Another Laundry List

Man and boy, I've been watching presidents stand at the rostrum of the House of Representatives for about 40 years.  And I'm getting a bit tired of it.  Why is it considered statesmanlike to go through yet another a laundry list of warmed over government programs and imagine that this contributes to national welfare?



Here we had President Obama, sucking empty on the sine qua non of any presidency: a healthy economy.  And what does he come up with?  More subsidies.  More spending.  More urgency.



The astonishing thing about his speech on Thursday evening to a joint session of Congress is what he did not do.  He did not act to relieve the huge costs that government places upon the private sector, the chunk that government takes of every paycheck, of every product sold, of every service delivered.  That is what is killing the economy.  Reality finally caught up with the progressive game that worked so well for so long.  You impose enormous costs upon producers and consumers, distributing favors to your supporters with the proceeds, and then take the credit for prosperity and growth.



Maybe the progressive game still works in normal times.  But not after a teeth-rattling financial meltdown.



Yes, Virginia, it's true that government is indispensable to a healthy economy.  But its role is stage-setting, providing the property laws, the stable financial basis platform which players in the game of capitalism can rely.



President Obama is still going full bore on his progressive agenda, shoveling out money at Democratic constituencies.  His speech was no pivot, but more of the same, throwing good money after bad.  It's a measure of the impossible position he's in.  He can't do the things he ought to do: reverse ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, Sarbanes-Oxley, anti-energy regulation.  Because if he did that he'd lose his Democratic base.  Why?  The support for these programs among Democrats is not practical and empirical.  It is religious.



In a sad way, Republicans and conservatives can take comfort from the president's speech.  Here we are, two and a half years into his term of office, with failures littered all over the political landscape, and he still doesn't get it.  It makes you confident about the results of November 2012.



I am starting to believe in a 55-45 America:  A 55-45 percent Republican presidential popular vote, a 55-45 Republican Senate, and a 55-45 percent Republican House.

Will Liberals "Go Off the Deep End?"

Over at the American Spectator the "Green Lantern" worries that liberals will go off the deep end if their Obama loses next year.

Environmentalists, now embarrassed about being arrested in front of the White House for opposing their favorite President's policies, will be right back where they want to be -- throwing their bodies at the juggernaut of the American economy. Young fanatics will be blowing up pipelines and power plants because they are unable persuade 300 million Americans to give up prosperity and live on wind and sunshine.

Really?  I don't think so.  It's true that leadership Democrats successfully prodded their liberal rank-and-file to protest the whisker-thin victory of George W. Bush in 2000, so that liberals spent eight years in a fantasy-land of "Selected, not Elected", Bushitler and Darth Vader Cheney.



Yes, it's true that liberals have mostly "continue[d] to prosper while moving rapidly toward the angry left." over the past decade. It's true that they all vomit out standard Democratic talking points: the Tea Party is "crazy"; Gov. Walker (R-WI) is "insane"; the president's troubles are all due to "racism". But that's why we have elections.



I recall back a few years ago when the Religious Right got up an initiative to limit abortion in Washington State. It went down 25-75. That was the end of social-conservative politics in the Soviet of Washington. It's amazing what an election will do.  If Obama goes down 45-55 in November 2012 it will have a similar effect on liberals, Oh sure, they will snap at you about the asininity of President Perry/Romney, whoever. But they will be cowed. They will be beaten. They won't be staging stupid terrorist tricks, because they will have read the election returns. They may say that the American people are racists or mentally ill. People say things like that, to keep up their spirits. But they will know they are beaten.



In my view, the presidency of Barack Obama is the best thing that could have happened to conservatism. Liberals got to do everything they had ever wanted. They passed the Holy Grail of universal health care. They passed their trillion-dollar Keynesian stimulus. They whacked Wall Street with swingeing new regulation. They flooded the nation with windmills and very fast trains.



