Cliffhanger Budgeting

Back in 1995 Bill Clinton discovered the advantages of cliff-hanger budget battles.  He shut down the government rather than agree to the evil Republican appropriations of the newly elected first-Republican-Congress-in-40-years.



And he won!  He got the American people to agree that it was Congress that shut down the government, not his veto.



So it is not surprising that President Obama has used and perfected the same tactic.  He got himself a cliff-hanger debt crisis in the summer of 2011 and now we have the "fiscal cliff" crisis of December 2012.



Part of the game plan is to have some poor victim group that will suffer if the crisis isn't resolved.  This time it's the folks on long-term unemployment benefits.  Wouldn't you know that they are scheduled to expire four days after Christmas!



For years and years people used to complain about the venal process of Congressional appropriations, the deals, the log-rolling, the Iron Triangles.



But now it seems that we have got to a worse place, a world in which Democrats in Congress don't bother to obey the law (the Budget law that Democrats passed in the 1970s to put a curb on President Nixon) and all appropriations are rolled into a single continuing resolution and a crisis between Congress and the president.



You have to wonder: is this really the world that Democrats want?



Who knows?  Like I wrote in my American Thinker piece this week: despite appearances, the Democrats are hurting. They are no longer the confident ruling class they used to be.  That is why they have to cheat.  And that is why they have to resort to transparent shenanigans to get elected, dishing out more and more entitlements and benefits to keep their support.  That is why they have to stage big publicity crises to panic the American people into more spending.



Now even liberals like Nicholas Kristof are discovering the rotting culture that the administrative welfare state promotes.



But really, liberals are not going to stop doing the Obama, dancing to get the biggest state with the biggest entitlements that the politics of the moment can obtain.  That's what they know; that's what they do.



And that's why big government never goes quietly into the good night.  It always end in default, riot, and mayhem, when all of a sudden the game is up.



But the Obama years do the impossible.  They make the old Congress of powerful committee chairmen and old bulls seem like a kinder, gentler age.

Queen Hillary?

I suppose that it's to be expected.  That the media would be doing a boomlet for Hillary Clinton for President in 2016 in the lame-duck days of December.



Don't even bother, you Rubios and you Ryans, because Hillary has it all sewn up.  First woman president, and all that.



But let us not forget the head winds facing a three-in-a-row for the Democrats.



First there is corruption.  The modern Democratic Party is built on a coalition between the 19th century big-city political machines, the chaps that organized the Irish immigrants into US politics, and the goo-goo Progressive reformers.  It was a match made in heaven.  The Progressives would come up with the ideas for big government and spending other peoples' money, and the machines would deliver the votes.  But it is horribly corrupt.  People on the outside looking in really don't like that.



Then there is cruelty.  The Progressive-machine coalition exists by promoting a soft form of civil war: class war and race war, and the war on religion.  The result is that the Democratic Party has been busily making enemies of whites, middle-class achievers, and Christians for the last couple of generations.  That is how you get social conservatives and Reagan Democrats turning up, unannounced, in the Republican Party.



Let's talk about injustice.  The fact is that government is always and everywhere a system of power and domination.  What moderns want with enlightenment reason is to dominate nature and other men.  It was a couple of lefties that wrote that.  Big government means big injustice, and it's getting worse all the time.  We don't get to see it that clearly because the mainstream media is running interference for the Democrats and the liberals, but sooner or later it is going to pop onto the national radar.



Then there is waste.  Everything the government does, from the Pentagon down to the littlest program, to kill barred owls in order to save the spotted owl, is pure waste.  Now there is no question that we need the Pentagon and the police, because all human societies need protection from enemies foreign and domestic.  Otherwise you get the modern equivalent of the Vikings sailing up the rivers in the fall, just after the harvest.  But everything else is something that we ought to be doing for ourselves or for each other without the government forcing us to do it.



Finally there is delusion.  Yes, our liberal friends busily tell each other that they are the reality-based community.  But every ruling class sustains itself by telling itself lies.  The Brits told themselves that they were really bringing India into the modern age.  Liberals tell themselves that they are the most evolved, educated Americans, and that only they know to do the right thing for anti-intellectual America.



Underneath all the propaganda and the hoopla these irreducible facts are working away.  Just like the Soviet Union, our Democratic friends look unbeatable right now.  They have the best propaganda that money can buy and Chicago bullies can intimidate.  But then one day the whole thing collapses.



That is the faith that sustains us, and that is the reason that 2016 may be too late for Hillary Clinton.

"Internal Colonization"

Marxists may be terminally annoying, but they continue to produce compelling critiques of modern society.

Whereas liberals are totally useless.  Being the ruling class, liberals produce nothing but shoddy apology.

