Obamacare: Just Another Press on the Brow of Labor

The basic technique of government is to extract a fee from all market transactions.  That's what sales taxes and tariffs are all about.  Or government can demand to get a cut out of every paycheck in an income tax.



But probably the most ingenious approach is to demand that employers provide benefits to their employees.  Then the government doesn't actually apply a tax.  It just forces market participants to act in the way the government wants.



But it really doesn't make any difference in the big picture.



The big picture is that all these interventions harm the economy.  Let's look at Obamacare. Writes Michael Tanner:

By raising the cost of employment, Obamacare makes employers slower to hire and reduces economic growth. The CBO recently warned that due to the law, the equivalent of 800,000 full-time workers will leave the labor force over the next ten years.

But hey, that's what government does.  When it takes money from Bill to pay to Pete, or it forces Bill to provide services to Pete, there's a cost.  The cost is that the economy is smaller: less jobs, less products, less services.  Unfortunately, most people don't get it.  They buy into the idea that other people can and should be forced to provide benefits to them.



Here's a couple of Obamacare victims that suddenly find out from their insurance companies that they are going to be paying for Obamacare.

Cindy Vinson and Tom Waschura are big believers in the Affordable Care Act. They vote independent and are proud to say they helped elect and re-elect President Barack Obama.



Yet, like many other Bay Area residents who pay for their own medical insurance, they were floored last week when they opened their bills: Their policies were being replaced with pricier plans that conform to all the requirements of the new health care law.



Vinson, of San Jose, will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy, while Waschura, of Portola Valley, will cough up almost $10,000 more for insurance for his family of four.

Golly gee-willikins!  Who could have seen that coming?  They want to make me pay for the new government program?  Cindy Vinson, retired teacher, was laughing at Speaker Boehner and his government shutdown tactics, until the Obamacare bill came due.



But really, what planet do these people live on?  All government interventions have a cost.  They disturb the natural flow of the economy, of people providing goods and services to other people.  So, almost inevitably, something will get lost when the government steps in.



What government does, and it does it pretty well, is to inject plausible lies into the conversation.  It encourages people to believe that they have a right to a decent job, to health care, to education.  But the truth is that these basic goods are the reason we work.  It is our labor, our skills, what we can offer to other people, that makes gives us the right to hope for a decent life in exchange for what we provide to our fellow citizens.



We can use force to supply deficiencies, because some people get too little out of their contribution to society.  But every time we allow government off the leash to do this, we reduce the basic sociability of our society because we increase the span of force.

White Working Class Used to be Little Darlings

Here's conservative icon Ben Stein getting an earful from a racist.

“This is a George Wallace moment,” my interlocutor continued. “White working class people, white small businessmen, mothers, are just sick at being pushed around by the courts, by the government, by the media, by the intellectuals...."

And so on to blacks on welfare and affirmative action.

But I have to say to the apologist for the white working class: What did you expect?

Back in the day the white working class was the little darling of the liberal ruling class.  Liberals couldn't do enough to extol the sturdy virtues of the working stiff.  At least that's how it went back in the 1930s.

But you could tell things were changing in the 1950s when Jackie Gleason portrayed a less than stalwart municipal bus driver.  And the worm had clearly turned in the early 1970s when Atchie Bunker was made into a figure of derision.

Listen fellahs!  Sooner or later the ruling class gets bored with the little darlings they've created.  They decide that blacks, or women, or gays are far more engaging than bitter-clinger working class whites.

And then the old little darlings are left, deserted, with their bitter tale of betrayal.

Listen up!  When you sign up with the politicians as their little darling du jour you are signing up to be their mistress.  They'll be around to chuck you under the chin and give an expensive present at election time, but the rest of the time you are expected to smile sweetly and never complain.

Here's the future for the white working class.  The affair to remember is over.  The government goodies are over.  The movies, songs, paeans to honest toil are over.  Now there is nothing left but to suck it in, get an education, get a job, and join the People of the Responsible Self in the middle class.  You will find them in the Republican Party.

When you are a little darling of the politicians you can sit on your butt and complain about the unfairness of life.  And because you are a pretty little darling and you have still got what it takes the liberal ruling class will respond to your whining with government programs.

But what happens when the bloom of youth is over?  Then the victim card doesn't work any more.  Then you have a choice.  You can slowly decay like Blanche DuBois as you continue to depend on the kindness of strangers, or you can suck it in and get a life.

