Palin and the White Working Class

Just in time for vacation season, Gov. Sarah Palin (R) has tricked out a bus for a One Nation tour of the Northeast. Here's the announcement on SarahPac.com:

This Sunday, May 29th, Governor Palin and the SarahPAC team will begin a trip through our nation's rich historical sites, starting from Washington, DC and going up through New England. The "One Nation Tour" is part of our new campaign to educate and energize Americans about our nation's founding principles, in order to promote the Fundamental Restoration of America.

In other news, Ronald Brownstein of the National Journal reports that the most demoralized group in the nation is the white working class. Working class whites used to be the overwhelming majority, and

whites who have not completed college remain the backbone of many, if not most, communities and workplaces across the country.

They are also, polls consistently tell us, the most pessimistic and alienated group in American society.

No surprise there. The "average high-school-educated, middle-aged man earns almost 10 percent less than his counterpart did in 1980."

But here's the kicker. Minority men have done worse, and have suffered just as much in the recession. But minorities are optimistic. "63 percent of African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they expected their children to exceed their standard of living." Only one third of the white working class believe that.

Well we know what is going on. It is all about religion. America's secular religion, run by our liberal friends, has spent the last 50 years telling minorities how wonderful they are and how liberal politics will transform their lives. And liberals have been ostentatiously spraying taxpayers' money at them.

A century ago, the Progressives and then the New Deal liberals were doing the same gig--for the working class. And the working class believed them.

But now, liberal presidential candidates sneer at the white working class as "bitter clingers." All the benefits they showered on the white working class have melted into air. Even the foundations of the liberal deal with the white working class, Medicare and Social Security, are tottering.

And the white working class has been flip-flopping between the Democrats, that used to love them, and the Republicans, that can't quite bring themselves to seduce them.

Until now.

When Sarah Palin mounts a bus tour with a tricked-out bus, and starts at the Rolling Thunder motorcycle ride at the Pentagon on May 29, 2011, you know what it is all about. It is about connecting with the white working class. It is about a Fundamental Restoration of the white working class. Because if Sarah Palin can talk the white working class out of its funk and get it to believe in itself again...

All I can say is that I'll bet the other GOP presidential contenders right now are thinking: "Why didn't I think of that?"

Medicare, Mediscare

The general line on the GOP defeat in the special election in NY-26 is that the Democrats successfully demagogued on Medicare. This seems to have lifted Democratic spirits and disheartened Republicans.

Actually, I don't think that the Democrats' Mediscare strategy will be all that effective. Sarah Palin has already shown how to demagogue it right back: "death panels".

The tactical situation on Medicare depends on the skills of individual politicians. The larger picture is quite simple.

On its current trajectory, Medicare is going to eat the federal budget and maybe the whole economy.You can see that in the CBO's Long Term Budget Outlook (Medicare is the red band):

So it's pretty clear what has to happen. Wealthier older Americans are going to have to pay more for their health care, and in return, hey should demand the right to structure it the way they want it. Poorer older Americans, people that won't or can't put up money of their own, are going to have to be rationed.

The Ryan Plan does that. The Obama Plan, hidden in ObamaCare with its Independent Payment Advicory Board or "death panel", is a health care rationing plan for all Americans.

There's a tantalizing piece from Daniel Foster on a meeting between former President Bill Clinton and Paul Ryan. Here's the money quote from Bill Clinton:

I think the Democrats are going to have to be willing to give up, maybe, some short-term political gain by whipping up fears on some of these things — if it’s a reasonable Social Security proposal, a reasonable Medicare proposal. We’ve got to deal with these things. You cannot have health care devour the economy.

Actually, I believe that the Democrats are never going to give up short-term political gain on Medicare. They are always going to argue that any cuts in any government program puts grannie out in the street. But the Republicans also have a line on demagoguery, and they can hammer home the line on unelected bureaucrats getting in between patients and doctors and rationing care.

I suspect that the nation will be making a grand political decision about all this next year. With a bad economy, inflation taking off, housing barely out of the doldrums, and entitlements all on the political agenda, we are going to get a memorable political year in 2012.

