Dems to Offer More Free Stuff in 2014

Now that the budget negotiations are safely out of the way it's time to get back to business.  And for Democrats that means selling more free stuff.  On CNN this morning there was a New Years piece on the struggle of living on the minimum wage.  Yeah, let's raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour, and... well, science says that the minimum wage increases unemployment.



Here's another fabulous idea from the Democrats.  Extend the extended unemployment benefits.  Even though science says that unemployment benefits encourage the unemployed to delay getting back into the job market and that every idle day without work reduces your job skills.



Over in the UK the Labour Party is proposing an energy price freeze.  You gotta love the pure effrontery of this.  Energy prices in Britain are going up because of the Labour-backed green energy programs that spread subsidies out to uneconomic wind and solar farms and sock the electric customers with the bills.  There's no question about the science on this.  Subsidies distort the market and result in a net decrease in income and prosperity.



But what about global warming and climate change?  Surely we have to do something before the temperature goes up and the oceans inundate the Statue of Liberty!  Well no.  Temperatures have been about flat for the last 17 years, diverging significantly from computer model predictions.  And there is the ominous fact that the sun appears to be entering a quiet phase, perhaps even a grand minimum like the Dalton Minumum in the early 19th century.  There seems to be a correlation between a quiet sun with few sunspots and cold global temperatures.  Science doesn't know why.



Our liberal friends make a big deal about the settled science on climate -- which isn't that settled -- and completely ignore the settled science on energy subsidies and on basic economics.  There's no mystery about this, of course.  Minimum wages and unemployment benefits are free stuff that liberals use to entice and rile up their voters, and to hell with the settled science.  Green politics is based on crony science, cooked up by bribed apologists in the academy, but liberals love the power of building wind farms and bullet trains and HOV lanes and rail transit.  Because they love politics and political power.



But I wonder how in the world conservatives can win over the American people that don't know a blind thing about economics and climate change except what they heard on the news.



The answer is, I suppose, that we win over the American people when they get pissed off with their health insurance premiums going into the stratosphere.  When gas prices and electric rates ratchet up.  When something goes wrong and they want someone to blame.



But the other side is that voters will always respond to the temptation of the free stuff.  And politicians will tempt the voters with free stuff, settled science or not.

Paglia's Feminist Foolishness

In looking over the WSJ's "weekend interview" with Camille Paglia, it's hard to decide who is more foolish, Paglia or her interviewer Bari Weiss.

It almost makes you despair that we will ever come out of the utter folly of feminism and the women's movement, which both so totally misunderstand woman and womanhood.

The crowning folly is the notion that the highest calling for woman is a career in the workplace.  Here is Paglia's muddled thinking muddied by the pen of her muddled interviewer.  On the subject of sex education Paglia wants to get away from mechanical stuff and concentrate on life choices.

"I want every 14-year-old girl . . . to be told: You better start thinking what do you want in life. If you just want a career and no children you don't have much to worry about. If, however, you are thinking you'd like to have children some day you should start thinking about when do you want to have them. Early or late? To have them early means you are going to make a career sacrifice, but you're going to have more energy and less risks. Both the pros and the cons should be presented."

 What do you mean "career sacrifice," Camille?  Are you suggesting that career is naturally or appropriately the center of a woman's life, or ought to be, or that a woman should think carefully before she steps away from a career?  What makes you think that "career" is so gosh-darned important anyway?

Let us illuminate this folly with a discussion of chimpanzees.  Remember!  The scientists tell us that our DNA is only one or two percent different than our great ape cousins.  So the behavior of our cousins should tell us a lot about ourselves.

Chimpanzees, according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, operate a society in which the females devote their lives to food gathering and caring for the young and males defend the borders of the troop's territory.  Both "gendered" roles are essential because more territory equals more food equals raising more young chimps to adulthood.

In our modern notions, we would say that the men were involved in constant border wars and the women lived in a community of women that cared for the troop and its children.

