Who caused the Crash of 2008? Government.

In his speech on Monday September 16, 2013 President Obama spewed his usual vomit of dishonest partisan talking points.  As in:

They said that they wanted entitlement reform -- but their leaders haven’t put forward serious ideas that wouldn’t devastate Medicare or Social Security.  And I've put forward ideas for sensible reforms to Medicare and Social Security and haven’t gotten a lot of feedback yet. 

Oh really Mr. President?  I haven't heard a whisper about your ideas on entitlement reform.  But I have heard about Rep. Paul Ryan's Medicare reform, a sensible idea to switch to a straight subsidy.  And if you are interested in entitlement reform, why don't we hear more about it?  Why aren't you barnstorming up and down the land, like President Bush did for his Social Security proposals in 2005?



But I really want to deal with the president's mendacious narrative on the Crash of 2008.  President Obama said:

And as we worked to stabilize the economy and get it growing and creating jobs again, we also started pushing back against the trends that have been battering the middle class for decades.  So we took on a broken health care system.  We invested in new American technologies to end our addiction to foreign oil.  We put in place tough new rules on big banks -- rules that we need to finalize before the end of the year, by the way, to make sure that the job is done -- and we put in new protections that cracked down on the worst practices of mortgage lenders and credit card companies.  We also changed a tax code that was too skewed in favor of the wealthiest Americans. 

Let's take these item by item, Mr. President:

• Broken health care system.  The problem with the health-care system is that it is cartelized by government.  Principally, the problem is that most people don't pay directly for routine care.  Your Obamacare will make these problems worse.


• New American technologies. I suppose this is an oblique reference to all the green energy crony capitalism and boondoggles that your administration has backed.  But the decline in foreign oil addiction is due to the "fracking" revolution.  And your administration is trying to slow it down and hinder it.


• Tough new rules on big banks.  You mean, I suppose, the endless boreal forest of Dodd-Frank rules.  Here's a tip for you Mr. President, which might help the next Democratic president avoid 5 years of sub-par growth.  The time you need tough new rules is during a full-bore boom.  That's when you need to bump up credit-score requirements for loans and down-payment requirements.  Right now, when asset values are down, banks should be taking a flier on new loans.  And anyway, the big banks know that they are too big to fail.  They know that the government must bail them out.  Nothing has changed.


• Worst practices of mortgage lenders and credit card companies.  This is the one that stuck in my craw.  The number one thing we need to learn from the housing bubble is that it was government, through the Community Reinvestment Act and the GSE mortgage lenders, that forced mortgage lenders to lend to people with bad credit.  The "worst practices," Mr. President, were forced on lenders by people like you working with ACORN in Chicago in the 1990s. Remember that?


• Taxes favoring the wealthy.  How come the share of federal income tax paid by the 1% went up as tax rates were lowered?

Let's get down and dirty with the mortgage meltdown. Here's a real cool chart on mortgage delinquencies in 2008 by credit score.





Gosh, golly, geewillikins.  It looks like the lower the credit score the more likely people were to default.!  Who would have thunk it?  So here's the smoking gun, according to Tom Bloomer.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did their part by lowering borrowers’ credit score approval thresholds in their automated underwriting systems for loans they would purchase from originating lenders. The key changes, according to a mortgage brokerage executive with whom I spoke in 2006, involved reducing the conventional loan threshold from a FICO credit score of about 670 to 630 and the subprime threshold from about 630 to 590 (other online sources I’ve found indicate that each threshold may have actually been an additional ten points lower).

Notice how, on the chart, 670 is just the place where you want to draw the line.  15% defaults. Perfectly manageable.  But if you go to the new subprime threshold of 590, you get to 51% default.  No bank or GSE is long for this world when it is suffering 51% defaults.  Especially if the government has forced lenders to lower their down-payment requirements.



The credit system, sports fans, relies on two things.  It relies on the confidence that other people will make their payments.  And it relies on the confidence that the assets backing any loan would liquidate the loan balance if the debtor defaulted.