And the whole thing flushed down the toilet. ObamaCare is a disaster. The stimulus came and went. Dodd-Frank ended up entrenching "Too Big to Fail" and President Obama is backtracking on draconian EPA regulations.



Don't forget how this all appears to liberals. They thought that with intelligent people, finally, in charge, the nation would turn around from the incompetent Bush years. Teach those greedy bankers a lesson, give the economy a shot of sponduliks, and here we go for reelection. They cannot believe that it has all gone wrong.



But they will. And come 2013, after the liberal annus horribilis, liberals will be sadder and wiser. And a lot less cocky.

CLOUDs in the Cloud Chamber

The Wall Street Journal's reporter Anne Jolis puts it so innocently.  The physicist folks at CERN finally got around to testing the theory of Henrik Svensmark, that cosmic rays (charged particles entering the earth's atmosphere) "seed" clouds by creating cloud pre-nuclei as they speed through the atmosphere.

At the Franco-Swiss home of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, scientists have been shooting simulated cosmic rays into a cloud chamber to isolate and measure their contribution to cloud formation.

Do tell.  So, after half a century of particle accelerator chappies using cloud chambers to track high- energy charged particles we have to test whether charged particles entering the atmosphere leave tracks of visible moisture?  You mean charged particles out in the atmosphere behave just like they do in cloud chambers?  Golly, those physicists are smart.



CERN has notoriously taken over a decade to run this experiment.  You can understand why.  Confirmation of Svensmark's hypothesis means that climate is driven in large part by the solar cycle.  When there are few sunspots, we know, more cosmic rays penetrate to the atmosphere.  So if cosmic rays seed cloud formation and clouds reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth, why, maybe the Little Ice Age, coinciding with a major solar minimum, was caused by excessive cloud formation from cosmic rays.  Better soft-pedal that one.  We government-funded physicists wouldn't want to tread on the gravy train of our government-funded climate scientist friends.



It looks like the whole climate-change hysteria is reaching the end game.  That's why the climate scientists reacted hysterically to the recent Spencer-Braswell article on cloud feedback.  Just as well, really.  We could use the money to repair the government's balance sheet.



I wonder what the liberals and the environmentalists will come up with next.

When Liberals are the Oppressors

Liberal ideas were developed in the good old days when landowners, slave owners, and business owners were the bad guys.  So liberals developed the notions of protest, civil disobedience, and passive resistance as the means by which the oppressed, assisted by their educated allies, could register their protest against injustice, expose the hypocrisies of the powerful, and win through to a just society.



But now a new justice movement has emerged onto the political radar.  Only this time it is not a liberal movement, enthusiastically supported by our liberal friends.  Instead this movement, the Tea Party movement, is anti-liberal.  It has arisen to oppose the injustices of liberalism.



As you might expect, our liberal friends are not reacting very well.  Protest, civil disobedience, mass meetings are one thing when they are used for a progressive purpose.  When used by conservatives--even conservative religious women--liberals talk of "incivility", of "terrorism", of racism, and worse.



Over the last week we have seen a ton of bad behavior from liberals on this matter.  Exhibit A is probably the head of the Teamsters union, Jimmy Hoffa, who introduced the President of the United States by calling workers everywhere to a war on the Tea Party.

Let's take these son of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong,

 Hey, we all like to throw out red meat to our supporters.  But using war metaphors is considered inappropriate for Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.  So why is it OK for a labor union leader?



Then there's the remarks of Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN) at a Congressional Black Caucus meeting.

Some of these folks in Congress right now would love to see us as second-class citizens. Some of them in Congress right now with this tea party movement would love to see you and me — I’m sorry, Tamron — hanging on a tree.

Mike Adams, a professor of criminology, is a practiced provocateur.  His latest wheeze is to exploit the new federal edict on sexual harassment, requiring vigorous prosecution on campus using a "preponderance of the evidence" standard.  So, writes Adams, that means that when an impressionable young woman hears her lefty professor refer to Tea Party members as "tea-baggers," a reference to oral sex, that young woman is clearly being sexually harassed.

