Conservative Concern for the Poor

Arthur Brooks, he that wrote about conservatives giving more to charity than liberals, is chiding conservatives for not caring enough about the poor.

An April YouGov.com poll—which mirrored every other poll on the subject—found that only 33% of Americans said that Mitt Romney "cares about people like me." Only 38% said he cared about the poor.



Conservatives rightly complain that this perception was inflamed by President Obama's class-warfare campaign theme. But perception is political reality, and over the decades many Americans have become convinced that conservatives care only about the rich and powerful.

So what should conservatives do to change perceptions?  Well, writes Brooks, for a start they should emphasize that out of control Social Security and Medicare is "imperils the social safety net for the neediest citizens."  Never mind the teachers' unions: the problem with education is that "poor children and their parents deserve better schools."



Well, yeah!  That's what conservatives are always trying to say.  The problem is that nobody wants to hear it.  And why is that?  Well, the big thing is that your average middle-class grandma says that "they" had better not touch "her" Medicare.  Then in the next breath she worries about health care for the poor.  And on education, your average soccer mom cares only about the special program that her Asbergers kid qualifies for.  What politician wants to mess with that?



The problem is that, at every turn, Democrats manage to demagogue conservatives onto the defensive, by recklessly promoting more "free stuff."  You can understand that the poor like "free stuff."  When you don't have very much, then you won't foolishly look a gift horse in the mouth.  But we middle-class entitlement beneficiaries are the problem.   It's our addiction to free stuff that legitimizes big government and its waste and injustice.  Worst of all was that obviously middle-class young woman that baited Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign:

“You’re all for like ‘yay freedom and all this stuff and yay pursuit of happiness,’” the student said. “You know what would make me happy? Free birth control.”

If you want to know what our big problem is, it's right there.



And that's why I say that we can't fix the problem until we are going over the rapids.  Because only then will the allure of "free stuff" finally lose its luster.



There is another way.  It is called religion.  While politics has always offered free stuff to its supporters, religion has been the human way of getting people to be social rather than selfish, to ask first "what am I giving" rather than "what am I getting."



Because the only way you can deal with the young woman that wants her free stuff is by shaming her.  The way that liberals shame conservatives about their lack of concern for the poor.

Why President Obama Keeps Campaigning

The Austrian caped crusader Joseph Schumpeter wrote that, considering that politicians are professional election-winners, it's amazing that they do any governing at all.



And President Obama seems to want to prove his point.  Everyone is writing articles right now about how the president is ignoring governing for the more enjoyable job of politicking. "Do we have a president or a perpetual candidate?" asks Michael Barone.



The conventional wisdom is that the president is amping up the political volume, including the funding of his permanent campaign vehicle, Organizing for America, in order to win back the House of Representatives in 2014.



How could that be?  A president has never taken back the House in his second midterm, nor ever got into a double-digit increase in any midterm.  My guess, though, is that the president and his people are just trying to avoid the usual second-term debacle.  They are fighting hard just to stay even in 2014, and even will be good enough.



After all, their second-term goal is to get Obamacare implemented and beyond the hope of repeal.  For that they need to maintain enough power in Congress to prevent a wrecking crew from getting to work.



And anyway, the Obamis are doing plenty of governing.  They are writing regulations and issuing executive orders to advance the progressive agenda as far and as fast as humanly possible.  When we say that the president is politicking, not governing, what we really mean is that he is doing everything in his power to avoid ever compromising with the Republican agenda.



The main thing for Obama is to get to the next presidential election without the roof falling in.  And how likely is that?



Those of us that want a new and a better America need to understand that it won't come with political reform or with bipartisan deals with the Democrats.  It will only come after the moral and economic collapse of the administrative welfare state.   It will only come after liberals have completely lost their moral and cultural power, and the administrative welfare state has run out of money.



In that sense, President Obama is doing our work for us.  His resistance to spending cuts and his insistence on tax increases only bring forward the inevitable collapse.  A practical and bipartisan president that sat down with Republicans to plan entitlement reform and school-choice reform would be a president that was preserving the welfare state for future generations at a sustainable level.



