Who is Going Over the Cliff?

The problem for any spectator of events is that of discrimination.  Which events are important and which events are mere noise?



That's the question after the late election.  Who is in more trouble, the Republicans or the Democrats?  It depends, in the end, on what the American people want.



Do they want a land of freedom where people launch themselves into the world to try and serve it?  Or do they want a land of power where people fight to get their fair share?



Of course, there is a bit of each of these in all of us.  We want freedom for some things and we want to force our way in others.



Is the Republican Party finished as a national party?  Probably, except that the experts are always predicting the end of the Republican Party, and it always refuses to die.



But look at the Democratic Party.  For years and years it represented Everyman, the working stiff who went off to work everyday with his lunch-pail to build the houses, dig the coal, smelt the steel and produce the products.  Now it represents everyone who is not really working gainfully, from college professors to government employees to all the crony capitalists that feed at the government trough.



In my view the Democrats made a fateful decision back in about 1990 when it seemed that the Reagan revolution had dealt a fatal blow to the party.  That's when they really kicked the race thing into gear, and the secular thing, and the effort to boost the Hispanic population and vote by turning a blind eye to illegal immigration and passing the Motor Voter Act to make it easy to register to vote.



Meanwhile there's a problem.  While Democrats have been desperately demagoguing their way back into power they have allowed all their social programs to develop into corrupt monstrosities: Social Security corrupted by fraudulent disability claims, Medicare a bottomless pit that will eat the budget, welfare a yearly trillion dollar incentive against work.



When you see  gigantic areas of corruption you have to think end-of-an-era.  When you see the annual staged budget crises, Debt Crisis followed by Fiscal Cliff, you have to think that things are worse than we know.



But how and when does it all change?   Who knows?



And it's all such a shame.  This great nation is bulging with possibilities and potential.  Instead we are diverted by cunning stratagems and pummeled by political slugfests.



At least we know this.  The Democrats have opted for cheap money and higher taxes.  That always ends in a cliff.  That's a shame, because the American people deserve better.

The World According to Medicare

When you are 66, like me, you start to think about what life will be like when you are really old.  Yeah,  I know: you young 'uns think that 66 is really old already.



No, I am talking about people in their 80s that are falling apart.  It could be dementia; it could be physical problems, like balance or glaucoma or a heart condition.



Life looks very different to you and the people that look after you when you get to that age.



Whatever the situation, you and your nearest and dearest must deal with the immense frustration that you are less that a full human being.  You can't get around.  Or you can't be left alone.  Or you can't communicate properly.



Of course, the same applies to children.  But with children there is this:  every day they grow and become more competent and independent.  With an older person the opposite is true, and this is very frustrating for all concerned.



Then there is the expense.  In the old days, people took to their beds and then fever or something soon took them off.  You nursed the invalid or you could afford a slave or a servant to care for them at a minor expense.  Today we have technology and government and institutions, and they are very expensive.  There has to be a better way.



The trouble with the expense is that we all have to turn to government: for medical costs, for care-giving, for drugs.  Nothing wrong with that, of course, except that government is force, and anything rendered unto government ends up as force: one-size-fits-all, bureaucracy, guidelines, and crony capitalism.  There has to be a better way.



Some day in the future, people will look back on our age and marvel at our stupidities:  the way we confine children in child custodial facilities, the way we barrack the sick in hospital factories, the way we warehouse the aged in "independent/assisted living facilities."  It's as though the gang system of the slave plantation and the factory had taken over the whole of society.



Wouldn't it be great if baby boomers like me could find a better way to deal with old age other than big budgets, big government and big warehouses.



Don't hold your breath.  The defining principle of the baby boomers has always been: we break it; you fix it.

Obama's Great White Whale

You expect politicians to have hackneyed political ideas, and President Obama doesn't disappoint.

It's been obvious all along that his central concern is "inequality" and a post-election piece by Zachary Goldfarb points that up.

As Obama did in legislative fights during his first term, he also will be striving to reduce a three-decades-long wave of rising income inequality that has meant that fewer Americans have prospered while more struggle to get by.

