The Indictment

Conservatives have only one real problem with the administrative welfare state. Our problem is that the welfare state is unjust. Of course, we don't like the fact that it is also cruel, corrupt, wasteful, and anti-human-welfare, but the extras are just penumbras on the basic indictment.  Don't agree?  Let me count the ways.

Force.  Government is force, and big government is big-time force.  The result is that many social functions become exercises in force.  We are forced to send our children to school, and for the overwhelming majority, that means a government school run by government supporters.  We are forced to contribute to a government pension scheme, and the government manages the scheme badly.  We are forced to contribute to a government health-care scheme for our retirement years, and the government has badly underestimated the resources it will take to deliver the promised services.  What is the solution?  For government, more force.

Division.  Government is the means to defend against enemies, foreign and domestic.  But government cannot fight the foe unless it unites the people against the enemy threat.  Thus politicians are experts in the art of uniting.  But that also means they are experts in the art of dividing.  If there is no foreign threat that politicians can use to unite us then they will unite one half of the nation, in a political party, to fight against the other half.  There is nothing sinister about this; that's just what politicians do.  Obviously the more the government does, and the more money it spends, the more scope there is for uniting and dividing.  You can do it with class, you can do it with race.  You can set employees against business owners, and health-care consumers against insurance companies.  The more division you can create, the more that you can mobilize your supporters against the evil greedy ones.  There has to be a better way.

Freeloading.  Freeloading is the great issue for social animals.  We derive enormous benefit from our social engagement with each other, but every society has to deal with the freeloaders, the people that want to get their share without contributing their share.  In the past, societies have developed ingenious ways of dealing with freeloaders short of force, including naming and shaming and divine justice.  Of course, societies have long accepted that some people just cannot contribute, for no fault of their own.  But now we have developed the cult of the victim, in which people are encouraged to define themselves as indigent and unable to contribute their fair share.  Politicians use the cult of the victim to build support.  Where once leaders frankly offered loot and plunder to the warriors in their feudal host, now they offer loot and plunder to people that vote for them and define themselves as victims.

Patronage and Clientage.  In the agricultural era the food producers lived under a peculiar disadvantage.  They needed to store food against the next harvest, but any pirate or plunderer could come by and steal their store.  So the food producers ended up as clients of feudal patrons; they became serfs to warriors that could keep the plunderers at bay.  Since the warrior lords were predatory as well as the pirates, you might say that the cure was often worse than the disease.  Now the bourgeois revolution in the early modern era proposed to ditch this patron-client social relationship with the national state model.  The monarch got an army to defend against marauders, and the people were free to produce and consume in a market economy without having to truckle to a powerful patron.

It is clear, from the history of the last 200 years, that when people first arrive in the city from the country they bring their old patron-client culture with them from the countryside.  All immigrants to the US have begun by joining some sort of patronage machine, from Tammany Hall to the modern Democratic Party.  That is what they understand.  It is only when they get confident and competent in the world of the city that they come to embrace the individualist creed, which asserts the notion of the responsible self that confidently offers services to the community based on the faith that the money will follow.

But really, do we need a patron-client relationship to govern government employment?  Do we want basic social services to be delivered by powerful bosses?  Do we want favors distributed to grateful clients on the basis of race or class?  That way lies injustice.

Impossibility of reform.  The market economy is a process of constant adjustment.  No job, no fortune is guaranteed.  Every participant must consider, every day, how to serve the consumer.  That is why so many of us look to government to guarantee our jobs with labor legislation and preserve our fortunes with crony capitalism; we just don't have confidence in our ability to serve the consumers.  But the result is that government makes impossible promises to its supporters that cannot be withdrawn without a fight.  That is what is happening in Europe right now as people riot in the streets to protest the cuts in social services.

Any system that cannot reform itself short of riots in the streets is a failed system.  The welfare state system is a process of political warfare, a battle to divide the spoils of taxation and borrowing and regulation.  But the winners in each battle seem to think that they have won for all time, and are willing to fight to assert that right of victory.  There has to be a better way.

There is a better way.  Conservatives have recommended a limited government since the dawn of the modern era.  But Marxists have come a close second.  It was Marx that wanted to free the workers from the alienation of wage labor in factories so they could develop their human capacity to the fullest.  It was the Marxists of the Frankfurt School that argued that government and business both had dominatory tendencies, reducing everything to the mechanics of rules and system.  There had to be another way, a social way, that resolved issues of social cooperation in communication and persuasion rather than rules and penalties.

Everybody wants a better way.  Liberals call it "peace and justice."  Conservatives call it "limited government and peaceful cooperation."  The question is how do we get there from here?

Why Romney Lost

Leaving aside all the usual stuff about Republicans losing the black vote, the Latino vote, the youth vote, the single women vote, there is this.



