GOP: Conservatives vs. Moderates

On the O'Reilly Factor, Dr. Charles Krauthammer tried to pour oil on the troubled waters of the Republican divide.  All this is just a question of tactics, he said.



But conservative firebrand Jeffrey Lord begs to differ.  Republican moderates, he argues, are willing to accede to the leftwards ratchet.  Republican conservatives want to ratchet the government to the right.  Moderate George W. Bush wanted a compassionate expansion of federal education funding with No Child Left Behind.  Conservative Ronald Reagan wanted to abolish the federal Department of Education.



Allow me to translate.



Republican conservatives are ideologues.  We believe in limited government.  Republican moderates are pragmatists.  They do not believe in any principled limits to government.  If someone comes up with a good idea for a government program to help children, why, what's the harm?



The harm, according to conservatives, is the free stuff.  Politics is almost always about politicians promising free stuff to their supporters.



When some politician comes up with a plan for a government program to help children, it always involves a free or subsidized delivery of benefits to the children of the politician's supporters with funds to be supplied by taxing or regulating people who are not the politician's supporters.



That is unjust.  It is force.  But worse, it doesn't even work, because the program to help children slowly turns into a jobs program for the program's bureaucrats and doesn't help children.



Or take Obamacare.  The "good idea" is to provide health insurance to people that currently don't "have" it.  It is claimed that about 30-45 million people don't have health insurance.  You can see that these 30-45 million people would approve of "getting" insurance, provided that they didn't have to pay for it.  Now it stands to reason that such a plan, if it subsidizes the previously uninsured, is bound to shift costs to the presently insured.  But Obama and the boys wouldn't admit that.  They claimed, from behind a barricade of complications, that "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan."



In fact, of course, as we are experiencing day to day, Obamacare does shift costs to the insured.  And the mechanism that the Obamis used to do this is to force health insurance companies to change the pricing and the content of their health insurance plans.  This year the government is forcing people with individual plans to pay more for coverage; next year it will be the turn of employer plans.



Now, the whole point of politics is, as the song goes:

You've got to accentuate the positive

eliminate the negative

Latch on to the affirmative

But don't mess with mister inbetween

Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of Obama and the boys, the negative has decided not to get eliminated. Tens of millions of people are going to have to pay more for health insurance, and they know it.



So the Obamis have screwed up on the basics of free-stuff-ology.  They have failed to hide the costs of the free stuff that were always going to be forced upon average middle-class Americans that go to work, pay their taxes, obey the law, and make sure to have health insurance.  Result: political death spiral.



Back to the difference between Republican moderates and Republican conservatives.



Republican moderates believe that there's not much you can do about free-stuff politics.  The American people want free stuff and they will vote for politicians that promise it.  You gotta go along to get along.



Republican conservatives believe that free-stuff politics is morally wrong.  It amounts to the dictum that Might is Right.  You gotta majority, you get to plunder the minority to hand out free stuff to your supporters.  Call it the Divine Right of Majorities; it's no better than the old Divine Right of Kings.



Republican conservatives believe that if the notion of humans as social animals means anything it means that we do not use force on each other, except in the case of murder and robbery.  This means, obviously, a policy of No Free Stuff, because free stuff always means that someone has been taxed or otherwise compelled to surrender their labor or property so it can be handed out to someone else.



Bottom line for Republican conservatives is that we believe we should always be trying to reduce the amount of free stuff handed out by the politicians and fighting attempts to increase it.



Leaving aside the moral question, there is the practical question.  As government has got bigger and bigger it has gotten harder and harder to find new ways to hide the fact that free stuff always has to be paid for.  Also, each free-stuff initiative kills off a zone of voluntary cooperation and freezes a relationship in place: so much money has be collected in taxes and so much money has be handed out to the government's supporters, and don't you dare try to "cut" the amount of free stuff.  Eventually, you run out of other peoples' money to hand out.



The idea of voluntary cooperation and the market has always struggled against the idea that the poor could never get an even break.  Of course the rich would use their power to loot and plunder.  Of course the poor would go to the wall.  Stand to reason.



The modern innovation is to come up with an explanation of why this isn't true.  If you prevent the powerful from using their power to loot and plunder you find that people can and will cooperate for mutual advantage.  The Invisible Hand doctrine says that if you go out into the world to serve people rather than plunder them you will find that there are people who are prepared to pay for your services.  The better you figure out their needs the more you are likely to get paid.  The newly escaped Negro slave Frederick Douglass went out into New Bedford, Massachusetts one morning and offered a woman to move a pile of coal.  After the job was done the woman paid him with two silver half-dollars.  And that was just the beginning of Douglass' life in freedom.