Liberals spent twenty years turning that upside down with their government coercion of banks into lowering credit thresholds -- thus increasing the probability of defaults, and lowering down-payment requirements -- thus increasing the chance that loans in default couldn't be liquidated.



Thanks liberals.  You guys are so brilliant I gotta wear shades.

Welfare State: Mend it or End it?

What should we do about the welfare state of comprehensive government social-insurance programs? We know that Social Security can't go on the way it has.  We know that Medicare is worse.  We know that government education from K to grad school is mindlessly elbowing boys aside as it mindlessly continues to regard girls as an "under-served population."



But the question for conservatives is: should we mend it or wait until things get worse and end it?



Here's NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez interviewing Christina Hoff Sommers, author of the updated 2000 book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men.  Yeah.  Thirteen years later and nothing has been done.  Girls are doing better and better in school, and boys are doing worse and worse.  Sommers suggests a program similar to ones in Australia and Britain.

[W]e can follow the example of the British, the Canadians, and the Australians. They have openly addressed the problem of male underachievement. They are experimenting with programs to help them become more organized, focused, and engaged. These include more boy-friendly reading assignments (science fiction, fantasy, sports, espionage, battles); more recess time (where boys can engage in rough-and-tumble play as a respite from classroom routine); campaigns to encourage male literacy; more single-sex classes; and more male teachers (and female teachers interested in the pedagogical challenges boys pose). A few years ago, the Australian government launched a campaign called “Success for Boys.” This program provided grants to 1,600 schools to incorporate boy-friendly methods into their daily practice.

Oh good.  Another one-size-fits-all government program.  With its own advocates, its bureaucrats, and its special interest suppliers.



Here's Reagan-era warhorse Martin Feldstein offering a reform of Social Security and Medicare by raising eligibility levels and lowering benefits.

Congress should vote now to continue raising the full benefit age from 67 to 70. When that is fully phased in, the annual cost of Social Security benefits would be reduced by about 20%, equivalent to a saving in 2020 of $200 billion or about 1% of GDP.



Gradually raising the age of Medicare eligibility in line with the age for full Social Security benefits would achieve a budget saving of more than 1% of GDP in 2020 and later years. Individuals between ages 65 and 70 could still enroll in Medicare by paying a fair premium.

Do conservatives really want to get caught in this trap: the people that cut Social Security and Medicare?



The conservative vision of a limited government and a large civil society would surely require that parents control the education of their children.  So it would be meaningless what the government thought about it.  Parents would organize their children's education according to their lights not according to some elite activist's lights.



The conservative vision would surely require that the inflexible one-size-fits-all structure of Social Security and Medicare should be replaced by personal saving.  You want a secure retirement with a good income and a solid health care package?  Why, you work and save for it.  And if you have made a mistake or two on the way, or if the government strips the nation of resources in a war or a financial collapse, then you get to work a year or two extra.  Your work and your savings then create jobs and careers for the young generation as you enjoy your retirement.



No doubt we should all be forced to pay for a safety net for people that will not or cannot provide for their children or themselves.  But the default must be that people take care of their own.  The default must be that millions of us, responding to the challenges and the opportunities of our individual lives, work and save and adapt in our own individual ways to contribute to the welfare of the whole.  That is the foundation of humans as social animals.  We each do our best, contributing according to our lights.



When we talk about a program to help boys, or a cut to Social Security and Medicare, we are still talking the liberals' language, with the government in the center of our lives, telling us what to do, or else. And inevitably the whole thing will turn upon the free stuff that the government hands out to its supporters.



I went to watch a play-reading over the weekend.  It used Don Quixote to illuminate the problems of the homeless and the mentally ill and the question of Dignity for such people.



Well, here's an idea.  There can be no Dignity in the authoritarian welfare state.  That's because government is force, and system is domination.  Nobody, not the Tea Party member being roughed up by the IRS or the homeless Hispanic hearing voices, gets to be treated with Dignity when the government functionaries are backed by government force.  Because there always comes a point in an interaction with a government functionary where the functionary says do what I say or else.



There is such a thing as society.  It's just not the same thing as the state.

