Stop Complicating Home Finance

The US Senate is presently putting together what reads like Obamacare for Mortgages, a fiendishly complicated bill that will privatize, yet super-regulate home mortgages -- with a ton of special subsidy programs to queer the whole thing into a nightmare.  At least that's what the Wall Street Journal reports.



So the political elite hasn't learned from the Great Crash of 2008.  And no wonder.  Democrats have been indefatigable in blaming greedy bankers for the problem, rather than face the truth, that the deliberate federal policy to subsidize home mortgages forced bankers to extend loans to people that couldn't afford them.  If you read The New York Times and listen to NPR you wouldn't have a clue about what really went down.



It gets worse.  Here's a report on some focus groups of Option-ARM mortgage borrowers conducted for now-defunct Washington Mutual back in 2003.  The borrowers really had no clue what they had signed up for, with low payments and negative amortization for now followed by huge increased payments later on.  They knew they had a great deal -- for now -- but really weren't thinking too hard about what came later.



Yes.  WaMu was staggeringly negligent in pushing out mortgages to people that didn't have a clue what they were getting into.  But WaMu was just dutifully implementing national policy, pushed  by liberals for a generation.  It started with liberal activists complaining about "red-lining" in the 1970s.  Red-lining referred to the reluctance banks showed in loaning money on inner-city homes.  And why not?  Decaying inner city neighborhoods are not the place to loan money on demand deposits. It's simple prudence.  So we had to make sure that a certain share of mortgages went to "sub-prime" borrowers.



Because liberals are smart and compassionate.



And when the whole thing blew up, liberals blamed the greedy bankers.



Yes, of course the bankers were greedy.  Anyone that works close to government is greedy, because there's a lot of free stuff going on if you are smart enough and pushy enough to get in line for the handouts.



Given the financial ignorance of most people, the government's role should be to regulate the financial system to make it as simple as possible.  But that would make it harder to buy peoples' votes and hand out free stuff.



Given the financial ignorance of most people, we should reform the home mortgage business to remove the subsidies, to disabuse people of the notion that their homes are an "investment."



Given the financial ignorance of most people, we should get the government out of mortgage finance.



But the realities of legislating means that any reform of Fannie and Freddie will have to buy off the powerful special interests, in finance, in real estate, and in the liberal activist community.



Which means that the cure will probably be worse than the disease.



The real cruelty of the Liberal Century is the idea that government can be smart and intelligent -- if run by intelligent, large-minded people with the help of rational experts.



No it can't.  That's what we know now after a century.  Governing makes you dumb.  Governing makes you stupid.  Government makes you cruel.  You can take the largest-minded person in the world, but if you put them in charge of a government or a government program, they will turn out stupid.



This is not rocket science.  Government is force; politics is division.  When you put government in charge of something it will turn it into a bureaucratic monstrosity, pushing people around.  And the politicians will be figuring out how to divide people and how to buy votes with the money sloshing around in the government program.



Suppose the program turns out to be a complete mess?  How do you unwind the mess of bureaucratic rules; how do you persuade people to give up their nice little subsidies?



Exactly.  You can't.  Short of Armageddon, people are going to demand to keep their goodies.



They will keep on demanding their goodies until the invading soldiers are going house to house raping the women, and the question is no longer subsidies and handouts, but getting food to stave off starvation.



Meanwhile the mortgage mess remains a mortgage mess.  Thanks a lot, liberals.

Liberalism will end as a joke

You can't be serious.  That is perhaps what conservatives feel as each new Obama era folly hits the headlines.



This week we saw Democrats in the House claiming that the Republican pursuit of Lois Lerner was McCarthyism.



We heard of the Dallas office of the IRS brimming with pro-Obama election fever.



We saw liberal students and faculty getting Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born woman who has risen from tribalism to an icon of freedom, uninvited as Commencement speaker at Brandeis.



We saw the Obama administration ginning up their female base with yet another equal pay act.



We saw dear old baseball legend Hank Aaron linking Obama critics to the KKK.



Yeah, I know.  Marx told us that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.



But I wonder if there is a deeper truth there.  Beyond the idea that a movement begins as a cause, then becomes a business, and finally becomes a racket, I suggest that the final phase of any human endeavor is to become the butt of jokes.



