Bill, Amity, and Mort on Jobs

Good old Bill Clinton has just come out in Newsweek with a 14 point program on jobs to highlight his Clinton Global Initiative meeting in Chicago. The former president's plan treads delicately, as he doesn't want to tread on Obama's toes. But he does have some good ideas: Cash for business startups, which would reduce the current problem that aspiring startups can't tap home equity, because they don't have any; and copying Rep. Ryan on lowering the corporate income tax rates. But there's a lot of silly stuff on green energy, which is perhaps marginally less silly than the president's green energy program. The big problem with the economy is the economic detritus from a century of government meddling. That is something that politician Clinton just doesn't get, as he proposes to pile on with more, and still more government meddling with the economic system.

Forgotten Man author Amity Shlaes takes us through the 1970s and a Federal Reserve that was always behind the curve on monetary inflation, until Paul Volcker came in and slammed on the brakes in 1979. We'll need someone to do that this time, she argues, and it won't be Gentle Ben Bernanke. Double dip recession? Not quite yet, I'd say. The Fed is still fighting recession, and probably won't start fighting inflation until after the 2012 election.

USAToday honcho Mort Zuckerman does the numbers on employment and they ain't pretty. The fact is that businesses are afraid to hire on permanent staff.

The most recent statistics are unsettling and dismaying, despite the increase of 54,000 jobs in the May numbers. Nonagricultural full-time employment actually fell by 142,000, on top of the 291,000 decline the preceding month. Half of the new jobs created are in temporary help agencies, as firms resist hiring full-time workers.

Like I've said. The Obama administration is going to wake up pretty soon and realize what a deep hole it is in for 2012. Then you can expect a really bone-head Hail Mary play to try to make the economy look good for a few months. There's only one problem with that. I doubt if the Republican House of Representatives will want to go along with it.

We have come to the end of the government's ability to manipulate the economy to shovel money at its supporters. We are coming to the point where government is just going to have to start stiffing the government employees, the benefits recipients, the subsidy mavens, and the crony capitalists. Because that is the only way that we are going to get the economy moving again. But there is one thing certain. The ruling class will try every trick in the book before it actually starts to acknowledge the real problem. Government is too big, and it spends too much, and just about everything the government spends is waste.

Obama and Thomas Kuhn

Can President Obama still pull it out? That's what Walter Russell Mead is asking. The president needs to lead, needs to define the national problem and represent the solution to the problem.

Look, we know that the "blue social model" has failed. The American people need to know what is going to replace it.

Americans are realistic enough to understand that the breakdown of the blue social model is a messy process and that perhaps no president can deliver a pain free transition to the next stage. But what they aren’t hearing from President Obama is a compelling description of what has gone wrong, how it can be fixed, and how the policies he proposes will take us to the next level.

But really, can he? Can he reverse and say, hey, all that stuff about benefits and greedy bankers and make the rich pay a little more? Forget all that. All that stuff that we Democrats dispensed over the last century is inoperative. Conservatives have been right all along. We need to get the government out of the lives of the American people and rely on that good old American can-do spirit to get us moving.

That is just not how the world works.

To understand the politics of today we need to look at the theory of Thomas Kuhn and his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Normal science, he wrote, was the patient advance of knowledge using the accepted paradigm. But when a paradigm starts to break down then the world splits in two. The old generation keeps faithfully on with the old paradigm and the new generation tries to understand the world in terms of a new paradigm.

But the new paradigm only wins when the old generation dies off. Why? Because the old generation has all the powerful jobs. Only when they retire, or are kicked out, can the new paradigm come to full flower.

It is bootless to imagine that President Obama can abandon the blue social model that today's Democrats took with their mothers' milk. The new era of smaller, limited government will only come about after the utter discrediting of the blue social model in the minds of not just conservatives but moderates and independents. Democrats will still believe, of course, but they will be demoralized and ashamed.

If President Obama were to come up with a narrative that moved on from the blue social model now, he would probably split his party, and maybe even provoke a third party effort on the left. If he were to do that, Democrats might suffer an utter wipeout. No, the best thing for him to do is to keep to his left-liberal beliefs. He may go down to defeat 55-45 or even 57-43. But at least he will hold his party together.

