What Hispanic Vote?

So now, Michael Barone tells us, Republicans must stop turning off the Hispanic vote by talking like Mitt Romney about "self-deportation."



Well, OK.  But the problem that sticks in the craw of Republicans is that immigration "reform" means making Democratic voters out of people who came to the US illegally.



(I know.  Who worried about legality when the Irish were tumbling out of the "coffin ships" of the mid-19th century?)



The point is that every immigrant group in the last 150 years has started out voting for the Democratic Party because, one way or another, the Democrats were offering "free stuff."  It's natural for immigrants just off the farm to respond to patronage politics and look for a strong patron to protect them with "free stuff" as they learn how to swim in the treacherous currents of the city.



Ever since the Republicans gave up on the tariff--a kind of "free stuff" that appealed to native-born workers--in the debacle of the Great Depression, there has never been a time where Republicans were any good at winning the battle of "free stuff."



So why have the Republicans been able to compete in the political arena?  Two reasons.  Frist there were groups that left the Democrats after they got on their feet and tired of the "free stuff" notion.  Second, there were groups that left when the Democrats started dissing them.  When the Democrat-voting GIs became home owners they stopped needing a powerful patron.  When the Democrats turned against Christianity they lost the enthusiastic Christian vote.



Really, through all this, the Republicans just slogged along being the Sensible Party, worrying about taxes and deficits and the Communist Menace.  If there was a magic moment, when the nation was actually interested in Republican ideas, it was in the late 1970s when the economy went south in a swamp of stagflation, when inflation was 10 percent and unemployment was 10 percent.   And even then it was nip-and-tuck as the Democrats successfully framed Ronald Reagan as a mad bomber and an amiable dunce.



The Republican Party is the party of the People of the Responsible Self.  It is for people that don't think of politics as a way to get their hands on the "free stuff."  It is for people that don't believe in the exploitation theory of history.  It is for people that think like Adam Smith, that the first thing to do is to figure out what you can do for other people.  That it's your job to make yourself useful, and then start to worry about how much money you are getting back.  The Invisible Hand.



The Republican Party is for people that think there is a fundamental harmony of interests.  That all government spending is waste, starting with the Pentagon and the police, but that some things--very few--justify the waste.



There is no point in the Republican Party joining the "free stuff" steeplechase.  Democrats have already got all the best mounts, and they know how to ride them.



The immediate prospect for the Republican Party is not in making nice to Hispanics, who probably have half a century of "free stuff" politics left in them.  The immediate prospect for Republicans is white middle-class voters that are feeling sadder and wiser after the Obama debacle.  We will see the first signs of spring, if there is to be a spring, in the Fall of 2014 after a year of Obamacare.  How's that "free stuff" healthcare turning out, voters?  There eventually could be a wave of women disillusioned with a world without marriage, recoiling from the illusion of life as a career in some stupid bureaucracy to discover life as a social human being in a neighborhood community, bearing and raising children and creating the future.



Really, the politics of the Republican Party is an impossible dream, that politics should not be the politics of the armed band marching around in search of booty, but an attempt to create the good society, by inculcating a culture of cooperation and responsibility, backed up, at the limit, by limited and necessary force.



The chief barrier to the impossible dream is not ordinary people and their appetite for "free stuff" but liberals.



It is liberals that think they deserve government grants  to fund their hobbies.  It is liberals that think they should have the right to sit for decades as tenured professors in government universities on the public dime.  It is liberals that think they have a right to taxpayers' money to fund "the arts."  It is liberals that think they have a right to six-figure salaries and bullet-proof pensions in state government because they care about the poor and the marginalized.



There used to be a word for people like this.  They used to call them "hypocrites."

Forget Woe Is Me, Conservatives!

Conservatives still seem to be in the post-election cringe.  Now comes the RNC autopsy, courtesy of Reince Priebus, about how Republicans should do outreach to women and minorities.

Oh and by the way, lose the idea that the Republican Party is the party of big business.  Really.  How could Republicans have ever allowed Democrats to get away with this?

The Democratic Party is the party of Bigs: Big Government, Big Labor, Big Business, Big Philanthropy, Big Education, Big Media.  Where in the world does anyone get the idea that the Republican Party or the conservative movement have anything to do with the modern Bigs?

