Don't Think MultiCulti is Dead

Everyone is nodding approvingly at British Prime Minister David Cameron's attack on multiculturalism at Munich. Douglas Murray points sensibly to the double standard in multiculturalism.

In Britain, for instance, this meant that if you were a white English girl born into a white English family and your family decided to marry you against your will to a randy old pervert, the state would intervene. But if you had the misfortune to be born into an "Asian-background" family and the same happened, then the state would look the other way.

Now that the great and the good agree that "something must be done" about extreme Islamism, the tolerance for non-Western cultural practices seems like folly.

But let's not be in a hurry to declare multiculturalism dead. Look for the next version of the cultural attack on democratic capitalism to rise out of the ashes of multiculturalism.

It is important to understand that the cultural double standard is a constant on the left. It is the Schwerpunkt of their war on democratic capitalism. It started in the 19th century when the left declared that, because the working class was exploited, they couldn't be expected to conform to middle-class morality and culture. The working class had its own authentic culture and we ought to respect it.

Notice how this political program works for the left on several levels.

1. By rallying to the support of the working class, in the middle of its struggle out of rural indigence, the left earns the grateful support of the working class.
2. It discourages the working class from adopting the culture and mores of the competent, disciplined, rule-following middle class. This keeps the working class in a kind of working-class cultural and economic ghetto, and thus easily led by the left.
3. It supports the main left-wing narrative of exploitation. If the working class is confined in a ghetto, that proves the left's assertion that the working class is deprived of a fair participation in the capitalist economy and therefore the government should have the power to loot the private sector to pay reparations to the exploited working class.

And so on. The same strategy works for any group that the left defines as marginalized and exploited. But it is a cruel and unjust strategy. The mores and the rules of middle-class democratic capitalism are not a cunning trick to keep the middle class in power and evil corporations profitable. They are the culture that has made the world what it is today, where ordinary people can apply themselves to serving other people economically and make a decent living out of it. On the margins, of course, some people by innovation jolt the economy into the stunning leaps from horsepower to steam power to gasoline power to nuclear power. That is what gets us from a $3 per person per day economy to a $100 per person per day economy.

For the past generation the left has been playing their game with the Moslems that are immigrating in their millions out of hopelessness in their native countries to the vibrant economy in the West. They are encouraging the Moslems to believe that they can have their pre-modern traditional culture and their western wealth as well, just as they encouraged the working class a century ago.

But there is no way for the immigrants to the city to have their cake and eat it too. Sooner or later they must submit to the culture and the rules of democratic capitalism if they want to make it in the city.

And no left-wing lies will change that.

It's Not Just the Money

The video of Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) explaining to a black policeman why he's going to have to pay for a third of his health care costs out of a 2 percent pay increase will become a classic.

It's a classic on many levels, including the demonstration of political skill. Christie walks out his ground, getting applause from the audience as he goes, building the case for spending cuts. He includes the case of municipal employees that got $900,000 on retirement from cashing in their unused sick leave. But still, the policeman didn't care. All he cared about was that he was looking at a big increase in his health care costs and he wasn't being made whole.

It's the basic problem of all government programs. Everyone signs up when there's free money going, and everyone acts outraged when the free money gets taken back.

But there's a bigger problem that I'm trying to understand. It is this. If you look at government operations, they are utter failures from top to bottom, starting with foreign policy. That's understandable, because foreign policy is always a fight between the good guys and the thug dictators. Wars usually start with the most appalling losses and retreats.

Then we get to ordinary government programs like education. There's a fuss right now about for-profit colleges. The Government Accountability Office has investigated 15 for-profit colleges for encouraging applicants to commit fraud when applying for federal aid. Investor Steve Eisman is also railing on the for-profit vocational college industry.

OK. Let's investigate fraud and prosecute it wherever it is found. But why just the for-profit colleges? What about government colleges? How well are they doing? And what about K-12 education? How well are the public schools doing in the inner cities? Where are the undercover investigations exposing the shoddy practices of the public sector education industry?

The discouraging truth is that it is almost impossible to criticize a government program until it breaks. That's because every government program is protected by a special interest lobby, and if you dare to criticize the program you will find yourself accused of slandering teachers or farmers, or policemen, or firefighters.

That's a shame. The truth is that all productive activity should be constantly adjusted and improved to deliver better service. You get that in the private for-profit sector, because if you don't you go out of business. But in government you get a slow death. A program may start out full of promise and hope but it descends inevitably into a producer protection racket. All that matters are the paychecks going to the government workers. And if the service isn't any good, that is just an argument for more funding.