Then, after a monumental defeat, then and only then will Democrats be ready to move on from the blue social model and join the rest of America.

The Political Philosophy of Late Liberalism

How convenient that I should be discursing on the justification of political power one day and the political nostalgia of uber-liberal E.J. Dionne the next. Let us mix them together and see what happens.

I first argued that, because government is force and politics is power, then you can only justify the resort to government (force) in exceptional circumstances, which I argued were invasion and injustice.

Then I laughed at E.J. Dionne's sudden nostalgia for President George W. Bush. All Democrats are nostalgic for the previous generation of Republicans.

But it was the offhand statement of liberal principle that resonated with me. Dear old President Bush actually wanted to do more with government, huffed E.J.; not for him mere "cutting taxes, slashing regulation or eliminating large swaths of government" like today's lot.

Unlike this crowd of Republicans, Bush acknowledged that the federal government can ease injustices and get useful things done.

Notice how this jars with my examination of the necessary springs of political action. In my view, government is force and it is illegitimate to do anything unless it requires force. But E.J. Dionne takes a more avuncular approach. He writes like a member of the Ruling Class. Of course he would. Yes, he intones, we compassionate elitists want to ease the injustices of life. We want to do useful things.

But the problem is that he leaves out the element of force. Government does not trot up one day and put a shoulder to the wheel of justice. It writes laws and raises taxes and spends money taken from taxpayers by force. Reasonable people might conclude that the injustice in question had better be a pretty serious injustice to justify all that force. Nor does government turn up one day and say that we're here to help on a useful project. It takes money from taxpayers by force and bond-holders and spends the money on some useful thing. But the money spent on that useful thing cannot be spent on some other useful thing. Maybe today that useful thing is the most useful thing that anyone could imagine. But what about tomorrow? For sure, the folks hired to do that useful thing will scream and yell that to abandon that useful thing will result in food being removed from the mouths of children. But producer interests always say that.

What we have here is the situation of every ancien regime, which came to power in some former time and now casually justifies its power not with the burning flame of rage and subordination, but with the avuncular self-inflation of the aristocratic scion: Yes, darling, just leave the injustice and all the complicated stuff to me. You wouldn't really be interested.

The great challenge of our era is the problem of every comfortable age. When people can afford to pay someone else to do the dirty work, they start the descent into decadence. You hire out the cleaning of their house, the raising of the kids, the driving of the car, the investment of the capital, the tallying of everyday expenses, eventually even the "work". And step by step, faster than you think, you become decadent and soft--not necessarily badly behaved, but soft in the sense of "use it or lose it."

The problem of the liberal welfare state is that we leave the organization of all public and communal affairs to liberals and bureaucrats. But the health of American life depends on the involvement of everyone in the day-to-day activities of social life, from high politics to neighborly cooperation and to family life. When government does all these useful things it means that necessarily ordinary people get excluded from participation. In other words humans as social animals are excluded from social life.

The whole point of modern American conservatism is to think and act upon this great truth. Everyone has a contribution to make, and it is a great injustice to exclude the great mass of ordinary people, as E.J. Dionne does with such cavalier presumption, in favor of liberal scions and their bribed supporters in government and on the entitlement rolls.

E.J. Nostalgic for Bush

Our liberal friends are always nostalgic for the previous generation of Republicans. They were so moderate! Not like the current crop of extremists. Now E.J. Dionne has got all nostalgic about President George W. Bush.

The 2012 GOP presidential field on display Monday offered not one idea about how to solve the problems facing our country that didn’t boil down to cutting taxes, slashing regulation or eliminating large swaths of government.

What troubles E.J. is that Rep. Michele Bachmann, the extremist, no longer looks that extremist in the middle of the current crop of GOP presidential candidates.

That’s why I felt nostalgia for Bush, especially the guy who was a candidate for president in 2000. Unlike this crowd of Republicans, Bush acknowledged that the federal government can ease injustices and get useful things done.

Of course, Dionne continues, he has no nostalgia for the later, war-mongering Bush. Oh no.

