Are Corporations Robber Barons or Cringing Courtiers?

Screw the insurance companies!  That's the knee-jerk instinct of many Americans. Why, just think of their profits — as in profits before people.



Sorry to disappoint, but "Health Plans" have a net profit margin of 3.3 percent whereas Microsoft has a profit margin of 28%.  Eevil Exxon has a net profit margin of about 10%.  So there.



Of course, there is no doubt that corporations have a lot of influence in the corridors of political power.  But the question is, are corporations powers in their own right, like the barons of feudal Europe, or are they more like courtiers of absolute monarchies?



Are corporations like the lusty and rebellious barons of Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays, or cringing courtiers subservient to the king's vizier, the Cardinal Wolsey or Thomas Cromwell of the day?



Let's look at today's issue, raised by Charles Krauthammer.  "Stop the Bailout!" he thunders.



You see, buried in Sections 1341 and 1342 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are two little sweeteners for the insurance companies.

First, Section 1341, the “reinsurance” fund collected from insurers and self-insuring employers at a nifty $63 a head. (Who do you think the cost is passed on to?) This yields about $20 billion over three years to cover losses.



Then there is Section 1342, the “risk corridor” provision that mandates a major taxpayer payout covering up to 80 percent of insurance-company losses.

Isn't that special?



But back to the question.  With this nice little bailout tucked into Obamacare, who is the real power?  Is it the government, telling the insurance companies: Hey, you wanna do business in this town, you gotta play with us.  Or is it the insurance companies telling the government: Hey, you want us to play doggo for this new government program and keep Harry and Louise off the air, you gotta pay.



 Maybe the real answer is the delicious irony.  Here we have the Democrats: they have been demagoguing against the insurance companies for decades and have trained everyone to believe that they are sworn to fight for the people against the insurance companies.



So let's see if they mean it.  Let's make the "first order of business for the returning Congress: The No Bailout for Insurance Companies Act of 2014," writes Krauthammer.

Make it one line long: “Sections 1341 and 1342 of the Affordable Care Act are hereby repealed.”

I think I will go and write letters to my two compassionate and caring United States senators: Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA).  Surely they will come down on the side of the people against the powerful.



But I'm still puzzled about whether corporations are the bosses or the courtiers.

Lily-livered RINOs and TIT FOR TAT

We true conservatives love to tie ourselves in knots over the lily-livered RINOs, that seem to betray our movement every time we turn around, by compromising with the socialist Democrats.  Here's Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator ritually damning Karl Rove and all "Republican socialists" to hell and back again.

Karl Rove (i.e., architect of the American Crossroads SuperPAC), the Chamber of Commerce, and the Washington GOP Establishment have declared war on the Reaganite conservative base of the Republican Party.



Welcome to the 2014 election.

What's the problem?  Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, 

major donors and advocacy groups, such as the Chamber of Commerce and American Crossroads, are preparing an aggressive effort to groom and support more centrist Republican candidates for Congress in 2014’s midterm elections. 

Actually the Democrats did a similar thing in their successful mid-term effort in 2006.  They recruited a bunch of centrist-looking candidates in swing districts and ended up winning 31 seats in the House.  Many of those centrist candidates got shown the door in the 2010 elections, sacrificed to the god of Obamacare.



But meanwhile, those "centrists" helped the Dems pass their liberal agenda in the Congresses of 2007-2010.



But what about the spineless RINOs in Congress like Speaker Boehner that recently spouted off against the conservative Tea Party groups?



Look.  The whole point of a legislature is to compromise with the other side.  You get together, do a little horse-trading, and out comes a sausage.  The remarkable thing about the Obama years is how little legislative compromise took place.   When the Dems had a solid majority they rammed their stuff through without Republican votes.  And since 2010 they have proceeded with high-profile standoffs like the Debt Ceiling of 2011, the Fiscal Cliff of late 2012, and the Government Shutdown of October 2013.  Yet when Rep. Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Murray (D-WA) were tasked with a budget solution for the next two years they quickly came up with a compromise that split Dem-Rep differences down the middle.



Guess what:  When you leave people alone they will usually cooperate and compromise.  Why?  Because that's the most successful way to operate.  Robert Axelrod proved it in The Evolution of Cooperation.  The most successful way to deal with other people is demonstrated by an iterative Prisoners Dilemma game.  The most successful strategy, called "TIT FOR TAT", cooperates on the first move and then echoes the "opponent's" move thereafter.  If the opponent "defects" (refuses to cooperate) then TIT FOR TAT defects on the next move.  If the opponent cooperates, then TIT FOR TAT cooperates on the next move.



Axelrod calls the TIT FOR TAT strategy: cooperative -- because offering to cooperate on the first move, "provocable" -- because it punishes bad behavior immediately, and nice -- because it forgives immediately a defector that returns to cooperation.  It all comes down to four rules:

1. Don't be envious.


2. Don't be the first to defect.


3. Reciprocate both cooperation and defection.


4. Don't be too clever.

Guess what: the TIT FOR TAT strategy worked in the trenches in World War I when the opposing sides tried not to kill each other in between battles.



We conservatives should not expect our congressional leaders to be in the forefront of the ideological wars; that's not their job.  Culture war is the job of the activist groups.  Compromise, given the reality of the present correlation of forces, is the job of the legislators.



But how in the world can we ever expect to win against the liberals?  Here we must turn to the late Andrew Breitbart who said that politics is downstream from culture.  First you must win the culture; then you can win at politics.



And that is conservatives' Big Problem.  We seem to be eternally playing catchup in the culture wars, getting defined as narrow-minded bigots by the cultural big-shots in the media and the activist attack dogs like GLAAD.



But how can we ever win against the big battalions of the liberals?  Well, it's not so much a question of big battalions as big ideas.  It means persuading, and in particular, persuading women: that abortion is cruel and kills little babies, that a sexual free-for-all hurts women and children, that no-fault divorce hurts women and children most of all.  And that big government, always and everywhere, means force and compulsion that must inevitably reach into every woman's home and tell her what to think and do, how to raise her children, or else.



Obamacare, anyone?



There will always be RINOs and compromisers that seem to be selling the activists out.  But the solution is not to beat up the RINOs but change the culture so that the natural place for compromisers to compromise is towards the conservative position rather than the liberal position.



Yeah, I know.  Changing the culture is hard.

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.