The New Praetorian Guard

Every schoolboy knows that, as the Roman Empire aged, its emperors declined from being Augustan gods to being shuffled in and out by the elite imperial guards, the Praetorian Guard.



Maybe Julius Caesar started the rot when he violated Roman law by bringing his army in Gaul across the Rubicon river and marched it into Rome.



As the welfare state careers towards disaster we are seeing the emergence of a new Praetorian Guard.  It is the organized mobs of government workers outraged that their over-market wages and over-market pensions are being cut.  You do not see dangerous mobs of ordinary citizens in the streets, unless you consider the peaceable and good-natured Tea Party a mob.  You see the civil servants in the streets.  No doubt the events in Madison, Wisconsin, of last winter will be repeated elsewhere as noble teachers and professors demonstrate their outrage now that their life-time employment and pension deal turns out to be less than gold-plated.



You could have seen it coming.  The politicians enrolled these supporters into powerful special interests to help them with their reelection.  And now their supporters are demanding that the checks keep coming.



In a perfect world, I'd say to hell with this ungrateful recipients of government loot.  For make no mistake, every dollar poured into the pocket of a government worker or a government benefit recipient has been obtained by force.



But reality is not as simple as that.



Our liberal friends have built their supporters up into a formidable political force.  That was the easy part.  The hard part is going to be persuading these lottery winners that you don't get to win the lottery every day of the year.  The tricky thing is going to be getting these folks to retreat without burning the place down as they leave.



Some politician is going to figure out how to do this, and I suspect that the key is understanding that most government employees--nurses, teachers, social workers--are women.  Let's face it, women in government, unionized as they are, aren't like the miners and the railroad workers and the auto workers that defined the union movement.  Women just don't do rioting in the streets.



Still, a grand betrayal of all the progressive promises is heading right down the tracks.  It is essential that the blame is put right where it belongs, on the liberals that promised that government could conjure up wonders.



What a crock.  Government is force.  If you want to do something practical, something productive and compassionate, perhaps, then you don't get government involved.  You rely on the cooperative nature of the social animal we call homo sapiens.




Meanwhile we've got the new Praetorian Guard trying to scare us into coughing up more money, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.

The Patronizing Dr. Warren

Liberals were famously irritated in the 2000s by the Texas swagger of George W. Bush.  You can understand why.  Elimination of the male macho personality type is precisely what liberalism is all about.  It is male aggression that brought us all those wars, not to mention domestic violence and gay bashing.



Judging by the response to Elizabeth Warren's riff about the wonders of government, it is clear that she represents an equivalent hot button for conservatives.



It is exactly the patronizing professorial attitude so common in liberals like Dr. Warren that drives conservatives to donate thousands of dollars to their favorite conservative candidates.



In fact you could say that both President Obama and Dr. Warren are poster boys for a particular type of liberal, the Pauline Kael type that couldn't understand why Nixon won the 1972 election, because she didn't know anyone who voted for him.  They live so completely in a liberal enclave that they never articulate in their speech the least notion that anyone thinks differently or needs persuading to the glory of liberal thought.



The beauty of Warren's comment that "nobody in this country that gets rich on his own" is its gloriously reactionary atavism.  She makes the common liberal mistake of conflating society and government.  To get rich, she patronizingly says, requires roads, educated workers, police, fire, and the armed forces. No kidding!



Then the pull quote:

But part of the underlying social contract is that you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid that comes along.

 Quite right.  As the Dalai Lama puts it, we need karuna, a directed altruism of action, issuing from a personal commitment to compassionate action.  Obviously that issues from a personal commitment in the individual.



The mistake liberals make that they assume that their compassion, directed into government programs, is the same thing, or the closest thing to real, personal compassion.



But we conservatives know that the liberal notion of government compassion is an atavistic holdover from the old days when society and government were not yet differentiated. In the ancestral village, government is not yet a bureaucracy.  Government is the gathering of the elders, carrying the opinion of the whole community.  When the community does something it is truly "we."



