Beyond Mediscare

Nobody knows which way the current argument about Medicare will go.  Is Paul Ryan proposing to "end Medicare as we know it" or has President Obama already ended Medicare as we know it by cutting it by $716 billion over the next ten years?  It's a battle of the sound bites.



What disturbs me is the bigger question.  Never mind the rough and tumble of the campaign.  Let us think about the bigger questions about government and society.



Let's start with Medicare itself (I am a Medicare recipient).  The current unfunded liability for Medicare, the benefits promised beyond what will be collected by existing taxes, is $80 trillion or so.  How is such a sum of money to be found?  Who could or should be forced to pay for this?  How can this money physically be forced upon Americans without wrecking the economy?  The fact is that the $80 trillion deficit is a moral and physical maelstrom, an utter failure of the political system.  It is a blinking neon sign that millions of people are going to be cruelly taxed and/or cruelly abandoned in the next 30 years.



As for Social Security, its unfunded liability is a mere $8 trillion.  But the problem is that Social Security, the primary means of retirement for most Americans, is not a savings program.  The FICA taxes are not saved in a retirement account invested in securities that create jobs for the next generation, the generation that will work while the retired generation clips coupons.  It is money taken from a worker's paycheck and sent directly to a beneficiary.



Never mind about Medicare and Social Security.  They are huge unexploded bombs that one day will blow up if they aren't defused.  Let's talk about the real corrosion in the body politic.  You get a feeling of the problem reading Victor Davis Hanson about the hollowing out of California: the dreamland of the coastal cities and their green liberal professional class and its dreadful hell, the blitzed out Central Valley.  Government regulation has set up rigidities, from land use to wage rates to unpayable pensions, that prevent society from solving problems and adjusting to new conditions.



There is the scandal of education, utterly non-responsive to the needs of children, and utterly failing to educate the children of the poor.  There is the mess of welfare, doling out pensions to twenty-somethings.  There is the wasteland of housing, monument to "affordable housing" and government mortgage subsidies.  There is the horror of college debt, weighing down a whole generation.  There is the cratered carcass of Medicaid.  There is the fatuity of green energy, a crony capitalist swamp of subsidies and pay-for-play.  There is the maelstrom of government employee pensions.  There is the exploding problem of disability, as the ranks of the "disabled" soars towards 7 percent of the workforce.



All these programs are liberal programs, and that's the problem.  Your liberal friends have no idea that the whole thing is flushing down the toilet.  That's because the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media carefully see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil about the cratering welfare state.  I suspect that it is not a case of evil intent, but a case of denial.  Liberal journalists just cannot bring themselves to look reality in the face and admit that their glorious vision is a terrifying tornado that is tearing society up by its roots.



Here's an interesting problem.  Our liberal friends can't see that in the coming era it will be liberals that symbolize the cruel, oppressive ruling elite, living by injustice and looting.  How can that be, they will wail, when we are the evolved, educated people that live to right wrongs and end injustice?



Because, honey, every political ruling class ends up using its power to look after Number One, and liberals are humans too.



That's why we moderns came up with the idea of limited government.  At least limited government limits the power of government to create and perpetuate injustice.

The Missing Liberal Canon

Why don't liberals have a canon, a list of thinkers and books that liberals can go to, to learn all about liberalism?  That's what liberals like Beverly Gage have been asking lately.  And conservatives have been eager to help them out.

Actually, liberals do too have a canon.  That is what Jonah Goldberg discovered when he wrote Liberal Fascism.  He wanted to know what liberals believed and where they got it from.  His journey led him to the Progressives, people like Herbert Croly and The Promise of American Life back at the turn of the 20th century.

But the worriers have a point.  Sensible liberals don't have a set of books that every liberal is supposed to read.  Unless you call out the wilder shores of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.  The reason is simple.  You don't need a canon, you don't need to study political philosophy when you are the ruling class.  Knowledge begins with a problem: why is the world so unjust?  But liberals are the ruling class. They sit in the catbird seat.  They don't have a problem, except the instrumental problem of how to pass the next comprehensive and mandatory social program.

