Obama Won't Talk

I always say that you can tell what you are good at with one simple test.  What do you like to do at 9:00am on Monday?  If you dread getting back to work at that moment, then you know something important about yourself.  You are in the wrong business.



There's a reason why I'll never make a good politician.  I don't like to get on the phone at 9:00am on Monday and talk to people.  And neither, it appears, does President Obama.  That's not me saying that.  It's MSNBC's Chris Matthews.  Says Matthews of conversations with people on Capitol Hill:

He doesn’t call. He doesn’t write. Matthews continues, “I keep asking them, when did you hear [from the president] last? Silence. He doesn’t like their company.”

When he first got elected as Governor of California, Ronald Reagan's aides pushed him in a different direction.  Forget about going home at five pm, they said:

You have to get to know the legislators, especially the leaders, especially the Democrats. You have to have drinks with them. Tell jokes with them. They have to get to know you, like you, and trust you.

Over at the Wall Street Journal Holman Jenkins details how his isolation worked against President Obama on the recently failed Supercommittee.  The president could have picked up the tax-increase idea floated by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) and fashioned a compromise.  But he didn't.

Mr. Obama, if he had the political creativity he credits himself with, would now pick it up and run with it, instantly redeeming the super-committee "failure" with an act of presidential leadership.

Ah yes.  Leadership.  What voters are generally looking for in a president.  But leadership, according to Ronald Reagan's aides, means getting out and talking with the players.  Because unless you get out among them, you will find it impossible to twist their arms when the moment comes to make the final push on a key piece of bipartisan legislation.



Napoleon said that in battle, the moral is to the physical as three to one.  When Gen. Sherman was marching through Georgia, his troops liked to get a look at their "Uncle Billy" to make sure that things were still all right.



When things get tough in 2012, how will Obama's troops get the same reassurance from the man that nobody knows?

Teeing Up For 2012

The Supercommittee, writes John Podhoretz, was never meant to work.  Or rather, it was designed to kick the can down the road once more.  And it did.  Forget about "dysfunction."  The debt ceiling debate of July 2011 demonstrated the current stalemate between the two parties.  Republicans don't have the power to change, and Democrats have the power to stand pat.  Only an election can decide it.

The central dispute between the camps of the supercommittee — the Republicans wanted no tax increases to stimulate economic growth and entitlement cuts to shrink the size of government, while Democrats wanted tax hikes on the wealthy — will certainly be the central debate of the upcoming national election.

And that is as it should be.



It is also right and proper, writes Yuval Levin, that the Democratic Party should be demonstrating the two sides of progressive liberalism: its technocratic side in the yearnings of people like Peter Orsag for less democracy, and its populist side in the envious ravings of the OWS crowd.



Yuval proposes two types of liberalism, the conservative liberalism of constitutionalism and limited government and the progressive liberalism of progress towards an ideal society.

One view, which has always been the less common one, holds that liberal institutions were the product of countless generations of political and cultural evolution in the West, which by the time of the Enlightenment, and especially in Britain, had begun to arrive at political forms that pointed toward some timeless principles in which our common life must be grounded, that accounted for the complexities of society, and that allowed for a workable balance between freedom and effective government given the constraints of human nature. Liberalism, in this view, involves the preservation and gradual improvement of those forms because they allow us both to grasp the proper principles of politics and to govern ourselves well.



The other, and more common, view argues that liberal institutions were the result of a discovery of new political principles in the Enlightenment — principles that pointed toward new ideals and institutions, and toward an ideal society. Liberalism, in this view, is the pursuit of that ideal society.

The Tea Party, a popular movement to restrain government, is today's instantiation of conservative liberalism, and the Democrats, with technocrats and populists blazing away, exactly represent what you would expect from progressive liberalism: frustration in the technocrats that they can't execute their well-crafted plans, and envious rage from the street that the ideal society hasn't happened yet.



Everyone thinks that next Fall the decision will be a pretty close-run thing.  But I don't.  I think we are going to see a 55-45 Republican win.  It's true that the president is stirring up his base and lambasting the Republicans at every turn and he is moving the needle on his popularity.  But the problem is that the president doesn't have a plan that gets us out of the jam.  Raise taxes?  Steady as she goes?  You must be joking.



The American people are frightened, and are looking for someone to lead them forward.  They know that government is too big, and they know that we need jobs.  Obama's plan isn't working, and it doesn't look as if things are going to be much better by next fall.  The Euro debt debacle will take care of that.



But don't think that a resolution of the Euro debt mess would help the president.  If the Europeans turn the corner then the hot money presently sitting in US debt as a safe haven will be looking at Europe for safety.  That would not be good for US Treasury debt yields, and it would not be good for President Obama's reelection.

Supercommittee Fail

The Supercommittee failure was predicted by Newt Gingrich back in August, according to Rush Limbaugh.  The reason? All those members of Congress weren't going to let a committee of 12 make all their decisions for them.



But bigger than that is President Obama's nasty bind.  Let's assume that he and the Democratic High Command know that entitlements must be reformed.  Let's assume that they also know that healthy, sustainable entitlements are vital for the core Democratic vote, the lower income folks who don't have capital assets.  So why isn't the president out in front proposing a practical, sensible reform of entitlements?



Because to do would demoralize the troops.  It would admit that the Democrats have betrayed their base, promising benefits that cannot be paid out to the party faithful.  President Obama is planning a reelection campaign in which he fights for his base against the mean, Do Nothing Republicans.  Admitting that the Democrats have overpromised on welfare-state benefits doesn't fit the narrative.



Moreover, there is the first law of government checks.  The shortest measurable time interval in the world is the time between someone getting a government check and deciding he deserves it.  Any cuts in government benefits are hugely unpopular.  Because the people receiving them reckon they deserve them.



Maybe, one day, Democrats will vote for reform of entitlements.  But, like the Europeans, they will only do it in the context of a threatened sovereign debt default.  Because in their political calculus, only the end of the world justifies cutting government benefits.



You and I can argue about the morality of big government.  We can wail about the social destruction that government "social protection" programs cause.  But practical politicians don't care about that.  They only care about the next election, and elections are won by promising loot to your supporters.



Reform of the welfare state, if it comes before total financial meltdown, will only occur in the context of a moral movement of reform, something like the anti-slavery movement of the 19th century.  And even then, it may not succeed without violence.  The fight over slavery ended in war because slavery was very profitable, and getting more so.  There was no way that the South could be persuaded on the moral merits of emancipation.  They were making too much money. And they had also seen how emancipation had ruined the sugar planters of the British West Indies.



I'm afraid that the same is true about the welfare state.  It's likely that the beneficiaries will want to fight to retain their benefits.  And judging from the way that the Democrats have given the Occupy movement a wave and a nod, it's unlikely that Democrats will stand in the way of a violent movement to protect "our" benefits.

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.