Obviously, when a male political science professor dismisses a female supporter of the Tea Party as one who enjoys oral sex, he has offended her. And that falls squarely within the university definition of sexual harassment.

Adams wants this followed up.  For either we will get rid of a bunch of obnoxious lefty professors or our liberal friends will suddenly discover that a higher standard of proof is needed in sexual harassment cases.

Nothing here is all that remarkable.  It's what you expect from a ruling dynasty when it loses the Mandate of Heaven and finds that the peasants are restless.   Agitators! Traitors! Murderers!

Right now I am listening to a grand liberal apology on audio from The Great Courses, The Meaning of Life, by Prof. Jay Garfield of Smith College.  We've just got to Gandhi and his non-violent protest against British racism and colonialism.  In the rehearsal of Gandhi's life Garfield talks about how the British divided the Indians, religion against religion, caste against caste, even extending to dividing Bengal in 1905.  Government should not divide people like that.  "Government could not be an institution that allows some people to benefit and others to suffer."



The Greek philosopher George Maroustos once said that you can't tell how good a dog is when it's out hunting.  You can only tell when it's being hunted.  The measure of liberalism will be how it deals with political and moral adversity, when it is challenged to live up to its values by forces with which it disagrees.



Things are not looking good right now, as liberals find that they are being hunted.  Liberals are responding to their troubles badly.  My guess is that we ain't seen nothing yet.

Healthcare From the Trenches

I recently talked with a physician from south New Jersey.  He thoughtfully enlightened me on a couple of healthcare talking points.



The 30 million uninsured

A while back, says my friend, a woman physician in south Jersey got a grant to start a clinic that would exclusively serve the uninsured.  He helped her getting started with office space in his own clinic.  The clinic for the uninsured closed after a couple of years due to lack of business.  The truth is that when an uninsured person gets sick they can probably sign up for Medicaid on the spot.  So why bother getting insured?  An elderly acquaintance from Peru, wife of a retired Lima physician, reports that when she gets health care in the US she never has to pay.  Now why would that be?



Those Medicaid reimbursement rates

How, I have wondered, given that Medicaid reimbursement rates are notoriously low and Medicaid patients have trouble getting physicians to see them, do Medicaid patients get their health care?  My friend told me.  In south Jersey they have recently set up a federal funded chain of clinics to serve the Medicaid folks.  How do the clinics get paid, I wondered?  They get paid through the usual reimbursement schedules, just like the private docs.  But, of course, they also get federal funding.  Nice gig if you can get it.



Entitlement mentality

The wife of a friend of mine here in Seattle works in University Hospital and complains that Medicaid patients tend to move in, and often only get discharged after a couple of weeks when the Medicaid coordinator puts an end to their shenanigans.  Regular patients with private insurance are whisked in and out in a couple of days.  My south Jersey friend has similar experiences.  He gets Medicaid recipients that come in and say: Give me the works, doc: MRIs, CAT scans, the whole enchilada!  Whatever happened to the grateful poor?



Maybe we should all be outraged by this corruption of the entitlement state.  But I am not.  It is perfectly obvious to me that any entitlement program or indeed any government program of any kind is bound to be riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse.  Government programs are not responding to human need; we have a market economy for that.  Government programs are projections of political power:  We are doing this because we have the power to do it.  In the end all government programs regress into a simple scramble for loot.  But at least when Boss Tweed looted the City of New York the city gotuilt a magnificent marble City Hall for their trouble.  The monument to our corrupt liberal welfare state will just be the broken lives and gigantic debt it left behind.

Democrats Losing It

Back in the 2000s leadership Democrats encouraged their rank and file in a lot of smash mouth partisanship. It worked, up to a point, in delegitimizing President Bush and setting up their 2006 capture of Congress and 2008 capture of the presidency.