The time has come for the white working class to suck it in and get a life.  The time has come for the white working class to embrace the life-giving ideology of individualism, which means that you take responsibility for your own life before God and stop blaming other people.

I call the people that do this the People of the Responsible Self.  The political home of the People of the Responsible Self in the United States is the Republican Party.

Glenn Reynolds is complaining today that while Washington isn't working, the world outside achieves wonders like private spaceflight.  Well, yeah.  Politics isn't supposed to "do" anything.  It is civil war by other means.  Don't expect anything other than a war out of the political process.

Even liberal pup Ezra Klein knows something is wrong.  For him, of course, it's all about the intransigent Republicans preventing things from getting done, from the end of earmarks to the failings of Speaker Boehner to the lack of big-business influence on Republicans. (Imagine: The Chamber of Commerce supports a "clean" continuing resolution for the budget mess just like the Democrats!)  Oh, and Ted Cruz.

But really what's happening is that every time liberals try to spoon that big government medicine between the lips of the little darlings, the little darlings upchuck.

Probably what we are seeing is the entry, finally, of the white working class into the Republican Party.

Because, at long last, the little darlings of the white working class have hit bottom and they have nowhere else to go.

Let Liberal Billionaires Help With Debt Ceiling

There is only one thing that a government must avoid if it wants to live long on this earth.  It must avoid the situation of Greece and Co.  They must avoid the situation where the government has to offer brutal rates of interest to lenders.



Put it another way.  If you can sell your government debt for a reasonable rate of interest, you are in clover.  It's when you have to pay north of 10% interest that things start to go south quickly.



But right now the US Treasury expected to pay an average of 1.2% per year net interest, or $223 billion in FY14, according to usfederalbudget.us.  Hey, me worry?



No the real problem is a "sudden stop" like they had in Britain under the Stuarts.  That's why the Brits had to call in the Dutch Prince William of Orange and his Dutch Finance.



The problem for the US government if Congress fails to pass an increase in the debt ceiling is a) whether to ignore Congress, and b) what programs to finance.  Oh, the agony!



But I have a better idea.  Let liberals step in and help.  Liberals after all believe with Oliver Wendell Holmes that "I like to pay taxes.  With them I buy civilization."



OK liberals, here's a chance for you to walk the walk.  Just log into eftps.gov and pay the Feds some estimated on your 2013 Federal Income Tax.  Here's the schedule I suggest for my liberal friends.

1. If you are a liberal billionaire, in the Warren Buffet or Penny Pritzker class, I suggest a $10,000,000 payment on eftps.gov.  Remember, the poorest guy on the Forbes 400 is worth $1.2 billion so there ought to be a good 100 liberals in there.   That $1 billion to buy civilization.


2. If you are a liberal centi-millionaire, I suggest a $1,000,000 payment on eftps.gov.  There ought to be a good thousand or so of liberal centi-millionaires.  That's another $1 billion.


3. If you are a liberal earning over $10,000,000 a year, I suggest a $100,000 payment to eftps.gov.  I figure there must be 10,000 of you chaps.  So that's another $1 billion.


4. If you are a liberal earning over $1,000,000 a year, I suggest a $10,000 payment to eftps.gov.  There must be 100,000 of you.  So now we've got another $1 billion.


5. Now let's talk about the lumpen liberals: government managers, professors, executives with non-for-profits.  There must be half a million of you folks.  How about a cool $2,000 payment to eftps.gov for you guys and girls.  That adds up to another $1 billion.

So there we have a quick $5 billion whip-round to tide Uncle Sam over for the week or so before we get a deal on the debt ceiling.  And liberals will like it.  Because by paying those taxes, liberals will buy civilization.



Oh, don't worry, liberals.  eftps.gov is still up and running.  In spite of the government shutdown.

And if that $5 billion isn't enough, hey liberals!  Pony up another $5 billion.  We are talking civilization here.

Media Lapdog Syndrome Strikes Again

I suppose you can say that the moment I lost my youthful innocence was the day that Jack Patera, the Seattle Seahawks first coach, was fired.  We immediately learned from the sports reporters that they had never liked Jack.

Oh really.  This was the guy that these reporters had been interviewing on the pre-game and post-game and in-between and goodness-knows-what show and we all thought he was their best buddy.

And all along these intrepid reporters were just being regular media lapdogs.  Do the Seattle Seahawks need the media more than the media needs the Seahawks?  Who knows?

What we do know is that the self-serving nonsense about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable is just that.  What the media really do is take kicks from the powerful and apply kicks to the powerless.

