Journalism vs. Science

One of the principal conceits of our liberal friends is that they are open-minded supporters of science while conservatives are superstitious bigots that persecute scientists.

In fact, of course, all people engaged in politics and religion are in the orthodoxy business. The whole point of politics and religion is the power to define what is allowed to be said.

This emerges clearly from an ambush interview on MSNBC where liberal host Rachel Maddow tries to ridicule Art Robinson, Republican candidate for Oregon's 4th District and scientist, for his controversal views.

First of all, she is shocked, shocked that there's a third-party group spending $150,000 on TV ads in his district. Who are these mysterious strangers, she wants to know?

Then we get to global warming. How could he deny the truth of man-made global warming?

Then it's AIDS. Robinson wrote 15 years ago that government was encouraging the idea that every disease suffered by gays was AIDS. Did he really write that?

Worse and worse. Robinson also speculated that maybe the way to deal with nuclear waste was to dilute it and spray it into the oceans.

Then it's on to hormesis, the idea that less radiation isn't necessarily better, that maybe we need a certain background of radiation to stay healthy.

Maddow unfortunately didn't have time to get to public education. Art Robinson is a noted home-schooler who has published a home-school curriculum, the Robinson Curriculum.

The point of the ambush interview was, of course, to present Robinson as a way-out crank. That's always the way of politics. And it is always the way of government-funded science. There are certain opinions, certain scientific theories, that are beyond the pale, and the whole point of practical politics is to demonize and marginalize people who dare to step beyond the pale.

In other words, in politics, conformism is the name of the game, even for liberals who advertise their non-conformism and their open-mindedness to the world.

But What Comes Next?

The era of the Third American Republic is coming to an end, writes James V. DeLong in The American. He means we are seeing the end of the Special Interest State. What is the Special Interest State?

Starting in the 1930s, the theoretical limitations on the authority of governments—national or state—to deal with economic or welfare issues were dissolved, and in the course of fighting for this untrammeled power governments eagerly accepted responsibility for the functioning of the economy and the popular welfare.

But the way this new system worked was in a contest of the special interests.

Control comes to rest with those with the greatest interest or the most money at stake, and the result was the creation of a polity called “the Special Interest State” or, in Cornell University Professor Theodore Lowi’s terms, “Interest Group Liberalism.” Its essence is that various interest groups seize control over particular power centers of government and use them for their own ends.

Originally, the Progressives had declared against the rule of the corrupt special interests, the city political machines and the corporate trusts, but under the rule of New Deal liberals, special interests became a feature, not a bug.

The problem is, of course, that "special interests try to convert themselves into moral entitlements to convince others to agree to their claims." That way, the special interests are not hogs in the trough but noble moral activists working for a better world.

But why shouldn't this system go on forever? DeLong counts the ways:

Sheer size The system just gets bigger and bigger.

Responsibility As the government's reach increases, people will blame it for the failures.

Lack of limiting principles There is no principle that says enough is enough. Thus the special interests will keep competing for the moral advantage until the whole system collapses.

Conflicts Eventually the special interests will be competing against each other rather than leaching off the unorganized American people.

Leaders don't get it No leader is indicating that they grasp the problem.

When all these problems go critical we will have a crisis of legitimacy. And then things will change.

Perhaps the Tea Party movement represents the leading edge of the change that is to come. Or perhaps not. DeLong quotes Herbert Stein (father of our beloved Ben Stein).

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

But in the long run, we are all dead.

What Women Don't Want

Liberal online Slate magazine has put one of those tiresome "whither feminism" pieces with a bunch of the usual suspects wondering whether Sarah Palin ought to be allowed to call herself a feminist.

Palin is of course profoundly anti-woman, according to Rebecca Traister:

While she may be a self-identified feminist, Palin's work and thinking is profoundly antifeminist and anti-woman because the policy and the candidates she supports would not help women (besides herself and her hand-picked cohort of Grizzlies) to gain power.

