The Clueless Clots of Silicon Valley

We conservatives thought that the tech revolution would usher in an era of small government.  But it turns out that the Gateses and the Jobses and the Google guys are Democrats.



I don't know whether it is snobbery -- because every educated person in America is taught from an early age to shun the gap-toothed fundamentalists and Puritans that run the Republican Party.  Or maybe it is crony capitalism -- because those corporate greedists learn pretty quickly that the guys they need to keep happy are the Democrats.  Or else.



But now it looks like the Silicon Valley guys are heading for trouble.  The local lefties in the Bay Area are starting to target the tech giants for their special attention.  And the techies are feeling confused. Walter Russell Mead writes.

[It] feels like a weird and painful betrayal—both to the techies who like to think of themselves as benign and progressives, and to the hipster left who thought that this corporate wave would be different.

 But, of course, these chaps are living in a fool's paradise.  Seen from a distance, the new tech giants are no different than the new giant industries of the 19th century.

 Many start-up industries are individualistic and libertarian in culture even when they depend heavily on state action.Many start-up industries are individualistic and libertarian in culture even when they depend heavily on state action. Think of 19th century railroads and their subsidies, for example. With tech, despite the usual wacky individualism and libertarian rhetoric, it has been DARPA and defense spending all along as a major engine of growth. It’s an association that goes back to World War Two, when the massive data processing needs of total war laid the foundation for the computer age.

The reality is that whether or not business is interested in government, government is interested in business.  Politicians are quick to grasp the power potential in the new technologies and immediately move to use it for their own power projects.



As frisky tech startups becomes Big Tech the left targets them as the enemy.  And, as Mead reminds us:

The pressure groups and government agencies of the blue state are desperate for revenue. Silicon Valley has money. The question becomes: how to extract wealth from those horrible techsters and redistribute it where, in the judgment of blue politicos and interest groups, it will do the most good?

 Hey Big Tech!  Isn't it time you re-evaluated who your friends are?  We conservatives may not be as hip and fashionable as you like, and we may be terminally embarrassing with our god-bothering, but think about it.



We conservatives think that government should be limited, and that means that its power to meddle with Big Tech should be limited.



What do you think about that, Google guys?  Don't you think that you should start hedging your bets and putting a bit of money on the same horses as those evil monsters, the Koch Brothers?  Not to mention the unmentionable ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, bête noire of the left?



Because you chaps are going to need a bit of covering fire from the right starting from right now, and if you don't get that, you really are the clueless clots, the mindless nerds, that everyone takes you for. 

Inequality, Crony Capitalism, the Left and Obamacare

The modern secular religion that we call the Left has a vision of human liberation and emancipation: a liberation and emancipation of all humans from the oppressions and subordinations of the past.

But the odd thing about its vision is that it is wholly political; it can only imagine getting to the future by force.

This is a puzzling thing, because the whole point of human society is that it represents a zone of peace; disputes between humans within society are not to be settled by force, but by other means.

This requires the left -- and every political actor -- to divide the society into Us and Them.  Properly, We are the group, the tribe, the nation, the society and They are the Enemy in the next village, next nation.

In the notion of the left the enemy is a viper in the bosom of our own society, a nest of exploiters, or robber barons, or class enemies, or racists, sexists and bigots.  Thus the left must mount a war of the people against the powerful, the workers against the bosses, the gays against the "haters."

In other words, the left is always waging a civil war against the domestic enemy.  The irony is that this usually requires the left to co-opt some of the people that it normally characterizes as the "enemy."

Take Obamacare.  For decades the left has taught everyone to believe that the problem with health care is insurance companies and drug companies and corporate greed.  Yet President Obama and the congressional Democrats designed Obamacare around the need to co-opt the drug companies and the health insurers into its plan so that they would not oppose it, and it exempted big corporations, the ones that self-insure, from many onerous regulations and requirements.  There is even a "risk corridor" to bail out insurance companies from losses if Obamacare's projections turn out to be wrong.

When corporations get in bed with government we conservatives and libertarians like to call it "crony capitalism."

Of course, nothing prevents the left from turning on their corporate "partners" when things go wrong.

But this is all wrong, and cannot end well.  That is because the whole point of capitalism is that it is adapting, every moment, to the demands of the consumers.  The whole point of a big-government program like Obamacare is that it protects people from adaptation, and solves, for all time, some monstrous oppression or injustice, and it sets up a bureaucracy to manage it.

That is the point: bureaucracy doesn't adapt.  It wants to keep running things the old way, and resists change.  It can resist change for a while because it has the power of government behind it.

Today the cry of the left is against "inequality."  Of course it is.  Because the left always needs some rationalization for the use of government force.  If some people are rich and some people are poor then it requires a government intervention to redistribute it.