In the end, we are going to have to pull all service-type activity out of the government. That's if we have any notion of getting health care, education, pensions, and welfare that works.

But it will take a revolution to get there.

ObamaCare and the Bigger Question

Why do liberals believe that the only way to improve the delivery of health care is by more compulsion? That is, after all, the assumption behind ObamaCare.

There are millions of people without proper health insurance, say liberals, the millions of the uninsured. We propose to correct this with a system of subsidies paid out of taxes and mandates and administrative regulation. In other words, faced with the problem that many people lack the means to acquire the middle-class approach to health care, government should force the nation to supply health insurance to them.

The liberals get to this position through a political narrative of inequality and oppression. They observe that many people cannot afford the social goods of health care and education. They conclude that the reason is injustice. It may be that a minority--racial or ethnic--has been historically marginalized. It may be that employers exploit their workers with low pay and limited benefits. It may be privilege, that certain groups have access to desirable social goods because of their parents' social and economic position. It may justs be that skilled people can afford more than unskilled people. Or there is the poverty-line argument. It takes a certain amount of money for a family to afford the basics of food and shelter, and society should assist those people that fall below that standard.

But in all cases, our liberal friends make the same leap. If there is a deficiency, it should be made up by a government program. Our liberal friends do not seem to understand what they are saying when they do this. They are saying that there is no way of providing social goods except through a lot of force and compulsion.

Oh really?

Many of the arguments that liberals make, of course, begin by assuming that force is needed. If you make the inequality argument, you are saying that only a certain degree of inequality is just, and that inequality in excess of that standard requires government intervention. The marginalization argument and the employer exploitation argument imply that discrimination, a veiled form of force, is abroad and probably can only be corrected by countervailing force.

The conservative argument is that, while exploitation and privilege certainly abound in the United States, they are not absolute barriers to a decent life. Uneducated immigrants and kids from single-parent families have a hard row to hoe. But they can and do get ahead. Indeed, they mostly do. In fact, we add, if you look at the numbers you learn that it is very difficult to be poor in America if you finish high school, get married, and don't have a child in your teens. That expresses the notion that even with a basic education, you can earn a decent wage in America to get food, shelter, and modest luxuries.

The question we wish to open is this. Why do we assume that "social goods" should be delivered through government? "There is such a thing as society, it's just not the same thing as the state," says Prime Minister David Cameron. In fact, as social animals, humans derive much of their feeling of self-worth and meaning from contributing to social enterprises, whether in a work team, a family, a church, or a benevolent association. Conservatives believe that it is part of everyone's duty to be aware of the needs of people they know, and to work to help them when they need help. These services are best delivered person to person, face to face. Failing that, it is best to deliver them through small, local organizations rather than big bureaucratic administrations. Failing that, it is better to deliver services through big non-profit associations than big government departments.

Why is that? Why is it better to help the helpless and the less fortunate face to face rather than through a big organization? It is partly because each person is an individual, and has specific and personal needs that are not easily accommodated to the rules and procedures of a large bureaucracy. It is also because people feel a larger obligation, both in giving and receiving in a personal face-to-face relationship. People feel more obligated to do the right thing around people they know. With a bureaucracy, they find ways to game the system, because nobody will know, and nobody will care.

There are some social goods, perhaps many social goods, that can only be delivered using force. But conservatives believe that, for the headline social goods of pensions, health care, education, and welfare, a sharply reduced government share would be beneficial to all: to those that must step up their help for their fellow citizens to those receiving help from their fellow citizens. It's the social thing to do.

Conservatives believe that ObamaCare will either get repealed or it will lead to a meltdown in health care. We believe that there has to be a better way than force.

A Jobless Recovery

The news that unemployment dropped to 9.0 percent last month is actually terrible news--for America and for the Obama administration. It means that the economy, now in a mild recovery for the last two years, still hasn't started to generate new jobs.

Back in the early days of the recovery in 2002 and 2003 after the tech bubble recession, Democrats like Nancy Pelosi would howl about the "jobless recovery." Now it's the Republicans' turn to howl, and Rush Limbaugh, for one, isn't slow to do so. You can see the situation from these two charts. The first one shows the US labor force for the last ten years.

It shows that the labor force is flat, continuing the flatness of the past three years. The second chart is total US employment for the last then years.

This shows the staggering bloodletting in the Great Recession. It shows we are still down nine million jobs from the peak of the economic cycle in 2006-07. It shows that the Democratic whining about a jobless recovery 8 years ago was ridiculous. In 2003 the labor force was climbing strongly, as people came into the labor force, and employment was climbing moderately. Contrast that with the current recovery, in which the labor force is flat, and the employment gain is also flat, and down nine million from four years ago.