What American Exceptionalism is Really About

Since Russian autocrat Vladimir V. Putin raised the question of American exceptionalism this is a good time to remind ourselves what it is all about.

The best way to start is to show that President Obama's idea of American exceptionalism, as addressed in his Strasbourg news conference in 2009, is all wrong and misses the point.  In answer to a question about American exceptionalism he said:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

That, Mr. President, is exactly what American exceptionalism is not about. America is not a tribe or a nation state based upon a state church and a Volk as originally thought up by the German Romantics.  It is a universal state for people that define themselves not by race and ethnicity but as individuals responsible individually to God.

Most people define themselves by their place, their family, their clan, their tribe, their race.  And they experience their national existence as a war against other nations, a fight in a cruel world of scarce resources.  But American exceptionalism tries to put all that on the waste heap of history.  I like to say that we Americans are People of the Responsible Self.

That is why we are individualists: not because we are selfish and egoistic, but because we experience ourselves as individually responsible for our lives, to God if we believe in God and to the people we know, and to society in general.

The reason that President Obama hesitates as he did in Strasbourg is that liberals don't believe in American exceptionalism.  Their whole world-view is a revolt against American exceptionalism, its individualism, and the idea of the individual as a responsible self.

Liberals have returned to the idea of the state as a robber band, plundering and pillaging the world for free stuff to give away to its members.  Liberals have returned with their identity politics to the definition of people by their tribal membership -- in race, class, gender -- rather than their universal individual humanness.  Liberals believe in the color of your skin, not in the content of your character. Liberals have turned politics into a scramble for loot and subsidy.  Liberals encourage people to think of themselves as victims, denied their rightful share of the world's benefits.

I like to say that this view of politics goes right back to our chimp ancestors.  In that world, as described by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, the welfare of the troop depends on the food supply, and the food supply, mostly in fruits, depends exactly on the ability of the males to extend their territory by border warfare.  Obviously this chimp world is a zero-sum world, because the food-bearing territory that the males conquer must be taken away by force from the neighboring chimp troop.

It all sounds very familiar.

The point about the modern world is that everything depends not upon the food-producing land that we occupy, but upon the ingenuity of each individual human to produce good and services for other humans.  Wealth does not consist in land or in natural resources but in "intangible capital," the skills and knowledge of humans and their ability to work together.

But people that have just arrived in the city don't yet understand this.  And so they respond to community organizers that tell them that they are being oppressed and exploited.  They are in a tough place, of course, because they don't yet know how to contribute to society with their skills and knowledge.  That makes them second-class citizens.

Let's give our liberal friends the benefit of the doubt.  They believe in their world view.  They believe that they are doing the right thing by handing out free stuff to the traditionally marginalized.  And it sure doesn't hurt that getting free stuff from the local patron is what the traditionally marginalized understand from their lives in the country as peasants.

But American exceptionalism says we are called to something higher, something better.  We are called to be People of the Responsible Self that think first about what we can do and what we contribute, and only second about what we will get and what we deserve.  This culture seems to have started in the cities in the first millennium BC, at the birth of the modern religions from Hinduism to Judaism to Christianity in the so-called Axial Age.

On this view Islam is something of an outlier, because Islam, in its very name, is a religion of the Submissive Self, not the Responsible Self.  It is a religion of warrior tribes, not cooperative city dwellers.

In How Civilizations Die David P. Goldman says that civilizations die by not having children.  See Europe, Russia, Japan, American liberals, and Islam.  People with a faith in the future have children. People that have given up do not.  American conservatives and American immigrants have children. American liberals do not.  Indeed American liberals worship the idols of creativity and abortion and population control and non-heterosexuality which lead to an empty crib and no grandchildren.

Goldman predicts a glorious future for America.  That's because of our American exceptionalism.  But obviously we can't really get a grip on the future until Obama and his liberal friends exit stage left.

And after the end of Obama the American people will need to declare, with their vote, that they are a People of the Responsible Self.

Does Nazism = Marxism = Liberalism?

Is it allowed in Obama's America to object to the idea that a departed Marxist was a "Marxist Humanist Mensch"?



