Government Did It

This week there's a story in The Economist about the 13-week-old strike in Greece by university administrators.  The government, which is broke, is trying to reduce the administrator head-count.



Of course, the Greek government is doing it in a sneaky way, but what else is new.



But the strike makes the point.  Workers at government universities are not in the business of delivering services to consumers.  They are in the business of getting their paychecks.



Nor are the students are in the business of paying for an education.  They are trying to game the system to get a cheap degree.



Of course, everything the government does has this flavor.  But usually, the government gets to blame someone else.  You know the drill.  If there's a financial crisis it's all because of greedy bankers.  If gas prices are soaring it's all because of price-gouging oil companies.  If you can't get the health care you want, it's all because of insurance company profits.



But nine times out of ten, it's not the greedy bankers or the oil companies or the insurance companies.  No it's not the greedy corporations.  Financial crisis?  Probably due to government cheap credit.  Soaring oil prices?  Probably due to government restricting oil production.    Health insurance going up with bigger deductibles and exclusions?  Probably due to government micro-management of health care.



In other words, the government did it.



Of course, mixed in with all this is that corporations vigorously lobby for subsidies, carve-outs and exemptions from the politicians.  In exchange for political contributions.  So maybe they deserve to get the blame.



With Obamacare the government is trying to set up the insurance companies to take the blame.  But it's looking like the Obamis may not make the sale.  That's probably because Obama and the Pelosis thought that Obamacare was going to be a glorious success and that the uninsured would be crying hosannas as they signed up for their subsidized care.  So they started out grabbing all the credit for themselves, right up until the whole thing collapsed.



So, as of right now, the American people seem to be clued into the idea that the problem is Obamacare, not the evil insurance companies.



But the Greek experience gives us a hint of what is coming as the various US governments run out of money.  The government workers will go on strike.  The disappointed beneficiaries will take to the streets.



So the prudent man and woman will be planning for this.  They will be figuring that Social Security won't be much of a deal.  That Medicare will dissolve into unworkable regulations and price controls.  That government education will get worse and worse.  That welfare will fail more and more.



What should the prudent man do?  Well, he should do what any 19th century man would do.  He would figure that he'd have to pay for everything himself, from saving for retirement, health care, and hard times, to shelling out for his kids' education.  Yes, and he'll even figure that it's up to him to attend to the relief of the poor.



Many people will rail against the scapegoats offered up by the media, the politicians, and the activists.  But they will be fools.



Because government is just like an army.  It marches its troops around and fills them with propaganda.  But in the end it leaves them, dying, by the side of the road.



That's why the prudent thing to do is to ignore the government's propaganda.



Chances are, when something goes wrong, the government did it.



And, in the liberals' 

Are Conservatives Voucher Addicts?

Michael Lind, founder of the New America Foundation, who styles himself a "radical centrist," thinks that conservatism is a one trick pony.  In Salon he complains that all conservative policy reduces to "vouchers."



He has a point.  We all know that conservatives want vouchers for education, to let parents take government money to the school of their choice.  But that ain't the half of it.

Healthcare? The right wants to replace Medicare and Medicaid with vouchers to let people shop for health insurance or healthcare in a deregulated healthcare marketplace.



Retirement? The right wants to privatize Social Security, replacing it with tax-favored individual contributions to private retirement savings accounts — a de facto voucher system.



The environment? Cap-and-trade, now demonized by conservatives, originated as a pro-market alternative to direct regulation of greenhouse gases.

Conservatives need to do vouchers in order to keep "the billionaires and the populists together in the GOP coalition."  The populists like their Medicare and Social Security, and "can’t afford to send their children to expensive private schools."  So vouchers represent an cynical abandonment of principle in the hard-right libertarian billionaires, a recognition that they need to buy the support of the gap-toothed populists.



We'll leave alone the notion that the conservative movement is run by libertarian billionaires.  After all, most of the billionaires are Democrats, from Bill Gates to Warren Buffet and the Google guys on down.  At least Republicans have the Koch brothers.