But in the modern era we have differentiated the spheres of human socialization.  We have government as the department of force.  It says you must.  We have the market economy as the department of stuff.  It says we could.  We have various religions, secular and transcendent, in the department of meaning.  It says we should.  We have decided that we need a separation of powers in society to avoid dangerous concentrations of power.



This is not hard.  In the modern era when you combine the economy and government you get crony capitalism, as in crony Solyndra, crony LightSquared, and crony Goldman Sachs.  When you combine religion and government you get totalitarianism, as in Hitler, Mao, Castro.  When you combine religion and capitalism you get liberals bossing business around.



The great problem of the current age is that liberals refuse to understand that their model of expert-led bureaucracy is flushing society down the toilet.  Modern society is much bigger than that; there just aren't enough experts to supervise, and there is no way they could know enough to supervise.  Modern society is a dense network of social cooperation in which millions of individuals contribute their knowledge and their skills to the whole.



For conservatives, we must resist the temptation to put businessmen on a pedestal.  For liberals, they must resist the temptation to put government on a pedestal.



The whole point of modern society is that it is not one big thing that makes it go.  It is everything working in concert that makes it go.  And until our liberal friends accept that, this country is in for a long nightmare of failure and conflict.

Obama Not Good On Economics

Now that the dam has broken on the Obama White House, we are getting our first real look at the man and his ideas--without the PR. Says The Money Illusion blogger:

It seems increasingly clear that Obama doesn’t have a good understanding of economics.  He approaches issues like a very bright non-economist using his common sense.

This is not good.  Because the whole point of economics and, for that matter, physics since Newton is that common sense doesn't do it on economics.  It would seem, from common sense, that productivity kills jobs.  You replace a man with a machine, and you lose a job.  Right?



Economics is the non-common-sense knowledge that says it ain't what you think.  The machine releases the worker for other work.  And there is plenty of other work to be done.  We've seen this process right from the start of the industrial revolution.  The workers that manned the textile factories were men that had lost their livelihood on the land.  Two centuries ago, about 80 percent of workers worked in agriculture.  Now it is less than 3 percent.  Then the factories started emptying out and manufacturing jobs started to decline.  A century ago, a huge proportion of workers worked in mining, steel, and railroads.  Now almost nobody works in those basic industries.  Yet overall Americans are much more prosperous than a century ago.



So it matters that President Obama doesn't get economics.



The bigger problem is that he doesn't get that he, or the next guy, is going to be the president that reneges on all the pretty promises about government entitlements.  Someone, and it better be soon, is going to have to reverse a century of liberal politics and cut entitlements, cut subsidies, cut labor regulation, cut environmental regulation and stop trying to gun the economy with the credit system.  The problem for Democrats is that their entire political existence is built upon entitlements, subsidies, labor "gains", environment, and cheap credit.  So if President Obama does fixes the economy he loses his base.



Right now the president seems to be focusing on the need to head off a primary challenge from the left. No doubt once he is sure of the nomination he will pivot to the center.



But the problem for the president that doesn't understand economics is that when he pivots to the center there may not be anyone there.  The president has been laying down a record for the last 30 odd months, and that record is spend, tax, regulate.  The American people want jobs, jobs, jobs.  And they mean jobs in the private sector, jobs that aren't procured by crony capitalism.



Any voter that thinks that Obama will deliver on jobs in the private sector any time soon deserves what he gets.

Buffet's Secretary Betrayed

Let's accept the argument of Warren Buffet, that his secretary pays a bigger share of her income in federal taxes than he does.  Why would that be?



The reason is that his secretary pays payroll taxes and he does not, or at least not so much.



But what are these payroll taxes?  They are usually characterized not as taxes merely, but as insurance premiums on the government's social insurance schemes, programs to protect ordinary people from the vicissitudes of life: old age, sickness, and poverty.