Conservatives on the other hand do have a problem.  We cannot stand the current liberal welfare state that wants to make everyone into a compliant and obedient ward of the state.  We want something different.  So we delve into the books to find out what went wrong.  We want to know why Americans just sit there and take the welfare state without doing anything about it.  We want to know how we could change the political system so that the instrumental domination of big government bureaucracy could be changed to something less oppressive and less unjust.

So we read up on Edmund Burke.  We check out the marginal economists of 1870.  We read von Mises and Hayek.  We delve into Thomas Sowell and Michael Novak.  We check out Milton Friedman.  We read Roger Scruton, Charles Murray, George Gilder, Rodney Stark, Frederick Turner, F.S.C. Northrop.

For myself, I've deliberately looked to the left to find conservative themes.  Some lefties get that there is a problem.  There are Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno and their critique of instrumental reason.  There is Juergen Habermas and his attempt at solving the instrumental reason problem with the lifeworld and communicative action.  There is James C. Scott and Seeing Like a State,  my current enthusiasm.  There is even useful stuff to be learned from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri and their wild lefty trilogy, Empire and Multitude and Commonwealth. 

Meanwhile, our liberal friends find themselves in a nasty spot, trying desperately to plug the leaks in their rusty ship.  They don't have time to read philosophical tomes.  They need to man the pumps and keep the welfare state and their power and their sinecures going for one more election cycle.

I wouldn't want to be a liberal.  Not in 2012.

Republican Voter vs. Democratic Voter

The furor over President Obama's "You Didn't Build That" riff is that it exposes the fundamental divide between the average Republican voter and the average Democratic voter.  I am not talking about elite voters here.



The average Democratic voter is what I call a "monthly pay-ment" person.  Yes, she is the kind of person that pronounces "payment" as "pay-ment."  She wants to allocate all risk and uncertainty away from her and reduce her life to a monthy payment.  We also talk about her as "living from paycheck to paycheck."  For this person anything not included in the monthly check must come like manna from heaven, because she does not think about making an investment in her future to, e.g., get a better job.  She just thinks about getting to the next paycheck.  It is this kind of voter to whom community organizers speak.



The average Republican voter thinks more strategically.  He thinks about getting a good job, marrying a pretty wife and having a couple of kids.  He thinks about saving up for a home and the kids' college education.  He thinks about saving for retirement.  He sees that the future may have its ups and downs.  That's why he listens to Dave Ramsay on the radio and keeps an emergency reserve.



You can see where the president's "you didn't build that" speech comes in.  For the paycheck-to-paycheck person the speech tells truth, for the successful business person won the lottery. Life is something that just happens to you.  It is not something you try to bend and shape.



For the rugged individualist, the speech is an insult; it denies all those years of struggle.



Now, of course, in reality we are all nothing without society.  On the other hand we are nothing without the people that strive and succeed.  The question is: how do we relate to the fact of society and the fact that we can each of us make a difference?



The Progressive movement of a century ago was based on the idea that we needed more rationalization in society.  Society needed to be designed better and run better by educated experts rather than autodidact empiricists.  But Progressives and after them liberals always needed to get elected to perform their rational wonders.  And in practice that meant appealing to people who wanted stuff from government.  So the high-flown rationalism always found itself in coalition with hard-headed street populism.  However noble your intentions, you had to appeal to the working stiff or the minority.  Thus the progressives won the working class vote with a class-warfare politics, the black vote with a racist politics, and the feminist vote with a sexist politics.  And all the while they insisted that it was the other guys who were classist, racist, sexist!



President Obama, a leftist from his early youth, ran in 2008 in a way that elided the racism, sexism, and classism of his politics.  But as soon as he got elected he rang alarm bells in the average middle class person that wanted to build lives at a distance from government.  Hence the Tea Party.



The good thing is that Obama's frank leftist governance has set up a decisive battle for 2012.  If Mitt Romney wins, he will have a mandate to roll back the excesses of a century of progressive politics.  If he loses then we have to go over the waterfall before we can change the national direction.



It ain't pretty, but what did you expect?  That life could be reduced to a monthly payment?

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.