And why is that?  It is because any human institution eventually gets inherited by fools, and fools are too stupid to realize they are running the place into the ground.  And so their clumsy pretense at wisdom and cunning becomes the butt of jokes.



And one day it all goes up in smoke.



Yeah, I know.  We Obama haters are desperate for a divination from the heavens that indicates that our prayers for a life after Obama will be answered.



But somehow, I have a feeling that the next 30 months leading up to the 2014 midterm and the 2016 presidential election will see a meltdown seldom seen before in US politics.

How do we beat the secular religious thugs?

The defenestration of Brendan Eich last week electrified the conservative world.  Imagine! A guy contributes money to an initiative campaign in 2008 and that disqualifies him from running Mozilla, the non-profit foundation that makes Firefox.

So the gay rights movement has progressed from hiding in the shadows to forcing its opponents into the shadows.  That is what you call progress.

But we conservatives ask: what can we do about this?  How can we stop the lefty bullies from bullying everyone in America to kow-tow to their household gods?

The answer, of course, is Michael Novak and his Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.  In that book Novak develops what I call the Greater Separation of Powers.  It is the idea that the public square in modern society amounts to three sectors: political, economic, and moral/cultural.

When the power of the political and the economic and the moral/cultural sectors are united, you get what is called "totalitarianism."  Not good, eh Vlad?  I mean Lenin, not Putin.

In the United States our founders built a constitution based on the concept of the separation of powers that Baron Montesquieu had formulated in his Spirit of the Laws.  The three branches of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, should be separate and should fight each other for power.

The founders also pushed the idea of the separation of the political and the moral/cultural in the notion of the separation of church and state.  They didn't want an "established" church, where the government picked winners and losers on the moral/cultural front.

You can see why.  When people on a moral crusade -- such as women's rights, or climate change, or gay rights -- get the bit between their teeth, they tend to get a little carried away.  They start to recreate the Holy Office of the Inquisition, or, if you like, the OGPU, the Gestapo, the KGB.  They start by showing people with the wrong opinions the instruments of torture, and they go on from there.

So it's a good thing to separate government power from religious power, including secular religious power.  Everyone agrees about that except liberals, because liberals cannot see that their politics is in fact a religion.  There are none so blind as those who will not see.

The Brendan Eich business was not an exercise of government power, but a moral/cultural attack on a private foundation.  So it points to the next frontier in the separation of powers.

What power should moral/cultural activists have over the economic sector?  And that reminds us of the other separation of powers issues that has been boiling over for the last century and a half.  What power should the political sector have over the economic sector?

The problem of political power over the economic sector has been a contentious one forever.  Most people fear that economic power is a monster that must be held in check by the strongest political chains, or else.  The whole point of Marxism is that economic power is to the worker what the landed warrior class of the feudal era was to the peasant.

But classical political economy starting not later than the late 18th century has argued that economic power is only powerful if it responds to the market, if it makes and sells things that people want to buy. History has proved the theory correct.  There is nothing worse for prosperity than subordinating the economic sector to the whims of the political sector.

And the late Great Recession proves the rule.  Here we had government subsidizing home mortgages for a generation and forcing the credit system to loan money to sub-prime borrowers.

Now the credit system runs on two articles of faith (i.e., credere, to believe).  First, it must believe that people will make their payments.  Second, it must believe that when people can't make payments then their loan can be liquidated by the collateral pledged to guarantee the loan.

Earth to liberals:  when you force the borrowers to lend to sub-prime borrowers and you also force lenders to make low down-payment loans, you are setting up a double-whammy of a financial panic!  Because when the downturn comes not only will subprime borrowers not be able to make their payments but their under-collaterized loans can't be properly liquidated.

So that's why Michael Novak recommends a Greater Separation of Powers.  The political sector should have limited power to lord it over the economic sector and that goes for the moral/cultural sector too.

As for the economic sector, it seems that most corporate honchos couldn't care much about political and moral/cultural matters.  Except when they go to government for crony capitalist special favors.  And when they retire and decide to spend all their money on charitable giving.

Yeah.  It's not too difficult to figure out how to get out of the mess we are in.  Just reduce the power of the politicians and the moralists.  And let the economy take care of itself.

It will, you know.  Nobody knows nothing about the economy, and the political activists and moral activists least of all.  The best thing to do it just to look on the economy with wonder.  And then cash your dividend checks.

Who are the American People?