Three decades, you'll note, takes us back to the beginning of the Reagan administration.  It means that the astonishing economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s was a mirage.  It's the basis of  "you didn't build that," of Joe the Plumber and "spread the wealth" and just about everything the president has done.

And the rest of the liberal political culture is not far behind.  That's what all the nostalgia talk about "good jobs at good wages" in the 1950s is all about.  Back then we had big corporations and strong unions and the working stiff made out well.  Today with outsourcing and greedy bankers and vulture capitalists like Mitt Romney the little guy is getting screwed.

That's the liberal line.

The conservative line comes out of people like Charles Murray and his Coming Apart.  The conservative line is that the mechanical liberal administrative welfare state hurts the very people it is supposed to help.  It encourages people in dependency, breaks up families, gives the children of the poor a lousy education, puts government under the thumb of government employee unions and business into the corruption of go-along-to-get-along crony capitalism.  Oh, things are going swimmingly for the cognitive elite, the people that are good at going to school and getting credentials and navigating bureaucratic hierarchies.  But if you are a meat-and-potatoes kind of person, one that learns by doing, and that lives in a face-to-face rather than a memo-to-memo culture--well tough luck for you.

But there's another troubling aspect to this, and it is coming out int he fiscal cliff crisis.  We learn from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that the basic fiscal-cliff proposal from the Obama administration is basically $1.6 trillion in tax increases.  If this is true, it means that the Obamis are not advancing a serious proposal for entitlement reform.  It means that, if there is any entitlement reform, it will be just a bargaining chip in the power struggle between the two factions of our ruling class.

This tells us a lot more than you might think.  Republicans and conservatives would like to reform the government entitlements so that they are self-financing, so that the federal government finances can get onto a long-term balance.  They want to get the government out of the middle of all this.  The Democrats don't.

When the Democrats stopped observing the Budget Control Acts after 2009 they opted for the annual cliff-hanger like the 2011 debt-default crisis, and now the fiscal-cliff crisis.  They are reducing policy to an annual national cage fight.

In my judgment this is a serious betrayal of the "little people," the welfare-state dependents that rely on those government programs.  It shows that the Democrats don't really care about them except for their votes.

Because when the crash comes, Arnold Kling's "sudden stop" when the government has to balance spending and revenue because it can't borrow any more, then the welfare-state dependents are going to be hurt the most: "women and minorities hardest hit" as the headline goes.  Eating the paint off the walls, as the Russians say.

But really, anyone that relies on a government to keep themselves in groceries deserves what they get.  Government is force, politics is for bullies.  If you cast your vote with the bullies, you get what you pay for.

I don't think that President Obama is really interested in the long-term fate of the dependent classes.  He has a facile answer for all that: "inequality."  Just lower the level of struggle for the struggling classes by making the rich pay a little more, and you can make America a better country.

There's another way of putting this.  Just let politicians do what comes naturally, dividing people by income and class and looting the producers to pay off their supporters, says President Obama, and all will be well.

Well.  The whole thrust of modern conservatism since Edmund Burke has been that you surrender society to "sophisters, economists, and calculators" at your peril.  He means, in our modern argot, that society cannot be reduced to system and administrative routine.  We humans are social animals, not mechanical animals.

Conservative Storytelling

Liberals tell their story better than conservatives.  That's the message from Lee Habeeb and Mike Leven.  Habeeb is a VP at conservative Salem Radio Network, home of Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager, so he should know.  Conservatives should tell our stories better.



No doubt.  And the liberal advantage goes back to the invention of the movie.  Even conservative icon Margaret Thatcher was affected when the movies came to Methodist Grantham in the 1920s.  What a world outside the dull Methodism of the old ones!



But it's not just storytelling; it's hegemony.  Liberals get to force their stories down our throats and stigmatize our stories as racist, sexist, homophobic.  That is the key.  Liberals sit in the cultural catbird seat and they don't intend to give it up or anything else.



And anyway, the main consumers of cultural product, young people, want edgy stuff that annoys their parents.  How are they to tell that the real "parents" are the edgy liberals running their schools and their TV shows?