Then there is Michael Walsh, who wants to fight on in the trenches and never surrender.

Look.  Let's lose the small-ball emphasis on tactics.  In the Franco-Prussian War the Prussians often got into trouble because their over-eager formation leaders got into tactical trouble--and the French chassepot rifles were better than the Prussian needle guns.  But the Prussians won because they got their strategy right.  Their armies were in the right place at the right time and the French armies were not.

But let us get ever further back, above strategy, above grand strategy.  How about the Grand Vision of what modern conservatism is all about?

Modern conservatism is merely the modern version of the Great Transition from agricultural life to city life that has convulsed the human world in the last three thousand years.  Let us stipulate that the transition was driven by a slow but progressive improvement in agricultural techniques so that fewer and fewer people were needed to grow food on the land.  Instead people could move to the city and make things.

As this Great Transition got started it shared the stage with a revolution in religion, what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age when all the modern religions got started: Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam.  These religions, according to Robert Bellah, all embraced in some way the idea of the Responsible Self.  Humans were not just the playthings of the gods like they were in the Iliad.  All of a sudden individuals were responsible to God for their individual conduct, and to fail God was a damning sin.

It started with the rich bitches at the top of society, your Confucian sages, your Prince Gautamas, your fancy-pants Brahmins, and then gradually worked its way down to the rising bourgeoisie of the Reformation and the mechanics of Methodism.  Now it is engaging the latest wave of people arriving in the city: the former African slaves and the former peons of Latin America.  Not to mention the hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants, moving into the city at the rate of about ten million per year.

There is a profound difference between life in the country and life in the city.  In the country, you are planted, like a tree.  You must make the most of what the weather, the landed warriors, and the vagaries of food production hand out: What you see is what you get.  But in the city you are forever moving, like a fish that must keep oxygen filtering through its gills.  In the city you can never stop.  You must always adjust your life to the command of the market and the price system.

You can see that our life as social human beings in the city is profoundly different than our life as social human beings in the countryside.

Out in the country, you keep the market at arm's length.  Sure, you buy and sell, but only occasionally.  The real business of life is growing the food and passing on the land to an heir.  In the city, every moment of life is engaged with the market.  You cannot repose on your land, because there is no land.  You cannot work at the same livelihood all your life because the market will change the terms of trade.  You cannot retire on your savings, because a war might come along and reduce the value of money.  You cannot check out, as you could do when planted on the land.  You must always be "on," always interacting with the market, always acting like a Responsible Self.

It is the frightful change from planted life to swimming life that so traumatizes the migrants from country to city.  But the migrants always found ways of dealing with it: with churches to learn the ways of the Responsible Self, with labor unions to try to stave off the worst swings of the market for labor, with fraternal associations to create an artificial community of brothers in a world where blood brothers could be scattered to the four corners of the earth.

Enter liberals.  Liberals don't like the culture of the Responsible Self; they are above all that.  They are people of the creative self, the Romantic self, the repressed self, the transgressive self, the liberated self, and they bridled at the dominance of the people of the Responsible Self.  Pretty soon they discovered a way to make war on the people of the Responsible Self and become the ruling class of the modern era.  They would form a coalition with the people struggling to figure out how to thrive in the city.  They would cater to their fears, and confirm them in their pre-responsible culture.  They would protect them from the nasty employers and the higgling of the market; they would give them pensions, health care, education, and other wonderful free stuff.  And these people of the Marginalized Self would be spared the rigors of the Great Transition from country to city.

Notice also how liberals have waged war on the churches, turned labor unions into organized political pressure groups, and most significantly, utterly demolished the fraternal associations without even noticing what they had done.  Here is what they have done.  They have demolished the authentic social institutions of the People of the Responsible Self to make way for their monuments to the administrative welfare state.

Only something went wrong with the liberal project.  Liberals scorned to build self-regulating systems for pensions, health care, and education, institutions that could run themselves, adapt to changing conditions and learn from their inevitable human mistakes.  They built massive monopoly bureaucracies  to fund their grand ideas out of the revenue of government, and liberals would be needed forever to run them.  Unfortunately--and the science is settled on this--governments are incapable of doing what the price system is doing every moment: fixing mistakes and figuring out new and better ways of doing things.  So the liberal administrative welfare state has been slowly running down.  And in addition the liberals visited a horrible cultural collapse on their political clients, so that now marriage is disappearing among lower-class women and work is disappearing among lower class men.  Today we are facing the reality that governments everywhere that have implemented the administrative welfare state model are approaching bankruptcy.  The administrative welfare state will renege on its promises to its clients, the people of the marginalized self, the people still learning how to thrive in the city.  And how.