So Warren Buffet's secretary pays a ton of money to the government so she can collect Social Security and Medicare.  Gee, it's a pity that Social Security and Medicare are bankrupt, so Warren's secretary may not get what she was promised.



But that is not all.  Warren Buffet pays a ton of taxes to the government on his secretary's behalf.  We are talking about the employer share of FICA taxes and stuff like unemployment tax and state worker's comp. (By the way Warren:  Do those business taxes count as her taxes or your taxes?)



Looked at all together these taxes paid either by Warren Buffet's secretary or by Warren himself are taxes to fund the government's social insurance programs.  The idea is that ordinary people aren't powerful enough or sensible enough to make provision for old age, for unemployment or to insure themselves against injury.  So the government must take taxes from them and their employer in order to give it back to them, less a processing fee.



Is that really true?  Are ordinary people not capable of making sensible provisions against the future?



Of course the problem is not just that the government is doing things that people could be doing on their own.  Politicians use these programs to make promises to voters.  They say: Yeah!  We are going to force employers to give you more time off when you have a baby.  They also raise the cost of doing business in a dozen different ways. All of these measures are either wages that could have been paid to the employee but have been diverted to a government program, or they just make the cost of hiring people more expensive.



Unfortunately all of these programs are rife with inefficiency and with cheating.  It's the free-rider problem, the basic problem of any society.  People scam their way onto disability programs.  Medical providers scam Medicare.  Ordinary honest people get cheated out of a portion of their contributions.



The person I feel for is Warren Buffet's secretary.  After all she's not a rich billionaire like Warren Buffet.  Whatever happens, he's got enough money to take care of himself and his family.  But the ordinary people of the middle class cannot afford to waste resources. like a rich guy.  They work because they have to, not because they are brilliant stock pickers.  They hope one day to send the kids to college and then to retire.  All the wasteful government programs they are forced to fund with their taxes make it harder to make ends meet and to achieve financial security. And the wasteful programs are supposed to help them!



One day, the ordinary middle class is going to wake up and realize that they have been betrayed.  They will realize that all the social insurance programs are social insurance in name only.  The programs are really just means by which politicians bid for votes.  The idea is to buy the votes of people by offering them material benefits.  The whole transaction is in the promise and in the vote.  If the promise actually gets enacted, if the monies actually help people, it is just an accident.  Almost certainly some special interest will get in line to get the money first, and almost certainly the money won't be there in 20, 30 years.



Almost certainly, the ordinary person would have done better to save money themselves rather than let the politicians get their hands on the money.



So the question about Warren Buffet and his secretary is upside down.  The question is not whether Warren should pay more in taxes.  The question is why his secretary is forced to pay so much.



Why should Warren Buffet's secretary be forced to contribute to so many programs that serve her so poorly?

Obama's Cunning Plan

Now that President Obama has turned sharp left with his tax-the-rich rhetoric, the question is this.



Is he crazy, or crazy like a fox?



If he's crazy like a fox it's because he and his campaign operatives see the danger of a candidate coming out of the left to challenge him.  He needs to keep the left-wing base on side until it is too late to challenge him in next winter's primaries.  On that view he would pivot to the center in mid-February and everyone would live happily ever after.



But is there a danger of a serious candidate from the left?  A candidate that will challenge America's first black president? I can't see a candidate from the left doing any more than embarrass the president. Might he not be more vulnerable on the right in his party?  Such as a Clinton candidacy?



The other possibility is that this is "Baldrick's Cunning Plan," a stupid panicky effort of the kind often proposed by Blackadder's rather slow-witted TV sidekick.



The panic notion is supported by the recent tittle-tattle book about life inside the Obama White House, Confidence Men by Ron Suskind.  It's the first solid indication of just what kind of a leader we have in the White House.  The New York Times reviewer puts it this way.

Mr. Obama emerges in this volume as an oddly passive chief executive whose modus operandi was to sketch out overarching principles, “wait until others had painted in those outlines with hard proposals” and then “step down from his above-the-fray perch to close the deal.”

