Hobby Lobby and the Liberal Project

Just in case you are worried that the Supreme Court's Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. decision is the end of the world as we know it, I have good news.  It isn't the end of the world.  The Supreme Court has said that the government can't force a closely-held corporation to offer to its employees health insurance that includes abortifacients.  That's all.

Hey, no problem.  The answer is to pay for abortifacients directly through government grants and spending.  Or, according to Ben Domenech, by making regular birth control pills "over the counter" drugs instead of prescription drugs as at present.

My local GOP guys understand that, storm-in-a-teacup as the Hobby Lobby decision may be, the Dems intend to use it for another Big Push in their War on Women offensive.  So they've sent me an email excoriating the cheap rhetoric of the lefties:

This dishonest and inaccurate rhetoric shows that the Democrats are always playing politics - in no way does the Supreme Court decision deny women access to birth control.  Rather, the Court has ruled that the government cannot force business owners to violate their religious beliefs.

So the political argument will be "access to birth control" vs. "violate... religious beliefs."

I suppose that the bottom line is that when the Dems are in the White House we are going to get liberals legislating liberal morality on the rest of us.  To me as a libertarian conservative it amounts to dressing up the free-stuff politics of the robber gang in the modest garments of fairness and rights.

And when the GOP is in the White House you'll get attempts to legislate the religion of the folks I call the People of the Responsible Self.

Why do politicians keep legislating morality? Because even though government is force, politicians still like to feel they are doing God's work.  Or history's work.

And that gets us back to the bigger issue.  Every ruling class is in the business of tossing out free stuff to its supporters; that's how it stays in business.  And since giving out free stuff usually starts out as robbery, it has to dress up its robbery in the decent drapery of religion.

If conservatives don't like that then we have to develop a civil religion that makes a scandal out of most of the free stuff that government gives out.  For instance we could start by pointing out how the low-interest Keynesian policy at the Fed is basically screwing the American middle class.  We could then say that free education is screwing the poor, because the schools for the poor are lousy.  Then we could go onto health care and point out that the scandal of the VA and Medicaid are not due to nasty bureaucrats but baked into the design of any centralized administrative program.

But people still like that free stuff.  So there will always be liberals and their government programs.

What Went Wrong: Let's Make It Harder to Hike Spending

To fix what went wrong we are going to have to change the culture from freeloading and buying votes to a culture of individual responsibility, as the previous installment argued. (Beginning of series here.)

But what about the medium term?  The answer comes from the problem described by John C. Goodman in his description of the Obamacare auction process:  Writes James V. DeLong:

Health expert John Goodman called Obamacare “a Rube Goldberg nightmare,” written “to appease every single Democratic constituency and every major special interest group.”  The process was like “going around a table asking each group what is the one thing they must have in order to support the legislation — the insurance companies, the drug companies, the hospitals, the labor unions, AMA, AARP, etc., [with] no one making sure that all the separate demands fit together in a sensible way.” 

Sound familiar to you?  It does to me.  James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock worked out the science of this half a century ago in The Calculus of Consent.  Talk about settled science!  In any voting system, they found, the proponents of a measure to spend public funds usually discover that they don't have enough votes for passage.  The reason is quite simple: apart from the proponents the rest of the voting population don't see any benefit for them in the proposal.  So the proponents of the measure have to buy the votes they need for passage from some of the voters that don't see any benefit for themselves.

Right at the end of The Calculus of Consent, after considering every voting system under the sun, Buchanan and Tullock finally present the voting system of unanimous consent, the startling idea that if government is going to do anything it ought to be forced to get the support of everyone that will be affected by the measure. Unanimous consent is great, according to Buchanan and Tullock, because it forces the proponents to pay for the costs that the opponents would be forced to submit to as the price of passing the proposal.  Can you spell J-U-S-T-I-C-E?

So here's the medium-term strategy for conservatives and Republicans.  If Congress wants to pass a measure to increase force – from tax increases to entitlement increases – then it should need a supermajority in both houses to pass legislation.  If Congress wants to reduce force, with tax cuts or deregulation, why then the maximum needed should be a bare majority.  Wait: here's a better idea.  A measure to reduce taxes or government compulsion should only require a simple majority vote of either house of Congress, subject only to the combined veto of the president and a supermajority of the other house.