So now we learn that the proposed biopics about the saintly Hillary Clinton have run into a problem. Nobody is willing to talk to the movie producers.  The word has gone out from Clinton HQ and everyone that knows what is good for them has clammed up.

What we really know about the media is that if they aren't dishing the dirt on some political figure it is because they are too powerful.  Nice little career you got going here.  Pity if something happened to it.  Pity if nobody who was anybody refused to talk to you.  Because what use to a journalist is anybody who is really nobody?

My theory about the Obama years is that the media adulation is not just knee-jerk terminal liberalism.  The bottom line is that the enforcers are out there and they will quickly remind any journalist what it would cost to go public on the Obamis.  In other words, the media is afraid, and rightly so,  because any single media personality is expendable.  In a minute.

Hey.  No biggie.  But the fact of the lapdog media is just another argument for limited government.  If the media won't expose wrongdoing because it's afraid, and won't write inconvenient truths about existing powerful political figures, then there is one thing to learn.  The political figures are too powerful.

How do you reduce the power of political figures?  You reduce the power of government, the power of government to come down like a ton of bricks on anyone for any reason.

What was it that Conrad Black did that sent him to jail?  Apart from the fact that a Chicago US Attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, wanted to make a name for himself.  Here's Ben Stein wondering what his friend, a financial planner, did that got the SEC after him.  That's the SEC that failed to stop the Crash of 2008.  And why not?  Because the drivers of the crash, "affordable" home mortgages, were supported by the most powerful people in the land.  And don't get me started about Bernie Madoff.

Maybe there's a silver lining to this black cloud.  Maybe the rise of the blogosphere means that there is more likely to be some naive fool out there that will publish the dirt about some powerful person before he realizes that he is fishing in deep waters and that he will regret his rashness for the rest of his life.

Tea Party Extremists? You Bet!

The word from the Democrats at this time of partial government shutdown is "Tea Party extremists" and "fairness."  And any Republican or conservative automatically winces.

Because we conservatives are not extremists, and we are not warring on fairness.  Are we?

Of course we are.  We want to reverse the century of progressivism, of administrative free stuff.  And you know what they call that?  Extreme.  And not just unfair to present government dependents, but cruel, unjust, and mean-spirited.

There is a word to describe who we are: Revolutionaries.

Anyone that wants a revolution is an extremist.  You are sidling up to that famous line in the Declaration of Independence, to "pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."  And indeed most of the signers of the Declaration did lose their lives and their fortunes to the American Revolution.

Jeffrey Lord makes things clear this morning.  It's a battle of the crusades he writes.

Mr. Obama and his friends are on a crusade to turn America ever further left than it was when they took charge...

For conservatives, this shutdown and the response to Obama is about nothing less than the life of America itself. A crusade to restore America to the constitutional republic it was designed to be.

But here is the point.  We, the conservatives and Tea Party extremists are the progressives, striving to create a new thing.  The Obamis and the liberals are the reactionaries, reverting back to the old thing.

OK.  What do I mean?

I mean that identity politics and the big man handing out the free stuff -- and 40% of Americans think that Obamacare is free -- is the old way.  You can see it in the story of chimpanzee culture described by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn where the males conduct continuous border wars to enlarge the troop's territory.  The result is the free stuff, the food and fruit that is free for the taking for the females.  And the bigger the territory the more baby chimps that grow to maturity.

You can see the old way operating in Homer's Iliad.  Homer's warrior culture was a simple culture of loot and plunder.  And the plunder included well-born women.  The conflict at the heart of the Iliad is the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles over the woman Briseis.  Here's the Wiki story:

Briseis, a daughter of Briseus, was a princess of Lyrnessus... When Achilles led the assault on that city during the Trojan War, she was captured and her family (including her father, mother, three brothers, and husband) died at his hands.[2] She was subsequently given to Achilles as a war prize to be his concubine. In the Trojan War, captive women like Briseis were regarded as objects to be traded amongst the warriors.[3]

That's nice.

The other interesting thing about the Iliad is that the warriors assume, as a matter of course, that they must sacrifice cattle to gain the favor of the gods.  Whenever some warrior wins a fight, it is assumed that the gods are on his side, and the action of the Iliad is constantly interrupted while the gods decide who is to win the next round of the battle on the plains of Troy. 

Isn't that pretty well how Democratic politics works?  You need to "pay to play."  The name of the game is getting in power and using the power of government to hose pensions and subsidies at your supporters.  You use the tribal loyalties of "identity politics" to divide off your constituents from the overall nation, encouraging people to think of themselves as African-Americans, Hispanics, feminists, gays, rather that 100% Americans.  Wise experts decide who will win or lose.

