Liberals, Shocked, Shocked that Government is Force

One of my favorite themes is that our liberal friends are a little to quick to suggest that the kind of government they advance is really just the benign program of a bunch of kindly librarians.  This allows them to forget, as they crunch down ruthlessly on anyone that disagrees with them, that government is force.

Now David Brat, economics professor and giant slayer, has dared to write that the "government holds a monopoly on violence."  He has even referenced Nietzsche and the last man.  And liberals from the Wall Street Journal's news side to the liberal blogosphere are hyperventilating, according to Charles C. W. Cooke.

OK. I get it.  Liberals really don't want the idea to get about that government is always and everywhere an overgrown band of thugs.  They don't want you to think that if you don't take care to limit its power government will sooner or later come and get you.  That's because they want to increase the powers of government.

I recently wrote an emailer that government can do three things: it can do war, it can do jails, and it can do loot.

I was at a party last night with a bunch of liberals, and afterward my mind was in a frenzy.  And I thought: government can do three things: it can do war, it can do loot, and it can do jails.  So it tries to solve every problem either with a war, such as a war on poverty, or a jail, such as our national child custodial facilities called "schools", or a handout to its supporters, as in Medicare, Social Security, handouts, crony capitalism, etc.

He replied by raising the question of "regulations" and imagining that I would characterize regulations as jail or loot.  It's true that it does seem a bit extreme to think of regulations that way.  But I'm reading Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist right now and his sweep of history has trade originating way before the start of cities, and even farming.

In other words barter and exchange are not a new and frightening thing that started with the industrial revolution.  It's been going on since the dawn of time.  Because Ricardo's law of comparative advantage applies to all living things, because everyone benefits from specialization and the growth of the "collective mind."  And most "regulation" of business was fully covered in the common law, which was judge-made law that evolved out of the legal conflicts between merchants.

But of course that wasn't good enough for the educated youth of the 19th century and it is certainly not acceptable to the progressive ruling class of the 21st century.  They want power, not justice.

Yeah.  There is a role for "regulation" but the problem is that it's a two-edged sword.  You can use it to curb corporate monopoly power, but what do you end up with?  You end up with the Interstate Commerce Commission that was supposed to curb railroad monopolies and ended up preserving the transportation status quo in a century-long railroad bankruptcy.  How do you know if your regulation is curbing monopoly and "externalities" or setting you on the road to "regulatory capture?"  The answer is that you don't.  The answer is that any government regulation will probably end up advantaging some special interest.

Start with Obamacare, which was advertised as bending the cost curve and reducing the cost of health insurance for the average family by $2,500 a year.  But now we read about the Obamacare "risk corridors" that are intended to bail the insurance companies out of losses in the transition period to full Obamacare.  What's that all about?  I thought that the whole point of Obamacare was to curb the eevil insurance companies from ripping us off.  The fact is that a monster government program like Obamacare has unlimited opportunities for special interests to carve out cozy little monopolies and subsidies that are too small for the media to sniff out and scandalize.  Of course it is.  Because we know that government regulation almost always leads to regulatory capture.  Because government is force.

And when it comes to green subsidies to green crony capitalists the media doesn't show up, because they favor subsidies and monopolies when it serves the liberal agenda.

Dave Brat is right.  If you don't start your day remembering that government is force, then you are already half way to deluding yourself that your program of government force is nothing more than a couple of librarians discussing a poster celebrating literacy.

Could a Democrat Get Cantored?

Everyone who is anyone agrees that the Tea Party is a dangerous bunch of extremists.  That's when they aren't agreeing that the Tea Party is a bunch of clueless Sharron Angles and Christine O'Donnells.

But I find myself wondering: could anything like the Tea Party happen to the Democrats?

Let's look back.  The last time that the Democrats had agitation in the ranks was the Occupy movement in 2010.  Was that a grass-roots movement?  Er, I don't think so.  The media climbed aboard it immediately, and the Obamis seemed to think it was going to power them to reelection and the war on inequality.  It looked suspiciously like a political cats-paw owned and operated by the ruling class.