While we argue over the deck chairs on the Titanic the iceberg is already slicing through the hull of the unsinkable administrative welfare state.  We, the People of the Responsible Self, must stop all this silly argument over tactics, because there is serious work to be done.  We must redouble our efforts to explain and proselytize our culture, which is the proven way to thrive in the city.  We should not truckle to minorities and women.  We should proselytize our glorious culture of the Responsible Self instead.

And we must now start to draw up the Bill of Indictment against the crimes of progressivism-liberalism, which has visited such mayhem on the lives of the migrants to the city, filling their heads with lies and hate, confirming them in their pre-urban culture when what they needed more than anything was a primer in how to make it in the city.  As we conservatives draft and redraft our Bill of Indictment against the liberal ruling class it will slowly begin to seep into the consciousness of people everywhere that we are dealing not with a minor peccadillo--mistakes were made--but with the Crime of the Ages.  Liberals, in their snobbish disdain for the people of the Responsible Self and in their Satanic appetite for political and cultural power, have visited a murrain of hardship and injustice on those least able to bear it: the latest arrivals in the city.

And really, the situation is so serious that there is not a question of punishment or retribution on liberals for what they have done.  There is no way of making restitution for what liberals have done.  The disaster is already too vast, too unimaginable.  The lives are already wasted; the finances of the nation already ruined; the culture already corroded.

All we ask of liberals, after the collapse and the ruin of their administrative welfare state, is that they join us, the People of the Responsible Self, in the work of rebuilding America with a  good will.

And let us all take a sacred vow right now that we will do what we can to ease the lives of the people that have suffered most at the hands of the administrative welfare state, and help them out of the cultural and economic maelstrom that liberalism has visited upon them.

For the reality of the modern city is quite simple.  You must learn to swim like a fish, always keeping moving, always pointing upstream and always conscious of the tides and currents of the market and the price system.  The way to thrive in the city is simple.  Step One: Think about a way in which you can serve your fellow humans.  Step Two: Do it.  Step Three: Repeat for the rest of your life.

Anyone that tells you different is a liberal.

Rush Limbaugh Gets It

Right now the Republican Party is in one of its quadrennial cringes over its relevance and its outreach to minorities and women.  Republicans need to be more understanding about women's issues, about immigration, and about gay marriage.  But Rush Limbaugh pointed out yesterday that this outreach is a losing proposition. Because liberals will always come up with another issue to make conservatives and Republicans look like unfeeling monsters. Take gay marriage, he suggests.

What is it that's going on?  Well, same-sex marriage, homosexual marriage is just the latest way to portray Republicans as oppressors.  After they get same-sex marriage, it will be on to something else.  They always have to have a cause that is liberation related and it's the Republicans who are the oppressors.

Exactly.  Liberation from oppression is what leftist politics is all about.  It needs two things.  It needs a minority population suffering from oppression and it needs an unfeeling or hostile Republican Party or conservative movement to serve as the oppressors.

And if Republicans and conservatives think they will escape their troubles by conceding on the oppression causes du jour they are mistaken.  Democrats will always come up with a new one.

We need to understand the game.  There are two responses to the existential sorrows of the modern age.  One of them is the idea of freedom to break the chains of ruling class oppression.  It is the idea that responsible individuals, acting in the world, are the antidote to the injustice of government domination.

The other response is the idea of liberation from ruling class oppression.  It is the idea that an avant garde movement can liberate people from their chains and lead them to the Promised Land.  But have you noticed, says Rush, what leftist liberation leads to?

But have you ever noticed all of the left's solutions for more freedom always involve us giving to government more control over our lives.  We always end up expanding government.  We always end up giving up a little freedom in order to be liberated by the left. 

 I like to present the modern predicament as the battle between the People of the Responsible Self and the People of the Marginalized Self.  The Responsible Self is a chap who wants to live in responsible freedom, living free of government compulsion, but doing the right thing for himself and his family, his neighborhood, his city, his country.  The Marginalized Self is someone who is "owed" and oppressed.

