When Does Justice Become Freeloading?

In the old days of the agricultural age, justice suited the ruling landowner class.  Nobody thought about the needs of the agricultural laborer.  The only thing was to make sure that he paid dearly when he poached a rabbit or stole a sheep.

Even divines like Martin Luther were clear that the new liberty was for the townsman.  The peasants should obey their landlords.

So when the modern era dawned some time in the 18th century, your average man was pretty well held down by a yoke of injustice.  There was slavery, there was serfdom, there was indentured servitude, you name it.  In the new conception of justice, that all men are created equal, the old hierarchical ethos no longer applied.

If we take the words of Robert William Fogel, a scholar of slavery, there are several things wrong with slavery, when viewed from our modern society.  In Without Contract or Consent he sets forth a four count indictment of slavery:

1. "Slavery permitted one group of people to exercise unrestrained personal domination over another group of people."
2. "Denial of economic opportunity."
3. "Denial of citizenship... the utter exclusion of slaves from civil and political rights."
4. "Denial of cultural self-identification."

Obviously these are the words of a liberal, but they resonate with me, not just in the case of slavery but in all questions of justice.  For in modern politics, the question of justice is usually decided by analysis of these four points but at a less extreme situation.  If there is a question of injustice, then people are asking these questions: Is domination a problem? Is economic opportunity constrained?  Is access to civil and political rights diminished?  Is cultural bullying a problem?

Our liberal friends are experts at this sort of thing and they have unerringly focused on the one thing that validates the four questions.  Is the person or group in question a victim?  If he/she or the group is a victim then the power of the state can be deployed legitimately to redress the victim's grievance or claim of injustice.

But here is a thought.  Let us categorize degrees of victimhood.  Let us say that slavery is the worst.  Then would come, in descending order, serfdom, political repression, economic exploitation, and last of all marginalization.

The question that conservatives ask is whether government is always the appropriate vehicle to redress these grievances.  For our liberal friends it goes without saying that all of it, down to marginalization, can and should be addressed by legislation and government programs.  But conservatives aren't so sure.  We look at economic exploitation and say, well, if there is no serfdom or political repression then a free laborer is free to leave an exploitative situation.  If you get the government involved in fighting economic exploitation you end up with collusion between big business and big labor, economic regulation, crony capitalism, and Solyndra.  You get duelling exploitation.  If we set up a government program to provide pensions for the disabled, then all of a sudden, people find ways of qualifying as disabled.   Government employees seem to be expert at this kind of work.

And as for marginalization, which is worse, the marginalization of immigrants by conservatives that tell them to get with the program and Americanize or liberals that ruthlessly marginalize conservatives at the university with speech codes?  Freedom means that people are free to deal or not to deal with other people.  At what point does the freedom not to deal with someone become a marginalization or repression that requires the intervention of the state?

The problem with empowering the state to interfere at the lower levels of the slavery, serfdom, political repression, economic exploitation, marginalization axis is that people are human.  They naturally think that government action is warranted when their friends are damaged.  But they are quite unmoved when people they don't like are harmed.

One big reason for our gigantic government is that politics has recognized no limit on government action.  If people are hurting, said President Bush, then the government must help. "We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move."

But that means that limited government is out the window.

But if someone is hurting then surely we must do something to help.  The question is: who is we?  Is the the government?  Is it the neighbors?  Is it business?  Is it "society"?  Our liberal friends are too quick to assume that if someone is hurting, then government must move.  But it would be better for all of us if, instead of government, Americans moved.  Because society, at bottom, comes down to humans acting sociably.  When government moves, people don't need to, and their social instincts atrophy.

It comes down to the basic truth about government: government is force.  So in every question about justice or marginalization, the question comes down to this: Is force the only way we can deal with this?  Because when you use force, then the four count indictment above may apply.  Never mind what the action does for the "victim."  Does it end up dominating someone else?  Or denying them economic opportunity?  Or abridging their political and civil rights? Or their cultural self-identification?  Chances are that it will, so we have to judge whether the cost is worth the benefit.

Because every time someone gets something from the government, the chances are that it amounts to freeloading.

The Coming Labor Split

When is the white working class going to get it?  That's the question I asked in my latest American Thinker piece.  You can't thrive when you are endlessly running to government for help.  Because in the end, the government stiffs you.



So yeah, government support of labor unions helped some workers for a while--until the unionized steel industry went broke and the auto industry needed a bailout.