If this is true then it tells us that Obama is not a "commander" personality type.  It means that he is likely to get confused and overwhelmed when the going gets rough.



When people get in a tight spot they find it difficult to think clearly and decisively.  Some people are just good at keeping their head cool in a crisis.  Most of us need training so we can overcome our fear when the bullets are whistling by our ears.  That's why the military trains its people to act on instinct.  That's why people who have studied airplane emergencies tell us that the crew always reverts to their training when the going gets tough.  Small wonder that when airlines put their pilots in the simulator they throw emergencies at them.



Now let us think about what President Obama would do in a tough spot.  He doesn't seem to be the decisive type.  And he doesn't have a lot of executive experience in dealing with tough situations.  He would revert to what he knew, his basic belief system, the tried and true.  But for President Obama the "tried and true" is the belief system of his left-wing youth and young adulthood.



We have seen peeks at his basic belief system when the president has been caught short by an unexpected question.  When Joe the Plumber asked him about taxing the rich, he talked about "spreading the wealth."  When Charles Gibson asked about higher taxes on capital gains, he talked about "fairness."



My guess is that the president is getting really overwhelmed, now that things are going seriously wrong with his presidency.  So he is instinctively going back to his training and his many years of experience on the left and in the lefty foundation world.



That stirs hopes in me of a blowout election in 2012.  We've had pretty close elections in recent years because the parties have been pretty careful not to scare the moderate horses in the middle.  But it looks like a panicked Obama might stampede those nervous moderates.



Could we have a 60-40 election in 2012?  Don't count it out.

Our "Circumlocution" President

Back in the dawn of the modern era, in the middle of the 19th century, Charles Dickens nailed modern government in Little Dorrit.  Dickens invented the Circumlocution Office, staffed by the Barnacles and the Stiltstockings, and the motto of the office was "How Not To Do It."



Decades from now, I predict, professors will be using the Obama administration as an awful example of "How Not To Do It."



Of course, for liberals, the example will be how the Obama administration managed not to do it to the greedy bankers.  There's a lovely piece today from New York magazine, a dialog between Frank Rich and Adam Moss about the new White House tell-all book Confidence Men by Ron Suskind.  Their big problem with Obama is that in the chaos of conflict between Tim Geithner and Larry Summers the Obama administration failed to reform the financial system and nail the greedy bankers.  That's the liberal narrative of course, that the financial meltdown was all due to greedy bankers, and Rich and Moss are sticking to it.



For conservatives, of course, the "How Not To Do It" of the Obama administration lies in its liberal folly. It failed to realize that the financial mess required a leaning of government and an all out effort to get the economy restarted.  Instead the Obamis went with a wasteful stimulus that mainly went into the pockets of Democratic supporters, and terrified all job creators with higher costs and taxes in ObamaCare and swingeing environmental regulations.



In back of all this is the bigger question, the monstrous betrayal of the American people, the cynical pandering for votes that has left the US bankrupt and will require the reckless promises on health care and pensions to be rolled back.



Then there is the devastating indictment from Reuven Brenner on education.

In fact the much discussed increasing inequality in the U.S. and other Western countries may be, in part, explained exactly by the fact that governments subsidize so extensively high-schools and universities.  After all, the best and brightest benefit disproportionately from these subsidies.

If someone is not thrilled about math and the sciences, but is excited to repair cars, and would like to open a garage, the government doesn’t offer him a $50,000 to $100,000 subsidy.  Yet the bright kid gets just such subsidy – and more – when studying math, engineering, biology, or medicine.

The problem is not just that the liberal elite has skewed the education system by sluicing money in favor of the kind of education they want for their kids, but that the whole economy is riddled with this privilege and subsidy regime, in which the $500 million load guarantee to bankrupt solar panel manufacturer Solyndra is just the poster boy.



One fine day, the educated class has got to wake up and admit to themselves that they know nothing about the economy or education or anything else, and that their high-handed efforts to make it more fair just ends up encouraging rent seekers to lobby for favors.