You can see that the beauty of the Responsible Self is that it assumes that people can be trusted to do the right thing.  It doesn't require extraordinary government powers to right the wrongs of the world.

But the problems of the Marginalized Self can only be solved by big government.

When Republicans are playing defense on gay marriage, on immigration, on the "war on women" they are in retreat.  To turn things around Republicans need to be playing offense, on guns, on government corruption, on deficits, on taxes, on the war on the unborn, on government bullying from fatty foods to global warming to financial regulation.  In other words, Republicans need to be playing the game of the Responsible Self, not the game of the Marginalized Self.

The great injustice of the modern age is its ruthless discipline.  Your medieval serf, oppressed though he might be, could order his life as he chose.  But today we are all the abject subjects of industrial discipline, bureaucratic discipline, regulatory discipline, and subject to a thousand criminal laws of which we know next to nothing.

If freedom or liberation means anything, it surely must mean freedom and liberation from the whip of the disciplinary overseer, that lashes us to work in our subordinate jobs, that channels and directs us on the street and in the airport, and that taxes and regulates us to a fare thee well.

Maybe the People of the Responsible Self can get together with the People of the Marginalized Self to do something about the ruthless and oppressive discipline to which every person in this modern age is cruelly yoked.

End of the Risk-free Retirement

For about half a century, our ruling class has encouraged the plebs in the idea of "retirement."  The idea is that after a life of work you can retire from daily toil and kick back.  As a right.



Maybe the government would kick in with a pension, as with Social Security.  Or maybe your rich corporate employer would kick in with a defined-benefit pension.  Then there are all those tax-advantaged savings programs like IRAs and 401(k)s.



But the truth is, according to Megan McArdle, is that there is no such thing as a risk-free retirement.  We've seen the corporate pension go the way of the Studebaker.  And now we see that public-employee pensions are in the same mess as corporate pensions of a generation ago.  You get into an economic downturn and suddenly your promises are worth nothing.



McArdle develops a mantra for this problem.  The future is uncertain, she reminds her readers, and you can't make that uncertainty go away.

We shouldn't have been surprised--however much financial planners may boast of reducing risk, it is rare for financial risk to actually disappear.  What we do is move it around, maybe transform it a bit.  But the risk always remains.

You cannot get to age 65 (or whatever), quit work, and say: Now I'mm checking out, so my pension, my Social Security, my savings can take care of me.  The future is uncertain. Period.



Retirement always was something of a fantasy.  It presumably developed out of the idea that a manual worker really is clapped out -- but actually well before age 65 -- and unable to work.  So noble government would propose programs and mandates to take care of the needy and the elderly.



Trouble is that governments are all in the business of looting the world for the benefit of their supporters.  And old people are an obvious source of loot.  So even if you think that everything is hunky-dory, chances are some war, some inflation, some confiscation, some disaster will come along and spoil all your plans.  The government will come and tap your savings like in Cyprus.



Cooler heads are saying that it is time to forget about retirement.  You need to be able to respond to whatever the world throws at you.  Older people like me need, in other words, to be employable and adaptable, just like any other responsible adult.  When you start to decline mentally and or physically so that you cannot take care of yourself then it is time to dip into savings and pensions, and maybe throw yourself on the mercy of your children.



Right now, of course, after a century and a half of Marxism, socialism and progressivism, we have the worst of all worlds.  We have the 47 percent that thinks it is "owed."  And we have numerous special interests with the power to loot the commonwealth.  We built powerful government to help the poor, but most of the time it just helps the ruling class.



Whether or not this is just, it means that the economic relations between worker and employer, between debtor and creditor, between spender and saver, between young and old, are grievously distorted by political meddling and outright looting.  It means that necessary adjustments are very hard to make.  It means that ordinary people will suffer.



Because the future is uncertain.  If you guarantee the future for Bill then it means that you will make the future even more risky for Pete.



And the moment we think that we have figured it all out is the moment that the universe decides to give it to us, good and hard.

Political Portents for Obama's Second Term

You can see why the ancients looked to the heavens for portents of the future.  They had no other way of figuring out the moods and the ambitions of the divine gods that ruled over them.



In the modern era, we look to the media for political portents, because it is hard for ordinary humans to figure out what is really going on in the councils of government behind the political PR and the interminable spin.



