The Welfare State: When It's Broke

The fight over the welfare state will, at the tactical level, occur around the questions of national bankruptcy and a sovereign debt crisis.

But the moral-cultural question is the fulcrum around which political and economic leverage will work. For the great question about our modern age is this: How much are we slaves to our system of instrumental reason, the great edifice of science and technique? To what extent is our prosperity founded upon the mankind's domination of the natural world, and to what extent is it founded upon the domination of one man or woman by another? We use natural resources as though we owned them. We domesticate and use plants and animals as though we owned them. We use other people as employees, as service personnel, as means to our ends. But at what point to we acknowledge that this use is a kind of slavery. We each act as if we owned the whole world and that everything is subject to our commands, down to the last penny in our bank account.

The question of domination is pretty clear when a human is bent to the yoke after an army is defeated in battle or a nation is defeated in a war. The wrong is pretty clear when an oil company pollutes a vast ocean in an oil-well blowout. But what about an employee under industrial discipline? What about a citizen forced to pay for and to join a government program? What about children sent to school for ten to twelve years according to compulsory attendance laws? What about the conversion of wild plants and animals to human breeding and domestication? What about the use of "non-renewable" natural resources? What about the release of "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere?

In human society these questions to be resolved according to the prejudice of the current ruling class. A century ago the ruling class was the commercial middle class, and so questions got decided according to their prejudice about employment, credit, and personal interest. Now the ruling class is educated liberals that rule with the support of the working class and government program dependents, so a different set of prejudices dominate.

The question is: isn't there a better way to decide social and economic questions than the domination by elite prejudice and political power? Can't responsibility and power be distributed more widely?

This all reduces to the problem of mistakes and the ways in which mistakes can be recognized and corrected. For it seems that it is very difficult for humans to recognize a mistake unless it has already caused a disaster. This is certainly true at the individual and family level. It is often true in business, where CEOs can sometimes run a corporation into the ground rather than quit a money-losing strategy, limited only by the equity and the credit of the corporation. This is especially true in politics, where special interests can usually block reform of their wasteful and dangerous subsidies and privileges up to the point where the very survival of the state is threatened by a sovereign debt crisis.

The problem in communications, an expert once explained to me, is not how to transmit the data. The problem is what to do when something goes wrong and a message is garbled. How do you resend the message, and how do sender and receiver finally agree that a correct message has been sent and received? The same is true in human society at large. When things are going wrong, when do we take corrective action? How long can we afford to put off corrective action, if we can agree what that action should be? When there is a mess in the business sector, the mess is cleared up in the bankruptcy process. It's a painful process, as judges and lawyers wrangle over the details of who gets to take the shortest haircut. When you decide such matters in the political sector it means that the correction will be decided by force, or at least a show of force. Humans can do better than that.

Wait Till Medicare Crashes

The upshot of NY-26 and the Democratic successful demagoguing of Medicare reform, featuring the delicate cinematography of The Agenda Project's commercial of Rep. Ryan pushing grannie of a cliff, is simple, according to John Derbyshire. It means that we can't reform Medicare. "There's nothing for it but to wait for the crash."

And that means, if you weren't paying attention, we can't reform Medicare until Medicare crashes the federal government's finances. Greek City, AZ, in other words.

It's tempting to accuse the Democrats of shameless demagoguery on Medicare, but I think we should give them credit for believing in their belief system.

Democrats believe that the way to help the poor and the marginalized is with comprehensive and mandatory government programs inspired and directed by the educated class.

They honestly look at the premium subsidy program of Rep. Paul Ryan and say: well what about the people who can't afford any Medicare premium? What about seniors, e.g., with dementia, who can't even rationally decide what Medicare option to choose?

The liberal conceit is that, given the fact that someone is going to fall through the cracks, a government program is the answer, a government program inspired and directed by evolved, educated people like themselves.

This is the central faith of our liberal, educated elite. Liberals are the most educated, evolved people in America. By virtue of their education and their advanced social views and their rational ethics they are the only people with the standing to decide all social and political matters, and to design rational and equitable programs to implement their advanced and evolved views.

That is why John Derbyshire's remark rings true to me. We Americans are not going to be able to resolve the central political questions of our time until our liberal friends have crashed in ruins. They may--they probably will--still cleave to their liberal faith after the crash. But nobody else in America will believe.

Conservatives never did believe in the liberal faith, but moderates weren't sure. Up to now these go-along-to-get-along folks have picked up the liberal faith as the default option. You go with the belief system implied in the TV news, on your worker's rights published on the bulletin board at work, and in your government schooling because that is what you do as a practical, conforming, social animal. And anyway, if the government is offering free stuff, why not?

But when you, as a moderate, find that you life is ruined, your savings account wiped out, your job evaporated, your Social Security capped, your Medicare rationed, then you look around for someone to blame. You do more than that. You lash out and you go after the first person that looks like they could be to blame. When that happens, any rational person will know who to blame: Greedy bankers.