Of course, conservatives have a simple explanation of the jobless recovery. President Obama and the Democrats thought, back in 2009, that all they had to do was pass a stimulus bill and jobs would magically appear. That's what Keynesian economics told them and that's what their tame economists told them.

Unfortunately, Keynesian economics is baloney. The government needs to keep its hands off the economy. It needs to promote a healthy credit market, which it has not done for the last century. And it needs to promote a healthy business climate, which it has not done from the start of the Obama administration.

If there is a good thing about all this, it may be that the overall losses to Democratic power in 2010 and 2012 will be so severe and so shocking that Democrats will abandon their inflationism, their interference in the credit markets, and their faith in Keynesian economics and come, grudgingly, to accept Reaganomics. But don't hold your breath.

Liberals Administering Prosperity

President Obama talked a Reaganesque line in his State of the Union speech about business and innovation. Here's his paean to business.

Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation. But because it’s not always profitable for companies to invest in basic research, throughout our history, our government has provided cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support that they need. That’s what planted the seeds for the Internet. That’s what helped make possible things like computer chips and GPS. Just think of all the good jobs -- from manufacturing to retail -- that have come from these breakthroughs.

Notice the "but". But government needs to step in to fund basic research, to plant the seeds of the internet.

Here's where our liberal friends smuggle their statism in the back door.

The internet, Mr. President, was invented through DARPA research because the Pentagon thought that the government needed a communications network that could survive interruption in nuclear war. In other words, the government invented the internet for reasons of defense. The government paid for semiconductor research because it needed lightweight electronics for ballistic missile guidance. In other words, the government was looking after its own needs, and its core responsibility of defense.

But this is an imperfect world. Politicians and experts aren't satisfied by the mundane tasks of defense. They want to save the world. That's how we get from defense research to climate-change research. But saving the world is not a government task. Saving the world is a religious task. It's the job of people with a moral mission, not a defense mission. Moral missions, of course, are much more fun. You can divide the world into the good guys and the bad guys, and you can lead a moral crusade against the bad guys. But never mind about that. Government doesn't just want to lead people on moral crusades; it wants to feed every child and put two cars in every garage.

The big problem, in other words, is mission creep. And when government gets into mission creep in the economic sector it starts building technological and economic white elephants. Mission creep leads to waste and corruption and to crony capitalism. Government doesn't make people more prosperous. It just gives money to its supporters, and stiffs the rest.

This really isn't hard. Government should stick to its basic functions and people in political life should stick to the dull and dutiful job of defending society from enemies that want to kill us or defraud us. The fun job of saving the world should be left to moral leaders. And the hands-on job of innovation and making new products should be left to businessmen, scientists, engineers, marketers, designers, salespeople, and investors.

When government tries to get into the business of innovation and basic research not related to its core functions, it makes a mess. That's because government is force, politics is power. Business is different. Business is about imagining and then creating products and services. Business is about listening to consumers and responding to their every whim. Leave business to business, and concentrate on applying force on them when they do something criminal. Otherwise, leave them alone, and above all, don't tempt them into crony capitalism.

Free Speech. Yes, But How?

Radio host Dennis Prager reminds us just how unfree we are when it comes to free speech. In America, you don't say anything that might offend left-wing ears, because it can get you into trouble.

In the past generation, the left has controlled so much speech and behavior that these controls are now assumed to be a normal part of life.

There's the telling point: "a normal part of life." And frankly, if you are a corporate exec, or an employee in a medium-to-large corporation, it would be disloyal to your employer to breach the left-wing speech codes. You might be willing to get yourself in trouble, but that is not the end of the story. For sure, your local HR department will be all over you like a cheap suit if you say the wrong thing. But your frankness can get your employer in trouble. And the fact is that most of us, the 80 percent of Americans who are not liberal, don't feel that our employer has it coming. We know how hard it is to create a profitable company, and we know how hard it is to keep a company profitable. So we really don't want to do anything that could harm our employer and get him in trouble with the PC police.

But the fact is that you can't say "Merry Christmas"; you can't talk about "innate differences between men and women"; you can't talk about black violence; you can't criticize homosexuality. It gets down to the bizarre. Apparently they are now Photoshopping out cigars from Churchill photos and cigarettes from FDR photos and Beatles photos.

What's to be done? Writes Prager:

If you love liberty, you must target the left and put its totalitarian tendencies in your cross hairs. We must shoot down political correctness and wage a crusade for truth and liberty.