One of the commenters was appalled by the lack of raised consciousness in the current generation of young women:

For me, the most interesting "meaning" of the word [feminism] came from my English comp. classes at a school of pharmacy that draws its students from St. Louis, Kansas City, "out-state" Missouri, and southern Illinois. Virtually all broke out in hives at the mention of the word, and were incredulous that I not only called myself a feminist, and proud of it.

Here's where I think these women go wrong.

First, for women, power is not the most important thing. Nor yet is paid employment. What counts for women is love, love and caring. Feminists have gone to enormous effort to persuade women that power is important and career is important, and they wrecked a couple of generations of women with their political activism.

But the new generation of women is reverting to the mean. Thus money is important to the extent that it makes for a comfortable home and to the extent that it provides for loved ones.

If you want to get the attention of women, don't talk about power, talk about love and relationships.

Secondly, I think that feminists put too much emphasis on the achievement of the movement. The fact is that women have been coming out of the domestic sphere into the public square for the last two centuries, with and without left-wing feminist political agitation. To take a Marxist view, it is the productive forces that create the social superstructure. The fact that it is safe for women to come out of the home, the fact that work is now much less physical and more cooperative, the fact that women have benefited enormously from improved life expectancy, all of these things have propelled women out of the home into the public square.

Conservative women are rising because they understand what most women want, and what they don't want.

What women don't want is to be men. They don't want to be fighting pointless bureaucratic wars in giant organizations and they don't want to neglecting their children while they pursue mind-numbing careers.

The dirty little secret about male careers is that men do it not for money, or power, or glory, but in order to get laid. Men instinctively understand the ancient philosophical notion that, when looking for a man, "girls just want to have funds."

Good News on Government Employment

Yes, I know that everyone is howling about the miserable employment report this morning. But I'm here to say it ain't so bad. Looking at the Household Survey we get this:

It show employment on a reasonable uptrend. Nothing fancy, mind you, but it is something. But now look at this:

It shows government employment on a solid decline. (The big blip is the Census temporary employment.)

But we are clearly seeing government shedding employees. OK, it is very modest. Still, it amounts to 400,000 employees laid off from government in the last two years.

And that is good, because it is releasing people from wasteful government employment.

Even in the short run, it is a plus for the economy because, on unemployment, people are cheaper than when they are working for the government. But better than that, it makes them available for gainful employment in the private sector.

From a broader perspective, I would guess that each extra government employee is a net drag on the economy because, even though they are good people, they are doing harmful things, whether it is educating children badly or breaking up low-income families with welfare or hindering private sector growth with harmful economic regulation, or screwing up the health care industry.

So when you reduce government employment you are releasing downwards pressure on the economy and helping it to grow.

As New Gingrich says, we have a choice this November. We can vote for a food-stamp economy, or we can vote for a paycheck economy. It's that simple.

Government is Force, Politics is Power

The world is full of people that talk about the sweet and gentle things that government does. It helps the poor; it gives grandma her health care; it cares about kids.

Er, not exactly. When the government does something it does it with your money. It is you that helps the poor, gives to grandma, and cares about kids. Government is not about caring; government is force. Let's expand this notion a little further.

Government is Force. What is a government, reduced to its essentials? It is an armed force that occupies an area of land with the power to extract tribute from the people living there. It might be a band of twenty guerrillas, hiding out in the mountains. But unless it gets money from a foreign power, it will survive by extracting tribute from the people it controls--by force. If it doesn't extract tribute by force, it isn't a government, it's a business.

Politics is Power. People that go into politics are people who like to fight. They want power. They run for election and the make promises to the voters about a glorious future they have in mind for the voters. But the promises are by-play. The name of the game is to get the support of the voters and get your hands on the levers of power.

