What I Want From Romney

You don't get to read too much about the presumptive Republican candidate for president from the mainstream media: who is is and what he stands for.  That's because they aren't much interested in Mitt Romney and his agenda.  Those chaps have another agenda.



That's why you have to get past the mainstream media and actually look at the candidate's speeches to figure out who he is and what he means for America.  Now that Romney is the presumptive Republican candidate we can get a glimpse of how he proposes to run for president rather than run for the Republican nomination.  Our first look at his general election campaign came on Tuesday night, April 24, 2012, at Romney's victory speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, after he won primaries in five eastern states.



What I want to see is for Romney to step up to who he is.  Democrats have made a big deal about his years leading Bain Capital, as if it is shameful to be a capitalist creating new companies and trying to resurrect failing companies.  Republicans cannot continue to shy away from support of capitalism. And I want Romney to take on the "fairness" issue.  So long as Democrats can go on about fairness and not get push-back so long will the unaffordable welfare state get bigger and bigger until it collapses.  Then the real "unfairness" will start.



In Romney's Manchester speech he made a start on both these themes.  Said he, about his business experience:

Only in America could a man like my dad become governor of the state in which he once sold paint from the trunk of his car.



I’d say that you might have heard that I was successful in business. And that rumor is true. But you might not have heard that I became successful by helping start a business that grew from 10 people to hundreds of people. You might not have heard that our business helped start other businesses, like Staples and Sports Authority and a new steel mill and a learning center called Bright Horizons. And I’d tell you that not every business made it and there were good days and bad days, but every day was a lesson. And after 25 years, I know how to lead us out of this stagnant Obama economy and into a job-creating recovery!

OK.  I'd call that a start.  Here's what I'd like him to say next. I'd like him to say that his business centered around two things.  First, he helped create new start-up companies, based on new ideas, with new money.  Then he helped try to turn around and rescue companies in trouble, by reorganizing and recapitalizing.



When you do that, you are putting yourself on the line, because there are going to be failures to balance the successes.  But if you don't do something, risk something, then you can't get to success.  Here in America, we need someone like that, someone with experience in turning around failing companies.  Because the United States is not in a good place.  In fact it is in a turn-around situation; we have to change now or we risk losing it.  We need not a community-organizer-in-chief but a reorganizer-in-chief.



Then there is Romney on "fairness."

This America is fundamentally fair. We will stop the unfairness of urban children being denied access to the good schools of their choice; we will stop the unfairness of politicians giving taxpayer money to their friends’ businesses; we will stop the unfairness of requiring union workers to contribute to politicians not of their choosing; we will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve; and we will stop the unfairness of one generation passing larger and larger debts on to the next.

Now we are talking.  The basic fact of the big-government welfare state is that it is unfair.  It is a system of looting.  You get in power and then you hand out the loot to your supporters.  So the more we limit the looting, the better for all Americans.  Right now, the biggest chunk of government loot is going out to baby-boomer seniors like me.  But why?  Seniors are the richest kind.  We shouldn't be looting the younger generation for our Social Security and Medicare.  Romney doesn't mention that, of course, because he dare not.  But he does hit the Obamis where they are most vulnerable.  On lousy urban schools, run by Democrats.  On crony capitalism, giving out money to campaign contributors.  On the gigantic disaster of government employees looting the state treasuries with their unfunded pensions and retiree health care.



Jonah Goldberg is out with a new book this week on The Tyranny of Clichés.  He argues that liberals use clichés to shut down political speech.  There are two problems with this liberal habit.  First of all it stops the other guys from talking to the American people.  That's a pity.  But then it puts liberals into an idea-free cocoon.  They never get to defend their ideas in an open forum.  They are always sneaking around looking for the chance to lead with a rabbit punch.  That's a shame.  Because one day conservatives will break through to the American people with some new idea and liberals won't know how to counter it, because they have never had to honestly defend their ideas.  Maybe that is happening right now.



Mitt Romney has started out the general election campaign with some good themes.  Things can only get better from here.  Is that possible.  One of the campaign consultants working against Romney in 2008 said this.  He said that the Romney campaign in 2008 learned so fast it was scary.



What's so remarkable about that?  That is how capitalism and business works.  That is how you get to be successful in business. You learn and adapt every day or you go out of business.  Or, as Mitt Romney said in his speech: "there were good days and bad days, but every day was a lesson."