Then there was the 2000s with the Kos Kidz.  But were they really a bottom-up movement like the Tea Party?  At any rate they seemed to get on pretty well with the Democratic establishment, pushing them just a little bit harder on Iraq than the regular politicians wanted.

Or the Democratic Leadership Conference that operated in the late 1980s and the 1990s?  The idea was to moderate the Democratic brand to make it more electable.  That meant a "third way" between left and right.  But was it a grass roots movement?  Hardly.  The grass roots was lefty.  The DLC was an attempt by a group of Dem leaders to present the Democratic Party in a new moderate way to the voters after the evident success of the Reagan revolution.

OK, what about the Sixties, and the movement against the Vietnam War, the New Left, the McGovern generation?  Was that a genuine revolution?  Not really.  Wasn't it really a movement at the top?  Wasn't it really the radical kids of elite liberal parents living out the logical implication of their parents' political beliefs?  At any rate the media, after a few false starts, got solidly behind the kids.  Walter Cronkite turned against the Vietnam War in 1968 and the Tet Offensive.  I'd say that the Sixties radicals amounted to a palace coup against the old big-city machines run by the Daleys, leaders of the white working class.  When the smoke cleared you had elite liberals in charge of the cities with an African-American militia to supply the political muscle.  And the old white working class headed for the suburbs.

Seems to me that in America right now you could not get in the Democratic Party a real bottom-up political movement like the Tea Party.  The Democratic Party is completely run by the ruling class.  There is no opportunity for dissent, no opportunity for some nobody like a Dave Brat to step into a Congressional primary.  Why, we just saw liberal poster girl Sandra Fluke told to go to the back of the line when she thought she'd run for Congress.  That's because the Democratic Party is a great big political machine and there are dozens of young Democratic lawyers and activists higher up the food chain from newcomer Fluke.  And they get first dibs at the loot.

The point is pretty simple.  The Democratic Party is a great big looting and pillaging machine.  You join the party or vote for its candidates because you want a share of the loot.  Hey, how about these SSA administrative judges handing out billions in Disability Insurance to the folks!  But the Republican Party is for people that don't really want loot.  They want to live their lives as People of the Responsible Self.  And every few years the GOP party supporters revolt against their Outer Party leaders that succumb to the temptations of office, and just want to go along to get along with the ruling class in the Inner Party.

Like right now.

Post Cantor: Why are Dems So Negative About Tea Party?

Ever since the Tea Party showed its ugly mug five years ago, our Democratic friends can't seem to decide whether it's a nothingburger or a frightful threat to everything we know and love -- a KKKish assembly of racist sexist homophobic gun-toting extremists.

Moments after House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) got primaried by Tea Party-ish economics professor Dave Brat, DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz quickly shot off a tweet to show how shocked she was over the Tea Party, according to Katie Pavlich.

So, do people still have questions? The Tea Party has taken control of the GOP. http://t.co/lAZ0ObfEa1
— D Wasserman Schultz (@DWStweets) June 11, 2014

So now the Tea Party isn't dead.  It's a mortal threat to the Republic, or at least to progressive values.

Look, I get why the Tea Party is a threat to the Republican establishment.  It makes it hard for them to play their role as the Outer Party, opposing the Inner Party progressive line but going along in the end in return for some quid pro quo.  E.g., immigration.

But the Democrats? If the Tea Party is such a monstrosity, why not keep quiet and let the racist sexist homophobes destroy the GOP?  Because the Dems are taking over the world with their Emerging Democratic Majority of minorities, women, educated and young.  Right?

The truth probably is that the Tea Party poses a real threat to the entire ruling class, Inner and Outer, because it threatens to offer an opposing narrative to the ruling class PC narrative.

Think of it from the liberal perspective.  They've managed to marginalize and intimidate the Christian Right and they have turned what might have been a libertarian Silicon Valley into dutiful liberal crony capitalists.  They have tagged the middle-class Republican Party as the Party of the Rich and with Obamacare they are 90 percent of the way to adding another permanent entitlement to the welfare state.

But then along comes this rag-tag band of Tea Partiers that just didn't get the message or the threats.