Romney lost the working class vote.  Here's what happened, according to Fred Bauer.

However, for those households making between $30,000 and $49,999, he underperformed: McCain lost those voters by twelve points, while Romney lost them by 15. Moreover, because of the economic travails of the past four years, members of those working-class/lower-middle-class households rose from 19 percent of the electorate in 2008 to 21 percent in 2012.

So the Obamis were smart after all.  They spent the whole summer on negative ads demonizing Mitt Romney as an uncaring capitalist, and it worked.



It's funny really, if it weren't so sad.  The whole prosperity of the working class depends on the ability of entrepreneurs to create jobs out of nothing.  But the Democrats have made a political empire out of demonizing those same entrepreneurs.



Meanwhile the Democrats destroy the economy with their credit subsidies and their interventions and succeed in blaming the greedy bankers.



Well, that may be so.  Look, nobody really understands the modern economy.  We all pontificate, conservatives about the wonders of markets and liberals about the wonders of regulation, but nobody really knows what they are doing.



And really, the voters are right in voting for Democrats.  Those folks who have lost out in the aftermath of the Great Recession are probably never going to rise again.  Many of them, we know, are settling for a disability pension, and are getting ready to live out the rest of their lives on the dole.  So they are voting for the dole.  That's a good idea as long as the checks keep coming.



So what happens next?



You can choose the Marxist prophecy, which says that the change in the economy changes the relations between people and prompts the creation of new "classes" mobilized to fight against injustices visited upon society by the old regime.



Or you can choose the moral movement notion, that politics is moved by moral movements, such as Great Awakenings, that work their way into politics and change the rules of governing.



When you think of it, they are saying the same thing.  Look out for new "classes" or moral movements to arise in the future as people respond to the stresses and the injustices of the age.



What will these movements look like and what will they want?



Nobody knows.  But they will surprise us and surprise the political experts.

The New EERA

My point is that, whatever we are fighting about on the front lines of politics, the real issues can be found by stepping back a bit.



In my weekly oped, I announce the new era of the welfare state smashup.  The welfare state smashup will occur because, the promises that have been made cannot be delivered.  What is more, they should not be delivered.



It's a new EERA, and I think that the defining issues will be Entitlements, Economy, Race, and Abortion.



On Entitlements, we must realize that, not only are entitlements eating up the budget, they are eating up our society.  The great issue of any society, from a family to a nation state, is freeloading.  The benefits of society are enormous, there is no such thing as an "independent" human.  We would all perish without society.  But equally, for each of us there is an eternal temptation to ride on the labor of others.  One of the central tasks of religion, according to Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct, is to control freeloading, by naming and shaming and, if that doesn't work, with divine justice.  But the welfare state creates a springtime for freeloaders, encouraging people to define themselves as victims that cannot be expected to contribute.  It dissolves the notion that we should all try to contribute as much as we can, rather that try to get away with as little as we can. or as beneficiaries who deserve to get back what they put in.  Then there is the systems aspect of entitlements, the idea that you can set up an administrative system that defines for all time what people should contribute and what they should receive.  Such a mechanical system is bound to fail.



On Economy, we must stop the government trying to game the economy.  No doubt there is a place for the government's system of force, but if we have learned one thing over the last two centuries of the industrial age it is that the government's attempts to second guess the market has almost always failed.  On the credit system, governments have again and again debauched the currency and stolen the savings of ordinary people.  On the market system, governments have again and again favored special interests and economic chimeras over the natural discovery process of the market.  And while the government is tending its cronies, the wind farmers and the government employee unions, the ordinary fraudsters and bunco artists thrive.  Why on earth did Bernie Madoff not get shut down by the regulators?



On Race, we must stop the monstrous betrayal of the civil rights revolution.  I can understand that the Democrats may have thought, after the civil rights acts, that they deserved to hand out some goodies to their supporters, but the hypocrisy of quotas and "diversity" 50 years later is an outrage, and the way that Democrats have ghettoized blacks into voting 90-10 for Democrats can only have been achieved by naked appeals to race.  What the civil rights revolution was supposed to curb in the racist South.



On Abortion, liberals need to rethink.  My prediction is that abortion is going to become the great moral issue of the age.  Think back to slavery.  Back in the 18th century, Europeans were doing a fine business in the slave plantation business.  It brought sugar to the breakfast tables of Europe, and built great mansions in the country.  But then the Quakers decided that it was wrong.  A century later, slavery was dead.  Today, we can agree that abortion is, after a fashion, tremendously liberating for women.  They do not have to be a slave to their reproductive role.  That's the good side.  But there is a cost to the convenience of abortion.  It cheapens the central business of life, which is reproduction.  There is a reason why women and children have been made sacred and set apart.  It is because we forget the central importance of reproduction at our peril.  When we see the child per woman rate down at 1.3 in Western Europe, when 2.1 is replacement rate, we know that something is wrong.  That something is the marginalization of sex, marriage, childbearing and childraising.  We talk about careers for women as more important than children for women.