Hey liberals!  If you are looking for an example of true right-wing extremism to sink your teeth into, you just read it.

We conservative responsible individualists are simple folk.  All we want is to stop the cruel and unjust externalities of free-stuff politics, and the way to do that is by changing the rules of the game to make it more difficult to buy votes and play redistribution.

We know that the world has plenty of genuine victims, and we feel genuine compassion about real suffering.  But if you professional victims want some cool benefit, then you and your patrons ought to have to pay for it.  Remember this: there is nothing in the world stopping sensitive and compassionate people from freely spending their own money to relieve the pain of genuine victims.

There are two ways of making your way in the world.  One way is the way of the predator that takes what he wants by force.  The other way is the human way of barter and exchange, of figuring out how to make some product or service that other people want and exchange it for something you want, with each human figuring out how to serve other people is a node in the buzzing network of the collective mind.

All we conservatives are saying is that if we want to fix what has gone wrong in America, the answer can be found by accentuating the positive of the collective mind, and eliminating the negative of force and its collective mindlessness.

And don't mess with Mr. In Between!

What Went Wrong: Getting to a Solution

For those of us that believe in individual responsibility and the free collective mind, we've got to get out of the freeloader culture and its collective mindlessness.  That's what we argued in the previous part of this series. (Beginning of series here.)

It is the great question that confronts our society in the second decade of the 21st century.  Shall we go further and further on the current path towards a society of complete administrative supervision, what I call collective mindlessness?  Or shall we change course and reduce the weight of government and reanimate our collective mind.

You've got to accentuate the positive. Eliminate the negative. And latch on to the affirmative. Don't mess with Mister In-Between. Rare words, brave world!  But what do we actually do?  The answer is obvious: we eliminate the negative boat anchor of politically mandated freeloading and its collective mindlessness.  We accentuate the positive flourishing of the collective mind.

But how?  How can we deal with the vice that has utterly metastasized itself throughout modern politics, the cancer of votes for free stuff?

In a recent piece for The American James V. DeLong confirms this analysis by describing the current political regime in the United States.  Each party must appeal to the “values and concerns” or “V&C” of a broad swath of voters but must also get money and influence from elites and special interests.

The system gives a big edge to the Democrats, who have no particular principles except for more government and more money to deserving groups. These principles are congruent with the interests of the dependent classes, the bureaucracies that serve them, the public and private elites who operate the system, an academia dependent on federal money, and many corporate looters.

DeLong goes on the show the problem that Republicans and conservatives have dealing with this system.

The Republicans have a harder time with the imperative to appeal to both the broad base of V&C voters and special interests. On taxes, the Republicans have made the link between benefits for targeted groups and pro bono publico, arguing that reductions for the rich and upper middle class prove the party’s dedication to the interests of working people, and it is not surprising that tax-cut rhetoric has a long chapter in the Republican catechism.

For conservatives, the definition of V&C has evolved. Rather than the usual jobs, education, and so on, their V&C concerns go deeper and now include dedication to free markets, light regulation, individual autonomy, respect for conscience, refusal to privilege victimhood, and the rule of law. These do not translate well into visible benefits for individuals, firms, or industries, and thus do not keep the vital dollars flowing into the coffers of the party, the independent groups, and the K Street lobbying firms where old donkeys and elephants go to get rich.

In other words, the Democratic voters and interests are united in getting (voters) and furnishing (interests) more stuff for “deserving groups.”  Republican voters are merely interested in values and concerns around the question of individual responsibility and rights and therefore aren't offering “more stuff” for anyone, not for voters, not for special interests.  Obviously the Republican voters can't get what they want unless their values and concerns become more universal, or unless the administrative state fails to deliver on its free stuff for the dependent classes and the middle-man elites.

You can see what is going on here.  Right now, in the United States divided about 50-50 between the two parties, we have a stalemate between the two parties.  The Democratic voter V&C plus the bureaucracy-elite-academia-crony looters are about equal to a Republican voter V&C that's warring with its own RINO elite.

The solution is obvious.  Republicans and conservatives must reduce the legitimacy of the free-stuff-for-victims V&C and the hall pass that the  bureaucracy-elite-academia-crony looters get from supporting the agenda of free stuff for victims.  Short term, Republicans can win by picking up some independent voters that are just annoyed by the failures of the Democratic ruling class and think it is Time for a Change.  But long term we are talking about religion and faith.  We must reduce the faith that people have in the ruling elite, and the tribal instinct that the village big man, aka the ruling class, can deliver the free stuff people have come to expect not just as a mess of pottage but as a birthright.