Here's what troubles me about the Tea Party question and also immigration.  I think that our ruling class could be a little more understanding about the concerns of the Tea Party and specifically the immigration question.

Look, for a nearly rich guy like me, immigration doesn't matter too much.  But for the average American it does matter.  If you are a low-skilled person then your wages are seriously degraded by competition from both legal and illegal immigrants.  Legal immigrants lower the formal economy wages; illegal immigrants push the whole low-skill economy off the books, which means that you aren't earning Social Security points and you can't buy a house because to the credit agencies you don't have income.

Right now the Democrats are playing a pretty cynical game.  They are sucking up to Hispanic immigrants and branding everyone that has a doubt about immigration reform as a racist.

But the support for immigration reform is not that deep and broad.  After educated goo-goo liberals, the only people really in favor of immigration reform are Hispanics who still have family they want to bring to the US.

Get that?  Established Hispanics don't care about immigration.  It's just the new arrivals that, understandably, want the rest of their family over here.

I think that what really scares the liberals is that the Tea Party is a bottom-up movement.  It's not like the New Left of the Sixties that were radical children of liberal parents. That was the ruling class kids cutting up a little until they wormed their way into the professoriat.  Perfectly harmless, if you are a liberal.

But the Tea Party is different.  It got started by nobodies like Keli Carender.  OK, so she's not completely a nobody, because she did some post-grad work at Oxford in England.  But the point is the Keli and many other Tea Party leaders aren't the daughters of a Somebody in the ruling class.  So the ruling class asks: who is Keli Carender: who are her people?  If you are a ruling-class member you have to worry about the Tea Party.  What is it really about?  What does it want?  Where will it end?

Probably the Tea Party will just end up as a temporary disturbance to the Force, a footnote to history.  But you never know.

Student Loans: Poster Child for Government Failure

Conservatives like to account for President Obama's serial illegalities by saying that he hates America -- or hates something.

But there is a simpler explanation.  The federal government is so screwed up that it is impossible to deal with its messes without illegal administrative action.  Because by the time that Congress could get around to fixing the problems, they would have got worse, much worse.

The current flap over student loans is a case in point. President Obama has signed an executive order limiting payments by student borrowers. Writes Amanda Paulson:

The memorandum he signed would, among other things, allow more borrowers to cap their student loan payments at 10 percent of their income. He also directed the government to renegotiate its contracts with federal loan servicers like Sallie Mae to improve services for borrowers.

After decades of subsidizing universities and offering university student grants and loans we have got to the point where the current generation of students is so indebted that it can't afford to get married and buy houses.  So the government proposes to forgive the loans that students have been encouraged to take out to finance their education.

No surprise, of course.  If you subsidize something you are going to get more of it. And colleges educating the subsidized students are going to increase their fees and their costs, because they can.  And the increasing cost of a college education is going to encourage politicians to "do something" to ease the difficulties that students experience in paying for college and then paying off their loans.

So President Obama finds that he has to act and "do something", because otherwise his party is going to get buried at the next election.

I've written that it's madness for students to take out loans to finance education because the whole point of a loan is to anticipate income.  In general in the loan business, if you can't show the income and you can't show proper collateral then you don't get the loan.  What student can anticipate their income for the next 20 years at age 18?  And then it's cruel to convert that loan into an crook equity deal where the government gets to take up to 10 percent of your income.  Talk about the road to serfdom.

So the current student loan system stinks, in theory and in practice.

Now President Obama, just in time for the November elections, proposes to limit student loan repayments to 10 percent of income.  He's already determined that students should have their loans forgiven after 20 years, or 10 years if they work for government.

(Yeah.  Where's the justice in that, given that government workers make 50-100 percent more than private sector workers for the same job?)

But the bigger issue is how to stop the government doing stupid things like subsidizing colleges and students and then compounding the error when things go south.  The Wall Street Journal reviews a book by a retired Yale Law professor Peter H. Schuck today: "Why Government Fails So Often."

To be successful, [Schuck] argues, a public policy has to get six things right: incentives, instruments, information, adaptability, credibility and management. The federal government tends to be bad at all of these.

Well yeah, whatever all that pompous stuff actually means.  Conservatives would just say that it's impossible for government to do these six things, for any program.  Because Hayek.