In the last couple of weeks there have seemed to be some real portents in the sky telling us that things are going to change.



There's the general malaise pointed out by Peter Wehner in Commentary.  Not only is the president's approval rating in the 40s, but Democrats are starting to "grouse."  When did you last hear about Congressional Democrats "grousing."



Then there is the story of the president dissing Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Flint) at a closed-door meeting of House Democrats.  You should'ha listened to my State of the Union speech, the president told this freshman Democrat after egregiously insulting the rest of the meeting.   When did we last hear anything negative from a closed-door meeting of Democrats?



Then there is Sen. Patty Murray's (D-WA) stupid budget.  No spending cuts.  No entitlement reforms.  Just a trillion in tax increases.



So the Democrats are running out of gas.  And no wonder.  They have been on a roll since 2006, winning Congress back decisively in 2006 and the presidency in 2008.  But last fall they only won the presidency by a few points.  And now the future of congressional Democrats diverges from President Obama.



The president may be boldly proposing to take back the House in 2014, but most Democrats know better.



Think of an army.  Think of a great offensive.  You prep for it; you build up supplies.  Then you attack and advance.  But eventually you just run out of gas.  It's time to shorten the line and consolidate.



Really.  After you have nationalized healthcare, what is left to do?



The basic problem for Democrats, of course, is told in Patty Murray's budget.  They are out of ideas.  They don't know what to do about all their programs except for increasing taxes.



But more than that is the fundamental error of the administrative welfare state.  It's one thing to propose a nice little pension program to help the poor.  It's one thing to help seniors and the poor with health care.  It's one thing to help the illiterate get their basic three "R"s in government schools.  But when these activities dominate the whole economy, you have a problem.



And the problem is simply "mistakes."  How do you fix mistakes?  Well, we know that with the price system, everyone is on their toes all the time fixing mistakes.  That's what the price system does to you and for you.



But in government mistakes are terribly hard to fix.  That is way Social Security is such a burden.  If everyone were saving for their own pension then the democraphic shift towards longevity and fewer children would simply be solved as people retired later.  But government just sits around and does nothing while the unfunded mandate piles up.  With Medicare the problem is that people don't care what their routine medical care costs.  It's not like reading the supermarket circular for the week's bargains.  So grannie just keeps going to the doctor hoping he'll propose a wonder drug to fix her aches and pains.  So with welfare, and so with education.  They cannot adapt to change and they cannot fix problems.  Because change just isn't what government does well.  That's why "change" usually takes a revolution.



This is no mystery.  It's because of the difference between the price system and the political system.  The political system is a springtime for freeloaders, where politicians are promise free stuff to their supporters.  The price system is a cooperative system.  I think about what you might want to pay for, and produce it.  You think about what I might want, and produce it.  If I am right, I get to collect $300 and pass Go.  If I am wrong then I better figure out a better way to serve you.



That's the problem with Patty Murray and her budget.  It makes absolutely no attempt to "do something" about the federal government's appalling finances.  What about those $1 trillion deficits as far as the eye can see?  Pay no attention to that deficit behind the curtain!  Keep all the programs and pile on the taxes.



Which takes us to Herbert Stein's Law.  If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.



But it sure would be nice to stop before we hit the wall at the end of the box canyon.  You know what that will mean: Minorities and women hardest hit.

Staring at the Obama Apocalypse

What comes next?  That is the question at the back of every conservative mind.



I was triggered to think about this when reading Jennifer Rubin's Right Turn blog at the Washington Post.  That's because of the comments.  They are horribly abusive.



It got me to thinking.  All those liberal trolls: they have absolutely no idea what is coming.  All they hear is that the Republicans are obstructing everything that the president wants to do.  They are not thinking about unsustainable entitlements.  They are not thinking about what happens after the Fed stops its QE.  They are not thinking about what happens to the credit system after it is regulated into the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  They just know that the Republicans are scum.



And they think that the way to tame the economy is to subject it to proper regulation by disinterested experts.



But the conservative blogosphere is trying to think about what comes next.  Here is Kathy Shaidle musing about ways to step aside when the day of financial judgment arrives.



Don't save for retirement: the government will probably take your retirement savings like they already did in Argentina.  Don't go to college: start a business.  Don't earn a lot of money: they government will just take it.  Don't have kids, and don't be embarrassed about joining the freeloaders.