In the third night of Wagner's monumental Der Ring des Nibelungen the broken Wotan, king of the gods, is reduced in Siegfried to "Der Wanderer," wandering the earth, his dreams of power shattered.

But Mime the dwarf still has a power project.  He wants to reforge Nothung, Siegmund's shattered sword, so he can kill Fafner the dragon and recover the Nibelungs' golden hoard.

Ask me three questions, says the Wanderer, but Mime is too stupid to ask the right ones. Instead he asks who lives on the earth, below the earth and above the earth.

But here in America as the Obama years dissolve into disappointment and rage, we need to know who lives where.  We need to understand the different kinds of Americans and "where they live" so that, we may hope, we can pick up the pieces after Obamadämmerung, heal our divisions, and get back on our American journey.

Who lives below the earth?  The Nibelungs, said the Wanderer, and Nibelheim is their land.  But in our world the Nibelungs are the folks camping out in our dysfunctional cities, living a stunted life on welfare and disability and single-parenthood, reduced to sending their kids to dreadful schools.  I call them the "people of the victim self."  They are people that do not believe in agency, in the ability of the individual to make a difference in her life.  They look to a powerful leader to support them with the crumbs from his table.  Their faith is the faith of the rank and file in the charismatic leader.

Who lives on the earth?  The giants, die Riesen, said the Wanderer, and Riesenheim is their land.  But in our world the plodding construction firm of  Fasolt and Fafner, builders of Valhalla, are the broad middle class, the people that follow the rules, go to work, obey the law, and pay their taxes.  I call them the "people of the responsible self."  These are people that believe it is up to each one to get an education, get a job, and find a way of contributing to society.  Their faith is the faith that each individual can make a difference.

Who lives above the earth? The gods, of course, the "Lichtalben" or lightbringers, said the Wanderer, and Valhalla is their estate.  With his spear, Wotan rules the world.  In our world, of course, the gods are the liberals, and they rule the world with their education, their large-mindedness, and their control of the culture.  I call them the "people of the creative self."  These are people that believe the simple life of responsibility is shameful, because creative people are called to something higher, to make or enact some new creation of the mind.  But liberals have warped this noble idea.  They do not say: here's a good idea; they say pass this bill so we can see what's in it.  Liberals can never leave anything alone.  Everything must be a creation of liberal minds and liberal power, and no others need apply.  Health care cannot be allowed to develop on its own; liberals must positively shape and order it.  The normal life of growth, marriage and children is a kind of serfdom, a subjection to a culture of patriarchy.  Thus to differentiate oneself, liberals must "challenge the system" in activism, in gender-bending, in a life as a creative artist.

You can see that each of these peoples is social in the full human sense of the word.  The people of the victim self belong by subordinating themselves to a leader as a way to get along by going along.  The people of the responsible self belong by surrendering their ego to the will of the market, and law, and work, and family in the faith that the market and the law will reciprocate their surrender.  The people of the creative self belong by contributing their intelligence, their education, their creativity, in the faith that the world can only progress through the power of an enlightened elite.

So now we know who the America People are.  Let us now ask what went wrong.

Something has gone wrong, and we know what it is.  The people of the creative self have not used their power for good.  They have used it to worship themselves instead of serve society.  They have used force where they should have used persuasion; they have divided where they ought to have unified.  So the progressives, the lightbringers, have not brought sweetness and light, but injustice and darkness.  Like all ruling classes, they have not ruled for the benefit for the least among us, but to continue their own power.

What matters in this world is not the cunning of the underclass, not the rule-following of the middle class, not the power of the over class.  What matters in the end is the power of women's love.  And before that the cunning of the Nibelungs, the rules written on Wotan's spear, and the power of the ruling class will melt away in yet another Götterdämmerung.

Every ruling class gets seduced by earthly power, and ends up in a maelstrom of cruel injustice as it seeks to hang on to power by grasping at straws, and so our liberal creative class will rattle in the tumbrils to the guillotine asking plaintively: what did we do wrong?

And the answer always is: we told you, but you refused to listen.

Two Midnight Rule: What Do You Expect?

What happens when government takes over health care?  You get dozens of bureaucratic horrors like the "two midnight" rule for Medicare.  What is the two midnight rule?  It is rule CMS 1599-F.

This new, Obamacare-forced rule specified that a hospital stay can only be paid for by Medicare insurance if that stay “(1) expects the beneficiary to require a stay that crosses at least two midnights and (2) admits the beneficiary to the hospital based upon that expectation.”