That means that nice people have to get a little nasty. When you are around your liberal friends you have to short out the censor, and talk as if men and women are different, Christianity is a good thing, homosexuality is problematic, blacks have bought themselves a problem by living on the liberal plantation. And so on.

If you don't have the courage to violate the liberal speech codes you can try irony and code words. Just a couple of days ago, I exchanged greetings with an older couple, and we commented on the snow storms up north. "Global warming," I said. "Climate chaos" came the replay.

My own strategy is to turn the left's words against them, using their slogans to mean something different. And I always make it a point to talk about "girl stuff" and "boy stuff" when the opportunity arises.

But it still comes down to courage. We have to refuse to play the left's game. We have to "speak truth to power."

The Indictment

For the last century and a half everyone has been whaling on the middle class--the bourgeoisie, the factory owners, the booboisie--and tremendous fun it has been. As with most calumnies there was a grain of truth in the indictment of the middle class and everything it stood for. The bourgeoisie, dignified and free, had in the industrial revolution transformed society from an agricultural age to an industrial age. Millions of lives had been transformed; completely new ideas and practices had sprung out of the ground; untold wealth had been created. But there was a terrible cost. Millions of people found themselves toiling and working in satanic mills in squalid slums on the edge of want and starvation; if that was the bottom line of the industrial age, it needed radical surgery.

That was the judgment of a new class that emerged out of the revolutions of 1848, the educated middle class radicalized by the turmoil and the suffering of the high industrial revolution in Europe. These people were young, they were educated, and they were idealistic. They saw that the toiling masses that wove the textiles, mined the coal, forged the steel, and drove the railroad locomotives worked and lived on the edge of poverty in conditions little short of hellish. What was the point of the new age of rights and liberties, of inventions and manufactures, if they could not lead to concrete improvement in the lives of the masses? They decided that political revolution, or at least radical reform, was needed to create a better society.

A century before, educated young men like John Wesley and George Whitefield had chosen a different path. They had led farm laborers and mechanics into a social movement of aspiration and responsibility. They believed that the lower orders had the ability and the virtue in them to rise and to prosper even without political transformation. But the 1848 generation of educated youth believed that it was the system that prevented the workers from rising. To the youthful Karl Marx, the old agricultural order, in which the feudal lords had exploited the serfs, had given way to more of the same, a new system of oppression in which the bourgeoisie exploited the industrial proletariat. In response to this perceived injustice, the 1848ers constructed a political vision that would raise them, the educated class, to political hegemony as permanent guardians of the proletariat. Practical activists, they adapted the political structure of the absolute monarchs of the 17th century for their own use. These monarchs had needed expensive standing armies to maintain their power, and that required a revolution in the organization of the state. It needed discipline, loyalty, a rational organization, and money. The monarchs found they had to cut through or circumvent the web of institutions separating them from their subjects and tax them direcly. To do that they needed a state bureaucracy staffed by professional administrators. Just like its parallel military organization, the state bureaucracy came to control the individual citizen as the military bureaucracy controlled the individual soldier.

Sounds familiar? Yet that is exactly what the generation of 1848 decided, as they worked to build a system that could deliver rights, benefits and programs to the helpless workers. They needed a system of administrative centralism to control society and extract the resources they needed to right the injustices of an unjust age.

Of course, the 1848ers were wrong. The workers were not condemned to everlasting poverty. They began to prosper steadily in the second half of the 19th century, perhaps assisted by legislation. Maybe we never needed the 1848ers and the educated political class.

Too late: now we are stuck with them and their system unless we rise up and change it. Because their system of of administrative centralism is unjust.

The modern central administrative state is just as unjust as the state bureaucracies of the absolute monarchs, and for the same reason. A society in which the major activities of life have been brought under the direct administration of a political ruling class is necessarily unjust, for it collapses political society into an administrative organ that is nothing more than the instrument of its ruler.

Thus we can say that the administrative welfare state that the post-1848 educated class, now out liberal friends, have imposed upon the American people is an abomination. It is deluded, for it attempts to solve a problem that never existed. It is unjust, for it puts a thumb on the scales of justice to advantage politically favored groups over others. It is cruel, for it substitutes government compulsion for voluntary cooperation and responsibility. It is wasteful, for it rejects the efficiencies of the market for the rigidities of government. It is corrupt, for it favors its well-connected supporters and politically powerful interests over the unconnected and the unorganized.

The administrative welfare state, the regime of administrative centralism invented by the absolute monarchs and perfected by the post-1848 educated class, is the rule of injustice. Once it was royal injustice; now it is liberal injustice.

It is an abomination, and it shall not stand.