We humans are social animals, but we are also easily distracted from any tasks and run off at tangents.  Instead of concentrating on the job at hand we run off into the weeds.  It is the job of the great social institutions to turn us back to our tasks.  On Entitlements it is to realize that the great social engagements of health care, education, and welfare cannot be shoved aside as mechanical administrative programs.  On the Economy it is to realize that the economy is something to which we must all contribute before we can get our reward.  On Race it is to refocus on what unites us rather than what divides us.  On Abortion it is to realize that our central creative task is to produce children not great products, great cities, or great works of art.



We can either re-channel ourselves to our central human task, or we can drain away into the sand, like every other civilization in history.  Our choice.

The Politics of the Smashup

I mourned for a day, but now I see the future.  The era of conservative reform is over and the era of the smashup is about to begin.



For fifty years conservatives have been offering a way to veer gently off the folly of the administrative welfare state by limiting the expansion of government.  But with the confirmation of Obamacare, President Obama has welded shut the door of the iron cage.  We are now trapped in the cage until we can smash it up and escape.



The four walls of the iron cage are government pensions, government health care, government education and government welfare.  The cage is designed, whether its designers understand or not, to replace the natural human instincts of social engagement with the mechanical steel of the administrative bureaucracy and the rulebook.



Karl Marx may have been the most unpleasant man of his generation, and he may have been dead wrong about the "immiseration" of the working class, but he had one thing right.  When the economy changes, as it did in 1760 with the textile revolution and again in the 1820s with the railroad revolution, then necessarily society changes too.  The old elite inevitably succumbs as the culture and the politics change and new men come forward.



So here we have the death of the old world of "good jobs at good wages" that we witness in the failure of General Motors and the devastation they say you can see from the Acela is it runs through Camden and Philadelphia.  And anyway, the workers hated those jobs.  We see the new world of smaller, agile companies that will demolish the big business model, and we see the prospect of on-line education that will utterly transform the big education model.  We know that big welfare is a total failure.  And here's my nickel that says that big health care is on the cusp of a revolution.



If the Economy of the Bigs is on its way out, then society itself is going to change.  So then what will happen to the biggest big of all, our modern big government?  Who knows?  But one thing is for sure: It will change.



It will change because it will run out of money.  Inflation, debt default, financial repression, confiscation, riots in the streets: Greece and Argentina writ large.  It's all a real shame, because women and minorities will be hardest hit.

Forget the Tactics and Messaging

Reading the postmortems on the 2012 election I see a lot of people worrying about tactics and messaging.  We didn't appeal in the right way with the right candidate with the right messages.



All true, but don't forget that the Prussians won the Franco-Prussian war despite some severe tactical mistakes.  They won because they had the better strategy; they had their larger formations in the right place.



That's why I believe we should take a deep breath and step back. The larger question is the question of the administrative welfare state.  Is it a social and political system that is: just, practical, sustainable.



The obvious answer is that the welfare state is profoundly unjust, for it merely instantiates the age old rule of the stronger over the weaker.  Welfare state politics is nothing more than the mobilizing of regime supporters with the promise of loot.



The welfare state is impractical because it does not have the bandwidth to manage society and its millions of transactions.  The administrative method can work for an army, although only just, because an army has a limited goal and it frankly admits that it uses its soldiers as cannon fodder.  In an economy and a society, we have the idea that the ends do not justify the means.  It is the means that matter and that means we cannot use the administrative method which treats everyone in its structure as a means.



Finally, the welfare state is profoundly unsustainable because, like all political systems, it cannot respond to change.  Politics is a human way of resisting change, of trying to set things up for all eternity.  That is a mirage.  A wise political system limits the power of government because it knows that it cannot anticipate every need and every accident.  We have a system for that; it is called capitalism.



In these days the world looks very dark for conservative ideas.  President Obama has cunningly characterized the utter bankruptcy of liberal ideas as President Bush's fault.  He can do that because when a Democratic president says something the mainstream media do not insert those snappish little paragraphs that begin "But critics say..."



But now the president must "do something" about the budget and about the economy.  My guess is that, whatever he does, nobody will be happy.



As Winston Churchill is reputed to have said, America always does the right thing. In the end.

End of an Illusion

The basic idea behind modern conservatism has been that we can persuade the American people to move away from their client relationship to the administrative welfare state, and build a different society, one based on freedom and free association, in particular the free associations of civil society.



