When the Patronage Has to Stop

Why is it that the old industrial mid-west, from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, was the center of the lurch to the Republican Party in the recent mid-term elections? I have a theory on that.

Politics is the process of bribing the electorate. You offer them goodies in return for votes. In the old agricultural era, the only voters were the landlords, the descendants of the warrior class that conquered and occupied the land. Kings and princes had to keep the support of the landed aristocracy with privilege and gifts. The result was that the rich paid almost no taxes and the poor paid a lot.

In our modern era the opposite is true. Now we have the mass of the people voting and they demand patronage from the politicians in return for their vote. The social-democratic parties are the masters at this game.

But there is a problem. Patronage politics is not a stable self-correcting system. That's because the supporters are ravenous for rewards. So the politicians have to keep offering new bribes at every election, for the old bribes are not counted as bribes by their recipients but as their "rights."

What happens when the money runs out and the politicians can no longer keep the payments coming? You get the industrial mid-west.

The industrial mid-west was center of post-WWII unionized manufacturing. The idea was that prosperity was a combination of big manufacturing corporations, big labor unions, and government adjudicating between the two. The reality was that the big corporations promised enormous benefits to their employees through defined benefit pension plans and retiree health benefits that would be paid out of profits ten, twenty, thirty years in the future. Unfortunately when the future arrived there weren't any profits, or at least, not enough to provide the promised benefits. So now the big corporation, big union model lies in ruins. The patronage promised by the politicians, the lifetime employment, the fat pensions, all is vanished into air.

If you are a sensible, practical person, and all the promises of the politicians turn out to be so much hot air, then there is only one thing to do. You must move on, admit that your investment in the political patronage system was a failure, and start over. That is what the folks in the industrial mid-west have decided to do.

But that raises a question. Why haven't the voters of California and New York joined in? The answer is that the big-government patronage model is still working for them--just. But in ten years or so some presidential candidate will be talking to his rich supporters about the bitter clingers. Only this time they won't be the bitter clingers of western Pennsylvania, devastated by the hollowing out of unionized manufacturing. They will be the bitter clingers of the huge government sector that collapsed in the budget cuts of the 2010s.

The GOP and Minorities Canard

They'll have to come up with another one pretty soon. Just when the cognoscenti wrote off the Republican Party as a hopeless collection of angry white guys, it was 2010 and Republicans started electing black, brown and female candidates to office up and down the ballot.

It's not just that Republicans are electing young, interesting candidates, writes Michael Medved, although they are.

The Democrats, in other words, have become a party of shop-worn retreads while the GOP bench is full of next-generation leaders of potential national stature, including Governors Chris Christie of New Jersey, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Rick Perry of Texas, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Senators John Thune of South Dakota, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and many more.

First of all, Republicans are electing Hispanics.

After the recent elections, skeptics can no longer deride the GOP as an all-white party of grumpy old men. Marco Rubio, 39, became the new Senator from Florida while fellow Latino Republicans Bryan Sandoval in Nevada and Susana Martinez in New Mexico became the nation’s only two Hispanic Governors. Jaime Herrera, age 31, captured a Democratic Congressional seat in Washington State, while Raul Labrador did the same in Idaho. Two more Hispanic Republicans-- Bill Flores and Quico Canseco—knocked out incumbent Democrats in Texas.

Then you have South Asian Americans and African Americans.

In South Carolina, Indian-American Nikki Haley won for Governor while black conservative Tim Scott beat Strom Thurmond’s son (among others) for a Congressional seat. Alan West, an African-American Iraq War hero, trounced an incumbent white Florida Democrat.

Charles Krauthammer has described the 2010 election as a "reset," that gets the party strength back to 2004 before GOP fatigue set in. But the 2010 result seems to go further than that. It seems to be knocking the predictions of an enduring Democratic majority out of the ballpark. Especially when you add into the mix the entry of conservative women into the mix. Yeah, it's true that conservative women like Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, and Christine O'Donnell don't get no respect. But here's a prediction. You ain't seen the last of conservative women in the political arena. The déclassée ladies from State U ain't gonna take the derision of the liberals lying down.

Women have spent the last century getting into the public square. The first thing they experienced was politicians offering the services of big government to liberate them from the hardships and the drudgery of the ages. With that liberation women could have careers just like men!

Well, it didn't turn out quite as promised, because most women aren't particularly interested in the greasy pole of careerism, and they aren't that excited about trashing their families and short-changing their children. So now women, led by conservative women, are trying to work out a culture that honors women as women rather than trying to turn them into men but without all the aggression.

It's a new era. You could call it post-racist, post-sexist, and definitely post-liberal.

And in this new era, big-government liberalism is turning out to be on the wrong side of history.

Bernanke Tries to Float Homeowners

If you want to boil national economics down to one issue, it would be this: When debtors get underwater, it messes up the economy.

The reason for this is simple. Modern capitalism runs on credit (means faith). The faith that runs the credit system is that the other guy can make his responsibilities.