But give us a break, Michael Lind.  We want to demolish the whole corrupt, unjust structure of the authoritarian welfare state, so we have to start somewhere.  And for conservatives the way to start is to convert centralized one-size-fits-all bureaucratic administrative systems into subsidies.



Michael Lind may not know it, but conservatives are in two minds about vouchers.  Some policy analysts have warned that school vouchers will allow liberals to dominate the education system without actually running it as a bureaucratic system.  Just as the federal Department of Education bureaucrats can order universities around on the diversity and hate-speech front even though the universities are nominally independent, you can bet that they'd do the same to voucher-funded private schools.



Oh and by the way, when Lind sneers that "So far conservatives haven’t proposed voucherizing the Pentagon", he's full of it.  The Pentagon doesn't build its weapons at government arsenals; nor does it grow its own food. It outsources to eevil defense contractors.  Probably the only reason that government gets anything done at all is that it outsources pretty well all the actual "making" and "doing" to private contractors.



For conservatives vouchers aren't a panacea.  They are just a start, and usually preferable to naked, shameless, direct, brutal government by bureaucratic centralism.



And we have a principled justification for this.  With subsidies, at least you have the form of a market, and you have a system that responds every day to market signals even if the market signals are corrupted by subsidies.  With bureaucratic centralism there is no response to market signals, only to special interests and complete breakdown.



Still, subsidies lead to bubbles, as in real estate and in higher education.



Liberals use subsidies and vouchers as a half-way house too.  Obamacare is an example.  If liberals had their druthers, Obamacare would be a "single-payer" system, a glorious government bureaucratic system funded by taxes.  But liberals know that the American people don't want that.  So they came up with Obamacare and its subsidies: subsidies for the low-income, subsidies for the older participants, subsidies for the "pre-existing condition."



But maybe the eevil Republicans know their vouchers and subsidies better than the Democrats.  Because it looks like the Democrats utterly failed to do the math right on Obamacare.  And Democrats utterly failed to complete the bureaucratic tasks needed to get the whole thing off the ground.



But maybe that has nothing to do with government and subsidies.  Maybe all we are seeing is a ruling class coming to the end of the dynasty and running out of ideas.



But that's the sccusation Michael Lind directs at conservatives: "out of ideas."

Daring to Talk About Injustice

The most obvious thing about Obamacare is that it is unjust.



It is unjust in the way that it forces responsible people to subsidize irresponsible people.



It is unjust in the way that it forces young people to subsidize older people.



It is unjust in the way that it forces everyone to subsidize big business like insurance companies, health providers, and Big Pharma.



It is unjust in the way that it forces liberal ideology about contraception and abortion on the rest of us.



It is unjust in the way that it forces individuals to get with the program while putting off for a year the mandate for employers.



And so on.



And that's just today, as Obamacare gets started.  You can bet money that Obamacare will multiply its injustices in the future as the special interests work their will on the law and its regulations.



Here is a principle to guide us on this.  Any government program, however noble its goal, will end up as a gross injustice, because government is force, the cockpit of power, where the powerful force the powerless to submit to them.



Let's take the great edifices of the welfare state and investigate the injustice in their foundations.



Social Security started as an attempt to relieve the poverty of the aged, at a time when old people were commonly poor and at a time when the age expectancy at birth was about 65 years.



But today seniors are the richest kind, healthy and wealthy, on average.  Why are we forcing young and middle-aged people, in the middle of their great effort to raise families, to support people like me?



I will tell you what Social Security is:  it is generational injustice.



I will tell you what generational justice looks like.  It looks like a private savings system where people retire when they can afford to.  What does that look like?  It means that you can retire when you have created enough jobs for young people with your savings to yield a decent retirement income.  The government's role in such a system would be to help, e.g., manual workers that really can't work past about 45 to 50 years-old.