I keep saying: it probably had to be like this.  The only way for everyone to realize that government is lousy at everything except simple force--keeping the peace--is to have the government try all the cool stuff, from education to pensions to health care to welfare, and then fail miserably at it.



And that is where we are at with this failed "Circumlocution" president.  We are in the middle of a great demonstration that government is always and everywhere a great Circumlocution Office, filled with place-holders like the Barnacle family, hanging on like grim death to their sinecures, and pathetically devoted to the practice of "How Not To Do It."

Yes, Conservatives are Radical, Dr. Krugman

Yes, Dr. Krugman.  We conservatives are radicals.  I'm glad you noticed.  We want change at the root.  As you write in your column:

[M]odern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the “common hazards of life” through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

I couldn't have said it better myself.  You see, we conservatives believe that when society "acting through the government" works to mitigate the common hazards of life, it diminishes people and damages society.  We believe passionately that society should act to mitigate the common hazards of life.  We just believe these things should be done through people, not through government.



Conservatives think that the mitigation of the common hazards of life is one of the basic functions of society, but that society, that is, people working together collectively, must cooperate together to do this.



Conservatives believe that when government is deputized to do this, when these mitigations of the common hazards of life are organized by government force in government taxes and government spending then the whole of society is put at hazard.  Humans are social animals, not social slaves.



Social Security: It is common knowledge that Social Security discourages people from saving for their old age.  That's a double harm, because it makes people more dependent and it reduces the opportunities for young people created by older peoples' savings.  Now it's going broke, and betraying the people it was meant to help.



Unemployment insurance: People that receive unemployment payments don't look for work very hard.  After all, it's not their money they are spending.  And unemployment insurance costs many employers a bundle.  For instance in Washington State in construction it can go up to 6 percent.  Imagine if that money went into a personal account for the worker.  Unemployment insurance is not insurance; it is an encouragement for free-riders.



Medicare, Medicaid:  These programs are going to bust the budget, because the programs give away a lot of free services.  The only way to reform them is to get the government out of them and start to make everyone pay for routine care up front.  Anyone who, e.g., smoke cigarettes, can afford to pay a little more on their health care.



Viewed from the conservative perspective the great social programs that liberals are so proud of represent a monstrous betrayal.  After promising the moon to the workers we are now facing the fact that the promises cannot be redeemed.  Modest, ordinary people that put their faith in politicians are going to be screwed.



Imagine:  Suppose that Social Security had been a proper savings program from the start.  That means that many people of modest means would have saved a significant capital sum that they could pass on to their children.  But not with Social Security.  Suppose Medicare/Medicaid were true insurance programs with realistic deductibles and co-pays.  Why then the grannies would be ferociously shopping for the best prices and the best service.  That's a big difference from right now where they care only about the service and not about the price.  The two programs are going to eat the budget, so there will have to be cuts, and sooner rather than later.  And without the government programs that let prosperous people off the hook, then we could all work together to make sure that people that have come upon hard times "through no fault of their own" could be properly helped.



Worst of all, after the liberal politics of the last three generations we now have an entitlement society where people expect to get a ton of services for free--because it's their right.  That is not society.  That is looting.  The health of any society depends on the amount that people are prepared to put into it, not by compulsion from taxes or from forced labor, but from their own cooperative spirit.  Liberals have managed, "in the last three generations" to destroy that cooperative spirit and turn the society of voluntary association into a selfish grab-it-and-go society.



The impression we conservatives get, Dr. Krugman, is that liberals believe that big government programs equal a compassionate society.  The facts argue otherwise.  In Makers and Takers, Peter Schweizer reports that liberals, people that believe in the welfare state, are less generous at a personal level than conservatives.  And less honest.  And more angry.  In other words, liberals are less social that conservatives.  I wonder why.



If you liberals really believe that government spending equals societal compassion, Dr. Krugman, I've got a bridge to sell you.