A bubble is a situation where a lot of people borrow money to buy assets which subsequently plunge in value. So these plungers end up underwater. If they were to sell their now-depreciated asset they would still have to find extra money to pay off their debt. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the economy is going to be in real trouble when millions of people are in this position, and are frozen in place hoping that, if they keep servicing their debt, things will turn out OK. The capitalist economy needs to have people freely trading and producing, not cowering in fright.

In other words, for capitalism to work, people must be able to cover their losses.

So now you can see what Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, is doing with his "QE2" money printing. He is trying to float the boats of the millions of people with upside-down mortgages. Once those boats are floating again then the millions of folks can sell their houses, they can move to new jobs. They can start to live again.

The cost of all this of course is enormous losses for the widows and orphans that own dollar-denominated assets. Because the whole idea is to devalue the dollar. You devalue the dollar and home prices rise. Home prices rise and underwater homeowners get to breathe again. Homeowners get to breathe and the economy recovers.

We've done this several times since the government asserted complete control of the credit system in 1913 with the establishment of the Federal Reserve. We did it in the 1930s. We did it during and after World War II. We did it in the 1970s when the US went off the Bretton Woods system. We did it after the Plaza Accord in 1985. We did it after the Mexican meltdown in 1994, the Long-Term Capital Management failure in 1998, the tech bubble in 2000, and the real-estate bubble in 2007-08.

Some day soon, it's going to be time for sensible, practical Americans to admit that the government has made a right mess of its constitutional right and duty to "coin money, [and] regulate the value thereof".

Once we've admitted that, then it will be time to do something about it.

Blacks Stay Home in 2010

You could have seen this one coming. "Black Americans voted with their feet in the 2010 midterm elections".

Yep, that's one of the reasons that the GOP did so well. Minority voters weren't quite as enthusiastic as they were in 2008. Writes black conservative Lurita Doan:

But why is this surprising? Consider: unemployment is greatest among African Americans, with the Bureau of Labor (BLS) statistics reporting in Table A-2, unemployment of 29% for Black American adults... [I]f you consider that BLS reported that for Black Americans between the ages of 16-19, the unemployment rate is a stunning 48%, this kind of disenchantment with an administration that promised so much, but delivered so little, should be expected.

And if minority voters aren't convinced by the unemployment numbers there's the clear signal from the defeat of reformist Mayor Fenty in Washington DC by the teachers union. Democrats care about teachers; they don't care about kids.

There's really only one way forward for blacks, now that we've had our First Black President. That's the good old Anglo-Saxon Protestant way symbolized by freshman Rep. Tim Scott (R-SC), who won the predominantly white 1st Congressional District in South Carolina. What does Tim Scott believe, asked Zev Chafetz?

What, I asked, would be his message if he is sent by the party to evangelize among African-American Democrats? “Faith in God,” he said. “School choice and vouchers. And private enterprise. I want people to know that the American Dream is still alive and well, and I’m living proof.”

African American Scott was an indifferent high-school student but a businessman mentor and Bible study in college "gave me confidence that I could think my way out of poverty."

Here's my prediction. The real importance of the Barack Obama presidency is that it will free African Americans from their faith in an earthly savior. They will turn to faith and self-reliance. They will return to the party of Lincoln and in another generation you will not find a more staunchly Republican group than middle-class blacks.

One thing you can learn from Bible study is this: "put not your trust in princes." Prince is an old-fashioned word for politician.

ObamaCare: The One Thing Needful

Many people are wondering: Why? Why did Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama push through ObamaCare in the teeth of opposition from the American people and why did they sacrifice their majority in the House to do so?

The answer is simple. If you are a Democrat you believe that you only get a chance to enact progressive legislation once in a generation. You know you'll pay for it but one thing keeps you going. You know that, whatever the cost at the next election, the new social benefit you enacted will never be repealed.

Obviously this Democratic faith will endure until it is refuted by the facts of experience. Obviously, one fine day, a glorious Democratic progressive legislative achievement will get repealed by a Congress and signed by a president elected to do just that. And that will be the end of liberalism as we know it, for liberalism is the idea that you make society more equal, more dignified, and more just with gigantic government programs like Social Security, free education, and government health care.

The great political question of the next five years is whether in fact the American people really want the Republicans to repeal ObamaCare. If the American people want that then they will know what to do. All they have to do is elect a Republican Senate in 2012 and a Republican president. That's all it takes.

If the American people do that then it will be the end of the liberal dream. Because the American people will have demonstrated that it is possible to repeal a glorious government entitlement.

Will Republicans get to do this? Well, there is one thing to keep in mind. When Democrats passed Social Security most people didn't have a pension. When Democrats passed Medicare most old people didn't have health insurance. But today, in 2010, most people already have health insurance and they report that they are pretty happy with it. ObamaCare is extending subsidies to the 30 million without health insurance. Obviously, the rest of the American people are going to have to pay for that. They are going to have to pay for it in higher taxes and/or in higher health insurance costs and/or reduced access to health care.

