Yes We Can -- Cut Government

President Obama is famously worrying about his fellow Americans right now. In tough times, he told the New York Times, when people are scared, "facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time."

The trouble with a statement like that is simple. Everyone thinks they have "facts and science and argument" on their side.

The thing about the president's critics is that we believe that, especially on economic policy, the president is on the side of rabbit feet, superstition and exploded Keynesian science.

Keynesian economics says that, whenever you are in a jam the government should print money and spend more on vital infrastructure. Conservatives say that the science is in on that: it does not work. It did not work in the 1930s and it did not work in the 1970s, and it will not work now.

What is needed now is to cut wasteful government spending and get back to hard money.

Now we have three case studies, thanks to Reason, about three western governments that cut spending and got their national economies on track.

Case 1: US after WWII. Arnold Kling writes that:

Government spending plummeted by nearly two-thirds between 1945 and 1947, from $93 billion to $36.3 billion in nominal terms. [In spite of the Keynesian multiplier] GDP increased almost 10 percent during that period, from $223 billion in 1945 to $244.1 billion in 1947. This is a rare precedent of a large drop in government spending, so its economic consequences are important to understand.

Case 2: New Zealand, 1980s Maurice McTigue writes that:

The government’s share of GDP was 45 percent, unemployment was 9 percent (it would later peak at 11 percent), the top tax rate was 66 percent, and the rate of economic growth was a sluggish 2 percent.

A decade later, New Zealand had one of the most competitive economies in the developed world. The government’s share of GDP had fallen to 27 percent, unemployment was a healthy 3 percent, and the top tax rate was 30 percent. The government went from 23 years of deficits to 17 years of surpluses and repaid most of the nation’s debt.

How was it done? By privatization, reducing civil service by 66 percent(!), "eliminating capital gains taxes, inheritance taxes, luxury taxes, and excise duties," halving tax rates, reducing deductions, making government agency heads accountable, and getting people off welfare.

Case 3: Canada, 1990s. The Liberal Party cut the increase in government spending and as a result "From 1992–93 to 2000–01, Canadian spending on federal programs fell from 17.5 percent of GDP to 11.3 percent." Debt went from 68 percent of GDP to 29 percent of GDP.

The great question facing President Obama is precisely the questions of "facts, science, and argument" relating to the best economic policy for a healthy growing economy.

And frankly, Mr. President, you are on the wrong side. What these case studies show is Yes We Can deal with the problem of a huge government and sluggish growth. The only problem is that it means throwing out everything that you and the Ruling Class believe--as myth, superstition, and self-serving hypocrisy.

Obama Behind the Curve

The problem with politicians is that they instinctively want to do the wrong thing. They want to increase spending, inflate the currency, and raise taxes.

There is one occasion when this makes sense, when the politicians are merely a guerrilla group in the jungle fighting a war of liberation. The American version of this is the Revolutionary War.

OK. There's one other occasion when it makes sense. It's when the nation is threatened by another power and has to fight a war.

My point is that the natural instinct of a politician is always the instinct of the guerrilla in the jungle. He needs money, so he requisitions from the peasants in the jungle. He needs to keep his supporters fed and happy, so he spends money on them. If he can, he borrows, up to the limit of the possible.

Obviously, in normal times, a government must do the opposite. It must pay down the debt run up in the previous war and it must forsake the feeding of its supporters for the general good.

Let's express all this in a law.

The instinct of governments is to spend money on their supporters, tax the money of everyone else, and borrow to the limit. The essence of good government is retrenchment in spending, reduction in taxes, and getting out of debt.

Now we see why President Obama is now behind the curve and why the rest of his single administration will be a horror show, not just for him but the whole American people. Let's rehearse the reasons for this:

Spending. Government spending in the 2000s was excessive because the Bush administration spent about $200 billion a year on the war on terror and ran an easy money policy at the same time. After getting over the Crash of 2008 the government needed to retrench on spending. Obama had an opportunity to do this in the winter and spring of 2009 and blame the whole thing on the Republicans. Even his progressive cohorts might have bought that. Instead, he unleashed the stimulus monster, and then the health care monster. That puts him behind the curve.

Taxes. Taxes are needed to fund the national debt, that's for sure, but mostly taxes are a charge upon the income of the American people. The more you raise in taxes, the more you waste the energy of the American people. Raising taxes in the middle of a lack-luster recovery is not going to help the economy and not going to help President Obama get elected. That puts the president behind the curve.

Debt. The only reason for a government to go into debt is to finance a war. Then, of course, it must raise taxes to pay down the debt. The current game of using debt to pay for social programs, and to promise social benefits far into the future is a policy that will end in tears. It will end in government debt default through "rescheduling" and inflation. That puts the president behind the curve.