Instead, the president seems to want to go for broke.  And broke is probably what he will get.



It's a pity, but minorities and women will be hardest hit.

Beyond Sequester

Over at America's go-to website on government spending, we have a little notice displayed in these sequestered times.

usgovernmentspending.com's numbers are based on official budget numbers. Until the president's budget is released in mid-March, we won't be able to show the impact of the sequester. Meanwhile, see budget detail page here.

Actually, of course, if you went to usgovernmentspending.com and created your own custom chart, you probably would need a magnifying glass to see the difference before and after sequester.

You can understand President Obama's situation.  He is sitting on an untenable budget situation.  Unless and until the feds cut spending sharply we are going straight towards debt default and maybe hyperinflation.

But what can a Democratic president do?  The whole of left-liberal politics is founded on "more."  More spending, more programs, more administrative welfare state.  The Democrats just don't do "less." That's why they call spending cuts "austerity."

But how do you do the politics of "less?"  It's a good question, and the answer is not very palatable.

You wait until the wolf is at the door.  The verdict of the 2012 election made that clear.  Yes, the American people know there is a problem.  But they are not ready, yet, for the turn-around artist to come in and fix things.  The moral drama was palpable.  Here you had Mitt Romney, whose entire life has been devoted to turning around "dysfunctional" organizations.  Here you had Barack Obama, who entire life had been devoted to left-wing activism.  The American people chose Obama, by a few percent.  But they kept the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, just in case.

Let us recall the point of politics, as described by H.L. Mencken

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Or take the prophetic words of Rahm Emanuel:

 You never let a serious crisis go to waste.

These are meaty quotes, but they underlie a truth about the human condition.  Politics is for emergencies.  It is for the moment when everything is at risk.  At moment of peril humans come together and look for a leader to lead them out of the land of Egypt.

The eternal problem is to make the politicians go away after the emergency is over.

And so we will never do anything about the welfare state until our nation is threatened with ruin if we don't do something.

In my view, the business of being social animals is characterized by the yin and yang of politics and religion.  Politics is the force end of the animal, and is easily corrupted into a project of freebooting and freeloading.  Its fully corrupted form is the robber band that rapes and pillages.  Religion is the project of converting humans into willing cooperators.  Its means is not the club of force, but the conquest of the mind.  It is easy converted into a battle of orthodoxy against heresy.  Its fully corrupted form is the union of politics and religion in totalitarianism.

The challenge for conservative politics is not so much the politics as the religion.  We all know the systems we need to impose to reduce the degree of political and governmental force in our society: more markets, more civil society.  But we don't know how to build a moral movement to persuade the American people to give up the politics of free stuff for the culture of free-dom, the culture of the marginalized self for the culture of the responsible self.

My guess is that the movement and the moment will come.  But not before a bone-rattling financial Armageddon.

Politics Means Intimidating the Journalists

While visiting my sister back in January, I suggested to her that, even allowing that the mainstream media guys are all Democrats, the utter lapdog attitude towards Obama seemed extreme.



Sure, the media wants Obama to look good, but the net result seemed to be too good to be true.  I told my sister that journalists are not that accommodating to people in power, even their favorite Democrats.  Journalists live for the big coup, and surely there are liberal journalists willing to stick their heads out for a scoop.



There must be something else going on, I suggested.  There must be intimidation, I said, and my sister agreed.



So now we know how it works in Obamaland, from the Bob Woodward flap here reported by Bryan Preston.  When veteran journalist Bob Woodward called to tell the White House that he was going to call the president a liar over the sequester, because the sequester was not Congress's idea, but the president's, he got yelled at for half an hour and an angry email with a veiled threat: "I think you will regret staking out that claim."



Now Bob Woodward is the hero of Watergate, and at 69, a grand old man of journalism.  He can afford to have the White House mad at him; he can afford to go public and publish threatening memos from White House bulldogs.  But how many others would dare?



The truth is that journalists are wusses.  That's because 97 percent of journalism is "source" journalism. That is French for sucking up to powerful people.  Here's an example of how it works, reported by Justin Katz, from the great state of Rhode Island.