But I appreciate what E.J. said, partly because he indicates that liberals are getting nervous. You see, they don't get nostalgic when extremist Republicans are running around getting nowhere. They only get nostalgic when the new breed of extremists looks like they might actually win. When Nixon looked like winning, they got all nostalgic about Ike. When Reagan looked like winning they got all nostalgic about Tricky Dick. When George W. Bush looked like winning they got all nostalgic about Poppy Bush.

What these liberals don't do is figure that it might be something liberals are doing that is helping elect these Republicans that seem, in each generation, more extremist than the last one. Let us answer the unposed question. What is it that liberals are doing that makes the Republican Party more and more extremist, and reduces it to a party of cuts: "cutting taxes, slashing regulation or eliminating large swaths of government"?

Here is the telling phrase: "the federal government can ease injustices and get useful things done." Here is the line between liberals and conservatives, between Democrats and Republicans.

Sure the federal government can "ease injustices" but Republicans believe that government can only do something about the really big injustices: e.g., slavery and legally enforced segregation. But when it comes to regulating the details of the workplace, when it comes to gigantic entitlement programs that hugely increase the cost of hiring workers, then Republicans say Enough Already!

It comes down to this. When we suggest "the federal government can... get useful things done", the answer that Republicans make is: "not much." Why? Because most useful work in this world is about making products and services that people want and are willing to pay for. Government at all levels is really bad at doing these useful things that require flexible and adaptive response to changing needs, tastes, and market conditions. That is why all government programs end up as subsidies for powerful producer interests. Nobody goes to government to start up a useful program that people are willing to pay for. They go to government to start up a program that they and their friends believe is useful, but that, for some reason, business has failed to produce at the price that the advocates want to pay. Then, when the program doesn't deliver much of anything, the advocates sneer that program opponents are "mean spirited" or don't care about kids.

Of course, this is a charitable analysis of E.J. Dionne's nostalgia. When we talk about "injustices" and "useful things" the fact is that people disagree profoundly about what counts as an injustice and what counts as a useful thing. The great political conflicts are precisely about deciding what injustices are serious enough for the government to ease, and what useful thing the government ought to get into. But E.J. Dionne will need to get nostalgic about another couple of GOP political generations before he gets to realize that.

The Grounds of Political Action

Government is force. Politics is power. So every political initiative is a program of force. Ever government program is an exercise of power.

But humans are social animals; we understand that only in exceptional circumstances is there a warrant for force. Thus political actors feel the need to justify their campaigns of force and power.

Every justification of force, it seems to me, comes down to two scenarios. Either the community is threatened by an invader--the Russians are coming--or the community is ruled by a tyrant--off with his head! These two springs of government action are so obvious as to be truisms, yet we often forget first principles. The two principles are also intimate. It is the need to repel the invader that invests the executive with the mandate of force, and it is the continuance of this power after the victory over the invader that creates the occasion for the abuse of power and the occasion of injustice.

But let us look at this from the position of the political activist. If someone wants power he has two roads to power. He can energize the community against the frightful danger--of Russians, Germans, Islamists. Or he must rile up the people against the monstrous injustices perpetrated by the current ruling clique. Again, this is almost a truism. If the nation isn't threatened by an invader, then why should the nation submit to the extraordinary subventions required in a national emergency? If there isn't a gross injustice then where is the justification for mounting a head of rebellion with all the risks of failure?

Our liberal friends have developed a curious version of all this. In the first place, they want to believe that there really isn't a threat from the invader. That is all just nationalism, and patriotism, we all know, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. But our liberal friends don't want to throw away the opportunity to wage war, so they came up with the moral equivalent of war: wars on want, on poverty, on global warming, on pollution.

But it is the liberal response to injustice that is really ingenious. For liberals argue that it is they, the political elite, that is the agent most appropriate to correct the injustices so keenly felt by working people, women, minorities and the traditionally marginalized. What a coup. The liberals defend their political power by siccing the police on greedy bankers, unjust employers, rogue polluters, and racist, sexist, homophobic bigots.