That's what John Podhoretz did when "leftist social critic Marshall Berman" was recently so eulogized.  He reacted, perhaps a little too quickly.  His tweet read: "Imagine a tribute to a Nazi humanist mensch.”



After a while he decided that he ought to apologize.



Actually, the idea that a thinker of poisonous ideas could be a mensch is not that outrageous.  People can espouse vicious ideas in their writing and still be kind to children and animals.  The point is that in Obama's America you are not allowed to call a dead Nazi social critic a mensch.  But you are allowed to do it for dead Marxists.



And if Nazism is an abomination, leading to the death of millions, what about liberalism, or "Liberal Fascism", as Jonah Goldberg so delicately puts it.  It led to the suffering of millions in the Great Depression and now it is creating great discomfort for millions in the Great Recession.



The point is that all these political doctrines -- Nazism, Marxism, and liberalism -- call for the supremacy of the political ruling class.  In all of them, politics and political power trumps everything.



Any sensible person would regard such ideas with suspicion.  Of course a ruling class, or would-be ruling class, would believe in the claptrap of political supremacy.



But not modern conservatism.  And that has to mean something.



Let us stipulate that Nazism, Marxism, and liberalism have a valid point.



Nazism grew out of the era of German Liberation during the Napoleonic Wars when German intellectuals like Fichte desperately tried to create an idea of German nationhood to push back against the endless imperial invasions of the French.  And the "volkisch" ideas of German Romanticism had a point too in honoring the solidarity and the community of traditional folkways.  A lot of the thinkers working on this were real "mensch" and good for them.  It all only became a murdering totalitarianism after the German defeat in World War I and the Germans, living in what they knew was the most advanced country in the world, started flailing around for an Answer to their problems.



Marxism grew out of the explosive industrial revolution that seemed to be turning workers into mechanical slaves.  It was plausible to worry that the newly powerful capitalists were something to fear and something to be fought.  Of course, Marxism was dead wrong.  But nobody knew that back in the 1840s.



Liberalism grew out of the same soil, the idea that someone had to supervise the huge new corporations that dominated railways and steel and oil.  Otherwise they would run amok.  It all seemed so plausible back in the 1890s.



Meanwhile, capitalism was crunching along, midway through raising daily income from $3 per capita to the present $120 per capita, based on the Invisible Hand doctrine that the market was self ordering.  Absent state power, the new capitalism would behave like an unconscious organism, according to Herbert Spencer.  People were like cells, obliviously doing their thing in the middle of a vast social organism, but still helping the whole thing thrive.  You believe stuff like that, fashionable people howled?  Give me a break!



Here's how I look at it.  Think of Nazism, Marxism, and liberalism as "plausible lies."



It makes sense that in a cruel world of knives in the back (German: Dolchstoß), you need a powerful nation built upon a people that share language and race.  Only it doesn't.  It turns out that humans are perfectly capable of cooperating across language and race barriers, so long as the language and the race baiters shut up.  Nazism is a lie.



It makes sense that individual workers would be helpless before the thundering power of Machine Industry.  Only it turns out that Machine Industry works much better when people are treated like humans and encouraged to be "self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility (German: verantwortungsfreudig)."  Marxism is a lie.



It makes sense that the economy would be a complete shambles unless "large-minded" administrators and experts were given the authority to organize things rationally.  Only it turns out that millions of producer and consumer decisions easily outperform the expert and the administrator.  That's because the millions are trying and failing and learning things in their millions, whereas the government expert and the government administrator can only try a few things, and cannot admit when they are wrong.  Liberalism is a lie.



That leaves us with the implausible truth that voluntary social cooperation is the way "forward" -- a voluntary social cooperation freed from a sovereign political hegemony that endlessly orders everyone around.



To figure out how that works you can do a lot worse than listen to Edmund Burke, the "first conservative."

1. No Lois Lerners.  Government administrators must not use their power to despoil ordinary citizens, e.g., "dangerous" Tea Partiers.  Burke started this revolutionary notion with his Impeachment of Warren Hastings.