But the smash-mouth tactics doesn't work so good when your guy is in the White House. That's because while vigorous opposition is a necessary safety valve for the loyal opposition, vigorous attacks on the opposition are another matter. It makes you look like fascist thugs.



Thus, for Cenk Uygur to complain about the president's treatment by Speaker Boehner over his upcoming address to a joint session of Congress is foolish and ignorant.

President Obama has now changed the day of his address to Congress to accommodate the Republicans. They were having a GOP presidential debate on the original date he picked. So, Boehner told him to move his speech. He is the president for Christ's sake. Of course, they should have accommodated him, not the other way around. But as usual, President Obama bowed.

Er, well, no. The president doesn't have the power to order up a joint session of Congress. Congress gets to decide that. That's the whole point of a divided government and a separation of powers.



Then there are the cute "theocracy" attacks on the Republicans. This is a recurring tactic of Democrats; they must think it works a treat. They take the statements of Republican politicians that their religious beliefs inform their politics and inflate them into a secret plan to legislate morality. This is actually part of the whole "Democrats are pro-science" and "Republicans are anti-science" meme. It shows an astonishing ignorance in Democrats for not realizing that their progressive beliefs are in fact religious and not scientific. Everybody brings their religious beliefs to politics; it's just that Democrats bring their secular religious beliefs in socialism and progressivism and statism to the table.



Here is the Washington Post's liberal Chris Cillizza acting dumb about the whole issue.



But here is my prediction. All the smash-mouth tactics being ginned up by the Obama guys are going to fail. The American people don't care about church-state issues this year. They don't care about Speaker Boehner playing footsie with the president. They just want someone to fix this lousy economy. And because President Obama is the president they figure that he's to blame.

"Too Many Takers -- Not Enough Givers"

That's the considered response from an Irish cab-driver. Larry Elder asked him what the No.1 economic problem was for welfare-state Northern Ireland.

The problem with the welfare state is that it rewards takers and penalizes givers. Why should that be?

The reason is not that difficult to figure out. It is that government is force, politics is power. Politics is the rule of the powerful, the guys with the guns. Of course, they may not actually display their guns, not all the time. The most effective government is the one that never has to show its guns. But the political sphere is the sphere in which things are decided by force. It may be the force that is legitimated by the "mandate" conferred to an electoral majority by winning an election. Or it may the mandate conferred by winning a civil war or conquering another country.

The power conferred by force is the power to set the rules and the power to take away.

But humans are social animals. The great trick of any species of social animal is that the advantages of social organization are, for the most part, not based on force. In the best social systems people sacrifice for the good of the community not because they are forced to do so but because they want to give, to contribute to society.

In the basic unit of society, the family, the parents give and the children take; it must be so. The parents give so that their children may grow up to adulthood and then give in their turn. In the market economy, people only get to receive if they are willing to give. Workers must develop skills to make themselves useful to employers. Business people must make and sell a product that other people want before they can take anyone's money. In religion people are socialized into becoming givers: people who want to give to others, and people who are reluctant to resort to conflict within a community.

The welfare state is different. It is the opposite of a social system. It is an anti-social system. It is based on the idea that people have basic economic rights, enforceable by the state, and that anything short of an adequate transfer of economic goods to the less fortunate is unjust. Thus it rewards takers, people that demand assistance, and it penalizes givers, people that think up ways to serve their fellows. There is nothing new in this. Robber bands have operated according to this principle since the dawn of time.

Our modern problem is that the welfare state, beginning with the modest transfers of a century ago, has followed its internal logic to the point that, we can now see, it leads to national bankruptcy. Also, it encourages a host of social vices. It encourages people to work less; it encourages people not to have children. It encourages children to abandon their ageing parents to the state. It encourages ageing parents to sicc the state on their children.

The welfare state. It's simple really. "Too Many Takers -- Not Enough Givers."