So let us look at Jürgen Habermas, a neo-Marxist who has brought the old Marxist idea of alienation to fruition.  The old Marxist idea was that modern labor under capitalism was alienating because labor was no longer social labor, working to create use value, but abstract labor, working to produce exchange value.

On top of that, Marx claimed, the actors in the capitalist market "reified" their activities.  They did not think of their relations as person-to-person, but thought of their activities in terms of thing-to-thing, an exchange of commodity for money.  That is what he meant by "commodity fetishism."

Habermas restates all this in terms that make sense to the average bear like me, by dividing the world up into "system" and "lifeworld."  Instead of abstract labor we have System.  Instead of social labor we have Lifeworld.  System is the market, and Lifeworld is the person-to-person relation.  More than that, System is the world of rational and strategic action.  You do almost everything in the market for gain, and it is very rational: sell, buy; make, create; up, down.  But the Lifeworld is not like that.  It is social, cooperative; it is language based, not reason based.  It is not up or down, but tries to create a consensus, a sharing.

Following Horkheimer and Adorno in A Dialectic of Enlightenment Habermas makes another important step.  He understands that the state, just as much as capitalism, is a rational system.  Both systems are based on "instrumental reason," trying to make things happen in the world by rational means.  And that means that government and business are both trying to "dominate nature and other men."  This means that government's project is the "internal colonization" of society.  Just as the European nations of the 18th and 19th century went around the world colonizing less powerful societies, so the modern state attempts to colonize its people with its experts and its bureaucrats, its regulation and its spending.

This is a punishing critique of the modern state, and a warning about its power.  We should be just as careful about government power as about business power.  Conservatives tend to worry about government power; liberals worry about corporate power.  But Habermas warns about all system power.

There is a difference between the two systems, beyond the analysis of Habermas.  It is that government is all about war.  When we say that government's primary job is to defend against enemies foreign and domestic we really mean that it is government's job to wage war on enemies foreign and domestic.  In other words, government is at loose ends unless it has an enemy to fight.  William James famously articulated this truth just before World War I when he advised that, since war was now unlikely, we would have to gussie up the "moral equivalent of war" to mobilize people to do important things.  We can see the truth of this in the periodic campaigns that government comes up with: War on Want, War on Poverty, War on Drugs, Whip Inflation Now.

But this gives conservatives and limited government advocates an opening.  When deciding whether to start a new government program we should ask ourselves: is war the best way to do this?  Because every government program is about force.  It does not say, wow, saving for retirement is really a good thing, why don't we all save from our wages!  It says you must pay 15 percent of your wages to the government in return for a pension, or else.

So then you ask: if saving against a rainy day is a natural human thing to do, why do we force everyone to save?  If insuring against sickness is a natural thing to do, why do we force everyone into Obamacare?  If everyone can see the importance of getting an education, why force everyone into a compulsory government plan?

The answer comes easily from Habermas' idea of "internal colonization."  Because we, the ruling class, want to rule.  We don't want you running off and saving your own money; we want to force you to bank the money with us.  We don't want you running off educating your kid according to your crazy ideas; we want your kid indoctrinated with ruling class ideas.

But why do people put up with this?  Simple: there is an obvious attraction to colonialism.  If you go with the colonial masters you get to enjoy the free stuff, and maybe sup at the master's table--below the salt, of course.

But for some reason the colonized peoples of the 19th century didn't like the overall package.  They preferred to rule themselves according to their own way rather than truckle to their European colonizers.

The question for us is whether we continue to truckle to our native-born internal colonizers in return for all the free stuff.  Or whether we rise up and declare that we would rather live in our own way, backward and flawed, rather than ape the ways of our colonial masters.

Of course, today the question is moot, as President Obama takes us into the miasma of internal colonization on steroids.

But when the Obama years, "the years the locusts have eaten" are over, we will visit the internal colonization question again.

Nobody knows what answer the American people will give.

Republicans' Only Hope?

Everyone is full of advice to Republicans on how to enlarge the coalition.  "Be nice" seems to be the consensus, especially "be nice" to Hispanics.



But really, can Republicans ever compete with Democrats when it comes to sharing out the loot?



The irreducible fact of the US two party system is that, at least since the Civil War, the Republican Party has been the party of the "typical American" and the Democratic Party the party of the hyphenated American.  Typical Americans think that the system works pretty well; hyphenated Americans have a beef with the system.



This plays into the two basic narratives of the modern era: the Invisible Hand narrative and the Exploitation narrative.



As Michael Barone writes in The New Americans Americans tend to start out as embattled, exploited immigrant communities; as they begin to succeed they feel less embattled and thus become less likely to "fight" for their rights.  But some groups--think Jews and blacks--retain their sense of apartness longer than most.