But I am a radical simplifier, and I think it all boils down to this.  Government is force and the only thing the government knows how to do is declare war and bash its enemy over the head.  If it isn't a war then government shouldn't be doing it.

On that view it is obvious that the government has no business in the student loan business.  Who or what, after all, is it fighting against?  Ignorance?  Poverty?  Greedy bankers?  Pusillanimous college administrators?  Early marriage?  Big families?

Well, the current student loan debt is said to be up there are $1 trillion.  It is clear that things are going to get worse before they get better.

And there's an even bigger question than the incompetence of government and President's illegal government by phone and pen.  It is this.

When are liberals going to cry uncle on the utter failure of big government, this metastasizing cancer on the American body politic?

Exactly.  They will cry uncle when big government really starts to bite into liberal lives.  And they will blame the Koch brothers.  Or the greedy bankers.  Or the racist white working class.  Or corporate greed.

Anti-Piketty: He Even Gets "Père Goriot" Wrong

The liberal sensation of the spring has been Thomas Piketty's Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century in which the good French professor brandishes Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac at us in order to prove that r > g and the rich will go on getting richer and the poor poorer unless.

Unless we set up a cadaster of global wealth to make every rich person completely transparent, set up confiscatory income tax rates on the 1% and tax them 1-2% of their wealth every year.  What could go wrong?

Otherwise we'll find ourselves back in the extreme rentier income inequality so richly evoked by the novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac.

Of course Piketty's phony-baloney good-time rock and roll inequality of r > g, that the rate of return on capital is always bigger than the rate of growth, is nonsense.  First, because a major component of the rate of return on capital is simply time preference, that you must pay people not to spend their money on present goods.  Second, because a lot of capital is needed just to maintain the existing stock of capital before it can be used to create growth.

But the other argument, that the rich will keep getting richer and the poor poorer, unless... is also phoney-baloney good time rock and roll too.  At least according to Balzac.

So let's get back to Balzac, and particularly Père Goriot, the novel that Piketty wants us to accept as a moral of the grossly unjust rentier society. (Rentier means a holder of French government bonds, or rentes). I'd seen Père Goriot as a TV serial decades ago, but had never read it.  Now I have.

The term "Père" is meant to be patronizing, as we would say "old man Goriot" or "Geezer Goriot."  But the gravamen of the novel has nothing to do with the inevitable rich getting richer.  It is about the folly of people that are ready to spend away their entire fortunes to get a leg up in the social world of beautiful women, fashionable salons and the well-connected.

Both Goriot, impoverished businessman, and Eugène de Rastignac, an impoverished young noblemen, think nothing of money except as a leg up into the world of the beautiful people.  Goriot had a flourishing business as a grain merchant; he'd started up using revolutionary connections in the 1790s and he used the fortune he'd accumulated to launch his girls into high society with big dowries.  Then he sold the business to save his daughters the embarrassment of having a father in "trade."  Then he gave away the proceeds of the business sale to provide his daughters with cash to buy stuff.

Rastignac arrives in Paris with an introduction to a wealthy relative, and soon sees that he'll need money to cut a dash in high society, so he sends to his mother and sisters for money.  Then he is given a lesson in social climbing by Vautrin, a man in the criminal underworld: marry the rich young heiress, says Vautrin.   Nobody in the Paris of 1819 seems to have any idea of actually working for a living, except Goriot, who has an idea for making pasta in Russia.

The inescapable moral of Père Goriot is that money runs through peoples' hands like water, because they are not really interested in money, but in the things that money can buy.  And they are perfectly content to spend today's money on the hope of social climbing tomorrow.

So Piketty has got it completely wrong.  The best way to lighten the load of the rich is not to tax them out of their gourds but to encourage them to spend money on social climbing.  And think of all the jobs that creates for tailors, hatters, dressmakers, milliners, coachmen, farriers, stables, and on and on.  Not to mention professors with cunning ideas to increase the power of government.

The Party of the Ruling Class

How do we deal with the meme that sank Mitt Romney, the idea that he was an unfeeling rich man that didn't care about "people like me."  Mona Charen makes the point directly.