But when the hunter-gatherer age gave way to the agricultural age only a minority of men were needed for border wars.  The rest were needed for the heavy work of plowing (because women get miscarriages from heavy work).  You can still see this gendered role playing out in the paddies of South India, as the men drive the oxen and the women plant the rice plants in the mud.

With the industrial age the need for border warriors is even lower than in the agricultural age, so the question arose: what to do with the men?  The brilliant answer was "careers," from the French "carrière" or racetrack.

Instead of warriors, competing to be the top-dog in the caste of war fighters, men would now compete in the world of bourgeois business.  They would battle for market share, for promotion in government and corporate bureaucracies, for the glory of being the next Steve Jobs, the man that made Apple into a global cultural phenomenon.

Even so, of course, a majority of men would never enter the career stakes.  Lacking the competitive drive to dominate, they would be happy to acquire a skill, get a job, and live a life as husband, father, and provider.

At some point some bright spark decided that men were hoarding all the career goodies for themselves: women should get a share.  Women should get an advanced education, should enter the lists of career advancement, should break the glass ceilings that prevented women from exercising power and influence.

Except that while a majority of men are not particularly interested in a career of power, an overwhelming majority of women are uninterested in a career of power.

Yet here we have a culture and a ruling class that thinks it is doing a good thing by brainwashing every young man into believing that he should go to college and devote his life to a career, whether in business, government, or education.  And we have Camille Paglia dutifully repeating the same meme for 14-year-old girls, to think seriously about whether they should compromise career with children.

Let us get real here.  The most important thing that 90 percent of men and 90 percent of women will do is get married, make a family, raise their children and then get those children off the nest.  Work, career, fame, fortune, they are all very well, but they mean nothing if they do not serve that central purpose of life.

The stunning achievement of the modern age is to have figured out how to sublimate the aggressive instincts of men from war to the fake war of economic competition.  It has taken dominating aggressive males and bent them to the yoke of the market and the organization and made them into gentle husbands and fathers.  Otherwise the surplus population of warriors would just be causing trouble.

Do you not see that this domestication of males is an incandescent achievement that makes the invention of fire a mere footnote?

On this view why should anyone think that the means of domesticating men into the "career" would have any relevance for women, who are already domesticated and need no prompting to get with the program?

In the corporate world they encourage the corporate climbers to extend their "circle of influence."  It makes sense, for the male career is a career of domination, of corporate or market conquest.

But a woman's life is rarely a career of domination.  The women that I know, brainwashed to a fare-thee-well by the cult of career, eventually find themselves reverting to type.  They find that they are less interested in conquering the world and shattering the glass ceiling than in building a "career of care."  They want their loved ones safe and their minds forever return to the care of their loved ones.  Everything they think and do relates to the care and safety of their "circle of care."

And what about Camille Paglia, the feminist firebrand?  She's been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia since the 1980s.  Hey, Camille, what happened to breaking the glass ceiling and becoming a dean or a president?  Golly, here's a terrifying thought.  Perhaps Paglia just wants to teach and to write.  That means that she never wanted the great arc of a career, only a chance to write iconoclastic books like "Sexual Personae" and teach other people to become artists.

Eventually, lesbian Paglia and her partner decided that they wanted a child, and now 66-year-old Paglia has an 11-year-old son.  Only Paglia and partner are now separated.

I wonder what the 11-year-old son with think about all this in 20 years.

Note to Hegemons: Slaves Don't Tell You What They Really Think

The flap over Phil Robertson and his Biblical philippic on homosexuality, bestiality, fornication and all the rest of the old-fashioned sins has another angle.

Writes John Fund:

But people saved plenty of ire for his comments, offered in an interview with GQ magazine, that when he grew up in Louisiana in the 1950s he never saw “the mistreatment of any black person” and that African Americans in that era didn’t have complaints about white people.

Well of course he didn't see any mistreatment.  If you want to know what the slaves think about their slavery, don't ask the slavemaster.  In the Jim Crow of the Southern states, a white guy ain't gonna get the straight scoop from a man he and his kind are likely to call "boy."