But conservatives are different.  We are the heirs of a new thing that started around 3,000 years ago.  Karl Jaspers called it the Achsenzeit or Axial Age.  The new idea was that each individual had a personal covenant with God.  The relationship with God was no longer the supplicant buying favors with sacrifice, but a contract with God.  God is no longer playing favorites between the Greeks and the Trojans, as the mood takes him.  He is saying: here are the rules which both you and I should observe.

The Axial Age heralds the entry into history of what I call the People of the Responsible Self.  When you have a covenant with God then you are responsible for your life.  You cannot say, oh well, I would have been OK but the exploitation done me down.  You cannot say the capitalists or the Jews or the rich or the bankers are to blame.  You are responsible for your life, even in the face of evil and overwhelming power.

My guess is that this revolution in human consciousness was confined to the early cities.  It's in the city that each actor is individually responsible.  It's in the city that contract comes to the fore.  It's in the city that you start to deal with people who are not your kin.

And my guess is that the expansion of the new idea reflects the growth of the city.

But the revolution in consciousness is not easy.  It really is a complete turning over, the revaluation of all values.  That means it is an incredibly hard thing to do.  That's why, as soon as the Industrial Revolution got started, movements of reaction like Marxism and Fabianism began, each with a nostalgia for the comfort of the tribe, and the constant demonizing of the Other that is necessary in the eternal border wars of the hunter-gatherer and agricultural ages.

Only, of course, the old ways don't work any more.  They were perfect for the hunter-gatherer tribes with their hard-won territory, and the feudal states with their vulnerable grain stores.  You had to stick together and above all defend those borders.

We know the old ways don't work because the Soviets conducted an actual experiment in class tribalism and, after unimaginable cruelties, disintegrated in 1990.  We have Argentina, a perennial basket case of charismatic leadership and class warfare lurching from one devaluation to another.  We have Detroit.  We have Chicago coming up.  In the industrial age you simply can't operate on the old patronage/clientage model.

But we humans are still programmed to love that free stuff, and politics is still run on the old Homeric model: join with me and get your share of the spoils.  And so it is with the authoritarian welfare state.

We Tea Party extremists, we revolutionaries, we Few: we want to reverse the backwards lurch to the tribalism and serfdom of the authoritarian welfare state.  We are the People of the Responsible Self and we long for freedom, the freedom to do the responsible thing rather than kowtow to the knout of the welfare-state enforcement officer.

And that is why the battle is joined.  It's a fight to the finish between the nostaglic tribalism that goes under the name of "identity politics" and the universal freedom and responsibility of the thriving citizen in the thriving city.

Call me an extremist for the new way, the Way of the People of the Responsible Self.

Liberalism Starts Shutting Down

Back in the old days liberalism was a plaything of the educated youth.  Angry young men like Karl Marx saw the suffering of the hungry 1840s in Germany and declared that there had to be a better way that didn't put such a heavy burden on the workers. The Pre-Raphaelites and the Fabians sneered at the atomism of individualism and its reduction of every value to the materialistic "will it pay?"  These young men and women looked at the world and found it to be unjust.



Youth is always good at coming up with sweeping, idealistic theories, temples of reason, to show the way to the glorious future of peace and justice.



There's just one little problem.  That government is force.  Government is always an army looking for a war to fight.  In the 19th century you can argue that government had a mandate to fight against the cruel working conditions in the mines and the factories.



In those days, without a doubt, the rich were fat and idle, and the poor were thin and overworked.



But now?



Now we have Obamacare just rolling out, and, surprise surprise, the insurance exchange websites don't work.  And women are greeting their husbands in tears because their health insurance premiums have gone up.  That's because, necessarily, Obamacare is a war.  It's a war on... well what, exactly?



Government tends to get into two kinds of war.  There are wars for justice, noble efforts to blow away the accretions and cruelties of the ancien regime.  And then there are wars of loot and plunder, evil efforts to descend on ordinary people and hated minorities and strip them of their wealth and assets.



The government army always marches under the flag of justice but is often really engaged upon a orgy of plunder.



That's how to understand modern liberalism in general and Obamacare in particular.  The whole point is to distribute loot among the Democratic voting base.  That how you explain the waivers.



That's even how you explain the government shutdown.  The Dems need to frighten their supporters every now and again to make them realize how much they need their tribal leaders.