But what if the government policy supported and implemented by the left has actually contributed to inequality?  Somehow our lefty friends cannot imagine that.

There is a better way to look at this.  It is that freedom (and liberation and emancipation) needs individualism.  You cannot have freedom unless individuals are free (and also obligated) to search out and discover how they can contribute to society.  Servitude, the other side of the coin, always involves collectivization.  If government -- whether the family patriarch, the village big man, the local baron, the political commissar or the nation state -- guarantees anyone a lunch ticket then it must force people to work to provide that lunch.

When the Brits started emerging from feudalism a thousand years ago, they did a curious thing to break up their serf households; they sent their children away from home as apprentices and servants.  This meant, of course, they the detached their children from the mother's teat.  Each child had to find their own way in the world.

In a way, it's a cruel idea.  Each child must find a way to support itself on its own or perish.  But the alternative, of course, is to stay at home and submit oneself forever to the authority of the father.  Then you survive or perish upon the decisions of the patriarch.

OK, which is more cruel?  You rely on your own efforts to secure a livelihood or you rely on the efforts of the family patriarch, the precinct captain, the party boss, the charismatic politician?

I know what I think.

Never Call a Voter a Fool

The truth is that we voters are fools.  We vote for politicians that tell us things we want to hear and then we act all outraged when they betray us.



That is why H.L. Mencken said that "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."



What the common people want is free stuff, and what they get is the cost of free stuff.



Right now our Democratic friends are offering the common people extended unemployment benefits. Sounds like a good idea except that the longer people -- especially middle-aged men -- stay on unemployment the more likely they will never work again.



What about a higher minimum wage? Sounds like a good idea except that the science says that the minimum wage discriminates against young, low-skilled workers, and particularly young, low-skilled minority workers.  Maybe that's why the young unemployment rate is higher than adult unemployment and minority youth unemployment is the highest of all.



But how do you talk to voters who are fools?  The women voters that bought the Obamacare promises?  The youth that bought the free contraception, student loan promises?



All you can do is blame Obama.  All you can do is say they lied.



But then you have an opening.  You can say that this is what big government looks like.  Big government doesn't care about someone like you.  Never has, never will.



Big government only cares about power and influence.  If you want a society that cares about people like you then there is only one thing to do.  Vote against big government and start working for the family, church, and neighborhood organizations that know you personally and care for you individually.



Here's the thing.  It is only people that are related to you and know you personally that will be there when you need help.  As you will be there for the people that are related to you and know you personally.



Government doesn't care about you; it just cares about your vote.  The best thing for the economy would be to get the government out of its monetary and fiscal meddling.  Oh yeah, we need government as the lender of last resort, because capitalism is punctuated by crashes and panics.  It's pretty scary, but a lot less scary than what came before: periodic famine and starvation.



But when government gives out free stuff it is setting people up for a fall.  All that Fannie/Freddie credit?  Millions of people took the bait and ended up losing their homes and everything?  All that help for the poor?  It ended up killing work and marriage in the lower orders.  Medicare for seniors like me?  It's ended up as a racket where physicians go to conferences to learn how to "upcode."  Social Security?  It reduces savings, the foundation of the future.



You can see Republican Senate candidate Ben Sasse trying to break through to the voters as he campaigns for the US Senate in Nebraska.

[H]e faces a barrage of questions about health care, from workers watching their costs skyrocket and small-business owners worried about growth. There are broader concerns, too: “One of the most common questions I get is some version of whether we've come to the end of America,” says Sasse. “People are worried that we’re in decline, and that one of the reasons we’re in decline is because our leaders refuse to discuss it.” When the subject comes up, Sasse tries to acknowledge these concerns and sound a few hopeful notes. Then he says ordinary citizens must do their part: “We have to teach the American idea to our kids. The inertia of motion does not preserve a republic.”

Maybe that's all a politician can do: "sound a few hopeful notes."



Just don't call it Hope and Change.

"What is to be Done?"

Back in 1901, the year before my father was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, V. Lenin published a political tract titled "What is to be Done?"  Lenin set forth the Bolshevik vision that the working class on its own would never transform the state; it would take a vanguard party of middle class revolutionaries to engineer a fundamental transformation of Russian society.

Conservatives in the US are in a similar position.  Existing Republican leaders like Governors Scott Walker (R-WI), John Kasich (R-OH) and Chris Christie (R-NJ) are never going to do more than nibble away at the welfare state.  They are never going to push the boundary of the possible; they are never going to put the whole question of the administrative welfare state in question.  OK, maybe Scott Walker has pushed the boundaries a little.

That is why "A Conservative Vision of Government" by Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner is so disappointing.  They warn Republicans not to be seen as enemies of government, because, as James Q. Wilson wrote:

"Telling people who want clean air, a safe environment, fewer drug dealers, a decent retirement, and protection against catastrophic medical bills that the government ought not to do these things is wishful or suicidal politics."