Ditto Medicare.  It encourages senior citizens to shop around from doctor to doctor looking for the magic pill to put off the natural ageing process, and it culminates in heroic end-of-life care that makes end of life a nightmare for millions of the aged and their children.  We expect working people to pay for this?



Welfare is a different kind of injustice, because it discriminates against the "deserving poor" and rewards the scam artist that has learned how to play the benefits game.  Back in the 19th century the charities all agreed that it was monstrous for the idle poor to make a higher income that the industrious poor.  But now we have enacted precisely that program, and demolished the low-income family into the bargain.



We all know how liberal politics works.  It is all "because inequality."  It used to be that the left justified increased government power with "because exploitation."  But that argument has worn a little thin except in the most extravagant circles.  So now liberals argue that their big government plans are justified "because inequality."



And that is what President Obama was telling us in his inequality speech on December 4, 2013.  We need a higher minimum wage, more education spending, pro-union laws, etc., "because inequality."



Conservatives must get out there with a new message.  We must cut government spending "because injustice," because all government programs end up as a gross and indecent injustice.



The conservative politician that can sell "because injustice" to the American people will be the next Ronald Reagan.

Raise the Minimum Wage, Mr. President?

For about a year now, our "progressive" friends have been amping up a campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15.00 per hour.  Now President Obama is joining the chorus.  It's all part of the liberal war on "inequality."



This, of course, is shocking to me, because I thought that the science on the minimum wage was settled.  Simply put, the minimum wage does three things:

1. It locks young, inexperienced people out of the job market.


2. It helps institutionalize above-market union wages.


3. It drives business into the informal sector.

That's what I wrote just out of the top of my head.  So what is the received notion, courtesy of Wikipedia?  Well, the answer is: it's complicated.  There are all kinds of dueling studies showing that the minimum wage does, or does not help.



But one effect that Wikipedia highlights is that increasing the minimum wage probably increases the wages of people already employed that have wages less than or near the newly legislated minimum wage.  And, it speculates, this would propagate upwards as employers more or less maintain the differentials between unskilled and skilled workers.



Of course, the problem is that the minimum wage is just one government intervention in the labor market.  Welfare -- in its many manifestations -- is another.  Welfare allows people to retreat from the labor market unless or until wages rates increased to make it worth while to get a job instead of reposing on benefits.  So you could say that, if you have a welfare system a minimum wage is superfluous since workers won't work for "chump change" if they can use welfare as a backup.



And there are other, secondary effects.  The various regulations and taxes on labor encourage marginal workers and employers to desert the formal sector and work "off the books."  What is the cost of that?  It's a good question.



The truth is that the hoary interventions of the welfare state, from minimum wage to licensing to credentialism to restrictions on firing for cause, will always be with us.  Whether or not they work to "help people" they certainly encourage the marginal workers that respond to identity politics and look for leaders to "fight for the people against the powerful."



Right now we have liberals all agreeing that we must "do something" about inequality.  It could not be, of course, that a century of liberal economic intervention that has brought about today's inequality.  It must be that the rich are exploiting the poor.  So more government intervention is needed to bring the GINI coefficient down.



Hayek spoke about this years ago.  Modern interventionism is built upon the fallacy that you can treat the economy as if it were a simple mechanical contraption.  To think that you can direct the economy from Washington DC is what he called "The Fatal Conceit."



And anyway, Democrats are going to need something to rally the troops in 2014 after the debacle of Obamacare.  What better than to box the Republicans into proving their lack of compassion over the minimum wage?  Who could, in all conscience, oppose raising the wages of the lowest paid?



The truth is that the lowest paid are caught in a dreadful quicksand.  What was advertised as a safety net has turned out to be a poverty trap.  But as long as activists can get attention and politicians can get elected promising free stuff, so long will we have a minimum wage.

Who Failed the Dead Welfare Kid?

When a kid dies of an untreated dental abscess, who's to blame?



I'm talking about Deamonte Driver, a kid from Maryland.  It's a story from Avik Roy's book "How Medicaid Fails the Poor," retailed by Mona Charen.