A conservative news and commentary site for which I work, OceanStateCurrent.com, recently offered a young journalist a regular freelance opportunity at a very competitive rate of pay. The one catch was that his name must appear on the articles, and that was a step too far. It appears that union leaders and other insiders who are entrenched in boards, initiatives, and agencies at every level across government had only just begun responding to the journalist’s calls, having suspected his political leanings. For the journalist to be identified by his own name would be fatal. His calls would go unanswered again.

Journalists are like sharks: they only bite when there is blood in the water.  I learned this thirty years ago when the Seattle Seahawks first coach, Jack Patera, got fired.  All of a sudden, it turned out that the broadcast journalists, that had covered and interviewed him for years, thought he was useless.



Oh really.  Now you tell us.



Political journalists, not less than sports journalists, depend on getting their phone calls to powerful people answered.  To put your access at risk means risking your career, in a world where there are thousands eager to take your place.



No doubt there will come a moment in the Obama administration when there will be blood in the water, and we will suddenly learn how all those noble journalists hated being spun and intimidated.



But who remembers or cares about the sixth guy to stick the knife into Caesar?

Back to the Future on the Economy

Back in the 1930s the New Deal Democrats got really, really angry that business was sitting on its hands, that "capital was on strike."  So they passed a retained earning tax, to tax earnings that weren't distributed as dividends and weren't reinvested in the business.



Deja vu all over again as Connecticut Democrats push a hoarders' tax, according to Instapundit.

This would place a levy on liquid assets — companies with a lot of money in the bank — and dedicate the proceeds to job creation programs.

Really, the statists never learn.  Although, maybe they don't want to.  They don't seem to get that the more they bully business around the more that businessmen just want to curl up in a ball and hide.



Back in 1936, the year of their stunning win, the Democrats passed the Undistributed Profits Tax.

 The idea was to force businesses to distribute profits in dividend and wages, instead of saving or reinvesting them. In the end, Congress watered down the bill, setting the tax rates at 7 to 27% and largely exempting small enterprises.

Then in 1938 the act was watered down some more; it was repealed in 1939.



But maybe the Democrats then and now don't really care.  What they care about is getting reelected at the next election.  So the point is to generate the right atmospherics, to rile up the faithful against "corporate greed" and "price gouging."  It really doesn't matter what happens to the economy or jobs or wages.  That is a second order effect.  The only thing that matters is whether ragging on business helps you get reelected in November.



Election or reelection, the facts are still pretty clear.  When the politicians start bullying businessmen and creating uncertainty, then businessmen are going to draw in their horns.  Not because they want to "go on strike" but because any new capital investment is a big risk.  And if the politicians are threatening anti-business legislation it just makes any and all bets on the future a little more risky.



And get this.  Any and all business decisions are bets about the future.  The more uncertain the future, the more likely that any decision will turn out to be a mistake.

Obama: Genius of Being There?

Some conservatives like to think of President Obama as an empty suit.  Who knows?  Who knows anything about a public figure, given that public figures live by publicity, and we peons really know  nothing about them?



But the facts are that President Obama and his team won two presidential elections.  So the team won ugly, you say; but the president and his team still won.  I suspect that the bottom line reason for the president's success is that the American people aren't ready to move on from the entitlement state, and they won't be until they lie buried in its ruins.  Why should they?  As long as you can get free stuff, why worry?



So the president's policy is simply "Tax, Cut, and Pray" according to  James Pethokoukis, as in: cut defense, tax the rich, and pray the slowdown in health costs continues.



Every military commander has a idea in his mind about how his army is going to win, and the only way that Obama wins through is if the continuous explosion in health cost abates.  So naturally he believes that ObamaCare will "bend the cost curve."  The president and his liberal advisors have to believe that, otherwise they would have to "do something" about it.  And really, the only thing they care about is the next election, and you certainly don't win the second midterm by telling your base that the gravy train is ending.



It helps, in the fog of war, to cut to the chase, and I have been doing so with Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics.  The point he makes, again and again, is that the price system is the only thing we know that can coordinate an economy of strangers.



