adrian Fenty. Too bad. Fenty was defeated in the Democratic primary by Council President Vincent Gray. Fenty has been working to reform the schools and the city government, but that cuts no ice with teacher unions and government employee unions. They don't care about lousy schools and overmanned, inefficient city services. They just care about their jobs, their paychecks, and their pensions.

Does this mean trouble for the Democrats? Barone:

Gentry liberals and public employee unions were allies in the Obama campaign in 2008. But now they're in a civil war, in city and state politics.

Civil war? Really? I suspect that there is less here than meets the eye. Gentry liberals may not be unionized and they may like the idea of helping kids and fixing up municipal services, but not if it means breaking a sweat.

Gentry liberals occupy the sweet spot in the big-government universe. They are the managers, the directors, the principals, the government lawyers, the journalists. Their boat is floated by the sea of rank-and-file employees that deliver the votes.

Expect to see gentry liberals wringing their hands about welfare and family breakdown, about underperforming schools and inefficient municipal services. But don't expect them to vote to cut their cushy jobs in the higher reaches of the education blob or the university or the regulatory maze.

But the gentry liberals will be perfectly happy to let their union thugs take all the incoming rounds from the Tea Party and others. While they stay above it all.

I'd say that the chaps who ought to be thinking about splitting are the educated youth. They should realize that they are screwed, and better forget about their idealistic careers in government. But it may take them a while.

Here's Extremism For You

Well, so Christine O'Donnell is an extremist. That is what our Democratic friends want voters to believe. I guess that's what you get when you run seminars on the women in Lord of the Rings.

But if you chaps want extremism how about this?

In the United States there's a party that champions a program to force every worker to pay a tax amounting to 15 percent of their wages. At the end of 40 years the government pays the worker a "benefit" every month, as the mood takes it, until the worker dies. The money belongs to the government. All told, these government pension programs costs $1 trillion per year. And the government pension programs will all go broke in the next 30 years. Of course, if you'd paid 15 percent of your wages into a bank account, you could have lived off the interest and passed the principal on to your children. How extreme is that?

Here's another example of the extremism that we just take for granted.

The government forces every senior citizen to belong to a government health care program which yields a crazy quilt of benefits and puts the government in between seniors and their doctors. Combined with other government health care programs, it costs about $1.1 trillion a year, and there is no money to pay the benefits in the out years. Based on current taxation levels, we are short something like $30 trillion to pay the benefits promised by the government to seniors over the next generation. Of course, seniors could decide to look after their own health care, since seniors, in general, are the richest Americans. That means something at a time when young people are hurting badly in the Great Recession, and, when they have jobs, pay the taxes for all this and have children to raise and mortgages to pay. How extreme is that?

We have extremist education too.

The government forces every parent to send their children to a government child-custodial facility from age 7 to 16. It costs about $1.0 trillion a year. After the government has held these children in custody for ten years here is the result. On adult literacy, about 15 percent of Americans are "below basic," which is a polite word for functionally illiterate. About 50 percent of kids entering college require remedial courses. How extreme is that?

Here's another extreme situation.

The government forces everyone to pay for their vast establishment of programs for the relief of the poor. The result is a vast underclass, the utter collapse of the family among low-income Americans, and a stealth gray area of people on disability pensions. But this program is cheap. It only costs about $0.75 trillion a year.

For a generation at least, conservative Americans have been agitating to reform these programs, to reduce their reckless overpromising, and to reform their administrative failures. But a certain party, filled with extremists, has demonized every attempt at reform.

Who cares, you might say? Conservative Americans are prudent, careful people who will survive when the balloon goes up and the government defaults on its promises. Why should we care?

Well, the truth is we do care. We don't want the clients of the Democratic Party to wake up one day and find that the party's over and that, as they say in Eastern Europe, they'll be reduced to eating the paint off the walls. We want the folks on government programs to live decent, dignified lives.

We just believe that you can't have dignity when your life depends on some politician bringing home the bacon. There's a word for that kind of society. Feudal.

Republicans Eating Their Own?

This week we are back to the old meme: Republicans eating their own.

How come this only happens to Republicans, the usual suspects whine?

The answer is that the Republican Party is a different animal from the Democratic Party. And as I look around the blogosphere this morning I see that everyone agrees with me. Roger Kimball gets it, almost:

That’s the thing that scares people about the tea party. It operates outside the jurisdiction set down by the other parties, be they Democratic or Republican. All those sources of patronage, wells of political preferment, reservoirs of prestige, perquisites, and power: That’s what politics as usual is about. It has built up an impressive institutional structure.