The historic reelection of President Obama means that the conservative dream has become an illusion.  With the confirmation of Obamacare we now have in the United States a four-sided iron cage of administrative confinement.  For old age we have government pensions, for health care we have government health care, to educate the children we have government education, and for the relief of the poor we have government welfare.  And we will have all of that that until it breaks.



It will break, that we know.  The one great lesson of history is that people don't give up their free stuff without a fight, so governments like ours are forced to give out more and more out of a dwindling "stash."



The great blessing of the free market is that it offers humans a way of adjusting their behavior to the needs of their fellows.  If you have a job, or if your company makes a profit, it means that you are rendering valuable services to your fellow humans.



But government is different.  It is a system of force.  It is, always and everywhere, an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to provide for its supporters.  In the past these supporters have usually been a warrior elite, but in our day the government's supporters are the entitlement program beneficiaries and the government employees.



In The Great Wave David Hackett Fischer has described how an age of rising prices ends.  It ends in social collapse, in inflation, in disease, war, and famine.  Fischer isn't a very good economist, and still less a political philosopher.  But he can shovel out the facts.  In each era of rising prices governments start to live beyond their means, and they resort to borrowing and inflation.  They do that because to disappoint their supporters and reduce their stipends would deny the government's very reason for being.  And anyway, people denied their benefits usually resort to the streets.



Program beneficiaries are like NRA members who say you can get their guns out of their cold dead hands.  It is not just that they are selfish: we are all selfish.  The beneficiaries of the welfare state have organized their lives around their benefits.  They are, as they self-describe, people on "fixed incomes."  They don't propose, and maybe cannot, "do something" about their situation if it heads south, except to demonstrate and riot.



In our case projected government health care costs alone are going to eat the federal budget.  They cannot be paid and they will not be paid.  The same probably goes for the national debt.  We have three states already, California, Illinois, and probably New York, that are going broke.  With the reelection of President Obama they are probably going to get bailouts, meaning that they will not be forced to reduce spending.  Then we have the hyper-regulation of the Obama state that will probably keep business hunkered down on its capital strike.



Is there hope?  Of course there is.  We conservatives can continue to work on what comes after.  After the present welfare state of the educated liberals and their clients runs out of money and blood.



Our chance may not come for a generation.  Of maybe it will come in four years.  Who knows?



Paradoxically, the solution to our problems has probably received its most penetrating analysis from the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School.  It is they that realized that all instrumental reason, whether used in government or business, leads to domination, and a triumph of system over people.  The solution, Juergen Habermas realized, was a balance between our modern rational systems and the human-all-to-human lifeworld.  Or as we conservatives say, civil society, where free people in free association join with their fellow citizens face to face to meet their social needs and solve their social problems.

Today's the Day

Today's the day on which we Americans decide if Barack Obama's huge gamble pays off.



Back in 2006, if you remember, Democrats decided that they had learned from the Bush 2004 victory and they ran a lot of moderates for Congress.  It was a great success and the Dems picked up 30 seats in the House.



Then they ran the healer Barack Obama in 2008 and America voted for its first black president in the hope that he would end the centuries of race war.  The Democrats also picked up 25 seats in the House.



But President Obama did not govern as the healer.  He governed as a man in a hurry.  Galvanized by the almost filibuster-proof Senate, he decided to go for broke and pass every item on the liberal wish list while there was still time.  He passed a stimulus bill, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank.



The American people were outraged and in 2010 sent 63 more Republicans to the House of Representatives, including a Tim Scott, a black insurance agent to represent Charleston, SC, and Allen West to represent a district in SE Florida.



The question today is whether we return the president to office, in which case his signature Obamacare will probably endure, or whether we counterattack, and roll back his ambitious effort to "transform" America.



If the president gets reelected then he will go down in history as one of the most daring and successful politicians ever.  If he fails then he will be dismissed as just another reckless fool that tried to take a bridge too far.



Of course, beyond the issue of the president and his daring gamble for the laurels of history, there is this.



Politics is civil war by other means.  The idea is to take advantage of your opportunities, but not so that your opponents decide that their only option is civil war.  The way you do this is, as Noam Chomsky puts it, by manufacturing consent.



When you want to pass a great health care bill you figure that you have two options.  You could go for broke with a bare partisan majority and create a head of rebellion in the opposition.  Or you could broker a compromise and pass a "bipartisan consensus."  Then you can argue that your bill was a "bipartisan" bill and that only a rump of extremists voted against it.



President Obama went the bare partisan majority route and rammed his programs through in the teeth of opposition from the American people.  I suspect that his decision will echo down the decades to come in rancor and conflict.



The result, of course, is likely to be sovereign debt default and the collapse of the welfare state, and maybe worse.



Women and minorities will be hardest hit, as usual.



But then, that's what usually happens when transformative leaders start transforming.