When Deamonte complained of a toothache in September 2006, his mother began calling around, seeking a dentist who would take a patient with Medicaid coverage. 

When she finally found a dentist, he reported that "Deamonte had six abscessed teeth and required the services of an oral surgeon."  But that took more delay, and Deamonte ended up in the emergency room.  One of his abscesses had spread to the brain.  Despite brain surgery, Deamonte died from this untreated dental problem.



Yeah, there is no question that Medicaid "failed" Deamonte.  But there is something that worries me more.



Deamonte had six abscessed teeth.  So did Deamonte's mother think that unless she got medical and dental for free she couldn't do anything about it?  Did she have no husband with a job, no relatives that could kick in a couple hundred bucks?  No savings?  No church?



To me, the central problem with the liberal welfare state is the implied removal of responsibility.  It's the government's job to educate my children, the government's job to give me health care, the government's job to rescue me from poverty -- and that releases me from responsibility.



Back when the National Health Service came in in Britain, people were ecstatic because now the worry was gone, the worry that, if someone in the family got sick, it could wipe you out.  Now the government would take care of the worry.



But suppose the government doesn't do its job, as we are finally learning that it doesn't.  In Britain we are finally learning that the care in NHS hospitals is appalling, and people are left to die without being properly fed and hydrated.  Supposing Medicaid underpays doctors so that very few of them are willing to take Medicaid patients.  Suppose Medicaid recipients have trained themselves not to spend money on health care and dentistry.



Why then, if little Johnny gets a toothache you don't get him to the dentist unless it's free.  Because after all you are a single mother and you can't afford to pay for regular dental checkups.  And if no dentists in your area take Medicaid, then it's not your fault.



No doubt.  And it's not your fault that your kid dies because none of those greedy doctors would agree to treat your kid for free.



By the way, I know a doctor who does see Medicaid patients, despite the hassle and the low pay.  He just does it because he's a mensch.  And these folk come in with serious dental problems all the time.



But let's think about what we know.  This kid died because his mom didn't get healthcare and because she lived her life on the assumption that if she couldn't get it for free then she couldn't get it.  And it wasn't her fault.



There is another way of life, a way of life different from the neo-tribal way of the welfare state dependent.  That way of life is the way of the People of the Responsible Self.



On the way of the People of the Responsible Self, "it's not my fault" isn't an option.  You construct your life so that, if your kid gets sick, you can afford a doctor.  And if you can't you just load up the credit cards.  Because money is money, bankruptcy is bankruptcy, but your kid is your kid.  With money you can lose it and get it back.  With bankruptcy you can go through a few years of hardship but get through it.  But when your kid is dead there is no getting him back.  He's gone.



The mistake too many people make is to believe the politicians and think of government as a ministering angel.  It isn't.  Government is all about power; government is force, and politics is division.  The only thing the politician is interested in is getting elected and reelected.  He'll promise you things, and set up programs and all the rest.  But if your kid needs medical treatment and you don't have the money then you are living on a hope and a prayer.  Maybe government will come through; maybe it won't.  Why would you put all your eggs in one basket and live your life on the assumption that government will live up to its promises?



The reason for humans being social animals is that it improves the chance of survival.  If you have a two-parent family it improves the chances of survival.  If you have a job, it improves the chances of survival.  If you have brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles and aunts it improves the chances of survival.  If you join a church or a fraternal association it improves the chances of survival.



The problem with the welfare state is that it seduces people into believing that they can neglect all the social connections as long as they have their government benefits.  When things go wrong, they can always say "it's not my fault."



That is what they call famous last words.  Because the government safety net is not really a safety net at all.  It is just an illusion, a promise from a politician.  A real safety net is a mighty multi-stranded web.  It includes a spouse, a job, an extended family, emergency savings, friendships, relationships, memberships.  The more you have, the stronger and the safer is your safety net.  The less you have, the more you are at risk.



