A Gaffe, A Palpable Gaffe!

According to Michael Kinsley, "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth - some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say."

So it is pretty obvious that the president's gaffe on Friday 13th, "you didn't build that," is a classic gaffe.  Liberals like the president all think exactly what the president said, that everything good was created by liberal government, but it isn't a good idea to say it because most Americans believe in the American Dream, which is an individualist dream not a communal dream.

And now people are having tremendous fun dragging up photos of Steve Jobs with and iPhone, Bill Gates with a PC, Thomas Edison with a light-bulb, and photoshopping in the president yelling "You Didn't Build That!"

Conservatives may wonder why in the world liberals believe such rubbish.  That's easy.

We Americans have two duelling myths.  Conservatives believe in the Invisible Hand myth, that if you build it they will come.  Liberals believe in the Exploitation myth, that without liberals building caring and compassionate government programs we would all be slaves and sweatshop workers.

So when a liberal sees a picture of healthy, happy workers in some office park, they think "We liberals created that" with labor laws, with anti-discrimination laws, with minimum wage laws, and civil rights acts.  It's government to the rescue.

The thinking neo-Marxist disagrees.  He thinks that both big business and big government both carry the seeds of exploitation.  That's what Jewish emigres Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote in the 1940s in The Dialectic of Enlightenment.  Both modern business and modern government are based on "instrumental reason," reason deployed for practical purposes.  "What men want to learn from nature is how to dominate it and other men."  And then there is this: "Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator toward men."  This line of thinking further developed by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State. Governments want to make their people "legible" so they and tax them, conscript them, and control them.

So let's get free of the PollyAnna stuff about caring compassionate government, liberals.  Government is force, domination, tax, control.  It is delusion to think otherwise.

But there is a problem, and it is this.  Violence has gone down since the beginning of the age of the big corporation and the big government.  How can this be when we have big business and big government running around exploiting and dominating everything in sight?  The answer, as developed by lefties like Juergen Habermas, a student of Adorno, is that there is more to the human experience than the clanking mechanisms of instrumental reason.  Humans are social animals; we interact with each other not just in strategic system actions to extract maximum leverage from the rest of the world.  We also live in a lifeworld where we work out the good, the true, and the beautiful together in communicative interaction.

This fact of our social, rather than mechanical and instrumental, nature works itself out in theories of our social interaction, as developed by chaps like Alan Page Fiske.  We relate to each other in part by Communal Sharing, by Authority Ranking, by Equality Matching, and by Market Pricing.  On this view you could say that the dystopia imagined by Horkheimer and Adorno represents a world where everything has shrunk into a mechanical Authority Ranking and Market Pricing.

In fact, though, people hate it when human life is shrunken to just Authority and Markets.  That is why the folks laid off by Bain Capital are so upset.  They look at Romney and Bain as pure calculators that forgot that they were human.  That is why conservatives, ever since Edmund Burke, have championed "civil society" over the instrumental reason of "sophisters, economists and calculators."  And Neuhaus and Berger have championed the "mediating structures" to soften the harshness of the "megastructures" of business and government.

But people like President Obama and Elizabeth Warren don't get it, and that is why they are stumbling around with their mega-gaffes.  They think that their big government is the acme of evolved civilization and compassion.  They think that everything good in our society is built upon their programs, their education, their very fast trains, their green energy, and all the other corrupt government programs that are bankrupting our society.

The really interesting thing to me is that the real innovators, the Rockefellers, the Jay Goulds, the Carnegies, the Henry Fords, the Bill Gateses, the Steve Jobses, the ones that "didn't build it" are not very social or sociable at all.  Their astonishing innovations are the result of their anti-social nature.  They are obsessive people that don't listen and conform to other people and worry about what other people say about them.  They are almost pathologically anti-social.  They drop out of college.  They go off to India.  They are impossible to work for.  Yet they change the world with their genius.

But that makes sense to me, even if it doesn't to liberals.  Human society depends on an eternal battle between the individual and the society.  That makes it almost impossible to determine which is right: the individualist creed that champions the individual creator against the dumb herd, or the communalist creed that works to bring everyone together into consensus.  And without a society, the individual genius would just be one hand clapping.

