GOP Wobbly on Sequester

Look out below! The House GOP is going wobbly on the "sequester."  That's the modest $1 trillion spending cut agreed to by the president and Congress back in the debt-ceiling deal of August 2011.



You'll remember that the president wants to replace the spending cuts with a "balanced package" of spending cuts and tax increases.  Now that the cuts are looming ahead like linebackers, GOPers representing districts with defense workers want to punt.

The problem for Boehner is that while his members generally support his position, they are unhappy about having to explain these cuts back home. Privately, GOP members say, they never thought that Congress would actually implement these specific cuts.

“We all voted for this, but we thought at the time that both parties wouldn’t want to see this happen, so it’d make us work together,” says a House Republican close to the leadership. “Both parties still don’t want to do this, but it looks like we may be forced to, if the president keeps insisting on new taxes.”

It just shows the basic problem with modern government.  It's easy to talk about small, limited government, but nobody got pitched out of Congress for bringing home the bacon.



Here is Michael Barone praising  House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for his "outside" game, appealing to voters with poster boys and girls.

He spoke not of educational block grants, but of having federal education "follow children" to schools their parents choose.

In a move reminiscent of presidents' State of the Union messages since 1982, he brought along Joseph Kelley, who sent his son, Rashawn, and his three daughters to private schools with money from a District of Columbia voucher program the Obama administration has tried to shut down.

He criticized the Obamacare tax on medical devices by bringing a Baltimore nurse who worked to develop replacement discs for patients with back pain and then needed one herself. She was wearing her cervical collar.

He brought 12-year-old Katie, from Richmond, who has been treated for cancer almost all her life, to illustrate Republican support for funding basic medical research.

See what he is doing?  He is making the case for spending: on block grants, on medical research, you name it.  More goodies, more practical help for people.  And you know what he is trying to do.  He is trying to appeal to women.



Sorry.  But to me, Cantor is playing on the Democrats' turf.  Maybe that's all we Republicans and conservatives can hope to do.  Maybe that's the only way we will ever be able to appeal to women: dangling goodies in their faces for them and their loved ones.



But here is my problem.  If conservatism means anything it is that the health of the nation and society depends on people cooperating and helping each other outside the context of big government handing out goodies.  It means children with a married mother and married father.  It means people clubbing together to make education work.  It means a whole civil society of people working together to help each other.  It emphatically does not mean politicians bribing people for their votes, reducing human society to a scramble for entitlement loot.



Maybe there is nothing that conservative politicians can do, absent a moral revolution that declares the bidding for government loot to be as evil as bidding for human flesh at a slave auction.  After all, plenty of people made lots of money out of slaves for thousands of years without bothering themselves too much about the morality of it.



Nothing will really change until women mount a moral revolution that declares government goodies as stuff that hurts mothers and makes babies grow up into monsters.



So let the spending roll on!

The Root Cause: Fatherlessness

We educated types are pretty strong on the -essness words.  Joblessness, helplessness, and, of course, fatherlessness.



It's all part of the purposelessness of the average beneficiary of the administrative welfare state.  To have a good solid administrative state you need a good supply of the jobless, the helpless and the purposeless.  So you can help them with good solid government program.  And more to follow.



Falstaff knew all about it.  In fact he could ramble on forever on the subject:

A good [government program] hath a two-fold

operation in it. It ascends me into the brain;

dries me there all the foolish and dull and curdy

vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive,

quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and

delectable shapes, which, delivered o'er to the

voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes

excellent wit. The second property of your

excellent [program] is, the warming of the blood;

which, before cold and settled, left the liver

white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity

and cowardice;

And so on.  The problem is that, while a good government program, like a good sherris sack, is wonderful for Sir John, it isn't so good for the average person, especially when taken to excess.



Because the root cause of all that helplessness and joblessness and gun violence and welfare is fatherlessness.  That was highlighted in a couple articles in The American Spectator.



Item: Gun violence.  It does not occur too much out in the leafy suburbs, but has been notable in the inner city where families have broken up consequent upon the demoralization of men following the migration to the city.  It starts in American history with the Irish in the mid 19th century and The Gangs of New York and the 50,000 "nymphs of the pave."  Of course by the end of the century the Irish had progressed from "shanty Irish" to "lace curtain Irish" and the Catholic Church had made the nymphs into nuns and the gang members into fathers.  But that was before the administrative welfare state.