Government Spending is Handing Out Plunder. Government spending is the loot that a government distributes to its supporters. Reduced to the minimum, the guerrilla group in the mountains, government spending is spending to keep the guerrilla group armed and fed and keep the taxes coming in. But as a guerrilla group becomes a formal government it acquires the power to support not just its armed fighters but its civilian supporters. So just as a victorious armed raid on a neighboring land ends with a division of the plunder, so also does a victorious political party distribute the loot among its supporters. But wait, you say! What about all the wonderful things that government does with health care and education?

The fact is that everything government does, it does badly. Social Security? If we have to force people to save for retirement we would do better forcing everyone to have an account at Fidelity or Vanguard. The money would actually go into creating jobs for young people when we want to stop working. Health care? The current system gives a ton of people free health care by forcing other people to pay for it. People use free stuff freely. If people actually paid for their health care (and saved for the big expense of health care in the last six months of life) it would cost a lot less. Education? Half of the kids entering college need remedial courses. What about the kids that don't go to college? Let's not even think of going there. Welfare? Government welfare has destroyed the low-income family.

To repeat: government buys votes by distributing plunder to its supporters. In the old days of the absolute monarchs government used to buy support with sinecures and pensions. Today it buys support with tenured jobs and social spending. So nothing has changed.

Taxes are Tribute. Taxes are the tribute that the laborer pays government for the right to earn a living. The first thing that our guerrilla group in the mountains does is start collecting tribute to keep its armed group fed and armed. It collects taxes by going around from house to house requisitioning food and money at the point of a gun. In a settled society, government exacts tribute from everyone that works or buys and sells. Thus every time that a worker gets a paycheck, the government takes its share. Every time a merchant sells a product, the government gets a share. Every homeowner pays a tax on his property. It is tribute, the tribute that the servant pays to the master.

Debt Ends in Default. Whenever government issues debt it is spending now and taxing later. Chances are that it won't do the hard thing, and fund the debt with taxes. Instead it will default on the debt. Sooner or later all governments default on their debt. Usually they don't flat out refuse to pay interest and principal. Instead they inflate the currency. Or they "reschedule" the debt by unilaterally lowering the interest rate and moving the maturity to a later date. Or they throw the evil bankers in jail. Or they just take money out of peoples' bank accounts. Remember, government is force.

The great question about any proposal for a new government spending program is simple. Is this really something that has to be done by force? After all, if it were worth doing, someone would already be doing it. Without force.

The Gift of Obama

Here is what I wrote about Obama in the moment of his election two years ago.

This is not a moment of hope and change, or a moment that will transform the world. This is just the prelude to new disasters as more and more government programs unreformed for twenty, fifty, or—in the case of public education—over a hundred years run off the road into the ditch.

The reason is simple.

You can’t deliver on hope and change when you have a vast government apparatus eating up 35 percent of gross domestic product and your program is to increase it.

Actually, I recall that my real reason for voting for President Obama was that I felt that we needed the Dems in charge of foreign policy. They'd spent the last eight years barracking (!) President Bush about his stupidity and his cowboy attitude and his lies and his failed war in Iraq. Now they needed to take the controls and actually get in contact with reality. What did they really want to do about radical Islam? The American people and the world needed to know.

Well, now we do know. President Obama has presided over the worst two years in American government since President Carter 32 years ago. His foreign policy is a disaster and his domestic policy is a disaster. His party is going to suffer the worst mid-term defeat in our living memory.

But there is no gratitude in politics. If you want a friend in Washington, said Harry Truman, get a dog. So here we have Michael Barone reporting on Democrats turning on President Obama, the chap that gave them pretty well everything he could, given the limitations of practical politics, and then some.

The nasty truth is that the Democrats of the 2000s wanted to see a total humiliation of Bush's America.

They hoped to see an abject and abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq within weeks of the Obama inauguration. They hoped to see a beginning of withdrawal from Afghanistan not in July 2011 but in the early months of 2009. They hoped to see the detention facility at Guantanamo closed and shuttered and the detainees tried in civilian courts or freed to regale the media with tales of torture.