Why Obama Trashes Businessmen

When President Obama gave his "On your own" speech as Osawatomie, Kansas, conservatives were upset.  When house-flipper Elizabeth Warren told a meeting that people don't create businesses on their own, conservatives sneered.



But when President Obama told business owners that "If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that," conservatives exploded, and pundits opinionated here and here and here and here and here and here.



Now, of course, there is a sense in which the president is right.  There is no business until there is a government protecting property and contracts.



But why does the president think he needs to tell us this?



I will tell you.  The president has to believe that government is the enabling force behind every successful entrepreneur.  Every liberal supporter of big government has to believe that a world without big government run by liberals is a dark, cruel world of unimaginable injustice.  Otherwise what is the point of all those government programs?



I like to say that there are two economic myths competing for the hearts and minds of modern people.  There is the Invisible Hand myth, that says that all you need to do is offer your services to the world and it will reward you.  Then there is the Exploitation myth that says that everyone is screwed unless a powerful and just government comes to your aid and rights the oppression and injustice of the ruling class.



You can see immediately what falls out of these two myths.  On the Invisible Hand view, the need for government, any government, is obviously minimal.  On the Exploitation view, the need for government, and a particular kind of government, is immediate.



Obviously, neither of these myths can be true.  It is just not true that the world is a Pollyanna-land where the lions lie down with the lambs.  On the other hand, it requires tortured logic to insist that the stunning economic growth that has taken place since the dawn of the Invisible Hand myth in the 18th century is proof that the world is imprisoned in a hell of exploitation.



In America, the particular version of the Invisible Hand myth that we celebrate is called The American Dream.  It says that anyone can grow up to be president of the United States.



Here's a modern version of the American Dream. Once upon a time, in 1961, a boy baby was born in America.  His parents loved him very much.  But then he was abandoned by his father, and then his step-father, and then his mother.  So it fell to his grandmother to raise him to adulthood.  But despite all this, the boy, Barack Hussein Obama II, grew up to become the First Black President of the United States.



But notice that the grandmother didn't do it on her own.  Oh no.  She was a vice-president of a bank, a greedy banker, a "bankster."  And banks, as we know, are the darlings of big government, cosseted, and subsidized, and bailed out and given access to the Federal Reserve System's discount window.  So it wasn't Barack Obama that did it on his own.  Oh no.  It was the Federal Reserve System.  And liberal admission officers that admitted him to selective colleges.



The reason that we celebrate the American Dream and people that found successful businesses is not that we ignore the importance of society and a just government.  It is that we know how very hard it is to found and build a successful business.  We want to encourage young people to overcome their fears and accept the risks and the heartaches of trying to build something "of their own."  Liberals have their own version of this.  They call it encouraging "positive self-esteem."



Many years ago the Democrats tried this class warfare game. and they failed miserably.  I seem to remember some pundit explaining why.  The reason is that there are tens of millions of Americans that nurture a great hope that they may one day get successful and rich.  Think Joe the Plumber. They are fools, of course, because probably not one in a hundred will live out his dream.  But remember, the one thing left when Pandora's Box emptied out was hope.



It was said that in Napoleon's army every private carried a marshal's baton in his knapsack, because the Grande Armee was an army that promoted on merit.



But not in Obama's Solyndra America.

Jews and Paulites Knock on GOP Door

Back in March we stolid Romney supporters here in Seattle, Washington, were nearly overwhelmed by the insurgent Ron Paul supporters.  In my precinct caucus we had three Romney supporters and two Paul supporters.  The Romney guys were old 'uns and the Paul supporters were thirtysomethings.



I had a simple message for the Ron Paul supporters.  I said, you are welcome here.  Come into the Republican Party and make it your home.  I meant, of course, that they should come in the GOP and start to rearrange the furniture to make it more comfortable for libertarians like them.