Many Republicans now recognize that they must propose reforms that speak to middle- and working-class voters, and shed their image as the party of the rich.

But what is it that makes the Republican Party the "party of the rich?"  Is it that the rich Koch Brothers push the Republican line?  Or that Mitt Romney laid off a union steelworker? Perhaps it's because the Republican Party does not rush in with a new program when people are hurting.



But it was George W. Bush who said: "when people are hurting, the government's gotta move."  And this was the guy that didn't care about New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina.



OK, so the Democratic Party is the Mommy Party that believes that you must rescue little Johnny from everyone of his escapades.  The Republican Party is the Daddy Party that believes that when Johnny goes off to college it's time for helicopter parents to fly back to the pad and let Johnny figure things out on his own.



But the Democrats still get a lot of mileage out of the "party of the rich" meme even though you and I know that most rich people -- especially 2nd generation liberal trustafarians, and certainly the ones living in the richest zip codes -- vote Democratic.  Of course they do.  Their mothers get them into selective colleges by hook or by crook and they come out as good conforming members of the ruling class.



William Tucker just went to a class reunion at his top-ranked New England college, and he was just about the only Republican voice there in a class that includes one Nobel prizewinner and one on the way. "All of my classmates have prospered to a degree that none of us would have anticipated when we were swilling beer and pulling all-nighters back in the day."

There’s a predictably high portion of doctors, lawyers, research scientists, and college professors, but also an uncommon number who seem to have stumbled into finance, almost inadvertently.

And they are all liberals.  Tucker attends breakout sessions where everyone agrees with the liberal agenda except him.

When I arrived around 9 a.m. an earnest group of about 50 classmates and their wives was already deeply engrossed in the question of how to save the nation’s spirit. This time the discussion was more unguarded. “We’ve got to make this non-partisan,” said one panelist. “We’ve got to get Republicans involved.” “Of course Republicans are wrong about everything but we’ve still got to make them feel like they’re a part of it,” said another. After another hour of this I stood up and said once again I disagreed with every word but didn’t want to take up people’s time. “No, tell us what you think,” they insisted. So I let loose.

Talk about a meeting of the ruling class!  You can't make this up.  Tucker tells the group to "several gasps of disapproval from wives in the audience" about "a small museum in Colorado" that spent two years getting regulatory approval to divert a stream to build a generator. I mean, you can't just let people run around diverting streams in Idaho, darling!



And they call the Republican Party the "party of the rich."



Now there's no doubt that if you called Tucker's classmates and their wives "the rich" to their faces they would be insulted and the wives would gasp.  They know they can't be the rich because they are Democrats and the Republican Party is the "party of the rich."



So what's the strategic thing to do?  It probably won't work to counterattack with "so's your father" stuff.  It doesn't matter that the Democratic Party is the party of the rich and the crony capitalists.  Frontal attacks tend to be very costly and end up achieving nothing.  See: World War I.



No, I suggest creating the meme that the Democratic Party is the "party of the ruling class," the people that won't let you alone, that want to boss you around about everything from stupid light bulbs to baking wedding cakes.



The point about the "party of the rich" meme is that liberals want ordinary people to think that Republicans are callous moneybags swilling martinis up at the country club that just "don't care about people like me."



The point about the "party of the ruling class" meme is that conservatives want ordinary people to think that liberals are bossy meddlers swilling Chardonnay up at the faculty lounge that won't leave you alone and insist on telling you how to live your life.  Everybody knows some stuck-up little academic Hitler that uses their teaching or administrative position to make life miserable for everyone around them.



I know.  Just one little meme isn't going to change the world.  But it's a start.

Bergdahl: Obamis Just Don't Understand Honor

Many conservatives are puzzling over why, just why, the Obama administration would get itself into such a mess over the Bergdahl prisoner exchange.  How could anyone treat Bergdahl's likely desertion as just a matter of missing a class on Monday?

The answer is simple.  It is honor.  Lefties don't understand honor, male or female.  And especially they don't understand military honor. The whole point of the left has been to expunge honor from the culture, except for the honor-among-thieves culture among lefties and community organizers.  Yeah.  It's one thing for Obama's Organizing for America buddies to "have his back."  But not for the rest of us.