While the political professionals all seem to like the safe hands of Govs. Romney, Huntsman, and Pawlenty to lead the GOP charge, I still hanker for the political skills of Sarah Palin. Think of the US in Normandy: Palin as Gen. Patton and the other chaps as Gen. Bradley. Everyone seems to think Palin is crazy, but I think she is crazy like a fox.

Precautionary Principle: License for Activists

Nothing seems more reasonable than the Precautionary Principle, that it is better to be safe than sorry. And it has become the guiding principle of the environmental movement. In the Wingspread Statement, it is defined thus:

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.

In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.

The process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open, informed and democratic and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action.

All seems well, but as Jonathan Adler writes, in practice it is profoundly incoherent. He quotes Cass Sunstein:

The precautionary principle, for all its rhetorical appeal, is deeply incoherent. It is of course true that we should take precautions against some speculative dangers. But there are always risks on both sides of a decision; inaction can bring danger, but so can action. Precautions, in other words, themselves create risks—and hence the principle bans what it simultaneously requires.

In practice, of course, the Precautionary Principle is a power tool that allows the cultural and political elite to stop stuff they don't like, for it is easier to raise fears about good new ideas than to do something about bad old ideas. Thus, writes Adler, the precautionary principle is used to "burden private actors, most notably corporations, that propose altering the environmental landscape in some way or introducing a new product or technology into the stream of commerce." The problem is that the precautionary principle doesn't address the fact that while there is a risk from doing something, there is also a risk from doing nothing. Elites and governments across the world have insisted that we "do something" about global warming even though it is completely uncertain what the effects of global warming on humans will be, if there is any.

No doubt, the precautionary principle relies on the tendency of people to "dislike losses far more than they like corresponding gains," and there is also the human tendency to wait on a developing problem until it is clearly a serious problem.

But the big problem with the precautionary principle is that it hands government another weapon in its armory of power tools. Any special interest can use the precautionary principle to game the political system. And since the precautionary principle requires artful and articulate people to deploy it, you can understand why the educated elite would like it.

The bottom line is that anything that gives the government more power is questionable on its face. Government is force, and there are some things in the world that can only be done with force. But humans are social animals, not regimental animals, and most things in this world can be done best by persuasion, cooperation, and exchange.

The problem of government is to limit government. There is no pressing need to give governments more ways to deploy force.

Domination and Dependency

The great theme of the Left is oppression and domination. When it's not exercised about the ordinary domination of traditionally marginalized peoples and groups, it ponders how reason itself creates domination.

Reason, argue Horkheimer and Adorno in The Dialectics of Enlightenment is man's effort to dominate the world. You can see the development already of bourgeois consciousness and rationality in Homer's hero, the cunning Odysseus, as he battles, using instrumental reason, with pre-rational forces from Cyclops to Circe to the Sirens. And notice that Odysseus makes his followers block their ears with wax so they they will keep rowing his ship for him and won't hear and respond to the entreaties of the Sirens. There's domination for you, exploiting the workers to get himself out of a jam!

So Odysseus is just like the bourgeois businessman that tries to dominate nature and less-developed humans with his technological developments and energies.

There are three strong objections to this argument.

First, what makes humans any different than all the other living things? Humans must battle and adapt to carve out a niche in this world just like other living things. If humans have been spectacularly successful in doing this, what's the big deal?

Second, the great question about domination is: what does the dominator do with his domination? Does he dominate the rest of creation and create a desert for all the competing humans and species? Does bourgeois capitalism make a desert out of its economic domination? The answer is that, starting at the latest with the Romantic rebellion and the beginning of the industrial era, mankind has understood with penetrating insight the limits of instrumental reason. Humans cannot live a slash-and-burn life, using and abusing without limit. With great power comes great responsibility, as the comic hero says. The counter-theme of the great power of instrumental reason is the need to curb and to mitigate its power. This is remarkably well developed in the culture of free enterprise which dislikes extreme power, and has developed a legal system to protect the weak from the domination of the powerful.