The great Question of the last two hundred years is over precisely this issue.  Can the market economy really deliver justice to the poor laborer?  Or is the relationship between employer and employee inherently unjust and exploitative?



The whole point of socialism/liberalism/progressivism is that only politics can repair the inherently unequal relationship between laborer and employer.



The whole point of modern conservatism is that socialism/liberalism/progressivism only makes it worse.

Should Conservatives "Toughen Up" Our Children?

The NFL "toughening up" scandal involving offensive lineman Richie Incognito and rookie Jonathan Maartin raises an interesting question.

What about toughening up?  What about hazing?  Is it a bad thing or a good thing?

After all, all military training involves some kind of "boot camp" in which recruits are deliberately given a "hard time".  For what exactly?  Is it to make recruits into obedience machines?  Is it to prepare them for the rigors of the march and the battle?  Or is it merely an exercise of power, like the slavemaster and his cowskin whip?

Here's an example of "toughening up."  It's the contrast between the rich kids in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and the country cousins.

In Mansfield Park there are six rich kids.  Four of them are clearly vicious.  Only one of them is really virtuous, and he is weak.  There are two poor kids, William and Fanny Price; they are noble, virtuous, and exemplary. The story of Mansfield Park is really just the story of the "toughening up" that William and Fanny have to go through before they get their reward.

Fanny has to go through years of humiliation as the poor kid in the household of rich kids, not to mention suffer the bullying of her nasty aunt Norris and the awful presence of the forbidding uncle Sir Thomas Bertram.  But she remains true and virtuous through all her trials.

William goes off into the Royal Navy at age 11 or 12 as a midshipman.  Readers of Napoleonic naval novels will know what that life is like.  William returns to Mansfield Park at the age of 19.  He is an impressive figure and Sir Thomas encourages him to relate his experiences.

Young as he was, William had already seen a great deal. He had been in the Mediterranean; in the West Indies; in the Mediterranean again; had been often taken on shore by the favour of his captain, and in the course of seven years had known every variety of danger which sea and war together could offer.

Everyone listens to Midshipman Price's stories, even the indolent Lady Bertram, who is shocked by his stories of danger and privation.

To [rich kid] Henry Crawford they gave a different feeling. He longed to have been at sea, and seen and done and suffered as much. His heart was warmed, his fancy fired, and he felt the highest respect for a lad who, before he was twenty, had gone through such bodily hardships and given such proofs of mind. The glory of heroism, of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance, made his own habits of selfish indulgence appear in shameful contrast; and he wished he had been a William Price, distinguishing himself and working his way to fortune and consequence with so much self-respect and happy ardour, instead of what he was!

We moderns cuddle and protect our teenagers in "habits of selfish indulgence."  We mew them up in child custodial facilities where the only adults they meet are bureaucratic lifers.  We send them on to college with luxurious dorms and exercise facilities where all they learn is how to get good grades out of the professors for the least work.  We neglect to challenge them with "hardships" and forget to encourage in them habits "of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance."

This was not always so.  In England children, boys and girls, have been sent away from home since the 13th century to work as apprentices and servants in their early teens.  In North America things were no different. Abraham Lincoln was sent away to work on another man's farm at age 14.  Jay Gould was self-employed as a surveyor at age 18.  John D. Rockefeller built a house for his mother at age 18 while working as a bookkeeper at a commission merchant.

We may perhaps determine that the "toughening up" of the Miami Dolphins' Jonathan Martin went too far.  But how tough do you need to be to make it in the NFL?  Rush Limbaugh worked as a grunt for the Kansas City Royals way back.  And the players were ruthless with him.  It got to the point that he was afraid to go to the locker room and ask them to autograph baseballs for the fans.

But you know why the players were hazing him?  They liked him.

But what I figured out was it all happened 'cause they liked me. It wasn't the other way, that I saw that they disrespect me, dislike me. I'll tell you, it got so bad at one point that I refused to go down. I went up and I said, "You know what? Send somebody else down to get those damn baseballs autographed and I'm gonna find another way to the field to do the first pitch 'cause I'm not going in there. I'm just not going down there."