The reason conservatives are in such a world of hurt is that liberals have deliberately hitched up their efforts at cultural hegemony in the last couple of decades.  Let's say it goes back to the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was carrying all before him.  Liberals responded with the Clintonian New Democrat feint and with efforts to corral their supporters into ethnic enclaves. with naked racist appeals.  Along the way liberals taught themselves to stop listening to conservative critiques.



It is a mistake to imagine that the culture war is merely a matter of competing stories.  That's not the way the world works.  Each era has a dominant culture, the taken-for-granted stories about the way the world works and came to be.  That dominant culture doesn't really get challenged until it starts to fail.



The reason that Obama got elected and reelected is because liberals ran a full-court press to sell the idea that Bush had failed, and the American people bought the idea.  Never mind that the main reason for the Crash of 2008 was the popping of a 30-year real-estate bubble, and the biggest reason for the pop was the loans to people that couldn't afford to service them.  Nothing to do with greedy bankers and crazy derivatives.  Just bad liberal government policy.  And the fact is that liberals have the cultural power to push their narrative on the American people.



Liberals will find that their stories will cease to persuade when things start going wrong.  Oh they'll blame the insurance companies for the failure of Obamacare, and they will keep blaming class size for the failures of public education.  But in the end, people will stop listening and just say: things aren't working; we have to change.



At that point people will be ready to listen to another story.  It is then we will need conservatives with a story to tell.

After Patronage Politics Fails

Conservatives are full of foreboding these days.  The debt isn't $16 trillion; it's much, much worse.  The student debt problem is yet another case (after mortgage subsidies) of good intentions screwing the people it was meant to help.  Ditto Affirmative Action at the university.



The basic divide in this country is between two ideas of the individual.  There is the "responsible self," a notion that Robert Bellah attributes to the Axial Age when all modern religions got their start.  And there is the client self, the powerless peasant that attaches himself to a powerful patron.



Thus it makes sense that the average Republican thinks of himself as a "typical American" and the average Democrat thinks of himself as a hyphenated American.  If you adhere to the notion of the "responsible self" then you don't need and don't want to think of yourself as an embattled class.  But if you adhere to the idea of yourself as powerless, then you need to group together and identify a powerful patron, someone that will protect you and your group from a cruel and heartless world.



What I wonder is what happens when this breaks down, when the powerful patron can't or won't deliver.  In our terms, what happens when the entitlements run out.  What do the people do, and what do the leaders do?



The simple answer, from David Hackett Fischer in The Great Wave, is that you get default, revolution, and war.  The end game of the patronage/client business, when there is no more money, provokes people to seek an answer in the street.



Of course, the war and the revolution don't really solve anything.  Their contribution is to focus and concentrate the rage of the disappointed in a great battle.  After it's over the rage subsides, people accept the result, and life goes on.  The glorious principles to which people vowed solemn oaths lie trampled in the mud and blood, and people make do with what remains.



As the endgame unfolds in the near future we can expect that the client groups of the Democratic Party will lunge to grab more loot with tax increases.  And they will partially succeed.  The responsible selves of the Republican Party will try to tame the entitlements, and they will partially succeed.



Then we will come to the real default and the real disappointment.  All predictions and prophesies will disappear into the fog of war.



That's the whole point of war and revolution.  When you are brutally disappointed, you make one last violent gesture, to mix it all up and hope that after the confusion you come out on top at the end.



Medium term, you can see what is coming.  Barack Obama has set federal spending at about 25 percent of GDP.  Federal revenue has never really got about 19 percent of GDP.  When the current effort to make the rich pay a little more raises federal revenue to about 19.5 percent of GDP then the Democrats will call for a Value Added Tax.  Guess what.  That will fall on the middle class and the Democratic voters.



And what will the clients and the victims do then, poor things?

Does Kant Rescue Cause and Effect from Hume?

Perhaps the stickiest wicket that Kant faces in his Critique of Pure Reason is to roll back Hume's argument that there ain't no such thing as cause and effect.  For Hume, all we can say about events in the world is that B follows A.  We can never say that A caused B.

Since the Brits invented cricket, you can see that the German Kant would have to be really on his game to deal with the googlies from bowler Hume.  (Although I don't know if googlies had been invented yet).