And the reason it works is that the price system and the system of profit and loss force people to fix their mistakes.  Here is Sowell in Chapter 7: Big Business and Government.

People make mistakes in all fields of human endeavor but, when major mistakes are made in a competitive economy, those who were mistaken can be forced from the marketplace by the losses that follow.  In politics, however, those who were mistaken can often continue to survive by doing things that were never contemplated when their positions and their powers were created.

We have been seeing this from President Obama recently.  He proposes a universal pre-K program even though the governnment's Head Start program has been shown to have no measurable long-term effect on the pre-K children it serves.  Why not?  It may not help children but it certainly gives mothers a break and it will provide lots of jobs to deserving Democrats.



Now, it is fair to say that we need the government to do things that the private sector would not do on its own.  But really, are we saying that people would not save for retirement without Social Security?  That they would not make provision for end-of-life health care with Medicare?  That they would not raise children into competent adults without government education?



And are we to say that a government program that fails to respond to and correct its mistakes is better than a private sector provision that does, that must, correct its mistakes?



It's pretty obvious why we have all these government programs.  It's because we humans are all secret freeloaders.  We cannot resist the idea of someone else paying for our free stuff.



Politics is the art of gathering a band of brothers to get out there and get some free stuff, and President Obama seems to understand that at a deep instinctive level.



Because promising your supporters free stuff seems to work right up until the moment that the free stuff runs out.



Call the president a genius.

Max Weber's Economic Framework

Max Weber, he of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, developed a three point framework in which to evaluate state economic policy.

Actually, in General Economic History he divided it up into traditional economic policy and rational economic policy.

Under the old tradition, states had two objectives.  First, they wanted money from the land they controlled.  Weber calls this the "fiscal interest."  Second, they wanted to continue the "customary standard of living."  Weber called this the "welfare interest."(p.344)

I think that we tend to underestimate the importance of this traditional economics.  Really, the whole policy of the modern administrative welfare state is to attempt to satisfy the universal instinct to continue in the current ways and preserve the current standard of living.

It is the modern, rational approach to life, instantiated in the progressive businessman, that brands this old idea as a chimera.  In the modern economy--really in life itself--you gotta keep moving.  Otherwise you suffocate and die.

But most people hanker after a cloud-cuckoo land in which their yearning for an uneventful, secure life is realized.  Hence the medieval guild, the modern labor union, the wails from people on "fixed incomes" when anything goes wrong.

The modern era features the rational state and a rational approach to economic policy, i.e., policy based on a theory.

The first modern theory was mercantilism, according to Weber.  Here the state realizes that its revenue depends upon the ability of the economy to yield revenue.  The idea is to treat the state as a business, buying low and selling high.  Here is Weber in General Economic History:

Hence mercantilism signifies the development of the state as a political power, which is to be done directly by increasing the taxpaying power of the population.(p.347)

That's why the mercantilists thought that a country became powerful with a trade surplus.  It meant that specie would flow to the exporting state, money that could be taxed.  Flowing from that was the idea that the trade of the country should be conducted by the merchants of the country, and carried in ships owned by the merchants of the country rather than others.  We can see that this attitude survives today in the notion of crony capitalism and the shuttling of bankers between banks and government.

But the independent class of entrepreneurs didn't like mercantilism, because it shut them out.  And then came Adam Smith arguing that free trade, rather than government managed trade, was the way to riches.  This new thing, pushed in Britain by the Puritans, was "capitalism oriented in relation to market opportunities which were developed from within by business interests themselves on the basis of saleable services."(p.350)

The power of Weber's analysis allows us to see that all three approaches to the national economy are still fighting for influence.  The average person wants only to maintain their standard of living.  The government and the ruling class wants to increase their power.  And the businessmen (crony capitalists excepted) just want the freedom to create and sell products.

Under Ronald Reagan, the state became more powerful because it stepped back and allowed a hundred flowers to bloom.  Under Barack Obama the state becomes less powerful because it insists on controlling everything.  As it says in the Tao:

The ordinary person who uses force,
will find that they accomplish nothing.

Oh well.  Every generation must learn its lesson the hard way.