Now of course the problem is young fatherless blacks and Hispanics.  Without fathers they act out in the streets in the archetypal "men's house" gang.  But for President Obama, fatherlessness isn't the problem. Peter Ferrara:

More government spending for mental health, more federal spending for the local government responsibility for cops on the beat, and confirmation of a director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Ah yes, the need for another federal bureaucrat is really a root of the problem of gun violence.

Item: There is, as it happens, an organization that was founded over a century ago to deal with the broken family in the urban inner city.  It is called the Boy Scouts--in the US, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA).  It socializes boys (originally lower-income boys) under the control of non-gang older males.  Which is the way that societies usually socialize their boys.



But liberals, of course, want to muck around with the Boy Scouts, and end their ban on homosexual scout leaders.  Actually the Boy Scouts go further than banning gay scout leaders.  They have a rule that a scout leader cannot be alone with a Boy Scout.



You can see the blaring irony of this.  Here we have a stodgy old civil society institution that actually does something to mitigate the plague of fatherlessness by creating opportunities for fatherless boys to spend time in their teenage years around real fathers.  What do liberals want to do?  Liberals want to meddle with it, to advance their liberation agenda.  Not that a liberal parent would want to see their son within a country mile of the Boy Scouts.  But not to worry, writes Mark Tooley:

Defenders of the BSA’s current policy cite Canadian scouting having lost over half its membership in five years after liberalizing its membership standards in 1998, including accepting open homosexuality.

It's amazing.  Liberals seem to know by instinct how to weaken civil society and traditional culture to soften up society for more big government.



The basic difference between conservatives and liberals is the difference between liberty and liberation. Liberty is the right to conduct a flawed, but moral and purposeful life in this world with the hope of salvation in the next; it is the freedom to make mistakes. Liberation is the hope for salvation in this world; it is the removal of the concept of mistake altogether.



This is a hard time for conservatives, as liberals press the pedal to the metal on their entire agenda.  It is small comfort to recall apothegms like: "experience keeps a dear school" or  that democracy is the idea that the people should get what they want: good and hard.



But then, conservatism does not offer salvation in this world.  So who's complaining?

The Slavery Issue of Our Time

I've had this argument a couple of times.  The other guy says that Social Security is much safer than having your savings in the stock market.  Take the market of 2008.  You could lose half your money.  How are you going to retire on that?

My answer is, of course, that you have to put your retirement off for a couple of years.  And for a white-collar or professional guy, what's the problem with that?

Because the truth about Social Security is that it is a return to the feudal age.  Under Social Security the young and the poor pay taxes that go to the old and the rich.

Let's make the difference clear.  Under a private system of superannuation, workers save money from their wages and sock it away in banks and mutual funds.  When they have saved enough, then they can retire.  If there is a nasty financial crisis that takes the stock market down, then they have to put off retirement and keep working.  On this system the monkey is on the would-be retiree's back.  If the economy is in the tank you can't afford to retire.  You have to work alongside everyone else to put it back on its feet.

Under the government's system of Social Security you pay taxes according to the government's schedule and then, at a certain age, you get to receive a pension without regard to the economy's ability to pay.  If there is a financial crisis that takes the stock market down you still get your pension at the same time but the government borrows money if there is a shortfall. We know who gets to pay for the borrowed money: not the old 'uns.  With the Social Security system you got your rights, and the government forces the workers, people probably younger and poorer than you are, to pay up.

There is a word for the government's system: Injustice.

Now there are special cases, no doubt, to justify the use of government force.  People with disabilities, genuine ones.  Manual workers, whose bodies give out at about age 45.  Widows, orphans, druggies, you name it.  But the average person these days is a white-collar worker, and that white-collar worker--I am talking about you and me--can usually work a year or two more when things get rough.  Isn't that the caring and compassionate thing to do?  Nobody would want to put the whole burden of getting out of a financial crisis on the young generation, would they?  Would they?

Jeffrey Lord in The American Spectator puts the whole thing in context.  The "slavery issue" of our time is Big Government.  The Democratic Party, for obvious reasons, is the Big Government party, but the Republicans are split on the Big Government issue, like the Whigs were split on the slavery issue in the 1840s and 1850s.  The question is: where does each and every Republican stand on this issue?  Do you stand with the Bushes and the Roves, who want to compromise the issue, or do you want to have it out, like the Reagans?

Jeffrey Lord's argument, of course, is that a Republican Party that is split on the Big Government issue is heading for the exits, like the Whig Party.