But of course, President Obama can't give them that. His job is to defend the United States and promote its power interests. So he has disappointed the Angry Left at every turn.

This was why I voted for Obama. To force the Democratic ruling elite to confront reality. So far, so good.

I realize now that I expected the Angry Left to become sadder and wiser as Obama tried and failed to give them what they want. Instead they are surly and angry, and they want to take it out on Obama.

Without saying so, Obama has found himself having to teach this lesson to the Adam Serwers of the world. They don't like hearing it. They're keeping their ears plugged up and their eyes defiantly shut. Their MyObama Web pages are inactive and their checkbooks are closed. They've tuned out of the campaign and many of them won't even vote. The president they helped elect -- and the world -- have turned out not to be what they thought.

These folks are delusional. They are too stupid to see that Obama has tried to give them everything they wanted, but the fact is that he can't. If they cannot see that then they need a long spell in the political wilderness. So Job #1 of the Obama Years is complete.

But now we face the bigger question left undone by the Bush years. It is the job of setting a new direction for America in domestic politics. And that means, sooner or later, abandoning the government-centric entitlement state and re-socializing America.

You can call it what you like: a free society, spontaneous sociability, a culture of trust. It all comes down to the same thing. Government is force; politics is power. Society is something bigger, something deeper than mere government.

We are talking about the wail of Scarlett O'Hara: Where shall I go? What shall I do? It's the eternal human questioning after the meaning of life. It grows out of the very nature of humans as social animals seeking meaning in a world whose meaning is a mystery.

And now that liberalism has imploded, it's up to us: conservatives, moderates, recovering liberals. We are America, and this is our moment. Let us work to make sure that we deserve the heavy responsibilities that will be shortly ours.

The Democrats' Ethnic Split

Never mind that Democrats are splitting between their left-wing progressive elitists and their more moderate wing. There's also trouble on the ethnic front, as the fighting Irishman, Pat Buchanan, observes. Sure, the Democrats are going to benefit from the minoritization of whites as non-whites become a larger and larger proportion of the electorate.

Yet, within the Barack Obama coalition -- over 60 percent of Asian-Americans, 68 percent of Hispanics, 78 percent of Jews, 95 percent of blacks -- fissures and fractures have become visible, not only along racial and ethnic lines, but along issue and ideological lines.

Asian Americans are fracturing over Affirmative Action; Jews are fracturing over support for Israel; blacks and Hispanics are dividing over patronage and turf.

Actually, I think that too much can be made of this. The key factor in splitting people off from the Democratic Party is the hyphen. When people stop thinking of themselves as hyphenated Americans, but just Americans, that's when they are ready to become Republicans.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this effect is starting in the black community. We've seen blacks calling themselves "Americans" at Tea Party rallies. We are also seeing black candidates running for Congress as Republicans. There's Allen West, who's a retired army colonel running in Florida's 22nd District. And today's poster boy is Ryan Frazier, running for Colorado's 7th District. According to his campaign site:

Ryan Frazier is a husband and father of three, a military veteran, a small businessman, an elected representative, and a co-founder of a pre-K through 8th grade public charter school.

They don't get more Republican than that.

The biggest reason that keeps ethnics in the Democratic Party is the feeling of being an embattled minority. When you feel like that you belong in the Democratic Party, because the Democrats provide an institutional framework for people that feel threatened by the larger society.

Sooner or later, the members of ethnic groups discover, one by one, that it's safe to go into the water. That's when they leave the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, it can't hurt, as Pat Buchanan point out, that the coming age of austerity makes it difficult for Democratic bosses to share out an expanding pie among their hungry clients.

When the pie is expanding, everyone can have a larger slice. The crisis of the Party of Government, however, is that we have entered an era where most Americans distrust government and many detest government. Second, with the national debt surging to 100 percent of gross domestic product and a third consecutive deficit running at 10 percent of GDP, we are entering a time of austerity, a time of shared sacrifice.

How will a period of austerity play out? Let's face it: nobody knows.