Ryan Enthusiasm

Rule One about US politics is that liberals don't understand conservatives.  Today's proof of that rule is that Democrats are saying that the selection of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as vice-presidential nominee shows that Mitt Romney is panicking.



So I guess that the enthusiastic crowds suddenly showing up at Romney rallies are panicked bitter clingers.



On the contrary it looks like the Ryan pick has ignited enthusiasm in the Republican base.  That will go a long way to increasing the Republican presidential vote from 60 million in November 2008 to, maybe, 70 million in 2012.



To confirm that "something" has happened with the Ryan pick, the traffic at usgovernmentspending.com is up by 80-90 percent consistently in the three days since the Ryan announcement.



Now, why are Republican voters energized by Paul Ryan?  Well there can only be one reason.  They are energized because they know that Paul Ryan is Chairman of the House Budget Committee and he is the author of the Ryan budget plan that reforms Medicare-Medicaid and brings the out-of-control budget back into balance.



Apparently Paul Ryan right now has 50 percent name recognition.  I guess that all the people that knew about him are Republicans.  But Democrats ought to know a bit about him, because they have been running ads of Paul Ryan pushing grannie in her wheel-chair off a cliff!



When you think about it, it makes sense that Republican voters and Democratic voters divide on the question of Medicare.  For Republicans, Medicare should be something that enables them to choose sensibly between health care plans to find one that meets their health care needs at the right price.  Republicans don't want to have to hack through a government bureaucracy to get health care.



For Democratic voters, Medicare is a "right," which means that it is a benefit provided by political power.  Whatever it is, it is; the people rely on the politicians to "save" their Medicare.  Republicans expect to pay for health care, and they figure that, as paying customers, they ought to be able to get the best.  Democrats just expect health care to be provided as a benefit.



Why is Ryan enthusiasm important?  Republicans stayed home in 2008.  The Republican vote was 59.9 million, down from 62 million in 2004.  My guess is that it will take 70 million to win decisively in 2012.  Obama polled 69.4 million in 2008, but I'd be surprised if he got more that 66 million this November.



With real enthusiasm in the Republican base, overflowing into the homes of their suburban neighbors, there is always the mad hope that maybe 70 million is just for starters.  We won't know until November.

Panic Friday

Oh no!  President Obama is up by over four points in the Friday morning RCP Average, by 48.4% to 44.0%.  Mitt's losing!



That seems to be the panicked reaction of the right-wing commentariat today, from here and here and here.  And of course it could be true.



Here's a awful possibility.  Perhaps when President Obama said "you didn't build that" the American people agreed with him.  Perhaps when Joe Soptic complained about Mitt Romney not caring about his cancer-riddled wife, the president reached the forelock-touching peasant in all of us, who just wants to vote for a president that "cares about people like me."



If that is so, then Mitt Romney's goose is cooked, and so is the goose of the American people.  Because we are entering the end-game of the liberal welfare state, and there is no more money.



If the game is up, you would still expect a lot of people to vote for a man who promises to make the rich pay a little more so that they can continue to receive their entitlement benefits.  The French people just voted decisively for that, and we will see what will result.  On my view, increased taxes to pay for more entitlements is just more looting, the basis of the liberal entitlement state.  When you keep the looting down to a dull roar, you can have a prosperous society.  But when you crank it up, it just hastens the day of collapse: sovereign debt default, inflation, and asset seizure.



It is still understandable that most people would like to put off the evil day when the entitlements run out, government employees get laid off, grannie goes over a cliff, and the underclass goes back to work.



But if the American people want a path out of the liberal death spiral, then they have a candidate in Mitt Romney who, by temperament, experience, and principle, will give it to them.



We humans live by hope.  That's why when Pandora opened her box, and all the evil in the world flew out, there was still Hope left behind.  But the truth about life is that everything doesn't get kissed all better and tucked in by bedtime.  The human story is a story of great achievement--and also great disasters.  Sometimes the only way forward is through the searing heat of the furnace crucible where everything gets melted down and only then recast.



Look at China.  Dynasty after dynasty has started out young and vigorous and ended up unable to pay its bills and field a decent army when the latest version of the Mongols swarms over the border.  Why?  Because the state revenue ends up getting pissed away on special interests and regime supporters rather than vital services.



Today our American experiment is in peril because the regime has promised unsustainable entitlements to millions of people.  In consequence vital services are going unfunded, the financial system is getting wrecked, and resources are getting sucked away from growth and investment into pension payments to regime supporters.



Stein's Law applies.  If a thing cannot go on forever, it will stop.  The Fram oil-filter guy is still right.  You can pay me now, or pay me later.



And people will still panic on Friday.

Who Killed His Wife?

By now the fabled Priorities USA PAC ad "Mitt Killed My Wife" is entering the annals of not just below-the-belt politics, but stupid below-the-belt politics.



The way that the ad told the story, poor Joe Soptic was laid off from his steel-plant job and the next thing we know his wife is dying of cancer because he couldn't afford health insurance.