This weekend I got to read the now famous New York Times Magazine piece on "The Education of a President." It showed to me a president and his inner circle focusing on tactics instead of grand strategy. Maybe they have a grand strategy but they aren't telling. Somehow I doubt it. The chatter in the article is all about the commonplaces of liberal governance: the programs, the legislation, the issues agenda.

But we are past all that now. We are entering a new era in which the shibboleths of the last century will not serve, not at the level of grand political strategic vision nor at the ground game of getting out the vote.

It has been well said that Obama is not a socialist, not an extremist. He is just a conventional liberal with the liberal faith in administrative government as a social model. But Obama and his people, and indeed the whole of liberal America, have no clue about any other vision of government, even when the Tea Party is staring him in the face. That is why the president seems to see himself running a conventional campaign against a conventional rival.

Somehow, I don't see the presidential election of 2012 being a conventional election. Somehow I see 2012 being an election about "America isn't working and liberalism is why."

Moving the Dial

Everyone tells the Republicans that they need to do something to appeal to women and minorities.

But how? There are two ways. You can do it by moving towards them. Or you can move them towards you.

Practical politics, we can assert, is a combination of the two.

The problem is that, until you've done it, the task seems unsurmountable. Take Latinos and blacks.

For Latinos, we are told, the big issue is immigration, and why not. All recent immigrants to the United States want to bring the rest of their family over. But for Republicans, that desire runs up against the fact that we can't just open the gates and let everyone in, and we can't just issue a blanket amnesty for illegal aliens. So how do Republicans reach out?

For blacks, the big issue seems to be racism, that behind every white face hides a southern sheriff. And blacks are heavily invested into patronage politics like affirmative action. Republicans are voters that don't like patronage politics.

Recent history tells us that people become Republicans when they stop thinking of themselves as hyphenated Americans. Yet a century ago, William McKinley won the 1896 election with a Republican coalition of business, labor and urban immigrants against a Democratic coalition dominated by rural, religious, easy money voters. Where did the hyphens go then?

For the last ten years, the Republican Party has been the party of economic conservatives, the religious, the married, the male, the white and the private sector. The Democrats have been the party of women and minorities, the educated elite, crony capitalists, the single, the secular, the moderate, and the young.

Now things are changing. Writes Matthew Continetti, in an article about Sarah Palin:

Over the past two years, Pew and Gallup surveys have tracked the public as it has moved to the right -- not on just one or two issues but on a whole constellation of them. Even on the controversial topics of abortion, guns and same-sex marriage, Palin is not as far away from the center as some suppose. A May 2009 Gallup poll, for example, found that a majority of Americans identified as "pro-life" rather than "pro-choice." In October 2009, Gallup measured record-low support for gun control. The public is divided on same-sex marriage, with about half the country joining Palin's (and Obama's) opposition.

The fact is that political parties are not like armies, directed from the top. They are shifting coalitions of voters, and they respond to changes in the political weather without quite knowing what is going on. The Tea Party movement seemed to come out of the blue and seems to be directed at least in part by a lot of conservative women. Where did they come from? To what extent is the Tea Party influenced by the Koch brothers and Dick Armey? Who knows?

What we do know is that the dial is moving. More people are persuaded by the conservative agenda than two or four years ago. Probably they are not persuaded by conservative ideas so much as frightened by President Obama's ideas and the clear feeling that things aren't working like they used to.

What we can be sure of is that the party alignments of 2100 will be different from the party alignment of 2010, just as the party alignments of 2010 bear no resemblance to the party alignments of 1896.

And anyone that tells you how to move the dial ought to know better. Sometimes you can move the dial; sometimes the dial moves itself. Sometimes the dial even moves you!

Announcing usMidtermElections.com

What this country needs is a good website about midterm elections.

Many people have instinctively wanted this, especially since this year we are going into perhaps the most momentous midterm elections in our lifetime.

Through the wisdom of the founders we have had midterm elections regularly every year from 1790 through 2006.

And now we are about to have another one. Wanna take a look? Just click on usmidtermelections.com. Here's a look at the most recent midterms for the US House of Representatives:

This year, Republican partisans are looking for a very good Republican year. Here are the best Republican House gainers:

But what about really bad Democratic years (it's not quite the same thing):

Go ahead. Click here and have some fun, er, serious historical research. Click the column headings to change the order of elections. You'll find that alongside each election is a link on the major issue moving the election. If you want, you can look at the Senate results.

As soon as the result are in in November 2010 we'll update the numbers, of course.

I wonder what the big issue is going to be this year?

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."