Those Big Greedy Bankers

Are bankers greedy?  Are they too big to fail?  Is it a mistake to allow banks to combine deposit and investment banking?  Yes, yes, and yes.  That's the conventional wisdom today.  And maybe the conventioneers have a point.

But all these cliches miss the main point.  After all, why was it that in the Crash of 1907 the biggest, greediest banker of them all, J.P. Morgan, ran the bailout and used his own money to bail out faltering corporations?  While in the Crash of 2008 it was the big bankers that needed bailouts with the government's TARP program?

Was Morgan greedier than the banker CEOs of 2008?  Were Chase Manhattan and J.P. Morgan bigger, relative to the market, in 2008 than in 1907?  And what about Morgan?  He was all over the place in investment banking as the chap that cleaned up the many railroad bankruptcies of the late 19th century.  And did the government's Federal Reserve System do any better in 2008 than Morgan in 1907 in righting the financial ship?

This is what we need to keep in mind when we evaluate, e.g., Warren Stephens' article in the Wall Street Journal about too-big-to-fail: "How Big Banks Threaten Our Economy."  Warren Stephens comes from the Stephens banking family of Little Rock, AR. You'll remember the name from the Clinton era.  Says he:

Five institutions control 50% of the deposits in this country. They are definitely too big to fail. In a capitalist economy, there should be no such entity. We should promote competition and innovation in the financial industry, not protect an oligopoly.

 He wants to limit banks to 5% of deposits, and break up banks currently over the 5% limit, keep $250,000 deposit insurance, and separate investment and deposit banking.  And no more bailouts.  Mr. Conventional Wisdom.



But Stephens is, in my view, missing the point.  The reason that banks went belly up in 2008 was that the government was forcing them to goose their real estate loans.  Not to mention that the inflationary anti-recessionary policy of the early 2000s encouraged borrowers to over-leverage.  The activities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac created a whole class of mortgages issued to people that couldn't afford any decline in asset prices.  Government was behind that, and a big-time political hack, James A. Johnson, campaign manager of the Mondale presidential campaign.



If we compare 2008 and 1907 we notice an important factor.  In 1907 Morgan regarded himself as the man in charge of saving the financial system.  He reckoned it was his job to fix the crash, and his job to bail out the firms teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.  In 2008 it was the government's job to do the bailout.  The result of the 1907 bailout was a restoration of the gold standard at the old parity of $20.67 per ounce.  The result of the 2008 bailout has been a significant devaluation of the dollar that may not yet be finished.



The big problem with finance is not greedy bankers and too big to fail.  The problem is that government has taken over the financial system and has ruthlessly exploited it.  With government in control the credit system is much more leveraged than in the old days.  Big banks understand that it is government that runs the system, government that sets the rules, and government that owns it.



If we want to get a financial system that is solid and stable we need to get the government out of it.  Well, not entirely because we still need the government to be able to borrow big time when we have a big time war.  But the lesson of the 20th century is that government is lousy at guarding the financial system, because it cannot resist using the financial system as a piggy-bank.



There has to be a better way.

Krugman and the Austerians

Paul Krugman, Keynesian extraordinaire, is crowing over the failure of "austerity" in Europe to reverse the economic decline.  He writes of "austerity" policies:

According to this doctrine, governments should respond to a severely depressed economy not the way the textbooks say they should — by spending more to offset falling private demand — but with fiscal austerity, slashing spending in an effort to balance their budgets.

He means, of course, the Keynesian textbooks preferred by chaps like him.  The basic idea is to keep borrowing to maintain government handouts and to print money to accommodate the borrowing.  Sooner or later the resulting inflation lifts all asset values and the credit system starts to work again.



In the alternative universe, the recession is the natural result of an inflationary boom; it is the period of adjustment after the failures of the malinvestments of the previous boom.  You can do your adjustment any way you want, by liquidating malinvestments or by printing money.  But the underwater debt has to be cleared one way or another.



The problem is that, in the European Union, the single currency has prevented the bad actors, Greece, Spain, and Ireland, from devaluing their currencies and refloating the credit system and its underwater debt.  So they have cut their budgets a little and raised taxes a little, but not enough to make it look as if they can start to lower their government debt to GDP ratio.  Markets are not stupid; they know that a rising national debt leads to default, sooner or later.



Keynesianism is not, and never has been, an economic doctrine.  It is a political doctrine, a way for the government pitcher to get out of a jam when the bases are loaded with sovereign debt.  It rewards the recipients of government benefits and debtors with the money of creditors.  How?  Debt default and inflation hit the creditor class, people with money in government debt or securities denominated in government money like dollars.