The question that we non-liberals must ask is whether our liberal friends have overdone all this. You can say that, e.g., it was necessary to use government force to reverse the age-old injustice of slavery and to bring African Americans to full citizenship by force. You could say, perhaps, that the working man needed assistance in the turmoil of the early industrial revolution. But it seems to me that in the early 21st century there is a ton of government compulsion going on that is based on the flimsiest possible demonstration of injustice. The world is, after all, seething with injustice, from the most petty problems in the workplace through the most savage enslavement of a whole people. The question is: where is the dividing line between a minor humiliation and a need for government force?

That is the great task before us.

2012 and Mediscare

Are Republicans vulnerable on Medicare? Should they cave on Medicare and wait for it to crash or should they fight back? Some people reckon that Democrats will demagogue on Medicare from now till November 2012, so there is no way of avoiding a fight.

Perhaps it is telling that Marco Rubio (R), junior US senator from Florida, the second-biggest Medicare state, has chosen to come out strongly in favor of the Ryan Plan. Reports Marc Thiessen:

For those who criticize Ryan, Rubio asks: “If it’s not the Ryan plan, well then what plan is it? The White House has not offered one. The Senate Democrat leadership has not offered one.. . . They have not offered a budget, much less a plan to save Medicare.”

Rubbish, writes Stanley Kurtz. The Democrats do have a plan. It is called IPAB; it is a monster, and Republicans should attack it 24-7.

What the GOP hasn’t yet done is go on offense against IPAB (the Independent Payment Advisory Board), the clique of Obamacare bureaucrats who are going to ration Medicare into the ground. IPAB is what’s really going to push granny off a cliff, giving her far less control of her fate than the Ryan plan.

Mediscare works best in the later stages of a campaign when Democrats get a chance to stampede seniors with scare talk. But if Republicans get started establishing a message now then the late-campaign Mediscare won't work.

It was Sarah Palin that first articulated Kurtz's strategy when she called the IPAB a "deeath panel." The president wants unelected bureaucrats and political cronies to determine who lives and who dies. Rationing means that you have to line up to get benefits. Unless you have a political pal in high places on the IPAB. How hard can it be to attack this monstrous policy?

The president has a plan for Medicare. His death panel will decide who lives and who dies. The government will decide who gets care and who doesn't. That's not just the end of Medicare as we know it. It's the end of Medicare, period.

There's another factor to consider. The presidential campaign season forces the mainstream media to ventilate Republican proposals and sound bites, if reluctantly and illuminated with unflattering light. Plus the paid media of Republican candidates puts the Republican message into America's living rooms. That makes it much harder for the Democrats to win on Mediscare.

Anyway, what's the point of being a Republican if you just run and hide whenever the Democrats try to electrocute you on entitlements. The whole point of Republican politics is that Americans are sturdy but cooperative individualists. They are proud of their independence, proud of caring for their own, and proud of giving a helping hand to those in need.

Entitlements are the opposite of Americanism. They are the politics of serfs and peasants, doffing caps to the lord of the manor as he drives by in his expensive gas-electric hybrid, hoping that he'll fight for them when grannie get sick. Because, after all, he did promise.

Revolt Against the Empire of Lies

Why not use the rhetoric of the American revolution to report today's politics? In that case, according to Andrew Klavan:

The week just past was a great one for the New American Revolution — that guerrilla assault by alternative media minutemen on the amassed redcoats of the Empire of Lies.

Yeah, that is one way of reporting Andrew Breitbart's exposure of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) as "a lowlife and liar." The problem with Breitbart, for the Empire of Lies, is that he is fearless.

Then, writes Klavan, there is Glenn Beck, who will be starting his own on-line network GBTV when he finishes with FoxNews. Beck has been replaying some of his on-air predictions, "predictions for which he was sometimes called crazy and which have more often than not come true."

Then there is Ann Coulter and Demonic, arguing "the thesis that the American left is the party of the mob." I wonder why she thinks that?

Klavan finishes with this:

The Mainstream Media’s Empire of Lies is still an empire, after all. They still have most of the money and almost all of the air. The alternative media is still, as it were, taking potshots at them from behind rocks and trees.

But last week — man oh man! — it sure looked like Lexington and Concord to me.

And, as I suggested to an e-mailer, using a different colonial metaphor: There are definite signs out there that "the natives are restless."