Thirdly, the real domination threat comes from the dominatory culture of modern governments, which, under the encouragement of left-wing elites, has driven the size and power of government to unprecedented levels. In the United States, the government's credit is under threat from the huge programs that transfer monies from the productive sector to the dependency sector. (In other words, the rich, dominating capitalists are paying swingeing taxes and penalties so that the politicians can pay off their supporters.) Thomas Sowell writes about this in "Dependency and Votes." Whenever we discuss cutting "entitlement" spending, he writes, the politicians rush out and peddle scary stories about the poor going without food and the elderly going without their meds. But the poor are presently fatter than ordinary Americans and the elderly are richer (15 times richer than the under 35 year-olds) than ordinary Americans. So what is going on?

The goal is not to keep the poor from starving but to create dependency — because dependency translates into votes for politicians who play Santa Claus... Independence makes for a healthier society, but dependency is what gets votes for politicians... “Entitlement” is just a fancy word for dependency.

And dependency is just the other side of the coin from domination. If you dominate someone, you hold them in dependency.

So here is a question. Why does the Left, that cries out to the reverberate hills about the evils of domination, support, defend and expand the most dominatory system ever devised by the instrumental rationality of mankind?

Things Liberals Believe That Ain't So. Part XXVII

It's not that liberals believe in power, or that liberals believe that they know best, or that liberals believe they are more evolved than other people.

The big problem is the things that liberals know that ain't so.

And one of the things that liberals know is that corporations are uniquely powerful entities that must be ruthlessly controlled. Otherwise they will take over and return us to the days of the early industrial revolution.

That's what the chaps at The Nation believe, and that is what all the liberals believe in the precious places, like Cambridge, Berkeley, and Austin.

But here are quotes dug up by Kevin Williamson. Surely, if the sainted liberal that invented Keynesian economics, John Maynard Keynes, thinks that businessmen are wimps, then it must be so.

Here is Lord Keynes, the inventor of modern Keynesian stimulus, writing after the end of World War I when everyone was enraged about "war profiteers."

We are thus faced in Europe with the spectacle of an extraordinary weakness on the part of the great capitalist class, which has emerged from the industrial triumphs of the nineteenth century, and seemed a very few years ago our all-powerful master. The terror and personal timidity of the individuals of this class is now so great, their confidence in their place in society and their necessity to the social organism so diminished, that they are the easy victims of intimidation.

So just what are we supposed to believe about those awful businessmen, demoralized by a few radical politicians?

Here now is Keynes writing to FDR. Here is what he said about businessmen.

Businessmen have a different set of delusions from politicians, and need, therefore, different handling. They are, however, much milder than politicians, at the same time allured and terrified by the glare of publicity, easily persuaded to be “patriots,” perplexed, bemused, indeed terrified, yet only too anxious to take a cheerful view, vain perhaps but very unsure of themselves, pathetically responsive to a kind word. You could do anything you liked with them, if you would treat them (even the big ones), not as wolves and tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish.

Yet our liberal friends insist that businessmen are dangerous carnivores feasting off the browsing herbivores of the middle class, and that liberals with elephant guns are needed to keep the businessmen in their place.

It really isn't so, liberals. The dangerous ones are the crony capitalists: the bankers that politicians need to float their paper and help deliver easy money, the green capitalists feasting on the politicians' fantasies of cheap, clean energy, the Iowa corn farmers earning fat profits from the politicians' ethanol scam.

In other words, the only bad businessman is a crony capitalist created by some stupid liberal program.

The Embarrassing Poor

Our lefty friends like to tell a story about the poor that goes like this. In the old days of the feudal era the people had their place and the lords had their responsibilities. The result was that the poor got taken care of. But then came the rise of trade and the poor fell through the cracks. Over and over, beginning with the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601, the state tried to come up with a way to meet society's obligation to care for the least among us, but more and more, as capitalism developed, the poor got shunted to the margins of society. But then came the modern era of social politics, and the state finally developed compassionate and targeted programs to help the poor and to mitigate their marginalized status. What's needed to finish the job is more funding to help people in need.