Then there is John Ransom musing on the VIX, the fear index.  The fear level is low right now, with the market up.  Which means that fear is low right now because the market it up.  Until it isn't.



Which is why I'm invested mostly in broad-gauge and consumer stocks.  When the crash comes, there will be no place to hide in the short term, and I am pretty sure that dollar assets like savings accounts and bonds will get demolished.  That is not a good place to be because whatever you lose in bonds will be gone forever.  The value of the dollar will not come back.



But if you have stocks then you have a share in the wealth creation of the post-crash America.  At least, that's my fondest hope.  If there is an America.  If there is any wealth.



What is certain is that in a few years the federal government will be desperately trying to get out of a jam.  It will be desperately trying to cut where it can without bringing people out into the streets, and it will be beating the bushes for revenue, starting with the low overhanging fruit.



The only question is: who will be left holding the short straw?

Can Government Correct a Mistake?

Over a century ago, at the dawn of the "common school" era, someone decided to stop teaching reading using phonics and to start teaching using "whole language" approach.  Modern "whole language" is credited to Noam Chomsky and Ken Goodman.

Trouble is that "whole language" makes reading into a job approaching in complexity the acquisition of literacy using the ideographic system of Chinese and Japanese.

Popular opinion for some years has represented the "whole language" approach as a mistake.  Maybe it is, maybe it ain't.  But the question is: how do we tell when the government school system has made a mistake, and if it has made a mistake, how do we get it to change.

That's the problem with government.  It is very difficult -- almost impossible -- to get government to fix a mistake.

Let us call in Thomas Sowell, who attacks the "mistake" problem with great vigor in his Basic Economics.  If you go to Google Books and search for "mistakes" in the 4th Edition, you get  8 snippets on your browser.  Here is his main address to the question.

Humans are going to make mistakes in any kind of economic system.  The key question is:  What kinds of incentives and constraints will cause them to correct their own mistakes?

The answer he gives is that people correct their mistakes consistently and rapidly under the price system.  But in government, mistakes can take years, even decades to get recognized and corrected.

Why is that?  The simple answer is that the price system is a two-way communications system in which producers and consumers signal to each other constantly and unequivocably.  Mainly, they signal what they don't want.

If a producer prices a product and very few people turn up to buy it then he has a problem.  If a consumer wants a product and cannot find it at the price she wants to pay, then she has a problem.  In both cases, the producer and the consumer have made a mistake.  The producer must lower the price, or improve the quality or improve the advertising.  The consumer must either pony up more money or go without.

It's simple.  Either you respond to the signals the price system is sending you or you go broke.

Government is a two-way communications system too, but it is a system with a very narrow bandwidth.  Moreover, like an army, a government does not immediately respond and stop what it is doing when things seem to be going wrong. It bellows "once more into the breach" and decides that more money is needed to solve the problem.

The phonics vs. whole language controversy illustrates the issue.  It went on for decades while partisans argued, and ended up with a qualified victory for "synethic phonics."  Meanwhile generations of kids went through the schools system.  Should generations of kids be sacrificed to a mistake?

If schools were private then they would quickly respond to the demands of parents.  There could even be schools declaring their commitment to phonics in no uncertain terms or to whole language, and let the market decide.

The point is that, in a free market under the price system, producers and consumers are ceaselessly communicating to each other, and products and services are constantly getting adjusted and improved to meet the needs and the price preferences of the consumer.  Under government, not so much.

Of course, the whole point of government is to stop change.  We don't want to change the form of election to suit the partisan advantage of the current ruling class.  We don't want to change the Bill of Rights.

But what about Social Security?  The current system doesn't respond to changes in demographics, in the economy, and in life expectancy.  That is why it is going broke.

What about Medicare?  The president knows the problem, according to the senators who dined with the president last week.

"He said the problem with Medicare is people think that it’s their money,” when in fact "they pay in a buck and get three.”

If Medicare were a private system it would adjust to this and correct it within weeks.

The problem with our national politics right now is that the national myth about the welfare state is a lie.  But nobody dare admit it, because they know that the first person to tell the truth to the American people will get run out of town on a rail.

There has got to be a better way to own up to mistakes and fix them.

There is a better way.  It is called the price system.