In the end, the excuses are just excuses.  Because when your kid is dead, your kid is dead.

The Paradox of Individualism

In our age we are taught from our cradle to honor altruism and fear selfishness.  Of course, we are social animals and we survive by sticking together and helping each other.  And our mothers start working on us at an early age: "don't be selfish, share your toys."



On the other hand, our Marxist friends like to conjure up a collectivist golden age when everyone got along and people worked producing things only for use.  Alienation began when people started working for wages, producing for exchange rather than for use.



What a bunch of baloney!  There was never a collectivist golden age.  Before the modern age people were slaves and serfs; they worked, according to the medieval scholars, for the household, the family unit.  Guess what that meant?  It meant that everyone in the family was subordinate to the head of the household.



People weren't producing for use, whatever that means, in those far off days: people were producing for the family unit and producing what the household head told them to do.  Women and young people, especially, were ruthlessly exploited in peasant families.  In return for their labor they got what the head of the household said they could have.  There was no responsibility; there was no accountability.  It was the rule of the strong, and the weak knew that it was best to go along to get along.  It was the world of the aggressive and the passive aggressive.



But the modern era of individualism is different.  It is not, as Ayn Rand seems to suggest, celebrating the "virtue of selfishness."  It is encoded in the idea of the invisible hand.  You got some selfish needs?  Then produce something for other people that other people are prepared to pay you for.  It is encoded in the idea of individualism.  Individualism is not individual selfishness, it is a notion of individual responsibility, and it starts with the Axial Age religions that converted the tribal collective gods, the ones that distributed gifts to humans in response to propitiatory sacrifice, into the one God before Whom we are each individually responsible for our actions.



Notice how the invisible hand fits together with the notion of individual responsibility.  You, the responsible individual, are not sitting in some peasant family, waiting for the boss to tell you what to do.  You are an individual, free and responsible, and you wake up in the morning thinking: wow, what can I do to earn a living, to get my next meal?  Well, you do what Booker T. Washington did, on his journey across the South to get him an education, when he woke up in the morning after a night under the wooden sidewalk.  He went down to the dock and offered to help unload a ship.  With his wages he bought him a breakfast.



It's a paradox.  Under collectivism we become whining victims pushed around by the local household boss or the government, endlessly complaining about what "they" have done, and crawling around to find ways to scam the system.  Under individualism we become responsible individuals that spend our lives worrying about what the other person wants and needs -- and is willing to pay for.



Which is more selfish?  Which is more self-centered?  Which is more social?  Which is more "alienated?"  On the answers we give to those questions about collectivism and individualism depends all that the world can do for us, and all we can do for the world.



It all reduces to a curious paradox.  The notion of collectivism, which seems to evoke altruism and solidarity, always requires the application of force.  The notion of individualism, which seems to encourage unbridled selfishness and egoism, in fact demands of us a constant solicitude for the needs of others.



Why is that?  It starts, perhaps, with the recognition that society is not a system, a mechanical contraption driven by Newton's laws, but an unconscious biological organism of constantly interacting cells.  Under Newton, each cog in the system responds to force.  Under biology, each cell instinctively knows what to do and does it.



And then?  Well, that is up to us to decide.

The Top 20% Just Wants to be Free

Even as the mechanical vice of Obamacare slowly clamps itself on the American people, so that they are forced into a one-size-fits-all plan for healthcare, mandated by a committee of lifer bureaucrats at the IPAB, you still see stuff like this.

"Talent Just Wants to be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids, and Free Riding."  That's a book by Orly Lobel, a law professor at the University of San Diego.  Talented people just don't want to be mewed up at some big institution.  They want, they need to be free to job-hop and re-skill, as the mood takes them.

Lobel critiques the dog-in-the-manger attitude of big institutions.

She identifies a “control mentality” in many companies that locks up employees and stifles creativity through the aggressive use of noncompete contracts and copyrights on inventions. She thinks bosses are too worried about “brain drain” to recognize the opportunities for “brain gain.”