In the American Spectator, Jeffrey Lord does a fine job of playing the Democratic Party helpless victims game, telling the story of one Frank Alfisi, who died because he needed to be admitted to hospital to get a kidney dialysis.  A dialysis doesn't need a two day stay, so Medicare wouldn't cover it and the hospital wouldn't perform the dialysis.  Alfisi was too sick for a regular dialysis.



So President Obama killed Frank Alfisi.



On the contrary, this is what you get when you put the government in charge of things.



This is what you get when you pretend that the government can act like a compassionate daughter, like Frank's daughter Amy.



This is what happens when you believe politicians that say that they care about people.



This is what happens when people buy health insurance and assume that it takes care of everything.



The fact is that all institutions, from government to insurance companies to hospitals, run on rules.  The rules are arbitrary.  The rules say that we will do stuff for you if you the facts say one thing, and we won't do it if they say another.



Of course our modern world is drenched in institutions like this, starting with the rule of abstract principles.  Everything is subject to the tyranny of rules and principles.



In fact, of course, life is a lot messier than the rules and the abstract principles pretend.  You see it in the assumptions of Newtonian mechanics, that it is dealing with point particles and frictionless motion.



And you see it in the assumptions of 1,000 page bills to reform the whole health care system.



There are two things that can overcome the rules.



One of them is money.  If you have the money, you can tell the hospital: screw the rules; I'll pay for the admission and the dialysis.  Unfortunately for Frank Alfisi he had already spent all his money caring for his deceased wife in her terminal illness.



The other thing is love.  You can say: I don't mind what it costs, we are going to stump up the cash for dear old Dad.



But in our degenerate age we prefer to re-enact the helpless victim as poster boy melodrama.  We ask, with TV cameras rolling, how "they" could be so heartless as to deny care to Frank or to deny coverage to Betty.  Everyone knows their role, from tough reporter to tearful relative, and plays it to perfection.



Some of the better modern thinkers have recognized the problems with the modern age of reason.  They recognize that instrumental reason is mechanical, that institutions based on modern reason act "strategically," that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.  That something else is needed, something other than systems and bureaucracies.



The modern era has been going for about 200-500 years, depending on your taste.  It's long past time for anyone to be shocked by the heartlessness of modernity.  We should all recognize that modern governments and insurance companies and hospitals are purely "strategic" institutions.



If you don't want to fall between the cracks you need a Plan B.  Otherwise the "two midnight" rule or its close bureaucratic relative is going to get you.

What Will Happen to the Loser in Obamacare's War

I was talking to a dentist this morning about his win-win strategy at work.  He has a scheduler that gets a bonus every time she fills the daily schedule for the hygienists.  Win-win.  Win for the dentist, keepings his expensive hygienists busy earning revenue; win for the scheduler, who gets to share in the profits of the firm's extra revenue.


Now let's talk about government.  In the last few months I've moved from Government is Force to the idea that government needs a war.  That's why we have wars on communism, wars on poverty, wars on drugs.  It's obvious.  If government is force then government needs a job where force is called for.  Force is, we'll agree, an extreme remedy for any ill, so any government initiative must represent itself as a remedy for a monstrous evil in its inevitable call for force.  In other words, a war.



But the thing about a war is that usually it ends up with a winner and a loser.  In the great wars between nations the losing side really gets hammered.  I am thinking about France in 1815 after the Second Hundred Years War.  The fact is that France has never amounted to anything since 1815.  Or Germany after 1945.  The fact is that Germans invented pretty well everything in the period from 1800 to 1930.  But after Hitler stripped the brain out of Germany and tossed it over the Atlantic, and after Germany lost WWII, well, Germany just doesn't cut it any more.  Russia after losing the Cold War?  Not so hot.



And here's another thing.  Germany and Japan and Russia, the three big losers in the last century, all have very low birth rates, way below replacement.  In other words they are heading for oblivion.  Is that always what happens to nations defeated in war?



Now back to the US and our notorious divided nation.  And Obamacare.



Let us leave aside the notion that one of the arguments for limited government might be that we want to avoid winners and losers here at home.  Because we are all in this together.  We lost that argument, at least until the next revolution.



Let us think instead about the risk in a big domestic war like Obamacare that the folks that started the war might lose it.