It is important to realize what a financial crash and associated recession means.  It means that the bet that a lot of people made against the future has failed.  In the case of the Crash of 2008 the bet was made by homeowners that assumed they would have the money to service their loans and cash them out at higher home resale values.  They were wrong.  Another bet was made by politicians in expanding their budgets when the good times rolled.  Well, they were wrong, too.  So now politically connected people need to cinch their belts.



The whole point of being a politically connected person, whether you are a crony capitalist or a welfare beneficiary or a senior like me getting Social Security and Medicare benefits is that you "can't" cinch your belt.  You are a victim on a fixed income: it's heat or eat.  As for the crony capitalists, they are contributing to the future with vital services like green energy and they have paid to play.  How can they be asked to contribute?



But somebody has to pay.  That is what happens in a recession.  Profits go down, wages go down.  People turn to government to help them out and reduce their losses.  But government just takes money from other people, and usually government takes money from useful activities, where people pay for products and services and spends it on less useful activities, like cutting checks for people who do nothing in return.



The politicians don't care.  They have tame economists to justify whatever they do, whether it is "austerity" or inflation or "retrenchment" or "sound money."  People like Paul Krugman.

Conservatives Are Indeed Social Darwinists

President Obama, deep in his liberal bubble, seemed to think he was hurling the worst insult in the world at Paul Ryan when he described Ryan's budget as "thinly veiled Social Darwinism."  He was relying on the notion that, ever since Richard Hofstadter and Social Darwinism in American Thought, "social Darwinism" was an ever-useful pejorative to sling at evil Republicans to send them slinking back to their whites-only country clubs.

Of course, the way that Hofstadter defined it, no doubt it is enough to intimidate practically anyone.  But seriously, conservatives should be proud to be social Darwinists.  Darwinism, as developed in The Origin of Species, merely states that the animals that survive in any habitat (particularly in boundary zones) are the animals that produce offspring that adapt best to the environment.  Darwin includes a diagram to illustrate "the probable effects of the action of natural selection through divergence of character and extinction, on the descendants of a common ancestor."

President Obama wants us to think that, without the beneficent Oz of government programs, the poor will become extinct in an "on your own" economy.   What rubbish.  Applied to human society Darwinism merely warns that its social institutions, like the species "large in its own country," are subject to the law of natural selection.  The ones that adapt best to the social and economic environment will wive and thrive; the ones that don't will wither away.  Individual people, being resourceful and energetic, will be sure to join and contribute to the thriving institutions and abandon the withering ones.  You see this occurring in the United States today as ordinary people abandon bankrupt blue states with onerous state income taxes like California and Illinois and move to red states with right-to-work laws and no state income tax.  Humans are social animals; they know that survival depends on belonging to the right collective.

Conservatism, ever since Edmund Burke, has recognized the importance of trial and error in social evolution, especially in the gradual reform of social institutions.  Capitalism and freedom provide the best social process for gradual improvement and reform, because all the time and in every way, capitalism motivates people to adapt to the changing social and economic conditions, to react to small riffles in the stream before they turn, further downstream, into a Class VI unrunnable rapids.

Indeed, there is a whole conservative subculture that has shown that conservatism is the opposite of an "on your own" society.  That is because a non welfare state society develops a rich undergrowth of mediating structures between the government and the individual that protect and nurture the individual.  In totalitarian and welfare states there is no shelter for the weak and helpless, because there is no social middle ground between the all-powerful state and the helpless individual.  You go along to get along, or else.

If conservatives are Social Darwinists, believing in an adaptable, flexible society, how should we categorize the other Big Beasts on the ideological plain: communists, fascists, and our liberal friends?  These species come in two flavors.  The communists and fascists we can call Big Bangers.  They believe in the revolutionary convulsion, the Year Zero.  Everything changes in the revolution; the old order goes out, and with it all memory and all superstitious attachment to the past.  Society is reborn from a single point, with no memory of the past, as our modern cosmologists imagine the birth of the universe 14 billion years ago.