Only now we are getting the details.  At the time that Soptic was laid off in 2001 (two years after Mitt left Bain, and after he refused a buy-out) his wife was working and had health insurance.



But in 2002 or 2003 she had to quit her job with a rotator cuff injury.  Then she went on disability, it appears.



But wait!  If you are on Social Security Disability you can get on Medicare after 24 months, even if you aren't yet 65.  Mrs. Soptic, it appears, finally went to the hospital in 2006 with pneumonia and tragically died.  But that is at least three years after her accident.



Something doesn't add up.  Not if the Soptic family was really concerned about making sure that its members were protected with health insurance.



The new digital media age has changed the rules for the old helpless-victim sob story.  It used to be that the mainstream media would roll out the sob story and would never give us the back-story, and there was nothing you could do about it.  But now anyone can do a bit of sleuthing and get the back story.  And put it on the Internet, and push back on the mainstream media.  What a world!



And it often turns out the the helpless victims usually aren't quite as helpless as the mainstream media want us to think.

Any Lemonade for Mitt?

Is there any way for Mitt Romney to make lemonade out of the Obama "Mitt killed my Wife" ads?



The ad template is as old as the hills.  The bosses close the plant to preserve their profits and the working man goes to the wall.



But is there a way to turn this around and say that, well, at least we tried?  Bain took a sick company, injected new money into it, but in the end the company couldn't compete against the Korean imports.  so we closed down the plants and gave all the laid-off workers two years of severance pay, or whatever it was.



Probably not.  Probably not because the mainstream media doesn't want to give an evil Republican that kind of space.  They prefer to stay on the peasant culture meme.  Here was a loyal peasant that always bowed to the lord as he passed by in his fancy carriage, and always paid his rent and did his bit weeding the cabbages on the lord's estate.  But when the lord had no more use for him, he threw him away.  And there wasn't even any common land left on which to feed a goose.



There is another meme that politicians often use: "tough choices."  Something like this:



"For over twenty years, I am proud to have led Bain Capital, creating new businesses and trying to save businesses that had come on hard times.  There were many great successes, like Staples.  But there were also failures, failing companies that couldn't be saved, even after investing hundreds of millions of dollars.  President Obama has made sure you know all about them.  But you know what?  When you are in business, it's different from politics.  There is no place to hide.  Either you are creating jobs and profits, or you end up going down the tubes.  It is a horrible experience to realize that you can't save a company, even though you know that, as much as it costs you in economic losses, it costs the laid-off workers much more.  In politics, on the other hand, there is always someone else to blame."



Of course, I'd really like to know a bit more of the back story to the laid-off worker.  How come he didn't do anything about his wife getting sick?  Did she really not tell him?  What about their children?  Daughters usually know what is going on.  Did they really do nothing to help mom?



Of course, there is the other side of this.  In highly unionized industries like basic steel, semi-skilled workers once got to enjoy incredibly high wages and benefits from a job that might just involve pressing a button.  If the job goes away they are screwed, because they do not have skills worth anything near what they were getting paid.  But that, of course, is the fault of the politicians that gave unions huge coercive powers, powers big enough to drive healthy companies into the ditch and pitch out all their workers onto a wild and barren heath without the means to survive and thrive.

Impossible Gridlock or Impossible Ideologues

For liberal Froma Harrop, the problem is the non-negotiable Tea Partiers.

The tea party movement has become the dead bad-luck bird hanging around the GOP establishment's neck. Its anger-fueled energy has forced moderate Republicans off ballots in places where moderates tend to win. It has burdened otherwise centrist Republicans with radical positions that don't go well with a general electorate. The Grand Old Party is being taken over by an ideological fringe with unclear motives, a loose grasp on reality and little interest in actually governing.

But for conservative Michael Walsh the truth is a mirror image.  Even if Romney wins in November, Republicans are still pushing upstream against the progressive tide.

They know from history that American counter-revolutions never really restore the status quo ante, and that “progressive” ideas are nearly impossible to root out, especially with the media blocking for them. And they know their unfireable, beetling minions in the judiciary and the regulatory agencies aren’t going anywhere soon, no matter who wins.

Notice the contrast.  Froma Harrop says that the impossible Tea Partiers will never amount to anything because they won't compromise.  Walsh says the Republican revolution will never work because they will never get the power to dislodge the immovable liberal bureaucracy.



On the other hand, at The Atlantic Philip K. Howard writes that the problem is the partisan stalemate. Nothing can be done because "we," conservative or liberal, cannot upset "our" base, the people we have mobilized to fight to the death for our party.

American government is a deviant subculture. Its leaders stand on soapboxes and polarize the public by pointing fingers while secretly doing the bidding of special interests. Many public employees plod through life with their noses in rule books, indifferent to the actual needs of the public and unaccountable to anyone. The professionals who interact with government -- lawyers and lobbyists -- make sure every issue is viewed through the blinders of a particular interest, not through the broader lens of the common good. Government is almost completely isolated from the public it supposedly serves.