Now of course we have the Democratic Party joined at the hip with public sector unions.  And private sector workers are getting the shaft.  President Obama recently "postponed" the Keystone XL pipeline that is designed to carry crude oil from Canada to the refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.  He sided with environmentalists and public sector workers against private sector workers.



The hype over "green jobs" is of course at attempt to paper over the fact that today's Democratic Party is radically anti jobs.  Daniel Henniger lays out the reality.

The Democratic promise to private blue-collar workers has been that the party would use its clout to in effect "manufacture" new jobs out of public budgets—high-speed rail projects, school construction and the like.

But really what hope is there for that, given the budgetary death struggles in the deep Blue states, where the Democrats are committed to supporting their public sector union buddies to the last tax dollar? "There isn't going to be anything large left over for "public-private" job schemes."  As in.  There is no more money!



Sooner or later, private-sector blue-collar workers are going to have to get it, that the Democratic Party is no friend of the working man.



Yesterday the news came through that the Seaway pipeline between Oklahoma and the Gulf had been sold.  The new owners planned to reverse the flow so that it will now flow from Oklahoma to the Gulf. Crude prices and the stocks of oil companies invested in the new oilfields in the Dakotas immediately reacted.



This is how energy policy really works.  Capitalists react to changed market conditions and create jobs by responding to the needs of consumers.  Whenever government gets into it, it always ends up in crony capitalism and epic failures, as in Solyndra and the fatuity of California's high-speed rail to nowhere.



Come on in, workers.  Capitalism is great and the water's fine.  Leave the Democratic Party to its last ditch defense of the indefensible public-sector bloat.

Beyond Constitutionality on ObamaCare

Columnist David Harsanyi is in a foul mood as he contemplates ObamaCare lumbering up to the Supreme Court for a constitutionality test.   Never mind the constitutionality of forcing Americans to buy health insurance, he writes.  It's the whole process that got us here: the lies, the corrupt process, and now the fact that an ObamaCare cheerleader sits on the Supreme Court.

Now, numerous news organizations have falsely reported that the Supreme Court agreed this week "to decide the fate" of Barack Obama's health care policy. Fortunately, the fate of Obamacare can still be decided by voters and -- more likely, in time -- by its overwhelming fiscal and moral failure. The court does not historically like to strike down federal legislation. Those who oppose Obamacare might hope for the best in July, but rather than stake their argument solely on the constitutionality question, they should be prepared to fight on grounds of bad policy and corrupt process.

Sooner or later we are going to have to confront the whole of the welfare state and its "springtime for freeloaders."  It's appropriate that an age that rejected the notion of divine justice, that God will get you even if earthly policemen and judges don't, has reverted to an older, crueler form of social control: the blunt force of government.  Because that is the grand theory of the welfare state: Force.



The reason that humans first invented divine justice, according to Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct, is that it is much better to have God deal with freeloaders than society, for with God you don't need policemen and jailers.



In the old hunter-gatherer days, freeloaders were controlled by the "force" of divine justice, but in the agricultural age real force was needed to keep the agricultural surplus away from robbers and brigands, so we got the warrior landowners to enforce property rights and protect farmers from thieves.



Capitalism came along and changed the rules again.  Instead of divine justice or land barons it offered freedom.  If you didn't trust someone, you were free not to deal with him: freeloaders beware.



A lot of people were scared to death by the new freedom.  What if my employer just fires me on a whim?  What if my best worker ups and quits?  So we got a new birth of compulsion.  Activists decided that government had to fill in the gaps in private education.  So now we have a government monster that fails to educate the majority of students.  Even at the top end, half of college freshmen need remedial courses.  Instead of mutual aid and charity, with the discernment to pick out the freeloaders from the honest folk coming on hard times "through no fault of their own" we have government welfare with qualification rules that the poor have become expert in scamming.  Instead of a flexible, adaptable health care system we have a government monstrosity that is eating up the budget.



The fundamental truth about social animals is that social behavior reduces the need for force.  You can't have social animals if everything is decided by force.  But with the welfare state we have regressed to a pre-social community.  For in the welfare state everything is decided by politics, and the decisions of politics are fast-frozen into bureaucratic rules.  Unfortunately there is an unavoidable truth about this.  Politics is power, government is force.  By deciding societal matters by force we revert to a pre-social society where everyone is a freeloader unless restrained by the police and the enforcement officers.



It's a tragedy that an age that invented a stunning system of social cooperation without force decided that it was much happier living under the knout of the politician and the bureaucrat.

Obama's Keystone XL Punt

One of the hardest to bear of the many liberal hypocrisies is the idea that liberals are trying to save the environment.  If only they were!