But the real problem is my friend, who thinks that Social Security is safer than the stock market.  He's not going to be willing to take a haircut on his nice safe Big Government Social Security benefits until the furnace of default threatens to burn his hair off anyway.  And then it is too late.

Let's face it.  The voters are going to want to muddle through on Big Government until it is too late.  The tragedy of the mid 19th century wasn't the demise of the Whig Party.  Who cares about a political party, anyway?  The tragedy was that the slave power was too wedded to its exploitation system, and wouldn't countenance a path to end its injustice and its disgrace.  So 600,000 young Americans had to die instead.

The same thing applies to the Big Government issue, the slavery issue of our time.  The tragedy is not that the Republican Party might get plowed under.  The tragedy is that the longer we put off reforming Big Government the more people are going to suffer when the end comes and the government goes Greece or Argentina.

Minorities and women hardest hit, of course.  That goes without saying.

Government, Guns, and Max Weber

Max Weber, the German sociologist famous for his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is not known as a gun nut.  But he had some interesting things to say about the relationship between armed citizens and big government.



In his posthumous General Economic History he does a tour d'horizon of the feudal era.  We tend to think of that era as a pretty fixed order, with landed aristocrats at the top and serfs at the bottom.  But of course things were much more complicated than that.  Some peasants owned land, others rented land, still others owed labor to their landlords.  But there is one theme that runs pretty clear.  People that owned their own weapons were accorded much more respect in the feudal era than people without the means to arm themselves.



I wonder why.



Weber also has interesting things to say about the rise of the cities.  Generally, when cities start up, the inhabitants still look to their blood kindred out in the countryside for identity.  They don't really form an urban community.  And often the local princes make darn sure that they don't.



But when the city inhabitants start to think of themselves as individuals that swear allegiance to the city--instead their blood kindred--then things start to change.  They especially change when the city develops its own citizen militia, armed with weapons provided by the citizens themselves.



Because, of course, the landed princes don't give no respect to people that don't have the power to make their presence felt in the calculus of power.  But when a city becomes an armed power, then the princes pay attention.



Now of course, when the Founders put in the Second Amendment to the Constitution they were 200 years closer to the old tradition of the citizen militia than we are. (Think of Rembrandt and his painting of "The Night Watch," a local Amsterdam company of musketeers).  So the Founders possessed in their cultural heritage the idea that involved citizens would naturally band together in armed companies to meet the exigencies of city life.



And there is no doubt that government at all levels respects people with the means to inject themselves into the power equation.  Government is force, after all.  So if you want to play in the game of force, you had better have credible reputation in the force department.



Something to think about as our modern ruling class attempts, once again, to disarm the populace.

Why Liberals Fight Inequality

Why do liberals keep banging on about inequality?  Look: per capita income has gone from $3 per day to $100 per day in the last two centuries.  After going nowhere since forever.  So why worry that some have too much when everyone is doing better?

It all comes down to my mantra: Government is Force.

Reduced to its essentials, government is an armed minority defending some territory from enemies, foreign and domestic.  And it doesn't matter if the government is a government of male chimps defending their territory for its food, according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, or American anti-communists defending the world against godless communism.  The point is you defend against foreign pirates and predators and against the domestic kind too, whether burglars or criminal gangs.

But liberals beg to differ.  They don't think we need to spend all that money on defense.  In fact, following chaps like Noam Chomsky, they believe that the problem in the world is US imperialism not godless communism or Islamofascism.  Nor do they believe that a vigorous pursuit of domestic criminals is appropriate since their violence and criminality is really due to "root causes" like poverty and discrimination.

Good.  So now we can dispense with government completely?  Because if government is force and the traditional functions of government are no longer front and center, then we don't need the armed forces to defend our borders.  Nor do we need the police forces to defend against criminals.

How wrong can you be!  Our liberal friends had already seen the problem a century ago when William James wrote his celebrated essay of "The Moral Equivalent of War."  Without the unifying and character-building of real war, he wrote, we would need to inculcate its virtues with the moral equivalent.  As in a war on want, a war on poverty, a war on cancer.

And now we have the war on inequality.  The president's Osawatomie speech was the official Obamian declaration of war.  And Alan B. Krueger, then Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, backed him up with a speech(pdf) on January 12, 2012.  The just war declaration depends on the following:

• Since "the 1970s income has grown more for families at the top of the income distribution".
• The "median household suffered saw a decline in real income in the 2000s."
• The "top 1% of families saw a 278 percent increase in their real after-tax income from 1979 to 2007, while the middle 60% had an increase of less than 40 percent."