That's OK as far as it goes. But here is commenter ZenPundit on a ChicagoBoyz blog about NPR's difficulty in understanding the Tea Party.

First, a majority of the Left are still in the “community organizer”, Alinskyist, protest theater, organizational front group, grievance-victim-social-justice paradigm adhered to and honed since the 1930’s by the Marxists, Social Democrats, organized labor and the New Left. They want a centralized nanny-state themed to race and gender issues and approach politics with a vanguard mindset where talking points are issued by the leaders and everyone must stay in lockstep.

We need to understand that the Republican Party, though it certainly deals in "wells of political preferment, reservoirs of prestige, perquisites, and power," only does it to a limited extent. It offers jobs to people who work in the federal government when Republicans are in power. Otherwise Republicans go about their daily life in the private sector. That makes the Republicans much more loosey-goosey.

But the Democrats are different. The whole point of the Democratic Party chaps is to organize a patronage system for themselves and their clients fed by government revenues. If you are a Democrat you probably earn your living in the education establishment, or a health/welfare bureaucrat or client, an NGO activist, or a government program benefits recipient. Your whole life is organized around the continuance of that government salary or benefits. Obviously, Democrats cannot relax for a moment. They must stay organized in their citadels of government largesse, ready to repel insurgents at any moment. Because if the Republicans ever took that money away...

The Democratic machine presents an awful power to the world. It has to. For anyone that breaks ranks, well, there's always the ancient threat: That's a nice little teaching job you got there. Pity if anything should happen to it.

But we should take our inspiration from that other formidable political machine, the Soviet Union. It specialized in frightfulness, right up until the day that it collapsed, as the Marxists like to say, of its internal contradictions.

The problem with the Democratic Party is that it has promised itself and its supporters loot and plunder that cannot possibly be delivered. Sooner or later the whole thing is going to collapse, because it will just run out of money.

When people worry about the lack of unity in the Republican Party, they have a point. But in the long term, this lack of unity is a strength. The really scary thing is the rictus of smiling unity in the Democratic Party. The day that smile breaks will be a day to behold.

Today GOP Elite Freaks. In November...

Hey, GOP establishment, I feel your pain. All the nice plans you made to get to 51 in the Senate look like they are compromised by the primary victory of Christine O'Donnell.

And I agree, she seems like a piece of work. Reminds me of another chap, name of Bill Clinton. A little bit of trouble keeping the story straight.

Glenn Beck had the mot du jour. Today, the Republican establishment is freaking, he said on his radio show. But that is just the beginning. Wait till the MSM starts freaking. Wait till the Democrat establishment starts freaking.

Naturally, establishment Republicans are worried that the defeat of RINO Republicans means that Democrats will elect people in Republican districts and the result will be that there will be no Republicans in the Northeast.

Maybe. That is certainly the lesson of the last ten years. Democrats have been able, time and time again, to brand social conservatives as way out radicals. But that was then. This is now.

The Preserve RINO strategy is a defensive strategy. It is a holding operation, trying to accommodate the natural domination of Democrats in the Northeast.

But the point of the Tea Party movement is to change the status quo. It is to energize natural conservatives and to begin the process of persuading moderates and independents that a Republican Party of common-sense conservatism is their kind of party. That's what a movement does. It moves the country.

When you start to do that, you leave behind the nice comfortable assumptions of the old order. You enter a revolutionary phase, where Americans are open to persuasion, where voters are up for grabs.

So the question becomes, should you use the strategy of the Allied World War I generals, and advance in lockstep, a step at a time? Or should you adopt the strategy of the German General Staff, that subordinate commanders down to the squad level should always be ready to exploit opportunities?

My feeling is that we are in new territory. My feeling is that the 50-50 nation of the past ten years is history. (Yeah. Remember 50-50 nation? Seems like ancient history!) My feeling is that we don't want to be fighting the last war.

And let's get back to the Germans again. In the Franco-Prussian War, General von Moltke had a real problem with over-enthusiastic unit commanders getting their units into trouble. But these tactical reverses didn't matter because Moltke had his armies in the right place at the right time. The French with their Chassepot rifles might win a local victory, but next day they would have to retreat.

That's where we are today. American politics is changing, and nobody knows where it is going, and where we will end up. It isn't going to be safe, and the old gang is going to have to give up its power.

In my view the Democrats will have a much bigger problem with that. But right now they are too busy laughing as the tsunami bursts over the GOP establishment. But don't worry. The tsunami is heading right their way. They are just too stupid to realize it.

Why Isn't Stimulus Working?