Hey you guys!  Without us you would be nothing!  Richard Fernandez thinks that the Democratic position in the shutdown saga is weaker than the Dems are letting on.

 Like any Ponzi scheme they need money to keep the pensions, the promises, the whole system of rewards going. Like a Ponzi setup, an ever-enlarging Big Government has only two modes: a brilliant tomorrow or total failure.

The Dems don't have any room to negotiate, for "a step back in the ever forward drive for bigger government means not smaller government but the cliff."  Why, if the Dems concede something to the Republicans this time then the GOP will be back for more concessions next time.  Where will it end?



So the grand visions of the 19th century have collapsed into the grubbing  attempts to borrow money to keep "the whole system of rewards going," to keep the troops from deserting.



It has been ever thus.  The king starts out on a magnificent campaign to conquer vast new lands, but eventually starts to run out of money.  For a while he can keep the army together by looting the countryside and by exhortations.  But eventually, without more money, the army melts away and the glorious campaign comes to nothing.



That's the advantage of capitalism for government.  When you have a thriving economy the government can tax and borrow to fund unimaginable wars, foreign and domestic.  But you want to be careful not to gum up the works with stupid regulation and wasteful subsidies.  Because then you might kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.  And you might frighten away the widows and orphans that you need to keep buying the government's bonds.

Shutdown: Looking Past the Tactics

Government "shutdowns" are said to be bad for Republicans.  And that's probably true in the short-term sense.  Our liberal friends in the mainstream media tend to report the news in liberal terms.  Thus a government shutdown means that women and minorities will be unable to get the benefits they need, and therefore Republicans are taking bread from the mouths of babies.



But long term it doesn't seem that big of a deal.  Sean Trende shows that the government shutdowns of 1995-96 didn't seem to annihilate the Republicans when it came to the 1996 elections.  True they did manage to lose some House seats, but mainly in Clinton-leaning districts.



So let's focus on the donut, and not upon the hole.  That's what supply-siders Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore do.  They note that the big Democratic spending occurred in 2007-10, when Congress was Democratic.  Since 2011, with Republicans running the House, spending has come down, rather more than we might think.  Although Republicans seemed to lose the August 2011 debt-ceiling crisis and the December-January fiscal cliff crisis, in fact they won, because they got substantial cuts in spending.  That's good for the economy, as Laffer and Moore point out.

The federal government’s main activity now is to redistribute resources, mostly from producers to non-producers. When the money the government takes from workers and producers is used to pay people and companies not to work—food stamps, unemployment benefits, bailouts, Solyndras, Obamacare health subsidies—it’s a double-whammy.

It's not good for the economy when government takes stuff from some people and gives it to others.  Why not?  Because when you give money to people, whether 19th century Russian heirs or 21st century "disability" recipients, they don't need to get out and get a job.  Where "job" is defined as doing something useful to other people for which they are prepared to pay money.



But look at the list above: "food stamps, unemployment benefits, bailouts, Solyndras, Obamacare health subsidies."  Add in too-big-to-fail banks and grants for studying global warming, and you'd define the current over-under Democratic coalition.  And the Obama years have been very good for them.



But the ordinary middle class has not done well.  If you want to start a business, the regulatory hail-storm has beaten you back.  If you want to retire, the Crash of 2008 made you sell at the bottom and now you can't even get a decent interest rate on your savings account.  If you are a middle-class college graduate you are buried in student debt.



In the 2000s the Democrats did a fine job encouraging "social liberal economically conservative" voters away from the Republican party.  That was easy when the economy seemed to be OK and you could always get money from the mortgage ATM.



But now, after nearly eight years of the over-under Democrats hosing money at their base, the "social liberal" question seems to be less important.  The fact is that if you are an unorganized individual, not a green energy capitalist, not a union member, not a welfare-state dependent, you are tearing your hair out right now.  You are wondering: can I ever retire?  Will I ever be able to start a business?  Will my children be able to afford a decent education?  Will they find decent careers?  Will the government come after my savings, like they have in Cyprus and Poland?



The fact of politics is that you may not like the other people in your party coalition, but you put up with them because the alternative is worse.  Libertarians may not like fundamentalist Christians, but when it comes to smaller government, what difference does it make?



And so I suspect that all the sound and fury of the government shutdown will signify nothing.  The fact of the matter is that if you are a member of the People of the Responsible Self these Obama years are the times that try men's souls.



Come 2014 and 2016 the People of the Responsible Self won't be worrying too much about the niceties.  We will just want Obama and Pelosi and Reid gone.