Well, all I can say to all that is good old Stein's Law.  If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.  In my view we are in a Clausewitzean decisive battle.  There is no doubt that the liberal welfare state cannot go on forever.  It has promised benefits way beyond what the economy can deliver.



So there is a choice.  It is the choice is between Argentina or civil society.  Do we go on, like Argentina, from devaluation to easy money to crisis to devaluation, with a corrosive populist politics that claims to want to squeeze the rich like sponges, but actually keeps the working class in feudal bondage and serves the crony capitalists?  Or do we change course,  back out the big government programs and replace them with a revived civil society?



I would that the United States would not go the way of Argentina.

What Do Liberals Really Believe?

Government is force, and politics is power.  Politicians and activists are bullies--when they are not being cowards.  So people that follow politics have to lie to themselves a lot in order to persuade themselves that they are on the side of the angels instead of the thugs.



Capitalist enthusiasts do this a lot.  The fact is that the Anglo-American empire utterly conquered the world in the last three centuries and not one stone has been left un-turned.  But we Anglo-Americans like to tell the story that we have ushered in an age of milk and honey.  Maybe we did, but we also took a lot of sled-dogs behind the rock and clubbed them to death.



Our liberal friends are like that too.   They are convinced that they are the harbingers of peace and justice even as they shatter civil society, turn every human activity into a government program, and break every rule that they set.



Want some examples?  Here are just two from today.



In Massachusetts, the failure of RomneyCare has prompted liberal politicians there to pass a "cost-containment" bill.  It will basically allow the state government to dictate the operation of the entire health care industry in Massachusetts.

Under the plan, all Massachusetts doctors, hospitals and other providers must register with a new state bureaucracy as a condition of licensure—that is, permission to practice...



An 11-member board known as the Health Policy Commission will use the data to set and enforce rules to ensure that total Massachusetts health spending, public and private, grows no more than projected gross state product through 2017, and 0.5 percentage points lower thereafter. (And Paul Ryan's Medicare projections are unrealistic?)



No registered provider is allowed to make "any material change to its operations or governance structure," the bill says, without the commission's approval. The commission can also rewrite the terms of provider contracts with insurers and payment levels and methods if they are "deemed to be excessive."

Or there is this.  The Obama Department of Labor doesn't want defense contractors to follow the law in sending out layoff notices to employees in advance of the November election.

One of Big Labor's legal pride and joys is the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, a 1988 law that requires federal contractors to tell employees at least 60 days in advance of potential large-scale layoffs. Well, what do you know, last week the Department of Labor issued "guidance" on its website that this law doesn't need to be followed for the purposes of the looming January 1 budget sequester.

When Republicans are in office, the mainstream media blows items like these into major scandals.  There is extravagant talk about the rule of law and abuse of power.  In the Obama years we have seen many flagrant abuses similar to today's mere two abuses of power, and the mainstream media has said nothing.



The brutal truth about politics is that it is civil war by other means.  Partisans on both sides excuse the abuses of "their" side while howling about the abuses of the other guys.  That's why we need reporters to make a fuss about any abuse of power.  It's a pity that the media so rarely live up to their responsibilities.



Well, there is this, from Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct:

Men like power and will seize it if they can. But if they can't rule, their next preference is that no one rule over them.

Maybe, just maybe, this fall the human second preference will rear its noble head.

Unemployment Sideways

Imagine if John McCain had won the 2008 election and unemployment was currently at 8.3 percent.  Yes.  The howls, the scandal, the monstrosity, the cruelty of it all would be bellowed out of every MSM outlet.  And there would be no chance, not one, that McCain could get reelected.



But here we are, and either employment increased last month by 163,000, according to the Establishment Survey, or declined by 195,000, according to the Household Survey.  Either way, the economy is not growing fast enough to get Americans back to work.  Right now, we are about half way back to the number of jobs in the US at the start of 2008 before the crash.



Let us not forget that the Obama administration deliberately made a policy choice back in 2009.  They would push the hugely expensive ObamaCare and the hugely bureaucratic Dodd-Frank financial reform.  And they would push their expensive green energy, and they would obstruct fossil fuel development.



If you had wanted to implement a slow recovery from the worst financial crash since the Great Depression, that is the policy mix you would have chosen.  We can assume that the Obama people didn't think that their interventions would be that harmful to the economy.  After all, everyone wants to be reelected.  They probably didn't really think about it.  They just went ahead with their agenda and assumed that their trillion dollar stimulus program would be enough to get the economy going.



But it hasn't.  And the evidence is that the Obamis really don't understand a thing about the economy.  Their new Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is busily reintroducing the failed policies from the Community Reinvestment Act that forced banks to loan money to unqualified borrowers.  Don't they get it?  When you leverage up the economy with bad loans you set up a big financial crash when things start to go south!  Just like in 2008!



And then the president says "you didn't build that."  Well, yeah.  Business people don't build roads and bridges.  But they do everything else.  You could look it up.