Supply-sider extraordinaire Alan Reynolds says that the verdict over the Obama stimulus is simple. Stimulus is Snake-oil. It never works. And it didn't work in the 1930s, despite the testimony of two generations of Keynesians.

Guess what, he writes. The so-called FDR stimulus wasn't anything like the Obama stimulus.

The budget deficit peaked at 5.9 percent of GDP in 1934, falling to 4 percent in 1935. Today, the Congressional Budget Office adjusts such deficits for the impact of recession, which would convert the deficits of 1934-35 into cyclically adjusted surpluses. That is, the US economy grew by 10.9 percent in 1934 and 8.9 percent in 1935 without any "fiscal stimulus."

Today's budget deficit is somewhere north of 9 percent of GDP.

The argument over Keynesian stimulus depends on what you think is the problem when there's a downturn in the economy.

The Keynesians argue that the problem in a recession is a lack of aggregate demand. Pump out some stimulus and you'll revive demand and restore the economy to the status quo ante.

The opposing argument, advanced by the Austrian School of economics, is that the problem in a recession is the collapse of the capital investments made in the previous boom. A recession is the period of adjustment during which the bad investments made in the previous unsustainable boom are liquidated.

Actually, other peoples' bad investments aren't that much of a problem unless they were financed with borrowed money. Why is that? Simple. If you make a bad investment with your own money, you don't have to liquidate and sell at a loss. If you make a bad investment with borrowed money, there is hell to pay.

Suppose you save money for 20 years and then go out and buy a house for cash at the top of a boom. House prices go down 20 percent and you lose your job. Now you have lost 20 percent of your investment. You have a problem. But you suck it in and carry on. You take a lower-paying job, of course, but that's ok because you don't have a big mortgage.

Suppose you go out and buy a house with 10 percent down at the top of a boom. House prices go down 20 percent and you lose your job. Now you have lost all your investment. Plus you have defaulted on your mortgage and lost your house. Plus you (and millions of others) have reneged on your promises and put the bank underwater. Taking a lower-paying job won't help because you need the income from the high-paying job to make the mortgage payments. Now you are broke and the bank has a problem. Not just the bank but the whole financial system.

Hey, this finance business ain't that hard.

There is nothing magical about Keynesian stimulus. It is just the way that governments always act. Rulers like to concentrate all the resources of society on one big thing. Maybe it is a war. Maybe it is a mega-project to go to the moon, or to give everyone a low-money-down mortgage, or health insurance. Either way, the ruler commandeers the financial system and orders everyone to pull together for the Big Push. It works for a year or two until everyone has to get back to ordinary life: making a living and paying for the kids' education. Then we are all screwed.

The problem the US faces is not a lack of aggregate demand, whatever that means. The problem is that millions of people got in way over their head in the housing market. They borrowed money that they couldn't afford to repay unless house prices went up forever. When people can't repay their debts it puts the whole financial system at risk. It doesn't matter whether the millions of people did this because of greedy bankers (the Democratic line) or stupid government housing subsidies (the Republican line).

The question is: how do we go forward?

The simple answer for us today that we can't go forward until we have liquidated the bad real-estate investments made in the great housing boom.

And it doesn't seem that a big stimulus is going to do a thing to solve that problem.

Mr. President: your turn.

Rhett Butler Conservatism

Liberals are still playing the race card. Hey, it's not personal; they think all conservatives are racists.

But Gerard Alexander in the Washington Post wants to persuade liberals that, rationally, you could argue that conservatives aren't racists, not really. Even if there are good reasons for thinking that we are. It wasn't just Nixon and the Southern Strategy that brought the South into the Republican camp. According to Haley Barbour, it was the young activists like him that first moved to the Republicans in 1968. The older generation came later, if at all.

But I think that this is all vieux jeux. (Or as Rush would say, liberals playing out of a 30-year-old playbook.) We conservatives are past caring whether liberals think we are racists. All the emotional race-card manipulations of little Miss Scarlett O'Liberal have got us to the point where we don't care any more.

Call us racists, why don't you. Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn. That's what Rhett Butler conservatives think. And those are the moderate ones. There are Breitbart conservatives too, and they are what you might call Eff You conservatives. They believe in throwing the race card right back in the liberals' faces.

Shannon Love at the ChicagoBoyz has a better idea. His argument arises out of the visceral hatred liberals have for Sarah Palin. He reckons that it is status anxiety. Leftists have a "vastly superior understanding of everything compared to ordinary people." Therefore there cannot be a Sarah Palin, an ordinary person juumped up into a national politician. Why, she doesn't even read the New York Times, dahling.

The left has had a bad experience since the 1960s when lefties last had a shred of a reason to believe that they had a special knowledge.