Now I read that Jews in suburban Illinois are moving in battalion strength into the Republican column.  It is not because of Obama and his Israel policy.  It is because the last ten years of Democratic state government has trashed the Illinois economy.  Said one GOP activist:

You have to understand that in this part of the world, as in so many, life is with family. Whether you’re Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant, you don’t want to see you[r] children to grow up in a state without opportunity and move away. What I see is people are realizing that their children will have no economic opportunity here and move. When people think their grandchildren are going to be living in Texas or North Carolina because of failed economic policies, party loyalty evaporates. Here, it’s a family crisis if the grandchildren are more than fifteen minutes away.

 Jews are seeing the death spiral of big government and are open to persuasion.

Jews are slowly beginning to understand that compassion and social justice cannot mean a coerced transfer of the benefits of their labor to someone else. The concepts of tzedakah (charity) and tikkun olam (repairing the world) are moral obligations of the individual, not obligations imposed on the individual by the state.

This is the central argument of modern conservatism.  You can only give charity and repair the world through your own moral actions in civil society.  Government cannot repair the world.  It can only compel obedience.  Compelled charity is not charity.  Healing the wounds of the world with force just opens new wounds.



Of course we know why Jews have been anti-Republican in recent years.  It's the Christianity.  Jews naturally fear that the Christians might turn on them again and scapegoat them, and Democratic politicians know it.  If there is one thing that Democrats know how to do it is to play the race card to keep the blacks home, the class card to keep the workers home, the gender card to keep the feminists home, and the bigotry card to keep the Jews home.



Actually, that class card hasn't been working so good in recent years.  What's the Matter with Kansas, anyway?



But the truth is that the Republican Party has a great big open door.  Anyone can come in, and anyone can make it their home.  The Republican Party may be the stupid party, but it is also the "nice" party, and we are determined to be nice to the new neighbors.  In the last 40 years, we've had Reagan Democrats come and go, but mostly come.  We've had the Religious Right come aboard.  Lately it's been the Tea Party.  Now it's looking like the libertarians and the Jews are next.  Maybe Catholics too.



All I can say is:  Come on in and make the Republican Party your own.

My Cunning Plan

Most conservatives are happy to belabor liberals with the transcendent truth of conservatives thinkers from Burke to Sowell. You know the schtick: conservatives use reason and liberals use emotion.

But I have a cunning plan.  I want to belabor liberals with with the transcendent truth of liberal ideas.

Just today my "seeing like a state" take on ObamaCare and the welfare state was linked by RealClearPolitics.com.  It uses the notions developed by Marxist professor James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State.  The idea is that modern states try to simplify complex social structures into uniform centralized rationalized plans--not because the old social structures are backward but because they are impenetrable to the bureaucrat and the tax collector.  And we couldn't have that!

So whatever liberals think they are doing with ObamaCare they are just acting like governments always act.  They want to know what the people are doing (in case they might want to mount a head of rebellion) and they want to control whatever they do.  It's not that liberals are evil or wrongheaded.  It's just that when you get in charge of government you start to "see like a state" and then act like a state.

That's what the whole idea of limited government is about.

I'm also working on liberal moral psychology professor Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind.   He's concerned with the "problem" liberals have trying to understand conservatives and communicate with people that don't think like liberals.  But in doing so he unravels the whole moral case for the welfare state because he says that the basis of human sociality is the group and the moral persuasion the group can bring to bear on free riders.  He inadvertently exposes the welfare state as a theme park, a Disneyland, for freeloaders.

Then there are the Frankfurt School chappies, Horkheimer and Adorno.  They show in Dialectic of Enlightenment that bourgeois capitalism and big government are two sides of the same coin.  They both privilege reason, one as the basis of the economy and one as the basis of government.  But reason is instrumental; you use it as a tool.  People use reason to dominate nature and other humans.  By the time you get to Adorno's student Habermas, we are talking about "strategic" instrumental reason and "systems" on the one hand and communicative discourse and the "lifeworld" on the other.  You can see that "system" is the world of money and power while "lifeworld" is the world of discourse and civil society, Burke's "little platoons."