The whole point of any hegemonic system is that the hegemons need to train the underlings to accept their subservience as a fact of nature.  It's kinda like Downton Abbey.  The downstairs people never let a peep of their resentments show to the upstairs people.  They just dutifully do their work and melt into the furniture.  Moreover, if the rulers are doing things right, the underlings will be focusing on their resentments vis-a-vis their fellow underlings.  They will pissed of that some other servant is getting an undeserved advantage because she has the ear of the mistress.  They are not thinking about the injustice of the whole system.

So if the liberals were actually as intellectual and knowledgable as they claim they would not just be condemning Robertson for his racism.  They would be twisting the knife with knowing remarks about feudal lords and slave owners down the ages.

Of course, liberals have their own problems in this department.  They think that everyone except a few bigoted conservatives absolutely love their welfare state and their wonderful Obamacare.  But most Americans know that when a liberal professor comes calling with a menacing remark about a "nice little grade you got here" they know how to behave towards the liege lord that has the power to make things really difficult for them.

Maybe in 30 years you'll run into some doddering old professorette that can swear on a stack of grant proposals that none of her students were ever mistreated or shamed as the conservatives imagine.

Why Liberals Sneer at the Tea Party

Here's a piece in The Atlantic from one of the leading lights at the Defenestration of Cambridge, Theda Skocpol.  It sneers at the Tea Party folks with the usual liberal condescension.

Tea Partiers are older, conservative, white Americans who feel they have lost their country to "mass immigration and new extensions of taxpayer-funded social programs" like Obamacare that target the black and the brown.  Yet Tea Partiers are typically "collecting costly Social Security, Medicare, and veterans' benefits to which they feel fully entitled as Americans who have 'paid their dues' in lifetimes of hard work."

This from the author of Diminished Democracy that celebrated the good old ways of membership organizations before the emergence of cadre pressure groups.

But really!  Who was it that encouraged people to believe that, as hard-working Americans, they had earned the right to call the US "their country" and had earned the social benefits that could never be taken away because they were all safely locked up in a Trust Fund.

Har Har!  The Crash of 2008 certainly put paid to that little fib!

But the bottom line, when you penetrate through the self-obsessed elite sneering about the little people, is that liberals have left the old working stiffs of the 1930s dying in the ditch.

Oh yeah!  Back then liberals loved the white working class.  They were the salt of the earth and liberals were going to battle the bosses to make sure that working people got justice, not to mention the Four Freedoms: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear.

That was before liberals got interested in banning hate speech, declared war on Christianity, devastated the poor with welfare, and sicced the IRS on their political opponents.

But in time the working class grew up and became prosperous; they weren't helpless, weren't victims any more.  So liberals lost interest and followed Ike's advice.  If you can't solve a problem, make it bigger.  Liberals turned the class politics of the New Deal into all-encompassing "identity politics."  They would fight for blacks, women, gays, environmentalists: anyone that wanted to expand government power for their special benefit.

There's a reason why the Bible features several warnings about government:  If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword;  Put not your trust in princes.  And so on.  In the end, government will betray you.  It will leave you, wounded and dying by the side of the road.  Then the suits will get into their carriages, or staff cars, or executive jets -- the preferred elite traveling conveyance of the age -- and leave you to your fate.

That's what has happened to the Tea Partiers, and that's why they have organized.  But if you cast an eye on today's road-side you can see more victims of the ruling class.  We are talking about the famous "uninsured" that are finding out that they are getting enlisted into Obamacare whether they like it or not.  And there are the young, the twentysomethings and "invincibles," that voted so enthusiastically for Hope and Change and now have no jobs.  They have appalling levels of student debt and, to add insult to injury, they are finding out that it is they that are to pay for Obamacare.

Here's what I think.  I think that the newly left-for-dead should form the "I" Party.  They are, after all, the generation of iPods and iPhones.