The Great Society failed, the ’70s were an overall train wreck and the once great Democratic cities of the Northeast collapsed. People voted with their feet again but this time migrating from blue areas to red areas. In this process the left lost its meritorious claim to status.

But at least liberals know that they are better than conservatives because conservatives are racists!

Otherwise, Rhett, where shall I go? What shall I do?

Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

Government's Poisoned Chalice

The record of the last century is stark. Everything the government has gotten into it has screwed up. Royally.

Want to talk about education? Things are so bad that we are now starting to wonder whether college is really worth it.

Homeownership? Government has been encouraging home ownership for nearly 100 years. The result is that fewer Americans own their own homes than Canadians.

If you look at all the areas of public life that are screwed up, government is in the middle of it. And it all started, in every case, with the best intentions.

Government decided to get involved in education, to educate our children. Yet government has loved education to death. Maybe 150 years ago education was a little rude and crude. But now we incarcerate all our children in government educational facilities complete with metal detectors. It is incredibly expensive yet about 15 percent of adults are "below-basic" in literacy and numeracy. Fifty percent of kids entering college require remedial courses. Government has loved education to death.

A century ago government got interested in homeownership. It pushed lenders to offer riskier loans and then people lost their over-leveraged homes in the Great Depression. It solved that problem by making it even easier to borrow money on a house. The result is a huge overbuilding and overpricing of homes that all came crashing down in the last two years. It has loved home-owners to death.

There are the workers. It was 150 years ago that "educated youth and middle-class intellectuals" got all worked up about the workers. The workers were having a hard time in the middle of the greatest migration ever, from the country to the city. They started suffering and dying in public, while the peasants had been starving for thousands of years in private. So government decided to help the workers. They gave their labor unions special exemption from laws against monopoly, and looked the other way when they descended to thuggery. They stopped child labor. They regulated hours of work. Then they gave the workers "benefits" like health insurance and pensions and unemployment pay. Only the workers didn't own these benefits. They got them from loving politicians. Now the great industrial corporations are dying, throttled by their labor unions and work rules, and government workers are paid 50 or 100 percent more than private sector workers. Government has loved labor to death.

Then there are African Americans. First we enslaved them, then we liberated them, then we Jim Crowed them, then we segregated them, then we integrated them, then we affirmative actioned them. So now about 70 percent of African American children are born to a single parent, and more African American men are in jail than in college. We have loved African Americans to death.

In fact, there's a good argument that when government comes calling with a a communion cup of government spending and political patronage there is only one thing to do. Dash the poisoned chalice to the ground before a drop passes your lips.

There are only two things that government can do. It can do force and it can do compulsion. It amounts to the same thing. If it's a question of forcing a foreign power to respect American power, government can do it, albeit at enormous expense.

If it's a question of beating up rowdy young lower-class males, government can do that too.

But when it comes to making a society, government is helpless. Because society is not a question of force, it is a question of cooperation, of nudging, of influence, of somehow getting people to do the right thing short of forcing them.

In the face-to-face society, we get people to do the right thing with a frown and a shake of the head. Let's check with Rodney Stark in Discovering God.

Social life is only possible to the extent that groups exert social control--collective efforts to ensure conformity to the moral standards of the group... So, from infancy humans are raised to believe that the norms of their group are the "right" way to behave and are trained to conform.

But as society becomes larger we need formal methods of control.

Formal social control is expensive--contrast the cost of dirty looks from neighbors with that of maintaining a police officer.

When humans start living in towns and cities, the detection of violations of moral standards becomes a problem. People can be anonymous in the city, and soon find that nobody will know of their evil misdeeds.

Enter "sin," invented during the Axial Age in the millennium before Christ. It solved the problem of misdeeds in the anonymous city. Your neighbors may not know of your misdeeds, but God will know! God will punish misdeeds, and even if you manage to avoid paying for your misdeeds in this life, God will punish you in the next one. Pretty clever, as long as people believe in God, of course.

Our age is an age that has tried to abolish sin. Of course, it has not worked. In some cases sin has been smuggled in the back door, where "sexual harassment" has replaced the disapproval of the cad. But mostly sin has been replaced with a gigantic government bureaucracy empowered to look into every crevice of your life to detect evildoing.

Bureaucracy is not society. Heavy-handed law enforcement is not a replacement for self-responsible freedom. In life after liberalism we must find a new code so that most of the time social control stops short of force, what we so charmingly call "law enforcement."

Now, I wonder what that might be? I wonder if anyone has invented it already. I wonder if it is working, already, around us every day, only we just don't appreciate it.

What do you think?