In Jonathan Haidt we get the idea that human reason first evolved as a way of rationalizing and excusing our naughty behavior to our fellow humans--just like kids do when they are caught lying.  That's a tricky concept.  Reason as a way to squirrel out of a tight spot?

The really important thing, I believe, is to adjudicate the two Big Ideas of the modern era.  Is it more correct to view the relations of our society as Adam Smith's Invisible Hand where people thrive so long as they serve others with goods and services?  Or should we think of the Marxian Exploitation narrative where the labor of the working class is alienated because exploited by the employers and driven by necessity.

The view you take is important.  If you think that, by and large, everyone benefits who puts a shoulder to the wheel, then you won't think that extraordinary government power is needed to regulate the economy.  If you believe that exploitation is everywhere then you will believe that government needs to be run by people like you that see the problem and can apply its power to liberating the people from exploitation.  Today "inequality" serves this function.  Liberals believe in inequality and believe that this justifies their redistributive economic policies.

Maybe it's time to revise the two concepts.  The Invisible Hand applies when free people interact in a free market.  Exploitation applies whenever big government is flat-footing around taxing and regulating good honest labor and playing favorites with subsidies and crony capitalism for its supporters.

In my view, when you assemble these notions together you get the idea that it takes government to give society genuine exploitation.  Humans are social animals--"ultrasocial" according to Jonathan Haidt--and really care what other people think about them.  Therefore we have the means in our genes and in our culture to curb exploiters and freeloaders.  It takes government and a ruling class to gin up genuine large-scale exploitation.  Without government people would just decide not to deal with exploiters and defaulters, and the exploiters and defaulters would soon get with the program.

Once we have decided on all this, that to get real exploitation and oppression you need big government, then we can apply good conservative principles about limited government and civil society--from Burke, from Hayek, from Sowell, from Novak, and lately from Lawrence Cahoone (another liberal professor)--and get on with the job of making America the last best hope of freedom on earth, the beacon, the magnet, for all those who must have freedom.

Jonathan Haidt and the Liberals' Problem

In a well-regarded book published this year, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt has challenged his liberal friends.

We humans, he argues, are wired to make instinctive moral judgments, and he has identified a moral matrix with 6 different axes, including Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation, that differentiates out our moral instincts.  He and his associates have developed a bunch of survey questions to identify where people score on these 6 moral axes at YourMorals.org.  Conservatives score about equally on each of the six axes, implying that conservatives value each of these moral axes as of equal importance.

But liberals don't.  They rate Care/harm of overwhelming importance, Liberty/oppression pretty highly, Fairness/cheating moderately, and Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation hardly at all.  So liberals have a problem in talking to the American people when they believe in such a limited range of moral concerns, whereas conservatives cover the waterfront.  That's what Haidt concludes.

But wait a minute!  Liberals do too believe in Sanctity/degradation: that is what environmentalism and climate change are all about.  They tell us that we are morally defective for eating too much, that corporations are evil for polluting too much; people that disagree with liberals on climate change are called "deniers" or at very least anti-social people that won't sign onto the "consensus."  Liberals do too believe in Authority/subversion.  They believe in the authority of political "idealists" and activists, and in the authority of educated experts to make the rules for the rest of us to live by.  And liberals certainly believe in Loyalty/betrayal.  They made a big deal about forcing liberals to declare their loyalty during the McCarthy era, for sure.  But try and get a job in Hollywood or in the academy if you show that you belong to the conservative team.  Liberals think that entertainment and education should be limited to members of the liberal team.

The whole point of liberalism is to change the rules on Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity.  Liberals don't like loyalty for families, tribes, nations.  They want us to be loyal to the idea of humanity in general.  They don't like the authority of kings, warrior landowners, clerics, and the old-fashioned WASPy "pillars of the community."  They want to substitute the authority of people like themselves: educated, evolved, and open-minded.  They don't want Sanctity founded of the love of God but on the love for the planet.  And they are pretty Calvinistic about all this.  Either you are a member of the liberal Elect or you will roast in secular Hell.  James Piereson called this "Punitive Liberalism" back in 2004.