Our liberal friends are Intelligent Designers.  Well, they are.  They believe that liberals can intelligently design modern social institutions, and that the complexity of modern society demands that an educated elite of intelligent liberals be empowered to rule the less intelligent.  Without this intelligent design, liberal believe, individuals will find themselves "on their own" and reduced to helplessness and marginalization.  Of course the science on this is settled, except for the tribe of liberal deniers.  Ever since Hayek we have known that modern society is too complex for intelligent design.  Thousands of intelligent designers in Washington DC simply cannot outperform millions of producers and consumers out in flyover country.  The situation is rather like the situation with the Intelligent Design argument for the creation of the universe.  It may just possibly be possible for God to do Intelligent Design and direct everything from the Big Bang and the cosmic constants to the fall of a sparrow.  But when it comes to Intelligent Design of health care and affordable housing and student loans, well, the most charitable judgment is that the jury is still out.

So much for the overall design of social institutions.  But the big question is: what happens when something goes wrong?  In the Big Bang, it's too bad, because once the revolution erupts and the New Era begins, that's it.  Whatever the the God of the perfect society did when he set the cosmic social constants, that's it.  Actually, the record of Big Bang societies isn't too hot.  The Bolshevik cosmic constants caused it to run down in 60 years.  The Nazi Big Bang collapsed in on itself in 12 years.  Mao's Big Bang was reversed by Deng XiaoPing after 30 years.  The Intelligent Design universe is not much better; it seems to be running down after about a century.  So what is the problem?  The problem is that the Big Bang and Intelligent Design models of society are not designed for humans to run.  They are suitable only for the divine gods, driving around heaven in their chariots, as Plato imagined.  The gods are lucky; they have two good horses pulling their chariots, but the souls of mortal charioteers have one good horse and one bad horse, and spend so much time and attention wrestling with the bad horse that they can barely glimpse what the gods can see up at the rim of heaven: Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

But conservatism is different.  It is designed with humanity in mind from the ground up.  That is why it is Social Darwinist.  It is constantly inventing new institutions and replacing old ones that fail.  You don't need an Intelligent Designer, you just need to make sure that the government is built upon the principle of the separation of powers.  The idea is to prevent one branch of government totally dominating the others, or for two branches to gang up on the other.  And more than that, you need a Greater Separation of Powers--that's my idea--so that the three great sectors of institutional society, the political, the economic, and the moral/cultural are separated.  We already have the idea of the separation of church and state, the separation of the moral/cultural and the political.  Now we need to go the next step, the separation of political and economic.  Sure, the political and the moral/cultural sectors can set the rules for the economic sector.  But it's time to tell them to stop trying to run it.  Because when they do, they make a mess of it.

The reason that our liberal friends make such a fuss about Social Darwinism is that their situation is very close to the panic fundamentalists experience with regard to The Descent of Man.  It cannot, it just cannot be true that society does not need Intelligent Designers to organize and direct the lives of Everyman.

Of course the mystery of the modern era is the great question.  Can it really be true that Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is true and that humans naturally act in a social manner because that's the best way to meet their own needs?  Conservatives admit we don't really know.  But we would really like the chance to find out--if only those liberal Intelligent Designers would stop messing up the blueprints.

Keynes a Symptom, not a Cause

The current wails about "austerity" signal the real problem with the big-government welfare state.  The Wall Street Journal properly points out that the Keynesian notion of austerity vs. growth is what Candidate Obama used to call a "false choice."

Spend more and you're for growth, even if a country raises taxes to pay for the spending. But dare to cut spending as the Germans suggest, and you're for austerity and thus opposed to growth.

This is a nonsense debate that misconstrues the real sources of economic prosperity and helps explain Europe's current mess. The real debate ought to be over which policies best produce growth.

And government spending doesn't increase prosperity.  How could it?  Government spending forces one set of people to pay for the goodies of another set.  What good could possibly come from that?

The bigger issue is the unsustainability of the welfare state model.  It is analogous to a homeowner up to his ears in debt.

When you ring up a lot of debt you are anticipating your future income.  You are assuming that you will have income in the future to service your debt.  But what if things go wrong?  What if you don't get the promotion, or your workplace closes?  Then you are in a world of hurt and if millions of people have overborrowed like you then it will endanger the health of the whole economy.  As Bagehot pointed out in the 19th century, the economy depends on "sound" people managing their money with prudence.

The welfare state is the same.  It sets up a high level of government spending assuming that the good times will always roll.  People sign up for the government programs and the free stuff and reduce their work effort to match.  When there's a recession the government revenues fall off and the programs that looked affordable in the good times cause the national debt to soar.  And of course the last people on earth to think that maybe government spending should be cut are the beneficiaries of all the free stuff.  That is called "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor."