It's a commonplace that nations start wars without seriously thinking about the consequences.  Certainly this has been true about Obamacare.  The Democrats went for Obamacare because it has been part of their 39 Articles since whenever: national health care.



We won, they said in 2009.  So we are going to do Obamacare.  We aren't going to do health reform that gets some Republicans in for a fig-leaf "bipartisan" bill.  So the Democrats went for decisive victory.



Imagine what would have happened if Obamacare had been a stunning success.  It would have demolished the Republican Party.  But it wasn't, and we know why.



Obamacare violated Irving Kristol's Rule.  If you want to help the poor, you must deal in the middle class.  Only Obamacare didn't.  It couldn't, because the middle class already has health insurance.



So, as Rush Limbaugh pointed out, the smart middle class voted Obamacare down in 2010.  The non-smart middle class is going to be voting against it in 2014.



Here's what I wonder.  What is going to happen to the Democrats after their glorious Eastern campaign for Obamacare hits its Stalingrad in the fall of 2014?



The reason that politicians are notorious and annoying trimmers and compromisers and log-rollers is that they instinctively know that a decisive battle is too risky.  Yeah, they could win, but what if they lose?



The consequence of Democrats losing in 2014 as the American people turn decisively against Obamacare is incalculable.  Because there has been nothing like it in our collective experience. A great government program in which one of the US political parties has invested all its marbles gets decisively defeated.  And the political party in question gets stuck owning the devastating defeat and failure.



Democrats have no clue what is about to happen to them.

Reaching Out to Minorities

Everyone says that Republicans should reach out to minorities, especially Hispanics and blacks.

But, Thomas Sowell writes,

Too many Republicans seem to think that the way to "reach out" is to offer blacks and other minorities what the Democrats are offering them. Some have even suggested that the channels to use are organizations like the NAACP and black "leaders" like Jesse Jackson -- that is, people tied irrevocably to the Democrats.

Fuggedaboudit, he says. "Voters who want what the Democrats offer can get it from the Democrats."

Actually, I think that there are two things to consider here.  The Democrats have two ways they appeal to their voters, as any political party does.  First, they appeal to greed; second, they appeal to fear.  Greed is the free stuff, of course, the programs, the appeal to resentment with the inequality agenda.

Obviously the greed agenda is a hard row for Republicans to hoe, as Sowell recognizes, because the Republican greed agenda is tax cuts and deregulation and spending cuts.  You'd have to be talking to a middle-class minority to get them to sign on to the Republican greed agenda.

But in my view it is the fear agenda that yields a 90 percent black vote for Democrats.  You cannot get a 90 percent vote on anything without scaring the heck out of people.  It is the notion that whites are getting together just around the corner planning the tactics to bring back Jim Crow that keeps the African Americans at home voting for Democrats.  And Democrats work on that every day.

And that's not all.  Democrats use the immigration issue to strike fear into Hispanics; they want Hispanics to fear that Republicans are ready to deport every last one of them back where they came from.

And there's a fear factor with Jews.  Scratch a Jewish-American and you will find someone frightened by anti-semitism.  And who does she fear?  The Christian fundamentalists that vote Republican.  Earth to Jews: it's the left that's turning anti-semitic, because the left experiences the Palestinians as victims of colonialism, and the Islamic masses in the First World cities as victims of racism.

If you ask me, Republicans need to get to work countering the Democratic fear game.  I'm not a messaging expert, so I don't know how you do it.  I suspect that you have to fight fear with fear.  If blacks are afraid of a return to Jim Crow, then maybe the only way to neutralize it is with a counter-fear.  Maybe that abortion is a cunning trick to commit genocide on blacks and browns?

Could Republicans accuse Democrats of hating blacks because they give them lousy schools as Sowell suggests?  You'd think, but in Washington, DC blacks voted out the mayor that hired Michelle Rhee to turn around the DC school system.  Why?  Because more important that education to DC voters are the jobs that they get in the school system.

Probably the only thing that helps Republicans in the long term is to promote a culture of Americanism. The Democrats work to hyphenate their voters, to get them to think of themselves as African- Hispanic- female- gay- Americans.  They talk inclusion but they practice division.  When voters lose the hyphen they lose their attachment to Democrats.

But probably in 2014 and 2016 it won't matter because voters will be so mad about Obamacare.