What is going on here?  Why are these folks finding themselves cast aside on the road of life, useless, wounded, diseased, left for dead by the ruling class?

It all makes sense if you accept my theory of politics.

Governments, on my view, are armed minorities occupying some territory, and rewarding their supporters with taxes from the general population.  Their trade is war.

War?  Surely not?  Don't liberals believe in Peace and Justice?

On the contraray, the very essence of a government is force and compulsion, and every government effort has to be presented as a call to arms.  Even for liberal and lefty goals.  Especially for liberal and lefty goals.

Enlist with us to fight injustice!  Join the fight against inequality!  Let's declare war on poverty, on bigotry, on pollution, on hate!  Everything that government does has to be a fight, and everyone drawn into a government effort enlists in a government army and subjects himself to military discipline.

At the beginning it's all flags and Greek columns and adoring crowds and nobody knows how it will all turn out.  Maybe in victory, maybe in defeat.  Most likely, though, things will end up worse that before; at the very least it will all cost a lot more in blood and treasure than anyone imagined.  Most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence lost their fortunes and/or their lives.  But at least they kept their sacred honor.

So it usually ends for the individual soldier: dead on a battlefield, left to die on the route march.  Or maybe the soldier is one of the lucky ones, merely broken in body and mind: an old soldier that does not die, but merely fades away.

So it ends for the darlings of the ruling class.  Enlisted with cheers and banners into the movement to end injustice: left eventually to fade away in the betrayal of all promises and hopes.

That's why conservatives say we should limit government and expand the social space of voluntary cooperation.  Government is all force and coercion and lies and betrayal.  Voluntary cooperation is all mutual, reciprocal and trust: giving and receiving.

Every generation must learn this lesson in its own way and in its own time.  And this is the time for the darlings of Hope and Change to learn their lesson.

Look for liberals to start sneering at the "I" generation some time in 2014 as it becomes clear that the twentysomethings have run out of Hope and Change.

The Two Individualisms

Modern conservatism and modern liberalism both start from the idea of individualism.  But conservatives and libereals had very different ideas about the nature of the individual.  Says Jonah Goldberg in an appreciation of Yuval Levin's "The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and the Birth of Right and Left":

Paine saw the individual as the irreducible unit of society... For Burke, no man is an island.

Paine's future society would require "tearing down the prejudices, customs and habits of the old order" while Burke believed that "Society is a complex and mysterious ecosystem, and no set of experts or 'sophisters … and calculators' can impose scientific perfection on it."

But we know that the Britain of Burke and of Paine was a Britain of an individualism that had flourished at least since the middle of the 13th century.  We are all individualists now.

The difference then between Right and Left is in the type of individualism.  Conservatives believe in a cooperative individualism, in which people enter society as individuals and cooperate voluntarily in various endeavors, from families and associations and businesses to contribute to the whole.  Liberals believe in individualist atomism, with nothing between the individual and the government.  That's what it means when you want to tear down prejudices and superstitions.  You clear away all the deadwood, and the deadwood is necessarily pre-existing institutions.

Now this is a controversial position, because liberals generally believe that their government safety net solves the problem of the atomistic individual thrown up by unregulated capitalism and alienated from himself and society, whereas the Burkean conservative approach leaves people "on their own."

But I believe that it is liberals that leave people "on their own."  In conservative-land people are free to design cooperative institutions any way they want, and they do.  In liberal-land it is the government that designs the collective, and if your needs get left out, well, too bad.

I am saying that liberals are trying to solve a problem that they themselves have created, and the problem is created by their conception of the individual as oppressed by traditional institutions and therefore needing to be liberated and emancipated by government force.

Of course when you diagnose modern people as alienated and oppressed individual atoms knocked around in a storm-tossed sea then you need to shelter with a government safety net to protect them from the storms of the world.  You have already defined the problem and pre-ordained the solution.