Then Krueger gets to the causes, according to a poll of economists, in declining order of importance:

1. Skill-based technical change, and a "slowdown in the growth of the supply of relatively highly educated workers in the US".
2. "Other and unknown factors."
3. Globalization.  Some have benefited, "but other workers have been left behind by globalization".
4. Union membership has declined, and union membership raises the wages of the lower middle class "so they can make it into the middle class".
5. "Tax changes in the early 2000s benefited the very wealthy by much more than other taxpayers", and only three countries "have tax systems that reduce inequality by less than the U.S."

So what is to be done?  I'm glad you asked that.

• The "Affordable Care Act is already helping middle class families."
• It "is critical to take the steps necessary to ensure that the current economic recovery continues", e.g. through the extension of the payroll tax cut.
• "Regulate excess risk-taking and corrupt practices in financial markets."
• Adhere to the Buffet Rule, where those "making more than $1 million should not pay a lower share of their income in taxes than middle class families."

Oh yeah.  Big deal.

Krueger closes by asserting that "more fairness to the economy would be good for all parts of American society."  Oh by the way, "this isn't about class warfare."  But you knew that.

Notice what doesn't get a mention in this speech?  Right first time.  Government entitlements.  The collapse of the lower-income family.  The retreat of lower-income men from work and marriage.  The penal marginal tax rates on the poor.  The credentialization of work.  The meddling of government in the credit system.

And that's leaving out other things.  Maybe the inequality growth in the 1980s was a delayed reaction to the corporatism of the 1950s and 1960s that fast-froze economic relations.  Maybe it had nothing to do with government, but just reflected the computer and information revolution.  Maybe there were just astonishing profit opportunities (remembering that profit is always unexpected gain) out there and chaps like Gates, Jobs, Dell, Hamm and Co. saw an opportunity and took it.  Notice that, except fort Bill Gates, son of a prominent lawyer, the others were relative nobodies: Jobs the adopted son of a mechanic and carpenter; Michael Dell the son of a stockbroker; Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental Resources, started out pumping gas, and often missed school to help pick cotton.

But that's not the point.  The point is that government is force.  When you have decided that you don't need force to defend our borders, then you naturally turn to other things.  Like inequality.  And you never think that, wow, maybe our previous efforts at force haven't worked out too well.  You don't ever think of that.  Your mind just turns to increased taxes and increased entitlements.  And more regulation of the financial markets, which have been only recently wrecked by reckless government actions and subsidies.

Jonah Goldberg writes today that people are pretty commonsensical about local government.  But when we think about the federal government we get all religious:

we've come to see the federal government as some sort of mystical entity empowered to right all of the wrongs in society. If there's a problem, there "should" be a federal response, the costs or feasibility of that response be damned.

Notice the problem here.  We are mixing up church and state.  Mystical entities are supposed to be kept in churches.  Because government is force.  When you combine church and state and start legislating morality to "right all of the wrongs in society" then you get into trouble.

Government is about force.  Religion is about meaning.  When you mix the two you tend to get wars and crusades and the little people get crunched in the middle.

Assuming that you care about the little people.

Do Alinsky's Rules Work?

It's become patently obvious that President Obama's only modus operandi is Alinsky: demonize the opposition.  With a bit of Marcuse: "the systematic withdrawal of tolerance toward regressive and repressive opinions" added in for good measure.  That's what Daniel Henninger is writing today.



But here's my question.  Does it work?  Yes, let's say it works in the context of a community organizer wanting to rile up his followers.  Yes, it works in the context of academicians enforcing their liberal orthodoxy in the university.



But does tactics add up to strategy?



What does the community organizer achieve, long term?  In Zola's Germinal the radical suit Étienne gets the miners to wreck the mines, obliterating their livelihood, and then he heads out of town for his next radical gig.  Way to go, Étienne!



And really, what are the PC types and the Gramscians doing the Long March through the institutions really achieving?  I will tell you what.  They are wrecking the lives of everyone below the educated class.  They are using the minorities-and-women-hardest-hit for their votes, and making them into government dependents, and then wiping the floor with them.