Quite.  But conservatism turns on the nice question: the "we" in "we must have clean air" does not have to mean government.  "There is such a thing as society, it's just not the same thing as the state."  Therefore, write Gerson and Wehner:

Providing [social] services and securing that safety net does not mean accepting the technocratic mindset of the liberal welfare state. It means replacing that mindset with a conservative approach that puts government on the side of civil society and private enterprise in order to achieve a more just and thriving society.

But that is precisely the point.  We are not going to replace the liberal welfare state with a couple governors here and a president there, and a reform of liberal technocracy.  A genuine reform of the liberal welfare state starts with something much bigger a vision of what could replace the administrative welfare state.

Everyone wants "a decent retirement," but is a government pay-as-you-go program the best way to go? Everyone wants a pension, but is the old "defined benefit" pension anything more than a 50-year-old lie?

The problem is that there are millions of people that have paid into Social Security's pay-as-you-go program for decades, and they properly fear any changes.  How can conservative reform this program so that it becomes a genuine savings program and ends its unjust robbery of black men?  How can you tell, e.g., Boeing machinists, that their defined benefit pension program cannot be continued because it makes an impossible promise about the future?

The situation conservatives face right now is that the American people have too much invested in the liberal administrative state to consent to any reform.  This is no accident.  The state is just like an army; it constructs reality to make it really hard and dangerous for any individual in the rank and file to desert the colors.  So the only time that soldiers desert is when the army has been defeated and the food stops coming and the officers have mysteriously disappeared.

That is why Barack Obama is probably a stealth conservative.  The only way that health care could ever have come up for real reform would be if the government crashed the whole system, so that millions of people would be desperate for a real solution.  Thanks Barack!

The same goes for pensions, education, welfare.  The only way to reform them is to wait till they crash.  Then and only then will the American people consent to reform.

The job of conservatives meanwhile is to construct a vision of what American could be.  We do that all the time when we witter on about civil society, home schooling, vouchers, privatized pensions in Chile and Australia, published prices for health care procedures.

Our faith is the old one of Mahatma Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Where do you think we are?  Somewhere between "laugh at you" and "fight you?"  Let's hope so.

Is There a Revolution in Our Future?

The conventional wisdom about political revolutions is that they represent a failure of the "old regime" to modernize and keep with the times.

But Steve Pincus in "1688: The First Modern Revolution" sees it a bit differently.  He experiences the British Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789 as the "old regime" pushing for modernization but losing control.

The problem for the "old regime" is that when it starts to modernize it opens modernization as a political question.  It extends state "authority more deeply into society" and so "politicize[s] and mobilize[s] people on the periphery," the people we call the low-information voters.  But people don't just get mobilized for the state's modernization project. There are regime opponents out there eager to mobilize the lo-fos against the state's modernization project and for their own modernization project.  Pretty soon the issue becomes not just modernization, but modernization for what, and for who.

In France before 1789, it is important to remember that Louis XVI was a modernizer. His modernization opened the question to discussion.

By announcing a break with the past, modernizing states create an ideological opening.  In order to explain and justify state expansion, state transformation, and the necessary intrusions in everyday life, modernizing states have to proclaim and explain their new direction.  In doing so they are compelled to concede the need for radical change... Modernizing states necessarily stir up wide-ranging debates about the means and ends of modernization.  Modernizing states create the ideological space for a modernizing opposition.

 The same thing applied in Britain during the Glorious Revolution.  James II started a modernization project to strengthen the army and navy and ally Britain with Catholic France.  But the Whig grandees wanted to strengthen the army and navy to ally instead with the upstart Protestant Dutch.

You can see where I want to go with this.  For years Democrats have forbidden any reform of their welfare state and have demagogued anyone that tried as tipping grannie over a cliff.

But with the Obamacare reform and its manifest troubles, Democrats have opened the whole question of reform.  With the lies and failures and millions of people losing their insurance the Democrats can no longer stop reform by worrying about grannie or the children.  Grannie is already being hurt; children are already starving.

So now the question is not between doing something or doing nothing.  We have already made that decision.  The question is what is the best way forward?  What kind of health care system do we want?  Do we want individual Americans to make their own decisions about health care or do we want the government to decide for us?

Obamacare is already changing Medicare with its attack on Medicare Advantage.  So that brings the whole of Medicare into question.  Radical lefties like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) are proposing benefit increases for Social Security.  Are you sure, Sen. Warren?  Because that brings the whole question of Social Security into the public square.

In the US today it is the liberals that represent the "old regime" and they have fought any attempt to reform their cruel and corrupt administrative state.   But now their modernization of health care is turning out to be a complete disaster they have accidentally opened the discussion about alternatives.

The aftermath of Obamacare may be a revolution in a lot more than health care.

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.