About two weeks later, a contingent of players came up to my office and said, "Where have you been?" They're in uniform and they're coming up into my office. "Where have you been? Come on back." They dragged me back down there and everything was okay. I wouldn't trade those five years for anything. That's why I say I learned more in those five years, the first five years out of radio than I ever did in the whatever, 10 or 12 in it.

They say that the basis of male honor is that you never quit on your buddies on the battlefield.  It's not patriotism that keeps soldiers fighting, you see; it's the loyalty each soldier feels for his buddies.  But how do you foster that feeling of comradeship, that feeling of loyalty that demands that you lay down your life to save the life of your buddy?

I don't know, but I'm pretty sure we need more of it here in 21st century America, and I don't think we can hope to teach virtue and courage by confining teenagers in schools under the authority of government bureaucrats.

Something else is needed.

Clueless Liberal in the Academy

Much of the time it seems to conservatives that liberals and Democrats have everything figured out.  They know how to rile up the base; they know how to frighten women with their "war on women" tactic.  They all seem to get the same talking points and stick to them.

But then some liberal academic writes an article for CNN that demonstrates their utter cluelessness.

Take Prof. Julian Zelizer.  He's a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and he has written a bunch of histories and a biography of Jimmy Carter.  He's looking at the wreck of Obamacare and writing that liberals really screwed up by proposing a half-baked proposal like Obamacare.  Let's give him his say:

The ACA was a product of a kind of half-baked liberalism that has been popular among many Democrats for several decades.

Since the 1990s, many Democrats have settled for jerry-built proposals that shy away from direct and aggressive federal intervention. Many Democrats have concluded that in the current era, the only domestic programs that stand a chance of passing Congress are those that rely on the participation of market-based actors, limited federal funding and heavy federal-state collaboration in the administrative process.

 The problem for full-baked Democrats is that it's hard to develop a clear message that lets people see the benefits of a program, and it turns into the mess that Stephen Teles has called "kludgocracy."  The solution is clear: well presented programs like Social Security, with clear benefits and clear funding that people can understand.

So, according to Teles,

if the government chose cleaner solutions to big challenges such as health care and education, "government would be bigger and more energetic where it clearly chose to act . . . but smaller and less intrusive outside of that sphere."

The cluelessness of this idea is nothing short of breathtaking.  Let's go through it all step by step.

1. "Cleaner solutions."  Social Security is a stupid example, and it shows the insular thinking of our modern academics.  The point about Social Security is that it is just about money.  The government takes in money and it hands it out to its supporters.  It doesn't have to do anything, like run a health care or education or welfare system.  The science is in on this.  Government can't do anything well except shovel money at its supporters.  The reason is that government is force, but the production and consumption of goods and services needs to be price and consumer driven.
   
2. "Half-baked liberalism."  The reason that liberals have been offering half-baked liberalism is that, as Rush Limbaugh says all the time, liberals can't admit who they are and what they really want to do.  Liberals would love to offer comprehensive and mandatory programs for everything.  It's just that the American people would upchuck on the spot if they ever did.
   
3. "Less intrusive".  Give me a break.  Where in the United States is the government not intrusive?  The government wants to tell us how to do everything, from sugary drinks to toilet flushing.  And all because of liberals.  The reason we have the "kludgocracy" is not because liberals have been stymied in their grand plans but because there are 100,000 liberal activists all beavering away on their one little issue and getting legislation and regulations passed to intrude on every aspect of human life.

It ought to be obvious, to anyone that has a clue, that all government is a "kludge."  What do you think the Soviet Union amounted to?  It was a kludge with terror on the side.  Ditto Cuba and all the rest.  When you get government without terror on the side then you just get kludge.  You get politicians offering more and more benefits to get elected.  But without the terror.

Let's look at things another way.  Let's start with Mises.  Socialism can't compute prices.  Expanded to its full potential this means that all government programs are a mess because they are always trying to deny the reality of prices.  What does that mean?  It means politicians are always trying to pretend that their grand plans don't have real and inescapable costs.

You can see this with the progression from Social Security to Medicare to Obamacare.  Social Security was, at least in the prospectus, all paid for by the payroll tax.  But remember, it was never a real savings program.  It was always "pay as you go."  Medicare was only partly "paid for."  It was a kludge job.  It had to be, because, no doubt, people in 1965 wouldn't have agreed to pay the real costs.  Anyway, government lowballed the costs, conveniently forgetting that people would line up to consume free stuff, and how.  Then with Obamacare the government had to flat out lie, because nobody would agree to any new program that wouldn't let them "keep their plan."  And that would apply to a single-payer program as well as the half-baked kludge of Obamacare.