Short term, we can bid for the independents; long-term, we must change the culture from freeloading to responsibility.  But what about the medium term? What can we do to limit the damage from the springtime for freeloaders that has resulted from the politics of the authoritarian welfare state?

That's what we'll look at in the next installment of this series.

What Went Wrong: Collective Mind or Collective Mindlessness?

We've been looking at what went wrong, pre and post Obama, at the tactical and strategic political level.  (Beginning of series here.) Now let's look at the decisive point: do we believe in collective mind or collective mindlessness?

The decisive character of humans when compared against the rest of Nature is that we can understand and practice barter and exchange.  We have the instinct to exchange something we value for something we value more.  From this simple idea comes the whole impossibly complex market economy and global exchange system.  Ships are sailing the seas, trains are rumbling over the fruited plan, people are working away, and nobody is in charge.  The whole thing works because people are willing to exchange.  They are willing to exchange a particular good for money, their time for money, and their money for food and shelter and products and services.  There is a name for this amazing phenomenon: the collective mind.

But government is different.  Government is mechanics.  Government is a Newtonian opposition of forces not an exchange of voluntary services.  Government is the seizing of wealth and income as the price of defending people against enemies.  Government says you must pay payroll taxes if you want to work at a job; government says you must not get on an airplane without submitting to government's security theater.  You could say that there is a word for this phenomenon: collectivism, but really it is collective mindlessness, the thuggery of the clunking fist.

You can see now where we have been going wrong, and where the Obama administration has been going wrong in spades.  We have been steadily increasing the amount of government in America and reducing the amount of free cooperative exchange.  We have been increasing the amount of collective mindlessness at the cost of shrinking the collective mind.  And for what?  To make the ruling class feel good about itself.

So we must change, and we must start to change today.  But there is a problem.  Nobody wants to give up a dime of their free stuff.  Grandmothers say things like: “'they' better not cut my Medicare.”  Seniors say: “I paid for my Social Security with my taxes.”  And so politicians dare not touch the sacred “entitlements,” the third rail of American politics.  Probably we cannot reform entitlements short of total government meltdown.  We should not be hard on our fellow citizens for their dog-in-the-manger attitude; our problem is not just a question of selfish freeloaders wanting to keep their free stuff.  The modern welfare state panders to the eternal yearning in every human heart to escape the contingency of human life, to obtain if not eternal life, at least a job for life, or a pension for life, or health-care for life.  But, of course, the person that wants politicians to give him a pension for life is not looking at the fact that he is exchanging his birthright for a mess of pottage.  He does not understand that he is putting his hands within the hands of his liege lord and surrendering his freedom and his dignity as a free person for three squares a day, as the English peasant could do a millennium ago.

The freeloader forgets that when he places his hands within the hands of his liege lord, whether warrior noble or The One who will bring Hope and Change, he is transferring the ownership of risk in his life, for good or ill, from himself to his lord.  And that risk has a price, not just in money but in human freedom and dignity.

Not everyone wants a life of subservience and serfdom.  Some people say: I don't want that deal.  I don't want to live in subordination to a lordly liberal ruling class, and I wouldn't want it even if liberals were really as sensitive and compassionate as they imagine themselves to be.  I want freedom and the responsibility that goes with it.  I want the monkey on my back, not on the government's back.  I want the right to choose how to make my own contribution to society and take the consequences rather than dutifully follow the dictates of my bureaucratic supervisor or my precinct captain who, I've noticed, isn't very sharp at anything except currying favor with his political bosses and playing favorites with his subordinates.

But is there any way that the responsible individuals can influence our politics, or are they doomed, doomed to be overrun by freeloaders and corporate looters?  See the next installment in this series.

What Went Wrong: Bad Political Philosophy

Yesterday we looked at the foolish politics of liberals, punching through major legislation on a partisan vote, running a permanent campaign as though Americans were at war with each other.  (Beginning of series here.) But now we look at the foolish philosophy at the bottom of it.

