Can Obama Do a Clinton?

The conservative reaction to President Obama's budget is fear. Fear that Obama will do a Clinton on the Republicans and set up a government shutdown that the voters will blame on mean-spirited conservatives.

What we need, says Thomas Sowell, is a Rocky Marciano, who knows how to take the punches but has the patience to wait for the opportunity to land the big one.

On the other hand, Daniel Foster has House Majority Leader Cantor stepping up to the plate with this comment:

Your question about the budget itself and the entitlement inclusion, yes, we will include entitlement reform provisions in our budget, again, unlike the President, and unlike Harry Reid who doesn’t even admit there needs to be any reform of Social Security.

We have to look at the bigger strategic picture. And that includes preparing the battlefield. Republicans and conservatives need to get the line out that the sooner we do entitlement reform, the less it will hurt, and the less it will hurt the poor and the elderly. The battlefield preparation may involve tactical defeats, which is a polite way of saying that there will be casualties. Bright, promising politicians will be defeated before they have a chance to realize their potential.

The outline of the future is clear; it has been worked out by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-IL). He proposes to convert Medicare from a defined benefit to a fixed subsidy. Senior citizens will get an annual amount to apply to the health insurance of their choice. Left unsaid, I suspect, is the obvious follow-on, that Congress will eventually demand that richer Americans will get less of a subsidy that poor Americans.

Yes, but what about the poor and Medicaid. My solution is Wal-Mart-care. Think of health care today as a world of corner stores and department stores. Very nice, and all that. But most people don't shop at corner stores and department stores any more. They go to the big-box stores.

Wal-Mart is already putting in-store clinics into its stores. It already has a fixed monthly fee for all-you-can-eat generic drugs. Expect that the genius of American innovation will find new ways to deliver health care on the big-box model.

Meanwhile, what are we talking about when we say that Republicans just don't know how to play the sound-bite wars? Who was it who came up with "death panels," who talks about "common-sense conservatism" and even "common-sense constitutional conservatism?" And now Sarah Palin has described President Obama's policy as "a bullet train to bankruptcy."

I tell you. The future is so bright, I gotta wear shades.

President Obama Behind the 8-Ball

With the release of the his FY12 federal budget President Obama is reaching a do-or-die moment.

The key to the budget is the new estimate of the deficit for FY11, the current fiscal year, from $1.2 trillion to $1.6 trillion. You can see the problem here, using usgovernmentspending.com's Federal Budget Analyst.

Budget	FY 2012 Deficit $ billion
FY2007	204.9
FY2008	53.8
FY2009	94.8
FY2010	929.4
FY2011	1,266.7
FY2012	1,645.1

No, it ain't pretty. And it's all the consequence of the two strategic errors made by the Obama administration in 2009. Let's list them:

1. Orthodox Keynesian Stimulus. Stimulus has a point when you are trying to rescue the banking system from a meltdown. But the idea that you can stimulate the economy with government spending is laughable. Liberals just can't wean themselves away from the notion, and this time, it is going to cost them big time.
2. Full-on liberal agenda. Obama and his chaps just put the pedal to the metal in 2009 with gigantic expansions of traditional liberal special-interest spending plus ObamaCare, a huge weight on the economy, and all the educated class agenda on high-speed rail, clean energy and taxing and regulating conventional fossil fuels. It was a gigantic mistake, and liberals will be paying for it out to the horizon.

The basic problem for President Obama is that Americans are frightened. They are frightened that the big spending and the big deficits are going to hurt the economy and take away their jobs and their retirement.

In that, the American people are right.

Maybe the economy, with the inflationary QE2 and the Fed printing money like mad, will improve enough by 2012 to get President Obama home for reelection. But maybe not.

In any case, the Liberal Hour is over. Whether President Obama gets reelected or not, the American people are souring on big government programs, especially as they feel, rightly, that they don't benefit them. That means that a second-term Obama would be in office, but not in power. And that would mean a mid-term election which could reduce Democrats to numbers not seen for over a century.

Beyond Blame

If we want to understand who to blame for the current cock-up in government, it is easy: our liberal friends.

It is liberals that have championed the neo-feudal welfare state and its politicization of everything.

Yes, of course, years ago liberals had noble thoughts about helping the helpless. But because their social vision did not extend beyond the administrative model of the absolute monarchs, their noble initiatives have inevitably descended into simple patronage politics. Politicians bid for the votes of the voters by dangling benefits before them. Inevitably, they offer more than the economy can deliver, and so, at some point, the government runs out of money to tax, borrow, or print.

So far so good. But there is a question ultimately more interesting and more uplifting than the tawdry question of blame. After all, all governments are a mess, stumbling from one disaster to another. All governments. Even in its heyday in the 19th century, the British Empire was a succession of disasters. First there was the mess of the Crimean War. Then there was the Indian Mutiny, called, in India, the Uprising. Then there was Gordon in Khartoum, followed by the Boer War. What a mess!