If you want to understand the whole question of honor, a good place to start is James Bowman's Honor, A History. It comes down to this, writes Bowman:

 [T]he basic honor of the savage -- bravery for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of the popular culture that has done so much to efface it.

But it is not just the act of bravery that is important; it is the reputation for bravery.  And by bravery we mean the reputation for standing in line with your fellow kinsmen or fellow soldiers and not running away in the heat of battle.  In the Greek hoplite honor and bravery meant literally standing in the shield line and not breaking away, for victory in hoplite battle usually went to the side whose shield wall collapsed last.

That is where the duel comes in.  The aristocratic duel is a corruption of the code of honor.  It goes beyond the idea that my deeds of courage speak for themselves; it says if that you attack my reputation for bravery I will kill you.

In the development of the modern nation state the idea of honor developed from bravery among kinsmen to bravery among hoplite soldiers to bravery in the army of the nation state.  That is why the bravery of Sergeant York in World War I is such a big deal and why the cowardice of Private Eddie Slovik in World War II was such a big deal.

And that's why the apparent desertion of Sgt. Bergdahl is such a big deal to the men and women in the armed forces.  It's about their loyalty to to their buddies, then their unit, and finally the United States.  That is the code of honor in the US armed forces.

Obama & Co. don't understand that because they have a different code of honor.  It is not to family, not to nation.  It is to the movement, the progressive movement, or whatever the current left-wing thing is at the time.

Obama & Co., with Hollywood, celebrate the anti-hero who makes a point of declaring that he does not owe loyalty to family or to his city or his nation.  So to them Sgt. Bergdahl's hesitance about doing the army thing is only natural.  That's how Obama & Co. feel too.  Enough of this nationalist nonsense!  Peace and Justice!  And that's how the mainstream media seem to owe loyalty to Obama and his agenda rather than to the United States and the rule of law.  In their code, the United States and the military are rather shabby things.  And the constitution was drawn up by slave-owners.  What matters is to fight racism, sexism, and inequality.

Of course all along the Obamis have known that they need to bow to the national gods.  They must say that there is no blue America or red America, but just one exceptional America, and when their minds are focused by the need to win the election they can stay on message.

But they don't really believe a word of all that exceptionalism crap.  They just say it because they must.  Just as they know they must wear those stupid American flag pins.  Their loyalty and honor code is, we might suggest, the the honor code of the community organizer.  The loyalty and the celebrated acts of bravery are the acts to advance the banner of progressivism.  Like the UAW and the Battle of the Overpass.  Or the Movement against the Vietnam War.  Or the Battle for Women's Rights, or the Battle for Marriage Equality.

I would argue that the entire left-wing movement is really a crazed millennial cult.  That everything it does leads to a dead end, whether the economic dead end of communism, the free-stuff dead end of the welfare state, the reproductive dead end of feminism and homosexualism, the population dead end of environmentalism.

Actually, we've seen this before.  Rodney Stark has a name for our modernacademic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex.  He calls it upper-class asceticism.  It starts with Buddhism, and the young prince Gautama Siddhartha giving up his princedom, his wife and children, for a higher life.

Ring a bell does it?

According to liberal philosopher Charles Taylor the trick is to combine a commitment to human flourishing with a commitment to something higher.  So you can't reduce life just to human flourishing.  Nor can you reduce it to upper-class asceticism unless you are a liberal trustafarian.

But back on Earth our liberal masters are screwing up royally, because they have selected themselves into an upper-class ascetic cult and are trying to force-feed the rest of us on their divine manna from heaven.  So they wrong-foot themselves again and again, and sooner or later the American people are going to take notice.

The folks that really need to take notice are the millennials, because they are the folks getting most royally screwed by the Obama doctrine.  But first they have to unlearn everything they learned from their liberal unionized teachers from K through grad school.

And the folks that will struggle hardest with that will be millennial women.  Nothing personal, but my life experience is that women actually believe what they have been taught, whereas men tend to think that the whole school thing is a joke.