Yeah. That's the great task of conservatives in the next few years. It is to make sure that liberals don't find some convenient scapegoat and dodge the blame for national bankruptcy and the failure of all their government-centric welfare state programs.

Liberal Hall Pass Expires

It must be the longest-lived get-out-of-jail-free card ever. For all my adult life liberals could get away with things that would sink a conservative in a minute.

Did FDR skirt the law on a bunch of stuff? Too bad. Did Lyndon Johnson have bolt holes in the Capitol where he could entertain young women? Hey, panty waist, what's your problem? Was JFK running girls through the White House like an escort service? Did Bill Clinton lie about sex? Did Anthony Weiner?

Yes, it's come to this. Finally, a Democrat is being held to account for his lies. The hall pass has expired.

What it took was the whole panoply of new media and a tough take-no-prisoners new generation of center right media mavens, epitomized by Mr. "Big," Andrew Breitbart, and his BigGovernment.com, BigJournalism.com and the rest of the Big websites. Actually, of course, the Breitbart empire is minuscule. The "Big" thing is a joke, son.

Thanks, Andrew. You won one for the Gipper.

When you think about it, this couldn't have come at a better time for conservatives. We are going into an election season when many of the Democrats' ideological chickens will be coming home to roost. Everything that the Democrats know that isn't so is crowding in on them. Whether it is Keynesian inflationism now revealed as bankrupt, or crony capitalism with unions and green energy corruptocrats wasting tens of billions of dollars, or the headline entitlements running out of money, the message is all the same: Democratic ideas stink.

Underneath the progressive carapace of caring and compassion is a bare-knuckle culture of compulsion, a faith in power and a will to dominate. Politics is power, government is force, and anyone that wants to increase government spending is someone that kneels at the throne of power for the chance to crack heads with the billy club of force.

We conservatives, we few, we happy few, believe that mankind is born onto this earth for something higher, something better that the crude rule of force. We believe that humans are social animals, not just regimental animals. And that is why we fight the corrupt liberal culture of compulsion and its endless hypocrisies.

"See the USA"

I think it was Dinah Shore that sang the good old jingle, "See the USA in your Chevrolet." Yes, it was. And a grand idea it was.

Now unannounced presidential candidate Sarah Palin is doing the same and everyone who is anyone is sniffing with nose high in the air. "Unschooled," says Charles Krauthammer. And the mainstream media is all upset that she's not laying on full campaign services for them on her current bus tour.

It's comical. One of the great acceptable national fibs is a candidate for president affirming that he "hasn't decided" whether to run for president. It's all supposed to be good fun and an inside joke between the candidate and the media.

But with Sarah Palin, it's supposed to be scandalous.

Look fellahs. It seems pretty obvious to me that it makes no sense for Gov. Palin to become a full-fledged candidate right now. She does much better flitting around on a royal progress pressing the flesh and demonstrating that she knows more than the average liberal about American history.

The campaign professionals are convinced that she's not running because she hasn't set up a campaign organization on the ground. OK, that's their view of the elephant.

But I suspect that when Palin actually announces for president, people will be running to her, begging to be allowed to set up a campaign organization in their state or city. Not to mention that there is a Palin organization in place already. It is called the Tea Party and I suspect that Palin has pretty good connections with that unorganized organization.

In all the fuss and feathers of the coming months, the thing to keep in mind about Sarah Palin is that she is a seasoned and resourceful elected politician. Anything else is reckless misunderestimating.

Mistake of 1937, Mr. Krugman

Sooner or later, President Obama is going to go for the long bomb to try to get his team over the goal line in 2012. With a Republican House, good luck with that, Mr. President. The economy for 2012 is probably already baked.

Conservatives have argued that the trouble with the president's economic policy is that it has boosted uneconomic things like ageing Detroit automakers and state and local governments and frank money printing instead of cutting taxes and wasteful spending, clearing away the detritus of the old boom and preparing the ground for new growth.

But liberal columnist Paul Krugman is worried about the "mistake of 1937."

For you young 'uns, a bit of history. The New Dealers cranked up a huge pre-election boom in 1935-36 that boosted the deficit and federal spending in real 2005 dollars from $72 billion in 1934 to $107 billion in 1936. The federal deficit was 4.76 percent of GDP in 1936. Then the Feds took a breather in 1937 and reduced spending to $98 billion in 1937. Combined with tighter monetary policy this brought on a nasty recession and the Dems lost 70 seats in the 1938 midterms.

So you can imagine that Paul Krugman is nervous. The Dems ran their stimulus in 2009-10 and now the stimulus is running out of gas. Maybe they shoulda waited a couple years!

The "mistake of 1937" notion misunderstands the problem. The New Deal of 1933-36 wasted billions of treasure on politically motivated crony capitalism and wars on businessmen and made the US a more expensive place to do business. They passed the Wagner Act to make union labor much more expensive. They passed Social Security and the 2 percent tax on payroll started in 1937.