And of course when the money runs out then the president's party will wave their hands and rage and fume and let their minorities and women get hardest hit.  No rocket science here.  It just obvious that anyone that relies on the government for their welfare is going to be badly hit when the government runs out of money.



The bottom line is that the conservative bid to reform the welfare state has failed.  The voters voted to continue things-as-they-are.  OK.  Then all we can do is be there when the default comes and say look: if you want a decent society where the poor are relieved and the average person can get ahead then you cannot vote for big government.  Because big government always ends up eating the seed corn.



Alinsky and Obamian divisiveness are tactics.  But right now I'd say that the Democrats are flat out of strategy.  They can't reform the entitlements because if they did then people would stop voting for them.



So they haul out Alinsky and bellow that the Republicans are monsters.  But don't forget women-and-minorities, that when the government runs out of money your community organizer types will do just fine.  It will be you and yours that end up paying the piper.  And why?  Because you gave up your birthright for a mess of pottage.

The Culture of the Invisible Hand

The great contest of world-views is the battle between the Invisible Hand narrative and the Exploitation narrative.  It's simple really.  The Invisible Hand narrative says that in order to get ahead you have to serve other people.  The Exploitation narrative says that without the right politics to curb economic greed it is Katy bar the door.

Frankly, it is the Exploitation narrative that seems closest to common sense.  Hey, it's a brutal world out there: people are looking for the opportunity to screw you and yours.  How then is it possible that a sober-sides like Adam Smith ever proposed the Invisible Hand as the reality of economic exchange?

For that we turn to Max Weber.  After writing his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Weber wasn't done with capitalism.  He had seen that the Puritans had developed the idea of work as a calling and had trained the minds of men to work for economic gain in an ascetic way, without wanting to end up in a life of luxury and power.  But he wanted to know more.

In his General Economic History he went back and mined the step-by-step development of the capitalist economy.  He found some remarkable nuggets.

For instance, Weber found that the Puritan sects separated themselves rigidly from society.  They were, in Rodney Stark's model of religions, very strict in controlling members' behavior.  You would expect that this rigid separation from society would legitimize an ethic of honest dealings with insiders and exploitation of outsiders.  But no.  Many sects prided themselves on acting in a trustworthy manner even towards the "sinful children of the world."

Here's another interesting nugget.  The Puritans so prized the "calling" in work that they preached that men should be "sober" in love for family and associates.  As Reinhard Bendix writes in Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait,

This emotional detachment from the community also reduced the social distance between its members and the strangers beyond the "gate."  Hatred is as dangerous to the soul as love, and where the relation to one's kindred and associates is detached the rejection of the stranger becomes less imperative.(p70)

This goes back, according to Weber, to the "development of mutual trust among men as individual members of a Christian community."   Then Bendix retails Weber's history of the city, which begins with associations of people that still retained their primary identification with their kinship group and only later--in the west--developed into the "burgher [that] joined the citizenry and swore his civic oath as an individual." So the city eventually developed into

an association of local property owners whose goals were: the amicable settlement of disputes; an administration of justice and a monopolization of economic opportunities that would safeguard and enhance the interests of the town residents; a reliable allocation of the obligations due to the local lord in lieu of arbitrary taxation; and, finally, the institution of a military organisation that would enhance the political and economic power of the community.(p75)

The whole urban "package" involved several items:

• "a single standard of ethics in all business transactions"
• an "oath-bound fraternal association [as] an important precedent for the congregational form of church government.
• the city as an association of individuals with weakened kinship ties and rituals

We can see how the rule of the educated class in our modern era attempts to turn back the clock on these developments.  It tries to create a distance between political ethics and business ethics, privileging political values over economic values.  It privileges group affinities in race, class, and gender, over the individualistic transactional exchange relationship of the city that even extends to family relationships.  And it tries to break up the congregational notion of, e.g., the New England town meeting, with the mobilized factions of modern democratic politics.

The problem for conservatives, who mostly follow the "urban package" of fair dealing, associational government, and individual responsibility, is that the working class didn't get socialized in the old ways of the Burgertum.  Instead the new educated ruling class took them into its government schools and taught them to be go-along-to-get-along clients of the regime.

How do we persuade the regime clients that they are getting royally screwed by their liberal political masters?

The answer is, of  course, that we don't.  We can only wait until the administrative welfare state crashes and burns.  Only then will the people be ready to listen to us and our radical notion of the Invisible Hand.  

Don't just sit there with your hand out.  Make something for others; do something for others.  Then worry about what you get in return.