The fact is that blacks and Hispanics are the latest additions to the American stew and they typically feel that the deck is stacked against them, and reckon their chances better with the share-out-the-loot party.  That is likely to continue for a while.



But history tells us that, despite everything, immigrants get fed up with the loot party.  It happened with the Reagan Democrats in 1980.  No doubt it will happen again when the "blue social model" starts to run out of other peoples' money.  For instance, what happens when the money starts to run out for state government pension systems?  Is is a "blue civil war," as Walter Russell Mead suggests, as Democratic Party supporters fight over the disappearing spoils?



Probably the more likely near-term outlook is denial.  After all, it's what liberals famously accuse everyone else of.  As amateur observers of liberal psychology, we should think of this as "projection."  And it is clear that President Obama's "rich pay a little more" policy is nothing but denial.



But nobody should expect the Democrats' blue coalition to cry "uncle" and back off on its loot philosophy until long after disaster is staring it in the face.



Meanwhile we should expect some groups to peel off from the Democratic coalition: perhaps the upper-income professionals, social liberal and economically conservative, that will overlook the down-market social conservatism of the Republican Party as the Obama taxes start to bite.



And let us not forget the big takeaway from the 2012 election: white voters that didn't turn out.  Who were they?  The likeliest argument is that they were working-class whites demoralized by the Romney-is-an-uncaring-plutocrat Obama ads.



So thank goodness that the GOP's leading contenders for 2016, Rep. Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Rubio (R-FL), are lifetime professional politicians that never went near the planet Pluto or ever learned how to run a business.



Still, it's a shame.  Businessmen are the people that converted the $3 per day economy of 1800 into the $120 per day economy of today.



Why in the world would the average person be afraid of chaps like that?

Poor Having Fewer Babies

Few things have worried the bourgeoisie more than the excess birthrate among the poor.  It probably started with worry about all those starving children, but by the turn of the 20th century and Margaret Sanger and all it reduced down to the problem of the unfit.  That's what Planned Parenthood was all about, remember.  And it worked.  To this day Planned Parenthood maintains a heavy presence in lower-income neighborhoods.

The interesting backstory to this is told by Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms.  It turns out that before 1800 in England the poor had less surviving children than the rich, for obvious reasons.  Since the Gerald O'Hara rule then applied, that "land is the only thing that lasts," primogeniture dictated that the younger children of the rich, the landed warrior class, were kicked downwards into the professions.  And the younger children of the professions were downwardly mobile too.  And so on until we get to the landless laborer.

But that all changed with the industrial revolution.  The poor started having more children than the rich and the children of the poor moved up in the social scale: an upwardly mobile society.  Hence the Sangerite panic a century later.

But now, according to Ross Douthat in The New York Times, the poor and the immigrants are having less children:

American fertility plunged with the stock market in 2008, and it hasn’t recovered...

This time, the birthrate has fallen fastest among foreign-born Americans, and particularly among Hispanics, who saw huge amounts of wealth evaporate with the housing bust.

But here's the clincher:

Among the native-born working class, meanwhile, there was a retreat from child rearing even before the Great Recession hit. For Americans without college degrees, economic instability and a shortage of marriageable men seem to be furthering two trends in tandem: more women are having children out of wedlock, and fewer are raising families at all.

 So all the worriers about the survival of the unfit can go home.  The unfit are having less unfit babies.  Back to the good old days of the pre-1800 downwardly mobile society.  But I don't think this will end well.

You only have to read Charles Murray's latest book, Coming Apart, to see why.  Life is peachy-keen among the educated class: that's you and me.  We get married, we have children, we get divorced less than average.  But in the lower orders, things are not good.  Fifty percent of children are living with one parent, and working-class men are leaving the workforce.  All the statistics show that children of single parents present more pathologies than children of two-parent families.  My favorite is that children of single parents suffer six to 30 times more from physical abuse than the children living with their married biological parents.  And then there are the men.  Single men do worse than married man, much worse.

Says Instapundit: "Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money. Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be. Promises that can’t be kept, won’t be."

But that misses the main point.  If the lower orders are doing worse then that amounts to the failure of the welfare state.  The whole point of the welfare state was to tax the rich in order to help the poor.

It goes deeper than that.  It means that the welfare state has turned out to be profoundly unjust.  Sooner or later the lower orders will bust out of their welfare-state ghetto with rage.  You'd like to think that they would focus their rage on the people that tempted them with welfare state goodies and in the process wrecked their families, their work ethic, and their prosperity.  But they probably won't.  They will probably go after the Mitt Romneys of the world, the uncaring capitalists that create the jobs in this world, on the prompting of some latter-day community organizer.

That would be a shame.  For all of us.

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.