The "mistake" was not in 1937. The mistake was in 1933-36.

In our case the mistake was the government-sponsored boom in housing that pumped trillions into risky mortgages that are now underwater. The second mistake was throwing good money after bad with subsidies for the wasteful and the politically connected. We are not going to get out of the mess until the housing market clears and the underwater mortgages start to float again.

In case you were wondering, that's what QE1 and QE2 and probably the QE3-to-come are all about. They are trying to devalue the dollar so that house prices will go up and "reflate" asset values.

Liberal attack dog Paul Krugman is baying at the moon. The American people are going to have to pay for the mistakes of their political leaders, and we might as well get it over now. Chances are that the cost will only get bigger the longer we put it off. And since the problem goes back to Democrat-favored economic policy mistakes, it is right that Democrats should take the blame.

When Nations are in Trouble

When people are in trouble they reach back to the tried-and-true ideas of their past. They instinctively grasp for a reed in the turbulent current of the rapids. If selfishness and recklessness seems to have piled you up on the rocks then maybe the answer is sobriety and faithfulness.

Nations do the same. When Germany lost World War I it couldn't believe that "the most advanced nation in the world" could be in such trouble. So Germans reached back into the past, to the idea of the old German nation united by blood. And it returned to the atavisms of blood and soil, particularly the conquest of Lebensraum in the East, echoing the Drang nach Osten of the previous millennium--the Teutonic knights, the conquest of Prussia.

The result was an even worse disaster.

Now the US is in trouble and people are looking back to the past for things that worked. And that is where American exceptionalism comes in. For when Americans think about going back to the past it means going back to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation. Our glorious past is not atavistic, Blood and Soil, but modern, the bright shining city on a hill of the great American Revolution and its stunning political institutions. And there is the example of Alexander Hamilton's implementation of the Dutch financial system of hard-money central bank providing a solid foundation for the bond and stock markets.

When a populist politician like Sarah Palin goes on a nostalgia tour she visits Mount Vernon, the Liberty Bell and the founding documents: America before it was corrupted by the Big Government of the educated elite, America of Alexander Hamilton's "perfect system" before it was mucked up by the easy money chaps.

Or, if we look back a mere generation we can return to the solutions to the 1970s stagflation implemented by President Reagan.

President Obama and the Democrats are folks that ever hanker for another New Deal. They think that the New Deal was the great solution to the problem of the Great Depression of the 1930s. After all, that's what liberal historians have been telling them for 70 years. So they implemented an economic program that they thought would repeat the best of the New Deal. Problem is that they are wrong. The New Deal was not economic salvation but an economic disaster that kept the Depression going for years. You could look it up in Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man or at my own US Stuck on Stupid.

As stagflation rears its ugly head and gathers momentum in the next year Americans are going to be looking desperately for new leaders and the new leaders will be looking at solutions from out of the past. Fortunately, in this exceptional nation, unlike the poor bloody Germans, there are solutions in the past that really work. Cut regulations. Cut tax rates. Cut spending and put the funding of the National Debt on a sustainable basis. Get back to the principles of the Founding.

Funny thing. It's worked every time it's been tried.

Who Will Bell the Cat Obama?

Writes Victor Davis Hanson: it is becoming clear how the president intends to run for reelection.

Obama’s campaign will focus on three general themes: a) the 2008 meltdown of the economy on Bush’s watch; b) conservative heartlessness in gutting cherished entitlement programs; and c) racial bias behind any criticism of Barack Obama.

Let's shorten this down even further.

1. Blame Bush
2. Conservatives are heartless
3. Conservatives are racists

So the question is, who would be the candidate that would best neutralize those themes? Mitt Romney? Well, the Obamis are already neutralizing him as the author of RomneyCare in Massachusetts. No point in electing a guy if he basically agrees with the president on health care. Tim Pawlenty? Well, he's a nice guy but he's a racist underneath. Bound to be. He's white isn't he?

But then we come to Sarah Palin. Blame Bush? I don't think so. Palin will hang the economy around Obama's neck. Heartless conservative? Why do you think Palin's second book was called America by Heart? Why do you think that Palin is running around the Northeast in a "One Nation" bus, and holding Pizza Summits with Donald Trump. (Wasn't it convenient that Palin was pictured looking towards the camera and Trump looking away but clearly listening carefully to Palin?)

But the biggest thing is race. Here is why the race card isn't going to work on Palin.

The fact is that it is Obama that has to tread carefully on the race issue. He can't afford to look like the big black man roughing up a delicate white woman. Yeah, I know. It's the hoariest racial stereotype since Othello and Desdemona. But the whole point about stereotypes is that they resonate in our hearts and unconscious minds.

Of course, what with the inflationary monetary policy and the uber-regulatory state and the jobless recovery, Obama may already be toast.

Still. Sarah Palin looks like a winner to me. Call her the darling of the white working class. Oh gee. I guess I already did.