The reality is that the poor have always been an embarrassment and an afterthought. That is why the poor always featured in moral and religious systems. We want so much to forget about them, but the moral critics insist that we remember them.

Were the poor really looked after in the feudal era? It's hard to know, of course. But the numbers indicate that they didn't do well. Poor people had fewer surviving children than rich people, according to Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms. Anyway, the reality of the feudal era was periodic famines and wars. Guess who got the short end of the stick? In the early modern era, with more wealth available, society could afford to spend money on bureaucratic responses to the poverty problem. Instead of personally doing something about the poor, communities could hire it done. There were two kinds of relief: "indoor" relief where the poor were warehoused, and "outdoor" relief where the poor were helped outside of actual institutions in private homes. In the 18th century in the Anglosphere this "doing something" developed into the workhouse, the place where the poor were warehoused and supervised by masters and beadles like Dickens' Mr. Bumble. By the end of the 19th century, inspired by Dickens and a new generation of social activists, everyone was disgusted with beadles and workhouses and so the relief of the poor was changed from institutional assistance in insane asylums and workhouses to the provision of assistance with money. Now in the early 21st century the notion of "welfare" through outdoor relief is perceived as a failure, so a new approach is likely.

But really, nothing has changed. The poor are, then as now, an embarrassment--people that don't socialize in socially acceptable ways. They have damaged families, they have limited work skills, and they survive by their wits and by scams rather than through mainstream work for wages. The solution to the "poverty problem" is for each of us, individual by individual, to work with the poor and reintegrate them into socially acceptable roles within society. But that takes work. We would rather pay the government to do it, and forget about the poor. No doubt that is why we have been willing to listen to our liberal friends when they told us that it was the height of compassion to give liberals money to help the poor. We believed them because we wanted to believe them. But now the poor, though materially better off than ever before, are socially and spiritually worse off, as Robert William Fogel asserts in The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism. And the reason why is that the modern welfare state shovels money out to the poor but lets their culture wither away. So now, people are starting to demand that we "do something" about the rampant pathologies of the "underclass."

The question is: shall we "do something" in the old bureaucratic way, maybe forcing the poor to work, or shall we "do something" about ourselves, reawakening the old moral obligation to do something personally about the poor?

Presidential Silly Season

Oh dear. So Mitt Romney has doubled down on his awful RomneyCare and Newt Gingrich has put his foot in it by trashing Rep. Ryan's budget plan, a plan so radical that it puts off Medicare reform for ten years.

We must be in the presidential silly season, as candidates maneuver and the media and the pundits look for cheap laughs.

All the old tropes are appearing. First of all, we have the usual complaint that all the Republican candidates are midgets. In fact most of them are seasoned and successful politicians. Mitch Daniels has been governor of Indiana since 2005. Before that he was head of the federal Office of Management and Budget, a corporate officer, a think tank president, and a political staffer. Tim Pawlenty was a two-term governor of Minnesota, and before that a state legislator and city councilman. Newt Gingrich was the guy that ended forty years of Democratic control of the House of Representatives. If these chaps don't make the grade then what exactly do people consider a top-drawer candidate?

If you don't like soundness and solidity in Daniels and Pawlenty or the excitement of Newt, there are the girls: Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Our liberal friends like to sneer at them, but I suspect that they will both prove much better politicians than their enemies believe. Bachmann is in her third term in Congress and before that served for six years in the Minnesota State Senate. Before that she was an activist in pro-life and education politics. Sarah Palin has been in electoral politics since 1992 as city council member, mayor, and governor. Really, what's not to like?

Of course, my taste runs to the girls. I ask: Is America ready yet for a conservative woman president? Is it, liberals?

Let's face it, the politics of the next generation is going to be about trimming the welfare state down to size, converting wasteful government programs in health, education and welfare into rational, sensible, compassionate social cooperation where government plays a limited backup role, and people, the American people, actively engage in these vital social and moral activities and turn away from the current culture in which we pay our taxes and leave all the dirty work to government functionaries.

What better than for a woman to be in charge of this immensely difficult work, transforming America from the corruption and cronyism of Obama's Anmerica into nothing less than the best it can be?