2. No religious persecution.  Let people worship their own gods.  Burke lost his seat in Parliament for supporting Catholic emancipation.


3. No rule from afar.  It's stupid to think you can rule America from Westminster, said Burke.


4. No rule of the experts and mechanics.  The human condition is not a mechanical toy.  Keep the "sophisters, economists, and calculators" off the levers of power.  Burke predicted that the French Revolution would end in the gallows.  OK, he was wrong; it ended in the guillotine.

So there you have it: three Plausible Lies and one Implausible Truth.  But why be amazed?  Truth, they say is stranger than fiction.  Because fiction always has to be plausible.

No Shortcuts writes JR Dunn

Terrified by three-and-a-half more years of Obama?  Too bad, writes American Thinker's J.R. Dunn.  There is no easy way out; nor should we want one.  What this nation needs is a decisive rejection of liberalism.

I want every single train of events set in motion by Obama, his administration, and his supporters, down to the last halfwit college undergrad, to play out in full.  I want every disaster that fool and his parade of twitches have triggered to blossom in bleak completion.  I want to see all their trains collide, all their ships sink, all their airships burnt to cinders.

The purpose of this is not to experience the fun of it.  It's not going to be fun, not for anyone.  And there is no shortcut to the sunny green uplands of a conservative future.

I prefer that we drink this cup to the dregs, take this road to its lonely end.  The liberals need to undergo the whipping that they have dodged for over seven decades.  The voters of this country, who have treated politics like a reality series, need to be backhanded by the world as it exists.  We require a rude awakening.  This country's pols, both left and right, need to be overwhelmed with worry as to what the next day will bring.  The people of this country need to be buried up to their necks in the results of their own infantilism.  All the fantasy castles need to be demolished to the last stone.  Liberalism must be discredited and humiliated, its adherents defeated and dispersed.  The leader of the whole circus must be tormented to the human limit and beyond, forced to break down in front of the cameras as he begs for help that will not come. 

In my view, it is women, white women, that need to experience this meltdown most of all.  Liberals have been spinning lies to women for decades and women have lapped it all up -- hey, no offence, women are programmed to lap up the milk of the lover's blandishments.



But women are going to find out in the next few years how bad liberalism is for them, their children, and their loved ones.



It will all be too late, of course.  That always happens with women.



But it is not a weakness in women that this always happens.  It's clear that women are programmed, by God or by Darwin, to believe in the conventional wisdom of their local community of women.  And when things go south, women are programmed to hang on, hoping against hope that they can get their children to adulthood before the flood carries everything before it to utter ruin.



Since woman have the vote, their credulity and their just-hang-on culture is now part of the public square, and we skeptical, rebellious men just have to deal with it.



That's why we need to experience the absolute liberal wipeout for the next three-and-a-half years.  So that the American people, down to the lowest information women voters, say: Never Again. 

Obama Discredits Liberalism

When I wrote my usual American Thinker op-ed over the weekend titled "Discredit Liberalism Utterly" I had no idea that when the article ran yesterday it would be the same day that President Obama would do the job for us.



Imagine that. Imagine how the president could have done more to discredit liberalism utterly in his speech on Syria of September 10, 2013, a day which will live...  As the day that liberalism started to die.



On top of that it was also the day that two Colorado state senators were recalled by a movement led by a twentysomething plumber.  You know their names: State Senator John Morse and State Senator Angela Giron.  You may not know the plumber.  His name is Victor Head.



John Ransom addressed the discredit liberalism issue in "6 Tricks that God has played on Liberals since November:"

It’s not even just that they are wrong, it’s that at the top of the liberal pyramid they are liars, intellectually bankrupt, the moral and intellectual equivalents of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, spreading a gospel which not only they don’t understand, but the they exploit for their own, and no one else’s gain.

Yeah, that does put it in a special light.  Liberals are no better than the Bakkers.  In a real sense.  We don't know what the Bakkers really believed about God.  And we don't really know what liberals believe about liberalism.  But we do know that, when you add the numbers up the only people that really seem to benefit from liberalism are liberals.



Just like the Bakkers and God.