But conservatism is different.  It experiences people as naturally cooperative individuals, atoms that in their natural state combine into social molecules, the "little platoons" of civil society.  Moreover the individual is not just an aimless atom doing its Brownian motion thing, but an active individual agent, that sets forth every day trying to imagine how to contribute some idea or service to society, and then doing something about it.

On this view the great debate between right and left is an argument that begins with imagining humans as cooperative individuals or humans as atomistic individuals.  Obviously the way you imagine the human-scape, the situation of people in the modern world, will determine everything else that you see, experience as a problem, and decide to do.

The conservative idea is that the birth of individualism over two millennia ago with the individualist religions of the Axial Age leads to the birth of social and economic individualism in the breakup of serfdom.  And that leads to the breakout of the industrial revolution in the years before 1800.

Cooperative individualism requires the social atom to be a responsible self, an individual that undertakes to carry the monkey of social responsibility on his back.  It is the responsibility and the privilege of each individual to imagine and to realize how to cooperate with his fellow humans and contribute to the flourishing of society.

Atomistic individualism experiences the social atom to be a helpless self, an individual unable to orient and steer himself in a world of overbearing powers.  With no defense against power in local and beneficial associations, the atomistic individual is like a leaf in the great plazas of the modern city, blown around by the powerful winds that gust between the megastructures of government, corporation, and foundation -- with no human-sized structures to protect him from the icy blast.

Life is better as a responsible, cooperating individual.  Suppose you want to protect from large hospital bills.  Why, you can band together with like-minded individuals and form a beneficial and cooperative association for the sharing of health care risk.

But as an atomistic individual in Liberal-land, you must defer to the ruling elite and its comprehensive health care solution.  What happens if it doesn't cover you and your particular situation?  Too bad.  You call your congressman and wait 20 years. 

This Christmas, Let's Reach Out to Liberals

In this time of good cheer, spare a thought for your liberal friend.



This is not a good time to be a liberal.



No, I am not talking about the fact that it looks like the bullies from GLAAD accidentally ran into a Louisiana buzz-saw.  I am talking about the implosion of the liberal idea.



The Obamacare meltdown is the immediate cause of liberal misery, but that is just the proximate cause.  Crowding up behind the pathetic and serial failures of the Obamacare rollout is the fact that the Obama experience brings into question, at long last, the whole liberal project.



If liberals can't build a website, what's the point?



If liberals can't create a big-government program with at least the pretense of competence and coherence, what's the point?



If liberals can't restore the economy to prosperity, what's the point?



If liberals can't predict the climate, what's the point?



If liberals are just another proud, overbearing, unjust, incompetent ruling class -- like all the ruling classes that came before them -- what's the point of them?



Every ruling class relies to a greater extent than we appreciate on the favor of the gods, the Mandate of Heaven: good harvests, good health, good times, good prospects.



And Barack Obama came in with such promise.  Why Barbara Walters reckoned that "we" all thought Obama was the Messiah.



(I know, that stupidity tells us more about Walters than about Obama).



If we conservatives were liberals we would redouble the efforts of GLAAD, of PETA, of HRC, of the race-baiters, of the academic PC crowd and the George Soros think tanks and we would rout the liberal army and scatter it to the four winds and salt their fields and ban their secular churches and on and on.



But we are conservatives.  And so, this Christmastide, let us each think of a liberal friend and reach out with a compassionate arm.



Let us tell our liberal friends that we feel their pain, and we want to help.  Of course, we'll say, things can't go on as before, with liberals spending the national credit card like there was no tomorrow.



But let it be said that conservatives will stand ready with a friendly word and a helping hand as our liberal friends go through the dark night of the soul in the months and years ahead.



Not because of them, but because of who we are, this Christmastide.

Government Always Screws the Powerless

Back in the day the modern progressive movement assured us that it fought for the common man.  And the working man.  Then it progressed to fighting for women.  For minorities.  For the "traditionally marginalized."  Or even for various sexual minorities, from gays to lesbians.  And now, of course, the New York Times is asking whether we should revise our ideas on polygamy -- sorry, "plural marriage".