No, my question is: what is it about the belief system of our liberal friends that led them into the blind alley of the administrative welfare state? What was it that allowed them to imagine that their big government would be any different from the big governments of history? What made them believe that the vast expansion of government would be anything other than a moral and cultural disaster? What made them think that you could have liberation, dignity, and justice with a big overweening government? After all, the whole point of a good belief system and its moral universe is to help its believers and practitioners avoid the common pitfalls of self-delusion and hypocrisy. A good religion should be a prop, and help you live a worthy and a meaningful life. It should not lead you into a reactionary political system and a swamp of hypocrisy.

In my view the big problem is that our liberal friends cannot see that their moral and political enthusiasms are, in the strict sense, religions. They think that they have grown beyond the superstitions and the narrowness of religious belief. In fact they think that religion is on its way out as people come to rely on science and reason instead of fanciful belief in gods and spirits.

In fact, of course, the history of the modern era is the story of one secular religious movement after another. You can start with the French Revolution and its cult of Reason. Then there is Romanticism, a belief that there is something deeper than reason that explains the nature of life. There is socialism in all its variants, the nostalgic idea that we can return to the Garden of Eden of perfect, eternal community. There is Comte and his Religion of Humanity. There is fascism, the nostaglia for the tribe and the kindred. There is Nietzsche and the Ubermensch, the extraordinary individual. There is the cult of creativity, the transformation of the natural generative urge into a metaphor of non-physical creation. There is the puritanical environmentalist movement that seeks to purify and save a polluted and corrupted world. It goes on and on.

Our liberal friends fail to understand that the meaning of life, its telos, is always a mystery. We do not know our human purpose, if we have a purpose. We do not know how we should act in order to survive and flourish. We do not even know if human survival is warranted. What we have is faith. We believe that certain ways are the best way to survive, to flourish, and to create a moral society. In the day-to-day social life we try to work out what is best for us, best for our families, best for our larger social groupings, and best for the world. In the arena of national politics, liberals believe in certain liberal folkways and conservatives believe in certain conservative folkways. It seems pretty certain that the other guys have got the wrong end of the stick and are likely to bring the nation to disaster. And because government is almost always a train wreck in progress, the governing class must bear the weight of the blame.

In the United States, over the last century, the educated class of liberals, progressives, creatives, secularists--whatever you want to call them--have dominated politics and culture. It is their ideas that drive the government, with its trillion dollars a year in government pensions, its trillion dollars a year in government health care, its trillion dollars a year in government education, and its three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year in government welfare. It is liberals that dominate the universities, liberals that dominate the entertainment media. They have caused the current crisis because they lacked the self-consciousness to realize that they, just like everyone before them, have a religion. It's a secular religion, for sure, but religion all the same. When you take your religion and you breathe it into all the organs of government, legislating morality with that secular religion, then you break down the separation between church and state, between the political sector and the moral/cultural sector. Of course, you don't believe that. You think that only right-wing preachers and right-wing politicians can create a theocracy.

But it takes a remarkably narrow and pinched understanding of the modern age not to understand that, in socialism and communism, and now in environmentalism and the climate change movement, we have what we have often had in the past, militant religions enthusiastically pursuing a vision to save the world from sin.

"Turmoil in their Ranks"

The chaps at The New York Times are eager to report that all is not well with the House Republicans. In "House Republicans Battle Turmoil in Their Ranks" Tom Hulse reports that:

Under pressure to make deeper spending cuts and blindsided by embarrassing floor defeats, House Republican leaders are quickly discovering the limits of control over their ideologically driven and independent-minded new majority.

For the second consecutive day, House Republicans on Wednesday lost a floor vote due to a mini-revolt, this time over a plan to demand a repayment from the United Nations. Earlier in the day, members of the party’s conservative bloc used a closed-door party meeting to push the leadership to go well beyond its plans to trim about $40 billion from domestic spending and foreign aid this year, demanding $100 billion or more.

So? What's not to like? There is a word to describe this situation. It is "democracy."

The elections of 2010 sent 63 new Republicans to the House of Representatives. It's the biggest turnover in a couple of generations. Obviously, it will change the game in Washington. But how? That is what Republicans are discovering as they stumble into the future.

A couple of years ago, after Democrats had won 55 seats in the House over two election cycles, they reckoned it gave them a mandate to crank federal spending up to 24 or 25 percent of GDP. On reflection, it is probably fair to say that they were mistaken. On balance. That's because the vast majority of Americans are worried about jobs and worried about deficits. They see big government as a threat to their livelihood.

Now the Republicans have swept to control of the House. These Republicans represent people who think that "something must be done" about wasteful spending and big deficits. So they are starting on that project. The GOP leaders, not surprisingly, are rather less gung-ho than the freshman class. They remember the Gingrich years and the firestorm they went through when they tried to cut spending with President Clinton in the White House. What we are seeing is the Republicans come to a consensus about just how tough they are going to get on spending.

In any case, all this is penny-ante stuff. The real story is the long-term budget outlook. As this chart from usgovernmentspending.com shows, the real question is health care: Medicare and Medicaid.

Obviously, the growth of Medicare and Medicaid cannot go on like this forever. They run into Herbert Stein's law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Somehow, in some way, the growth in government health care spending will stop.

Years from now we may look back on the budget battle of 2011 and see the seeds of the Great Repudiation--of big government.

Or maybe not.

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.