Jonah Goldberg also has a piece today that kinda hammers the whole "discredit liberalism" meme home.  He talks about the idea that liberals are live-and-let-live people and that liberal support for gay marriage and abortion proves it.  That, he says, is the Grand Myth of liberalism.

Social liberalism is the foremost, predominant and in many instances sole impulse for zealous regulation in this country, particularly in big cities. I love it when liberals complain about a ridiculous bit of PC nanny-statism coming out of New York, L.A., Chicago, D.C., Seattle, etc. -- "What will they do next?"



Uh, sorry to tell you, but you are "they." Outside of a "Law and Order" script -- or an equally implausible MSNBC diatribe about who ruined Detroit -- conservatives have as much influence on big-city liberalism as the Knights of Malta.

And when it comes to gay marriage and abortion, you'd better agree with liberals or else.  Gay marriage?  The local Human Rights Commission in New Mexico will come after you.  Abortion?  Obamacare says you gotta pay for it.



Thanks to those sharing and caring live-and-let-live liberals.



The only problem for me is what happens after liberalism is utterly discredited.  Even Aussie conservative Tony Abbott figured he needed to romance the ladies with a proposed maternal leave policy financed by a teeny-tiny tax on the rich earning more that $500,000 a year.



You see, nothing changes.  All politicians are like predatory plunderers, egging on their supporters with the promise of loot.  Women are supposed to be sharers and carers, yet politicians treat them like they were potential rapers and pillagers, anxious to get their hands on some free stuff.



The solution is obvious.  Fire the minds of men and women with the idea of limited government, that any plan to plunder A and give it to B is sick and wrong, and against "our values."



But who will be the one to make the first move?  Any ideas, President Obama?

Tony Abbott Equals Reagan Equals Bush

When Barack Obama acceded to the presidency after various verbal infelicities, such as the 57 states incident, he was hailed as a brilliant everything.



But conservative politicians are always represented as barely human.  Ronald Reagan was an amiable dunce.  George W. Bush was a dumb Texas cowboy.



So it's no surprise that Tony Abbott, leader of the conservative Liberal Party and winner in the recent Australian general election, has been characterized as an embarrassment.  He made a verbal slip about the "suppositories of wisdom" and is regarded as "hostile to women" and sexist for talking about the "sex appeal" of certain women parliamentary candidates.

Slowly, the public has come to accept Mr Abbott as its next prime minister, though he has long been dogged by claims he is hostile to women, particularly after his fierce approach to Miss Gillard.



He was heavily criticised for appearing at a rally against the carbon tax outside Parliament House surrounded by banners referring to Ms Gillard as "Ju-Liar" and "the Bitch".



Australia's first female prime minister hit back at him in a stirring speech in parliament last October that made global headlines.



"I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man," she said. "I've had enough, Australian women have had enough."

Well of course.  You're not allowed to criticize liberal women: That's sexist.  Just as you are not allowed to criticize President Obama: That's racist.



Any US conservative can see the parallels with US politics.  Conservatives are always characterized as unfriendly to women.  Or making divisive comments.  Or being sexist.  Or extremist.  A chap like Barack Obama can be way off on the left wing but get reported as the savior of women, children, and minorities.



Somewhere there is a campaign consultant that knows how to neuter this sort of thing.  But it won't be easy, because the routine marginalization of conservative politicians reflects the left-wing nature of the mainstream media.  The media lives in a bubble where of course conservatives are extremist, of course they are unintelligent, of course they are racist, sexist, homophobic.



That's why I issue the call to "Discredit Liberalism Utterly" in the American Thinker today.   I mean that particularly in the minds of nice women who have learned their lessons well in the modern secular seminary.  Because only when those nice women feel utterly betrayed will the scales fall off their eyes.  Only then will they realize that liberalism is bad for women for their children and other humans.  That liberals sees them as dupes, marks, easily manipulated innocents.  Because for liberals it is all about getting and keeping and deploying government power.  No matter how it hurts ordinary people just trying to live their lives.



Meanwhile, Tony Abbott has won in Australia, and "Australia is under new management and once again open for business."