OK. Now let's go to Hayek.  The bureaucrat in Washington can't out-perform a million producers and consumers in the marketplace.  Producing and consuming products and services -- including so-called public goods like health care -- are complex operations, and require constant adjustment by consumers and producers to the marketplace.  "Marketplace" means adjusting every day what people want, what they are willing to pay for, what producers can produce, and at what cost.  Government can't do that.  It simply can't.  Government is a system that responds to activists, special interests and "peaceful protesters" instead.  In other words, government responds to the threat of force.

Finally, there's Buchanan and Tullock and "public choice theory." (Why am I having to educate a distinguished academic on this?)  Public choice theory tells us that every government initiative involves log-rolling.  Any proposed use of government force means that a majority of the legislature votes to tax a group of people to fund some program that will provide certain benefits to another group of people.  Typically, the people asked to pay the costs of the program will vote against it.  So the proposers need to buy the votes of people only mildly hurt by the program to bring the full force of the law on the hapless minority.  That's why every legislative bill these days is a 1,000 page monster.  You have to pay off all the big interest to get their buy in.  It makes sense -- see the progression from Social Security to Medicare to Obamacare above -- that this problem will get bigger and bigger as the government itself gets bigger and bigger.

Right at the end of The Calculus of Consent Buchanan  and Tullock describe the only just voting system.  It is unanimous consent.  Under unanimous consent the majority that benefits from a program must pay the costs of the minority in order to get their buy in.  Notice that the market is a system of unanimous consent.  Nothing gets produced or bought and sold unless the buyer and the seller agree.  What a concept.

Unanimous consent, I think, is a process that would truly give us a government that "would be bigger and more energetic where it clearly chose to act . . . but smaller and less intrusive outside of that sphere."

But Zelizer is an academic.  He would know that.

Understanding Individualism

The last century has seen a great ideological war about the foundation of the good society, and that war has really been about capitalism.  Is it a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

In about the middle of the 19th century, capitalism became, for a growing sector of western society, a scandal, and that sector is identified with the name of Karl Marx.

It seemed to young Germans like Marx, in the decade when the old peasant order in Germany was collapsing and the industrial system was taking off, that the new industrial order was a murrain on society.  Yes, it was ushering in prosperity, at least for some, but it was demolishing the old collective ways in which humans came together in society and substituted nothing but exploitation: in one word, "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."

As the years passed and Marxism gained traction, a rather romantic notion of pre-capitalist society grew up.  People may have been poor in the old days, but at least they weren't thrown out into the world "on their own."  They had the comfort of a collective village or extended family.  Instead of going out into the world working for wages making things for strangers people lived and worked for each other.  This idea developed into the Marxian idea of "alienation."  The peasant worker worked in the village for family and neighbors "for use" but the factory worker worked for strangers "for exchange" in a barren world of ruthless market prices.

This all fed into a Three Ages model.  In the old days people were poor but they were happy, because they lived for each other.  Then came The Fall into market capitalism and individualism where people became separated from the collectivity into a cold hard world of the "cash nexus" and selfish life "on our own" where the weak went to the wall.  But soon will come the age of socialism when the collective spirit will be restored and come to its full flowering in a new heaven on earth.

One of the main props of this argument was the idea that Britain, the vanguard of the industrial age, had been a peasant society up until about 1660.  Over the next century, with the expulsions from common land by the Enclosure movement, a vast army of landless laborers was pitched out of its rural cottages into the industrial slums of Manchester and the coal mines of Newcastle.

But Alan Macfarlane in The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property, and Social Transition argues that England was already a capitalist, market driven society as early as 1250.  Already, at that time, people were buying and selling land, people could will real and movable property, women could own property and represent themselves in court, workers regularly worked for wages, and parents routinely sent their teenage children away from home to become apprentices and servants.

All this is significant because in the supposedly traditional peasant community that the medievalists have proposed, work and home were one, so children grew up to become workers for the family; homes featured an extended family of multiple generations; women were married off young in arranged marriages and were completely ruled by the patriarch of the household;  old people were cared for in the family home until they died.