In reality, liberals are like Siddhartha Gautama, the young Indian princeling and upper-class ascetic, who decided to dump wifey and kids and princely burdens for a life of contemplation and enlightenment.  They are ramming their religion down our throats, the religion of upper-class asceticism.  It goes something like this.  We are well-to-do educated chappies, and we have found that getting more stuff doesn't make us happy.  So we have decided that you chaps shouldn't have any more stuff either.



President Obama is the leader of the liberal upper-class ascetics in America and his job is to make sure that the great unwashed don't get out of hand and build stuff to create jobs and prosperity.  That would disturb the liberal vision of everyone living simply so others could simply live.  So he punted on second down on the Keystone XL pipeline that's designed to get oil from Alberta to the gulf state refineries in the US.  Apparently the pipeline is routed through the Nebraska sand hills and a pipeline rupture might harm sensitive aquifers.  Wouldn't want to upset lefty enviros right before the presidential election.



According to liberals, we need regulation so that we can do the science on technical projects.  But of course, in reality the regulation serves as a perfect vehicle for liberals to legislate their morality on the rest of us.  The result is a complete mess in the energy industry and crony green capitalism as entrepreneurs get the message and massage the liberal pols in a pay for play deal that would make the old robber barons blanch.



The same thing applies everywhere that liberals are active.  There's education, a complete mess, that is generating high-school graduates that can't write and college graduates that can't get jobs.  Liberals want government-dominated health care, as if it isn't government power that has screwed up health care this half century and more.



Rich Lowry writes about the comical side of all this.  President Obama tells us that we don't do the big things any more, like build the Golden Gate Bridge.  We have become lazy and soft in recent decades, apparently.  If only.



If we don't build Golden Gate XL bridges, it is because liberals are standing in the courthouse door.  If we are lazy and soft it is because liberals have forced a welfare state on us that has become springtime for freeloaders.  If we have an energy problem it is because anti-science liberals have prevented common-sense energy development in favor of pie-in-the-sky green energy.  If we have an entitlement problem it is because liberals refuse to sign on to a solution.  They would rather demagogue about "saving Medicare as we know it" and win the next election.



Every political dynasty begins in vigor and reform.  Every political dynasty ends up frozen in fear and unable to do the simple necessary things to get things done.  Unfortunately, we have not yet reached the  end-game of dynastic liberalism. Liberals are still powerful enough to stop change and reform, but the American people aren't yet angry enough to sweep them aside onto the ash-heap of history.

Obama Brings Liberal Stereotypes Back

The great theme of the Clinton presidency was the effort to hide the liberal stereotypes that had sent liberals to the political wilderness.  The only way for a Democrat to get elected, the Clintons believed, was by keeping a distance from "liberal, liberal, liberal."  But now Obama has gone full frontal nudity and exhibited all the offensive the liberal traits.  Yuval Levin enumerates them at the Weekly Standard.

1. The Big Spender. Liberals like to shame us into making "investments" but "investments" are wasteful spending by any other name.


2. The Incompetent Economist.  Liberals want to have their cake and eat it too on the economy.  The result is the 1930s Great Depression, the 1970s Great Inflation, and the 2010s Great Recession.


3. The Bureaucratic Technocrat.  Liberals believe you can cheat the market with regulations and subsidies.  It always ends in tears.  See Hayek.


4. The Big Taxer.  It is amazing that the Democrats are going full out on this.


5. The Class Warrior.  Once you unleash the Big Taxer you need the Class Warrior to stigmatize the rich and make the American people forget that everyone pays taxes.


6. The Cultural Elitist.  Keep quiet there in the back of the bus or we may make an example of you.


7. The Peacenik Protestor.  Given how much the American people hated this chap the last time around, it's a bit strange that Democrats think he'll do them any good with the #OCCUPY movement.

For the veteran conservative it seems incredible that the Obamis could think they could win with this combination.  You start to doubt yourself and wonder if the Obamis know something you don't.



Most likely, we are seeing a generational  thing.  It was raised at the time of the Crash of 2008.  Financial crashes come only once or twice a century.  They occur because nobody now working was around the last time.  You have to think that the Obamis, earning their chops in the Hyde Park liberal enclave, just never talked to an ordinary American.  So they will have to learn the lessons of the 1960s the hard way.



Marx wrote that: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."



He forgot to add that the third time, history repeats itself as a reality show.

Krugman: Welfare State Not To Blame!