Even if we say that welfare state spending is, overall, a good thing there is still the question of how much of a good thing the nation can afford.  A century of the welfare state shows it is almost impossible to adjust the size of the welfare state until there's a crisis.  The only time that government tightens its belt is when there's a looming sovereign debt crisis or galloping inflation.  This is surely not the best way to run a railroad.

In fact, of course, the social needs that government dominates--pensions, health care, education, and welfare--are not necessarily activities that must be performed by government.  They are social needs, for sure, but the clumsy force-centered model of government is surely not the way to meet such needs, which are not best met with one-size-fits-all government.

In fact the opposite is true.  The relief of the poor should not be a responsibility shuffled off on the government.  It should be the responsibility of each of us, as individuals and as groups joined into social service organizations.  Education is the same.  We are all called to raise up and educate our children, and to be there to help with our neighbor's children, and it is monstrous to shuffle it off on government functionaries who, like government workers since the dawn of time, think only of their emoluments and pensions.

Moreover, these social tasks are particularly the interest of women.  You can tell that just by listening to the conversation of women.  Yet our society encourages women in "careers," which were originally a brilliant notion to cure men of soldiering and divert their attention to fighting for dominance in organizations for the production of products and services rather than organizations for the securing of loot and plunder.  This is what we want for women?  Did anyone ask women what they wanted for themselves?

Keynesianism is not an economic system, it is a tactic for getting government out of a jam.  In the modern economy the government's demands upon the economic system have a depressive effect.  That's because it is all waste.  But this depressive effect becomes really serious in an economic downturn.  The Keynesian tactic solves this by continuing the government programs at their pre-recessionary levels, borrowing the money that's needed to continue its handouts, and inflating the currency to create an artificial stimulus.  Usually it works, at the cost of a 20-30 percent decline in the value of money.  But in a big downturn, like the aftermath of the 2008 credit crisis, some nations will be in danger of sovereign debt default before the economy recovers.

The solution is to radically reduce the size of government.  That will have two benefits.

First, it will reduce the weight of government spending and debt on the economy and enable government to respond with huge expenditures if there ever is a real catastrophe needing government help: think major earthquake or war.

Second, it will reduce the amount of freeloading and put the freeloaders to work helping their fellow citizens by producing products and services and by neighborly volunteer effort working to solve social problems.  This will benefit the freeloaders, and help them live happier, more productive lives, and also deliver more prosperity to society as a whole.

Confusion on Socrates' Last Day

Being a civilized community, the Athenians of Socrates' day executed people by hemlock poisoning in the evening of the day of execution. And so Socrates' young friends gathered at the prison on the day of his execution before he took the draught of poison.  Naturally they talked about immortality, and Socrates indulged in a bit of  argument by reckless analogy.  For instance, he argued, if we sleep and then wake and then sleep again, it follows that living and dying is analogous, and if we know things that we seem to have learned before we were born then we must have an immortal soul.

Socrates' young friend Simmias suggests that Socrates is wrong about the immortal soul.  After all, if you break up a lyre, then its harmony is gone forever.  So if the soul is a "kind of harmony or attunement" then it too is destroyed "when our body is relaxed or stretched beyond true measure by diseases and other evils".

In Simmias account, harmony refers to the relation between the tones from the different strings of a well-tuned lyre.  The harmony is "something invisible, without body, beautiful and divine".  Thus it is an instance, a particular of the Form of harmony, the eternal relationship between tones, the music of the spheres.  Given the context, Simmias does not think of the harmony of the instrument as the eternal Form itself, but the specific harmony of a given instrument achieved by tuning the strings.  Once you break the instrument or cut its strings you have lost the specific harmony of the instrument, its particular harmonic beauty.  Thus, he says, using a Socratic argument by analogy, the individual soul is lost when a body dies, because its particular harmonies are lost with the body.

Socrates attacks the idea of the soul as a kind of harmony.  First, if the soul is the composite of the elements of the body, then it could not have existed before birth.  But his learning-by-recollection argument proved that the soul exists before birth. Second, if a lyre can be more or less harmonized, presumably according to the specific tuning, surely that is different from a soul, which cannot be more or less of a soul: it is just a soul.  Conversely, if all souls are souls in harmony they must partake of harmony equally.  So how can "one soul have more wickedness or virtue than another"?  Thirdly, it seems impossible that the soul could rule the body if it is analogous to harmony, for "it could never by out of tune with the stress and relaxation and the striking of the strings".  In fact the soul is quite the opposite, since it rules over the elements of the body, "directing... inflicting... holding converse" with it.  So the soul cannot be like harmony.