So Macfarlane argues that England was clearly not a traditional peasant society, not as late as 1250.  That means that the industrial system was not a sudden plague visited upon a defenseless England in the 18th century.  People had lived as individuals for hundreds of years already.  In any household that had limited land the children were sent out to work and the farm work was done by hired laborers.  It is reckoned that about half the population of England was working as hired laborers or as servants.

Macfarlane also calls in the testimony of people that had seen and reported on both England and France or Germany in those centuries.  Their testimony is that England seemed to be a lot more prosperous than the continental nations.  Individualism and freedom and prosperity went together.

Now in our society "individualism" has a bad odor.  It is associated with Ayn Rand and ruthless business practices, and "higgling" in the marketplace and a lack of compassion for those less fortunate, and "the sneering question: 'will it pay?'"  But I have come to realize that this understanding of individualism is completely wrong.  Individualism is not a doctrine that makes a virtue of selfishness.  It is really the opposite: it commits the individual to individual responsibility for serving others and society in general.

Individualism starts with the Axial Age religions where people first start to experience themselves as personally responsible to God for their lives.  I suspect and assume that this started in the cities of the fertile crescent in the Middle East.  But it includes Confucianism in China, Hinduism in India, as well at Judaism and Christianity.  The result is what I call the People of the Responsible Self, people that believe themselves personally responsible for every facet of their lives.

You can see that traditional peasants are not People of the Responsible Self.  They are People of the Collective Self and also People of the Helpless Self, helpless before weather, before pestilence, before the power of the lord, and before war.

But you cannot live like a peasant in the city.  You cannot repose in your family and wait for the patriarch to order you around.  You must go out and get a job.  You must figure out where the employers are and you must search out the employer that might hire you and you must persuade him to hire you.  If you rise in the world like Abraham Lincoln, once a hired laborer and soon a hirer of others, then you must start to figure out not who has a job for you but what the consumers want from a person with your skills and your products.

Here is what I am arguing.  With the growth of cities and the market economy and the wage economy humans cannot thrive in a peasant-type society.  People must live as individuals; they must be responsible for themselves; they must reach out beyond their household to find out how they can serve their fellow humans.  That is the meaning of individualism; that is what People of the Responsible Self do.

So to ask whether capitalism is a good or a bad thing misses the point.  Capitalism is the way of the city.  The people of the city are the People of the Responsible Self.  People of the Responsible Self are individuals.  They live by the ways of individualism.

And the sooner we all understand that and recoil from the progressive dream of a heaven on earth, the better.

The Bonfire of Interest Group Liberalism

For over half a century conservatives have been warning that nothing good will come of interest group liberalism.  It leads to the special interest state and reduces society to unconstrained scramble for loot in the halls of government.



Back in the 1940s, with the golden glow of the New Deal in their rear-view mirrors, the hagiographers of the the Roosevelt era were inclined to see the clash of special interests as a good thing.  It was a natural way for coalitions to come together and hash out their differences.  But then in 1969 Theodore Lowi argued in The End of Liberalism that interest group liberalism was just a contest of political power and had nothing to do with the rational or moral questions underlying political questions.



Well, now we have Obamacare and its bonfire of the special interests.  Former regulator James V. DeLong reprises the appalling record of special interest log-rolling that it took to concoct this monster.



And now liberals are shocked, shocked, that it is all falling apart, that the president's promise that you can keep your health plan was all a lie, that millions of people are losing their health plans, and that people are experiencing sticker-shock as they shop for new plans.



Listen, liberals.  The science has been in on this for decades.  Hayek wrote that the government could never have the bandwidth to run anything.  Buchanan and Tullock invented public choice theory to show how special interest lobbying and voting always resulted in the majority eating the minority for lunch.  And then there is "regulatory capture," the idea that an regulated industry always ends up capturing the minds of the regulators set up to control them.



Actually, I think that liberals know all this deep in their hearts.  Their problem is that they are riding the dragon and they don't know how to get off.  They got the power they have by promising stuff to people, and their power depends on keeping on keeping on.  They have even figured out ways to import more voters likely to vote for more programs.



Anyway, there's a chance that the American people will make a decisive turn in the next two election cycles as ordinary middle-class Americans experience directly how interest group liberalism hurts them.



Or maybe they won't, and we'll keep on floating down the river to the waterfall.

Liberals' Two Trick Pony

Obviously, with the rollout of Obamacare, liberals are in a tight spot.  And we know why.  It goes back to Hillarycare and the "Harry and Louise" TV commercials run by the insurance industry.