Well that's a relief.  The New York Times' Paul Krugman assures us that the welfare state is not at the bottom of the current Euro crisis.  Some countries with big social protection expenditures like Germany are not in trouble, he tells us.  Anyway, back when the Euro was first proposed, a lot of conservatives were for it.



Then there is austerity.

The other thing you need to know is that in the face of the current crisis, austerity has been a failure everywhere it has been tried: no country with significant debts has managed to slash its way back into the good graces of the financial markets. For example, Ireland is the good boy of Europe, having responded to its debt problems with savage austerity that has driven its unemployment rate to 14 percent. Yet the interest rate on Irish bonds is still above 8 percent — worse than Italy.

Of course, he has a point.  But I would argue the bigger point.  Let us borrow a principle from environmentalism to do this: the Precautionary Principle.



The fact is that modern government pushes the economic system as hard as it can.  Partly the reason is to get cheap credit.  Partly the reason is to goose the economy to get revenues.  Partly the reason is to get out of a jam.  All of this violates the sacred Precautionary Principle, which says that you should know the outcome of technological actions on the environment before you barrel in.  How come that the party of the Precautionary Principle got us into such a jam with its non-environmental policies?  Surely the Precautionary Principle can be applied to all of life.



Instead what we get, every day, is some new subsidy program that just bandages some arbitrary economic wound.



Today is Veterans Day, and we are celebrating a veterans jobs bill that will give businesses a tax credit for hiring veterans.  It passed the US Senate on November 10.  It's nice to help veterans, but it would be better to have a solid stable economy in which all Americans can look for jobs and 9 percent of Americans aren't out of work.



Probably we won't get an economy like that until we have a proper separation of economy and state.  We all worship at the altar of the separation of church and state, although everyone wants his religion endorsed by the government.  Still, one of the defining ideas of the modern era is to separate throne and altar, to divide the powers of force and moral persuasion.  In the agricultural era the condominium of secular and religious power was endlessly abused, and as soon as God died, the idea got reborn in the modern secular religions like socialism and fascism.



Government makes a complete mess of the economy, because government is force and the economy relies on completely different principle: trust, the freedom of employment at will and consuming at will, and submission to the "creative destruction" of the marketplace.



And that is the problem at the bottom of the Euro crisis.  Everyone is busy trying to get the government to support their pet plan.  But if there was any virtue in those "pet plans" they would get funding without the intervention of government.



The current financial crisis represents the bonfire of the pet plans.  Some of them are subsidy plans like Fannie and Freddie.  Some of them are due to unaffordable pension and health care plans.  Some of them are just bad luck.



But there is no excuse for any country to have a National Debt over about 20 percent except after a bruising war.  A big National Debt is just asking for trouble.  And it will come.

It's the Freeloading, Stupid

It seems so stupid the way that tin-pot dictators screw up their nations' economies.  Don't they get it that debt default and inflation cause untold misery to millions?

Megan McArdle recalls how she, as an economics writer, used to rail at the Third World:

And the other journalists and I would cluck our tongues and say "Why can't they do the right thing when it's so . . . bleeding . . . obvious?"

Well, now we start to get it.  It's all too easy to for politicians of any stripe to hand out promises and goodies to their supporters.  The problem comes later on when the bill comes due and the supporters start to get really angry, and refuse to admit that their freeloading benefits have got to go.  Cue Greece, Italy, California, and now Ohio.  When voters get really angry, the politicians bolt.



If you want to know how things will develop, a good example is Vallejo, California, which recently emerged from three years in bankruptcy.  Here is the report from the liberal Huffington Post.

In an article on the state of California's legendary fiscal troubles, Vanity Fair scribe Michael Lewis pins the blame for the city's economic woes squarely on public sector pensions. "Eighty percent of the city's budget—and the lion's share of the claims that had thrown it into bankruptcy," wrote Lewis, "were wrapped up in the pay and benefits of public-safety workers."

At present the courts have been reluctant to cut public pensions, so the cuts will fall elsewhere.  There will be spending cuts and the firefighters are getting a new lower pension deal.  But here is the kicker:  "some creditors [will be] only getting back as little as five percent of the full amount they are owed by the city."



That will probably be the pattern.  A lot of spending cuts in jobs and libraries.  Some public employee give-backs.  And a real haircut to the creditors.



Call this the battle of the freeloaders.  Freeloader public employees want their pensions and health care. But the number of public jobs is going to go down.  Seniors demand their entitlements.  But they are taking a haircut in low interest rates on their savings accounts and facing a haircut on their bonds.



We are humans, social animals.  We can do better than that.