Simmias  was too modest, and did not make the most of his argument.  The soul is indeed like the harmony of an instrument, providing you don't get too reckless with the argument from analogy.  Harmony is an ideal, an invisible quality that the lyre is designed to approach.  Yet the soul of the instrument, its harmony, is merely banished to a musical underworld if a string is broken, or the instrument is damaged.  Every recreation of a musical instrument invites the eternal soul of harmony to inhabit it once more.

Socrates demands from his young friend a much higher bar for a valid argument by analogy than he requires of himself.  He has recently argued that sleeping and waking are like death and birth, a pretty good stretch.  Why shouldn't the soul be the composite of the elements of the body?  We could say firstly, that the soul, the harmony of the body, only inhabits the body when its components all come together in birth.  Secondly, a musical instrument can be badly tuned or badly played, and this is analogous to wickedness in the soul.  Certainly a virtuoso instrumentalist can take a so-so instrument and make it sing.  Thirdly, why could not the soul be like an instrumentalist struggling to create harmony out of an instrument that is part good instrument and part bad instrument like the chariot myth of the Phaedrus.  The strings are forever going out of tune and it is up to the instrumentalist to struggle with disharmony and strive to create good harmony.

Socrates was a wily old man, and his young friends were too young and inexperienced and in awe of the great man to critique his arguments properly and wrestle them to the ground.  It is up to us to set things to rights.

Liberals Out of Touch

In the New York Times review of Charles Murray's Coming Apart, Nicholas Confessore tells us a little more than he intends about liberal denial.  Writes he:

You will learn about working-class laziness, but you will find little discussion of the decline of trade unions or the rise of a service economy built on part-time work without benefits.

Murray's thesis is that the welfare state has led to a breakdown in white working class culture, the bottom 30 percent of white America: a decline in marriage, a decline of civic culture, and a decline in men working. Meanwhile things are peachy keen up in the top 20 percent.  Marriage is doing fine, and divorce is even declining.  People work like mad.

Murray argues that the welfare state has hollowed out the bottom 30 percent.  But Confessore grumbles that things would be fine if only unions were still strong and benefits were still robust.

So let us give Michael Barone a word.  He was raised in Detroit, and there is something he wants you to know about those good union jobs for good wages and benefits.

I don't know how many times I've seen liberal commentators look back with nostalgia to the days when a young man fresh out of high school or military service could get a well-paying job on an assembly line at a unionized auto factory that could carry him through to a comfortable retirement.

As it happens, I grew up in Detroit and for a time lived next door to factory workers. And I know something that has eluded the liberal nostalgiacs. Which is that people hated those jobs.

That's one of the reasons why the unions ended up killing the automakers.  They insisted on "30 years and out" for the workers that hated their jobs, and then they insisted on health benefits for their retirees.  It was a bridge too far for the automakers.

One of the things that advanced lefty thinkers have been pondering for the last half century is that big, rationally-designed bureaucratic organizations are inherently oppressive and exploitive.  They necessarily treat humans as merely a means to an end, a labor resource, whether the big organizations are corporate or governmental.  Of course they have ended by tying themselves in knots over this because they can't let go of the idea politics is everything and that that enlightened thinkers ought to be organizing the lives of the workers.  They can't let go and let the workers organize their lives like any social animal.  They have to butt in and save the workers from themselves.

So we have the rank-and-file New York Times reader in denial about the 1950s and the philsophers in denial about the limits of politics.

I just took a quick look at Wikipedia's stages-of-grief article.  Did you know that there are critics that say the Kübler-Ross model is rubbish?  It is perhaps more accurate to term the denial-anger-bargaining-depression-acceptance progression is not a healthy, but a victim response to life challenges.  Since our liberal friends don't believe in adaption in a societal context (because it is social Darwinism, darling) they regard unfavorable trends as an insult to their self-esteem.  Thus they respond to change with disfunctional denial and rage.

We are called all our lives to adapt to changing circumstances.  The liberal model of the bureaucratic welfare state just doesn't work.  We are never going to have an economy again with "good union jobs at good wages" where we can sit back like bumps on a log and extract monopoly wages from our fellow citizens.  It was a fantasy back in the 1950s and it owed everything then and now to liberal political power.  Do liberals want to lead their followers out of a dead end, and encourage them to compete in the new world economy, or do they want to exploit their victim-denial response until the whole system collapses as in Greece?