Harry and Louise liked their health insurance and they didn't think that a plan devised by a Hillarycare bureaucrat would be good for them.

That's why President Obama had to lie, again and again, and say that if you like your plan you can keep your plan.  Otherwise no Obamacare.

In the Weekly Standard the able Jay Cost has just analyzed the political situation Obamacare represents.  He says that it's like the First New Deal with its top-down corporatism, the Agricultural Adjustment Act -- which required farmers to plow in their wheat and kill little piglets -- and the National Industrial Recovery Act -- which set prices and wages throughout the economy according to NRA "codes."  The First New Deal was a political expression of the Progressive era's faith in "the management of the entire American economy by technocratic experts for the greater good."

Obviously there is a ton of this top-down technocracy in Obamacare.  That's the whole point behind setting minimum standards for health plans.  Foundation policy analysts and government technocrats know better than ordinary people.  Everyone from the president to his press secretary have recently told the American people that their old policies were no good.  They needed the new ones with better coverage.

But the New Dealers pivoted after a couple of disastrous years to the Second New Deal.

It was the failure of the First New Deal that brought about the rights-oriented Second New Deal, and with it Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act guaranteeing labor unions the right to organize, and eventually the Fair Labor Standards Act providing for a federal minimum wage. Liberalism shifted from attempting to manage the economy directly toward supplying the downtrodden with tools to fight their own battles.

Better hurry up repeal Obamacare, writes Cost, or the "rights" side of it, the subsidies, will win the day for the Democrats, and nobody will dare take those benefits away.

But I think that Cost misunderstands where we are politically.  He is assuming that the politics of Obamacare will play out merely as a ruling-class power play.  I don't agree.

I think that Obamacare will provoke a movement of rejection in the suburban middle class.

The Democrats have done a pretty good job since the demolition of George H. W. Bush in dividing the middle class.  They have done this by making the "economically conservative, socially liberal" middle class ashamed of the social conservatives.  The high point of this political thrust occurred when George W. Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative."  Didn't matter: the Democrats insisted all along that Bush was a religious bigot and social neanderthal.

As long as the economy was tricking along, the divisive strategy worked.  And let us not forget the moderate Democrats that were run in 2006 and the healing words of Candidate Obama to end the division of red states versus blue states.  A whole generation of young people were successfully raised in our government schools to believe in the liberal way.

But the reality of Obama provoked an immediate reaction.  We call it the Tea Party.  It rolled to an astonishing 63 seat pickup in the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterms.  Then, as we know, the Lois Lerners got to work at the IRS and slowed the Tea Party momentum.  Also, Obamacare hadn't actually been implemented so as you would notice until last week.

Now the American people, non-political middle-class people, the Harrys and Louises, are finding out that they can't keep their health plans.

At this point there is no telling what will happen.

But I suspect that the politics of Obamacare can't be confined into a ruling-class inside-the-Beltway power play.  The Obamacare issue will spill out into the country and will energize people that never took any interest in politics.  It may even teach the mind-numbed Millennials a thing or two.

My line is that average middle-class Americans belong to the People of the Responsible Self.  They experience themselves as individuals responsible individually for the conduct of their lives.  When the ruling class enacts its big government programs it denies the average middle class the right and the opportunity to live a meaningful live as responsible and productive citizens.

There has to be a consequence for a ruling class that cruelly and unjustly denies its people the right to live as responsible, contributing citizens.

GOP Establishment vs. Tea Party

Charles Krauthammer's appearance on Comedy Central's Daily Show seems to have sparked a big row.  It's between what might be called the Republican establishment's accommodationist stance towards the welfare state and the constitutional argument against it, typified by the Tea Party movement.



Charles Krauthammer defends the establishment argument here, and Andrew C. McCarthy makes the constitutional argument here.  Former leftist Ron Radosh votes for accommodation here.



I think the disagreements are based on the different assumptions of the different parties.



I don't think that anyone is suggesting that Republicans go into the elections of 2014 and 2016 and propose to end entitlements as we know it.  That is what the Republican establishment, as practical politicians, are telling us.



Anyway, the Tea Party folks aren't proposing to end entitlements; they expect to get theirs.



What thoughtful conservatives argue is that the authoritarian welfare state is doomed.  It is doomed because it has made promises that can't possibly be redeemed.  In their secret hearts conservatives would like to believe that they can persuade Americans to wean themselves off the entitlement drug.  But the truth about addiction is that people don't wean themselves off until they "hit bottom."  They have to see the wreck of their life in living color before they will swear off the demon rum.