According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement. White Americans had enslaved blacks and committed genocide against Native Americans. They had oppressed women and tyrannized minority groups, such as the Japanese who had been interned in camps during World War II. They had been harsh and unfeeling toward the poor. By our greed, we had despoiled the environment and were consuming a disproportionate share of the world's wealth and resources. We had coddled dictators abroad and violated human rights out of our irrational fear of communism.

It's pretty obvious to me that in this indictment liberals thought they were calling Americans to a new moral order with different parameters for measuring Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity.  The only reason that liberals don't score well on those axes in Haidt survey questions must be that he's not trying to measure them.

Jonathan Haidt is not a fool.  He understands that our moral instincts are there for a reason.  They help us function successfully as social animals.  The groups in which we live are social and cultural artifacts that allow us to work together as teams and provide the means to control free-loading.  Here is what he writes about this.

Everybody loves social capital.  Whether you're left, right, or center, who could fail to see the value of being able to trust and rely upon others?  But now let's broaden our focus... and let's think about a school, a commune, a corporation, or even a whole nation that wants to improve moral behavior...  To achieve almost any moral vision, you'd probably want high levels of social capital...

This social or moral capital refers to 

the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.

This is what conservatives, as Haidt realizes, have been talking about every since Burke and the "little platoons."

Of course, when it comes to the solutions chapter of The Righteous Mind Jonathan Haidt jumps immediately to politics, confirming the liberal belief in control of corporations and regulation, and admitting that the libertarians have a point in declaring the miracle of the market and that social conservatives have a point that you "don't usually help the bees by destroying the hive."

The problem is that Haidt doesn't see the basic problem of liberalism.  In advancing its cause of caring and its fight against oppression and its revaluation of the values of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity, it enforces its world view with the brute force of government.  We are to care for the poor with our taxes.  We are to fight oppression with government set-asides and subsidies.  And we must destroy the mediating organizations that don't get with the program.  Moreover, we are not to task the poor with any social responsibility.  Here in Seattle we have just enacted a plastic bag ban in grocery stores.  You must pay 5 cents for each paper bag so we will reduce the blight and litter of plastic bags.  Only, of course, people that pay with EBT, the electronic food stamps, are exempt.

That's a tiny example of a gigantic problem.  Whenever liberals legislate some big new reform, they always exempt themselves and their clients from paying the costs of the program.

There is a word for this.  It is called freeloading.

That is the Liberal Problem.  At the very heart of their political program is the promotion and expansion and encouragement of freeloading.  When people give, it is because they are forced to give in their taxes.  When they receive it is because they are entitled to a benefit by right.  This sort of thing does not build community.  It destroys it.

Yet the social scientists tell us that the basic problem for all social animals is the need to find a way to curb the free rider problem, and inspire each other to give rather than to receive.

Will Micro-tasking Take Over the World

President Obama and his acolytes are making a big deal about "outsourcing", the evil Republican plan to help evil corporations send all American jobs offshore.

But perhaps an even bigger threat is "microtasking", the on-line movement for people to do small tasks for corporations over the Internet for cash.  After all, argues Jonathan V. Last, it could detach corporations from the people that do the work.

Because while it’s true that the new world of anonymous, mass, remote freelancing may be a perfect distillation of a textbook labor market, it’s also a radical change in Americans’ understanding of the social compact between business and the citizenry. And it’s not clear that this change is for the good...

Because they are perpetual and, in a certain sense, unaccountable, modern corporations have a different set of interests than flesh-and-blood people, and a very different relationship with the people’s voice--government--than old-fashioned sole proprietorships or partnerships... [T]he corporation by design has only an interest in its own survival and profitability: It will concern itself with government insofar as it can enlist the government in helping it make money. On every other question, the corporation is, by definition, indifferent.

So global freelancing will take over the world, right?

Well, not exactly.  We turn to liberal Jonathan Haidt and his The Righteous Mind.  He writes about how instinctively humans color every action with moral judgment, and how profoundly "groupish" we are.