 Today in my AT piece "The People of the Lie" I make a joke about the internal contradictions between the managerial liberalism of the Progressive Era and the community-organizer liberalism of today's "progressives."

But there's another contradiction in our ruling class that is just as glaring.  It is the contrast between the natural culture of the top 20% that lives by creative work and the rest of America.  Liberals (and conservatives) want to have exciting and creative careers and understand that excitement means risk.  But then the same liberals turn around and built mind-numbing one-size-fits-all government programs for health care and education and welfare.  They run around practicing a politics that demonizes corporate chieftains for not providing complete satisfaction and life-time tenure to their employees.

Meanwhile, as Charles Murray has shown in Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010, the top 20% is doing fine, with good marriages, satisfying careers and incomes and wealth, while the bottom 30% is getting absolutely hammered, with the women opting out of marriage and the men opting out of work.

And in case you didn't know, the children of single women with live-in boyfriend are anything from six times to thirty times more likely to suffer child abuse than the children of married biological parents living together.

In the middle, ordinary Americans just want to keep a decent job, hope to buy a home one day, pay their bills, and get through this Obama economy.

One of my favorite websites is Penelope Trunk.  She combines career coaching with homeschooling and has just launched a company, Quistic, that provides online career coaching courses.

Absolutely fabulous, and no doubt a marker for where the world of the educated American is going.  No limits, no borders, no guard rails.  Just push out there for a creative, adventurous life.

Meanwhile ordinary people are getting hammered by the economy, by the lousy schools, by their health care premiums going into the stratosphere.

And young people!  Why the twentysomethings aren't in the streets yet is a mystery to me.  They have lousy schools, lousy job prospects, and they have been saddled with enormous student debt that operates like a permanent income tax on their income for the next 20 years.

Really, you expect this.  The ruling class takes care of its own.  If you are an educated person in America things are pretty good, and this is the era of the educated class.

But everyone else is just furniture to the educated class.  They are bitter clingers to sneer at, or they are traditionally marginalized to rile up with identity politics.  They are children to shuffle from school to school; they are welfare clients to shuffle from program to program.

That's why you get revolution.  The ruling class warbles on its way, as unconcerned as a seagull, congratulating itself on the wonders it performs for the lower orders.  And, like the landed magnates of old, it will tell you that its own local peasants are as happy as clams.

It's nothing but blue skies until all of a sudden a cloud forms on the horizon no bigger than a man's hand, and then pretty soon the whole nation is consumed in a perfect storm.

Because the peasants weren't happy; they just knew enough to keep their mouths shut.  The lower orders aren't grateful for the wonders performed.  All government is force, and force leads directly to injustice.

There's a piece in The New Republic by liberal guardian Franklin Foer.  He's worrying, as many liberals are worrying, that government is losing its reputation for competence.

But really, all talk of government competence is myth-making.  In reality, government screws everything up, because almost every government action amounts to an attempt to block and harass the normal operation of peaceful cooperation.

Sean Trende makes this point indirectly when he warns that Obamacare won't be the end of liberalism.  It will just end the current Obama era with the Democrats dominant.  Whenever a party has been counted out, it has always roared right back on the back on the current ruling party's staggering blunders.

That's the point.  Government, all government, is nothing but a parade of blunders, and the stupidity of supposedly intelligent elites is a constant in history.

Liberals have had a good run for about a century since folks like President Wilson started boosting the notion of competent, rational government, and Franklin Foer is right to worry.

Conservatives, of course, have developed a comprehensive critique of competent government stretching over the last century.  It's telling that in his article, Foer doesn't mention it: not a word, not a name, not a single idea.

First rule of war, Mr. Foer.  Always know what your opponent is thinking.

Meanwhile, it's time for thoughtful people to think about how we can help the ordinary people suffering under the injustice of the authoritarian welfare state instead of just thinking about our own needs for talent to be free.