And. of course, we have the famous prediction from John B. Judis and Ruiz Teixeira in The Coming Democratic Majority, that Democrats would rule forever on the support of women, minorities, young people, and professionals.

Now there is just one little problem with all this happy talk.  Government is force, and politics is power.  Whatever the rulers say, their program is power, and their behavior reflects that.

Any ruling class has two ideas, and two ideas only.  It is interested in seizing power, and it is interested in maintaining power.  All its promises and blandishments are made in service to those two objectives.

The people, whether they are old crusty geezers, greedy bankers, corporate greed, white racists, male patriarchs, or traditionally marginalized are mere pawns in the ruling class's game of power.

So yeah.  Back in the early modern era the newly rising bourgeoisie expatiated on the wonders of the common man.  But the governments they created were still governments, and the common man suffered mightily in the natural economic cycles of the capitalist age.

In the 19th century governments learned to sell themselves to the rising working class.  They offered them wondrous benefits, to be taken from the evil capitalists.  What it meant in practice was that the ruling class would sequester the savings of the working class and return whatever was left, in pensions, health care, unemployment, disability, after extracting its considerable fee in power and money.

We might ask whether the working class would have done better keeping its own money for its pensions, health care, etc.  Because the ruling class has ended up with a bankrupt system that is failing, and failing right now.  And what is the point, for the working class, of savings and health care that doesn't pay off?

The same is true for the groups that were going to make the Democrats the majority forever.

What about women?  Democrats have promised them a kind of liberation from all the heavy burdens of life: from overbearing husbands to unwanted children.  And, see here, wouldn't it be nice for women to get out of the house and work in the wage economy where the grass is greener, and even have career like men?

Or minorities.  Yep, minorities have lived under disadvantages since the dawn of time.  But the problem for minorities in the modern era is not merely removing disadvantages and exploitations, but learning how to thrive in the industrial and now post-industrial economy.  The politicians have offered the most wonderful shortcuts to this onerous process, but they lie.  The modern economy is founded upon the idea you figure out how to contribute to your fellow men and their needs and then you go do it.  Anything the politicians do to meddle with this process only lengthens it.

Hey, how about those young people?  Let's get one thing clear about young people.  On the one hand, they are highly susceptible to the fashions and fads whizzing around.  On the other hand they are the least powerful.  Why?  Because they haven't had time to organize and make themselves into a group for politicians to fear.

When the politicians tell the young people they care about them, they lie.  Politicians are going to use the young people, that's all.  On the one hand they may be able to fool the young people into serving in their political armies.  If they do that then the young people will suffer the fate of most soldiers and get left by the side of the road to die in some foreign country.  On the other hand they are going to make the young people suffer for the sins of their fathers.  It is the young people that will have to work to pull out of the wars, the famines, the financial crises, and the clear away the accretion of unsustainable privileges.

That's where we are in America in 2013.  We've had a century and more of the promises and blandishments and power and privileges of the ruling educated class.  Like every ruling class its promises and blandishments were mere self-serving apologies for power.  That is what the postmodernists tell us about the previous, bourgeois ruling class.

In the next few years the women, the minorities, and the young are going to find out just how broad and deep have been the lies of the liberal ruling class.  And so they will be looking for change.

But who knows if they will turn to the conservatives for relief?  After all, conservatives don't offer Hope and Change, and a heaven on earth.  Conservatives are People of the Responsible Self.  Conservatives offer people not a relief, a liberation from the cares of the world, but instead an engagement with the world.  For conservatives it is the individual, each individual, that must find out how to socialize with the world and contribute to his or her fellow man.  There is no such thing as a free lunch.

But conservatives have this to encourage them.  We would never had had a chance to earn the confidence of the American people until the liberals and their project of heaven on earth had failed.

After all, who would pass up a chance for heaven on earth for a mere offer to live a life as one of the People of the Responsible Self?

Nobody.  Not until that heaven on earth had been revealed as a hell of power and privilege.