Humans love to belong to "teams", according to Haidt, from families to tribes to religions, and we do our best work when we work as part of a team.  The most notable kind of team is the military squad, and it turns out that parade-ground drilling helps form the bond of the band of brothers, the critical bonding between soldiers that prompts them to sacrifice for each other.  Rhythmic dancing is similar to rhythmic marching; it helps promote a "groupish" feeling.

A corporation, Haidt reminds us, is just such a group.  Loosed upon the world two hundred years ago, it turned out to be a "winning formula."

It let people place themselves in a new kind of boat within which they could divide labor, suppress free riding, and take on gigantic tasks with the potential of gigantic rewards...

It is possible to build a corporation staffed entirely by Homo economicus... But this approach (sometimes called transactional leadership) has its limits...

In contrast, an organization that takes advantage of our hivish [i.e. groupish] nature can activate pride, loyalty, and enthusiasm among its employees and then monitor them less closely. This approach to leadership (sometimes called transformational leadership) generates more social capital--the bonds of trust that help employees get more work done at a lower cost than employees at other firms... Unlike Homo economicus, they are truly team players.

 Maybe we should stop worrying about whether "outsourcing" and "offshoring" will end the world as we know it.  Markets are wonderful, and capitalism has given us enormous wealth.  But almost everyone navigates the capitalist ocean in a boat with a crew of other humans.  It's likely that capitalism wouldn't work at all unless its workers worked in the modern teams we call corporations.  Just as soldiers since time immemorial have been organized in the 150-man unit called a "company."

Where's Romney?

Things feel a little flat on the presidential campaign front, and Republicans are beginning to fret.  Where's Romney?  How come he hasn't hit ObamaCare out of the ball-park?  How come he hasn't wrapped Obama in ObamaTax?  How come he got photographed riding a jet-ski?



Here's what I think.  I think that Mitt Romney spent the entire Fourth of July week strategizing.  And that's a good thing.  Starting from now we will start to see what Romney and his people think they need to do to prepare for the Republican National Convention in Tampa, August 27-30, 2012.



The first thing out of the box appears to be a decision to go after the president on his Bain outsourcing message.



Meanwhile everyone is offering their advice.  Here's Pat Caddell writing about "trust" and "taxes."  Here's Hugh Hewitt's chappie Clark Judge writing about the "battle of the agendas phase" of the campaign.  And there are a ton of people declaring that Romney has screwed up.  Totally.



In my view, this campaign offers Republicans an extraordinary opportunity to talk to the American people about some basic facts of life.



On taxes, I'd talk about the choice.  OK, Mr. President, so you want the rich to pay a little more.  Let's agree that we want to use the money of the rich for a good societal purpose.  Now, the question is: will the rich contribute more by creating new jobs (since almost all of "the rich" apart from liberal trustafarians are business owners) or by paying more in taxes?  What do you think, America?



On trust, the question is how to call the Barack Obama untruthful without calling the President of the United States a liar.  It's a delicate question that I am happy to leave to the professionals.



But the bigger question, I feel, is to make politics bigger.  The fact is that politics seldom gets beyond "what have you done for me lately?"  People support candidates that they expect to turn around and reward them.  That's why Social Security is a success.  Most people think that they benefit.  That's why ObamaCare is in trouble.  Most people think that they are going to get screwed.  It all adds up to Springtime for Freeloaders.



Our liberal friends are the worst at this.  They claim to be working for the good of all, but when it comes to the hustings it's all about class warfare and the race card and we care about you because we spend money on you.



What I want is a move away from the clientism of welfare-state politics towards a "culture of involvement."  In my America we won't need big government because every person in America will be engaged civically in contributing their time and money to the solving of social problems large and small.  It would be a society that is less governmental and more social.



Meanwhile we have an election ahead, a sluggish economy, and a president doing his best to divide us. I just hope that Mitt Romney came up with a good plan from his Fourth of July recess.



I am not talking about a "plan" for the economy.  We know what is needed there: tax cuts, spending cuts, regulation cuts, and sound money.  I am talking about a "plan" to persuade the American people to vote out President Obama, the worst president in history.