I don't think anyone can expect that entitlements will end any other way.  They will end when the checks stop coming and the checks will stop coming when the government's credit is totally tapped out.



The question is what comes next.  How can we rebuild America on better principles?  The Tea Party, aided and abetted by folks like Mark Levin and his bestselling books such as The Liberty Amendments are reminding us that America is supposed to be about limited government.  A limited government can't make the kind of reckless promises that have got us into this mess.



Let's take Social Security.  We conservatives look at the current system and we call it unjust.  It is unjust because it expects the working population to pay seniors for the promises of the politicians irregardless.  The act of paying your payroll taxes is completely divorced from the process of getting your checks.



To illuminate this, let's look at a private system of savings for retirement.  You save your money, according to your means; you invest it in broad market index funds and bonds.  Every year you look at your nest egg and figure out whether you can afford to retire.  Let us illuminate what it means when you reach that point.  You are basically saying that the capital you have saved can now create enough jobs to support you in your retirement.



Let's say you have saved $250,000.  That money is out in the economy providing capital to companies that use the money to create jobs.  In return you get, say, 5% return, which is $12,500 per year.  Or you can get an annuity which will pay you about 10% on your money.  If that $250,000 is not enough, then you work a few years more.  If the market tanks, then you have to wait to retire until it's recovered.



This is a self-organizing and self-correcting system.  (Oh, and by the way, the news has been reporting for a while that baby boomers are putting off retirement, because they lost so much in the Crash of 2008).



The role for the welfare state in this is,  possibly, to take care of the people who have failed to save money, or have become disabled -- all through no fault of their own.  Although I think that it is better for charitable relatives and neighbors to do the taking care.  The role of the state, it seems to me, is to borrow money after a great disaster to keep house and home together while people work to recover from the crisis.



The problem with government running a safety net is that government is an armed minority that stays in power by giving out loot to its supporters.  It has ever been so, ever since the Iliad, and it is certainly still so in the day of the advanced administrative welfare state.  So instead of creating a cooperative, social network of people caring for each other, government always gives you a predatory elite and its ravenous supporters that understand nothing except power and pillage.



The fundamental weakness of the welfare state system comes fully into focus when things go wrong, as right now, when the government has to cut back a little on its disbursements in so-called "austerity."



What happens?  The supporters of the government, the pensioners and the government employees, pour into the streets and "demand" their rights.



It ought to be obvious, to anyone with a brain, that the administrative welfare state is not a self-correcting system.  Instead, it is a system that is always careering towards chaos and conflict.



I like to say that the problem with government is that the only thing it knows how to do is conduct a war.  So everything it does has to be turned into a war: on poverty, on drugs, on bigotry, on racism.



The problem with wars is that there necessarily has to be a winner and a loser.  That is not cooperative; that is not social.  It is martial.  And that is why conservatives argue that the social safety net should not be a government safety net.



Once the government is in charge then the safety net turns into jobs for the boys, and subsidies for the cronies, and outlandish promises that can never be redeemed.  Of course it does.  That's because government is an armed minority: an army.  The political leaders are the captains and they love to fight.  The individual soldiers are recruited with the lure of loot, and they expect to get it, or else they will offer their soldiering talents to another captain.



In real life, of course, the captains use the soldiers as cannon fodder.  The soldiers often don't get their loot; they die of disease or get killed in a battle.  And sooner or later they don't get paid.  That is the lot of the political supporter too.  They get all carried away with the promise of the free stuff.  But in the end their glorious leaders betray them, and leave them to rot by the side of the road, used up and broken, just like broken-down soldiers of real armies.



That, of course, is what is happening right now to the supporters of Obama, like the woman who liked the idea of Obamacare but didn't realize that she would be the one to pay for it.



Socialism, progressivism, statism, call it what you will, has always lived on utterly empty promises.  Obama's promises for Obamacare are more egregious that most, but not too much.  The problem for Obama and for his liberal cohorts is that perhaps the Obamacare promises should have been a little less specific, and should have been a little less short-term.



After all, when millions of women are getting cancellation notices from their insurance companies, they know that they cannot keep their health plan, as the president promised.



But it is only when administrative liberalism has hit bottom that the practical Republican politician and the Tea Party radical will be able to unite and offer the American people a new social safety net based on limited government and consensual cooperation.