In a way, Kant's whole transcendental machinery is designed to deal with Hume's challenge: what warrant can there be for any assertion of A being the cause of B?  The whole idea of the external experience of objects as appearances rather than things-in-themselves is the center of Kant's cunning plan to deal with Hume and his tricky bowling.

Kant makes his argument that, for any experience in the world, there must be a rule that predicts the occurrence of an event from a previous event, for if there were no rule in the mind connecting events then indeed all sequences of perceptions would be merely subjective, received impressions having no connection with any outside object.  On that view there would be no way to cognize any outside object.

The cunning trick is, of course, that we are not talking about events-in-themselves or outside-objects-in-themselves.  The events are appearances, impressions that the mind processes into unified judgments about what is going on out there.  If I see a boy in the neighbor's yard in the act of throwing a baseball towards my house I take note of that appearance.  If half a second later I receive the impressions of a crash and tinkle in the front room and a a boyish squeak from the neighbor's yard, I am justifying in applying a rule that baseballs thrown at my house are quite likely to hit my house and that the appearance (or hear-ance) of a crash and tinkle shortly after the appearance of the neighbor boy and his baseball justify my judgment that it was the boy wot done it.

It all revolves around the appearances vs. things-in-themselves game.  In the game of appearances I could always be wrong.  It's possible that I didn't see the other kid across the street and his baseball.  Or it could be that a meteorite came out of the sky and broke my window.

But none of that matters.  What matters is that Kant's transcendental machinery describes how my sensibility receives impressions from the outside world, which I process in accordance with my forms of intuition about space and time and then combine them into a manifold using the categories of understanding.  Then I apply judgement to bring the manifold to a unified experience of possible external objects of experience.  But those objects are only appearances, not things-in-themselves.

Good old Kant.  Gin clear, as always.  And four runs for the Königsberger against the best bowling in England.

Kant's Problematic Refutation of Idealism

Immanuel Kant came up with a wonderful idea.  Let's just say, he writes, that we can't see things "in themselves" but only as appearances.  In that one idea he elegantly avoids claiming that we can ever know the whole truth about life, the universe and everything.

Kant's idea is, of course, not much different from St. Paul's talk about seeing through a glass, darkly.  And it is echoed by the quantum mechanical dictum that you can't see anything in the sub-atomic world without disturbing it.  So you do not see an item "in itself" but only after you have nudged it, with some kind of electromagnetic or sub-atomic energy.  So whatever you are looking at, it is not the same as it was.

But Kant feels the need to demolish his predecessors with his Refutation of Idealism.  He wants to dispatch the Dogmatic Idealism of Berkeley and the Problematic Idealism of Descartes.

Problem is that most everyone agrees that Kant doesn't quite pull it off, thus violating the first rule of politics that if you come to overthrow the king you had better succeed.  Or else.

Kant wants to refute the Cartesian idea that the outer world is "doubtful and indemonstrable."  Kant crosses over Descartes' division between knowledge of internal and external states by setting out to prove that the "empirical consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me."  Kant's argument is based on the idea that I am conscious of my existence in time and the presupposition of something "persistent in perception" and so on.  

The commentators all seem to agree that Kant doesn't finish the job.  Actually, they begin with contesting the first premise of his proof: "I am conscious of my existence as determined in time."  They say he doesn't even start the job of refutation properly.  

Even a tyro like me can see the problem.  Way back in the Transcendental Aestshetic Kant declares that time is a form of intuition that resides in the mind.  So we are using an intuition cooked up in the mind to argue for the existence of the real world?  Come on Immanuel.  You can do better than that!  You are really arguing Descartes' point that the only thing we can be sure about is the thinking "I"!

Really, Kant should stick with the beauty and the elegance of his central creative insight.  We can't know things in themselves.  Everything we know about anything (including our internal self) is founded on belief.  We believe in an "I"; we believe in an external world.  And until our brains start to rot in old age, that belief seems to work for us.  It gets us food, shelter, and a new generation on the ground and out of the nest.  

There's a refutation of idealism for you: grandchildren!