I ask you: what do you think that the American people think about that? And what do you think the American people are going to do about that?

Liberal Government as Secular Theocracy

If you give conservatives a chance, says the Angry Left, they will create "theocracy" and "legislate morality."

That was the way in the 2000s that our liberal friends experienced the Bush administration, led by a self-confessed Christian. And that is how our liberal friends experienced the Bush administration decision on embryonic stem-cell research.

Theocracy, as defined in Wikipedia, means the rule of the priests, or a society in which the church and the state are more or less unified into a single organization. Using Michael Novak's three-sector analysis of modern society, we could say that a theocracy occurs when the moral/cultural and political sectors are pretty well unified. Obviously, any such organization would quickly get itself into the business of legislating morality--the moral system of the church implemented in the legislative output of the legislature full of priests and ministers.

That's exactly the model of the administrative welfare state run by our liberal friends. There is only one difference. When liberals complain about "legislating morality" they are talking about laws that attempt to regulate personal sexual morality. But the whole point of liberalism is to translate their views on social morality into law.

Liberals experience unregulated capitalism as fundamentally immoral. They see poverty, they see economic exploitation, and they call it immoral. They demand that society do something about it. And what do they demand? They demand that everyone be forced to support their moral vision of government programs to ameliorate the social evils of capitalism.

What can you call this but legislating morality? Liberals emphatically reject the idea of laws to regulate individual morality. But they emphatically support the idea of laws to regulate social morality. They call it "social justice" or "economic justice." What is that other than legislating economic morality?

In liberalism, the functions of moral commentary and political action are combined, collapsed into a single operation. The liberal intellectual experiences himself as both moral arbiter and political strategist. The classic liberal intellectual product is the political manifesto, identifying a moral outrage in society, analyzing it, and proposing a political, legislative, big-government solution.

It's really pretty simple. Liberal government is a "secular theocracy."

The Hard Road Ahead

The results of the mid-terms were good, but not great. Even so, as usmidtermelections.com shows, it was about the second best showing for Republicans since 1900.

But clearly, union muscle helped Democrats in California and Nevada to get Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid over the finish line and back into the Senate.

What we can understand on the morning after is the hard road ahead. For sure, the voters rejected Obama and the Democrats. Now we have to get back to work.

But the long-term prospects are favorable. Let's look at three reasons for liberals to tremble.

There is no more money The big idea of liberalism was to construct a rational system to deliver vital social services that people on their own would not provide to their fellow citizens. But the trouble with this plan is that when you hand any problem to government it just ends up as a patronage program. And you end up promising more loot to your supporters than you can possibly deliver. That's what we have in America today: a huge bloated government that pays a ton of people a lot of money to do nothing. Eventually government will renege: on its promises, on taxes, and on its debt.

Meaningless lives The big idea of liberalism was to liberate people from the yoke of necessity so they could live intelligent creative lives. There's just one problem with this. If you take away the struggle of life, the grind of work, the obligations to loved ones, then you are left with nothing but dust. For the ordinary person to make a difference, they must work, and marry, have children and raise them. Off in the corner some talented genius will come up with an original creative work. Good for him. But society cannot be organized for the benefit of the occasional talented genius. Sure, it works pretty well for elite liberals: selective universities, interesting sinecures, opportunities to help the powerful. But when the ordinary people are reduced to beneficiaries of compulsory government programs, forced to government schools, government pensions, government health benefits, what's the point? You end up as an eternal teenager playing with grownup toys, but denied the dignity of living as a free citizen who can make a difference.

Established church of liberalism The big idea of liberalism is that there should be a wall of separation between church and state. To view this in a larger perspective we could say that we need to keep a distance between the moral/cultural sector of society, the realm of hope and faith, and the political sector, the realm of rules and force. Liberals fail to understand that a secular established church of liberalism is just as much a breach of the separation of church and state as the old established churches of Christianity. The problem is that when you combine church and state the state ends up dominating the church. The spiritual fervor of the religious community withers away and the only thing you have left is the power principle of politics. All the great government programs amount to the legislation of liberal morality. There's a moral case to look after the old folks. But should we legislate support and force everyone to support old people? There's a moral case to make sure that every child gets an education. But should we legislate morality and force everyone to support a government child custodial system? There's a moral case to relieve the poor. But has a government poor law that legislates morality and forces people to support government poverty bureaucrats ever resulted in anything but misery for the poor?

We will see liberals stumbling and bumbling all over the place in the coming years. They will use every trick in the book to preserve their power. But it won't work. Because liberals amount to a corrupt aristocracy that has forgotten that an aristocracy is supposed to be the rule of the best, not the rule of the best-connected.

If that isn't enough, there is the problem of the economy. Since the Obama administration doesn't believe in cutting spending, and will have a problem getting any tax increases, it has resorted to a policy of inflation. That is what "QE2" means. By the spring of 2012 this policy should be delivering significant inflation and some new asset bubble.

The American people will not deal kindly with the president that has screwed up the economy for four straight years.