The difference between a society and a bureaucracy or army ought to be obvious. A bureaucracy is a goal-oriented organization. Like an army it has simple, strategic goals. It is an instrument to collect taxes, like the IRS, or to coordinate health care programs, like the federal Department of Health and Human Services. But a society is different, because society is a work in progress. The truth is we do not know what a society is for, just as we don't know what humans are for, or the Earth, or the Solar System, or the Universe. The closest we can come is in vague words about the good society like “human flourishing” and “something higher than just material prosperity.” People disagree earnestly and deeply about what a good society is, and even when they agree about the nature of the good society they still disagree about how to get there.

So how can a president say to his defeated opponents: “we won?” How can we build a good society in the United States when the victor in the latest round of political fisticuffs says, in so many words: “screw you, loser?” He can only say it if he is a fool.

Moreover, how can a political party advance the cause of “human flourishing” with a comprehensive and mandatory administrative program like Obamacare, not to mention all the other big entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare? Administration and bureaucracy kill human flourishing; they pave over paradise and make it a parking lot. The whole point of administration and bureaucracy is to prevent autonomous activity and replace it with rigid rules. The whole point of life and liberty is that you don't know what is coming up next. The world will probably throw you a curve ball and you will have to adapt. How do you adapt to change when the whole of e.g., health care, is rigidly defined by legislation, bureaucracy, and entitlement whether or not the resources are there to deliver? When the world changes, how long does it take your activists, your politicians, your legislation, you bureaucrats, your regulations to adapt and catch up? Actually we know. With great national programs it is only possible to do political reform once in a generation, if that.

Our great national problem is that our ruling class, in order to advance its paltry idea of an administrative state and implement its elite fantasy of top-down springtime for rulers, has reduced the people of the United States to the pathetic status of freeloaders and foragers. To win the next election and the mandate to enact the next tranche of administrative authoritarianism the rulers must again and again bribe the voters with the promise of some free stuff. Hey kids: more student debt! Hey uninsured: super-subsidized health insurance! Hey illegals: amnesty! Hey veterans: free health care for life! But what actually happens? Students get buried in debt, because a twenty-year-old has no clue what kind of income he'll earn after college. The uninsured get lured into expensive insurance that doesn't help them because the uninsured don't need health insurance, not having any assets; they just need a bit of help with their health-care bills. Kids from Central America get lured to the border. Vets find that the free health care has a real cost: waiting lists and second-rate service.

Golly, who could have seen all that coming?  Evidently our educated ruling class could not.

So what do we do about all this?  Stay tuned for the next exciting installment.

What Went Wrong: Drilling Down

We just looked at the mess of what has gone wrong in America in recent years.  Now let's drill down a little.

That's all very nice, but let's get back to the question. What went wrong? I will tell you. And the answer dwells in the difference between the understanding of government as force, the necessary force to defend against enemies, and the understanding of society as a voluntary consensus, an unconscious organism of human cooperation.

When a presidential candidate wins a presidential election with his party we can think of him winning a civil war, but with ballots not bullets (actually ballot is the same word as bullet). Now the question is: after the bullets are counted, what happens next? Do the victorious president and his party continue to fight à outrance, as the French say? Or do they stop the war and follow the advice of Winston Churchill: “in victory, magnanimity?”

Yeah. When the president sends the bust of Churchill back to the Brits it does kinda send a message.

The fact is that President Obama and his party decided to go all out and exploit their 2008 victory to the uttermost limit. This was symbolized by the passage of Obamacare, in which the Obamis decided to pass their Affordable Care Act, after losing their filibuster-proof Senate to Scott Brown, by legislative shenanigans. Yeay! That'll teach those racist-sexist-homophobes!

But the Irish-American Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said years ago that you always want to pass a big thing like Obamacare by a 70-30 majority in the US Senate. You need to manufacture, at very least, the appearance of consensus. Why? Because in the end, you must obtain the consent of the governed for your legislation. If you win merely by powering over the opposition you have not obtained the consent of the governed; you have merely provokeed a head of rebellion.

Obtaining the consent of the governed doesn't just mean doing big things right like passing your landmark legislation with a 70-30 bipartisan vote in the US Senate. It means doing little things right, like obeying the law, talking to the leaders of the opposition and buttering up the barons of Congress, and speaking kindly to people that will never vote for you in a hundred years. Why? Because it quiets the fears of your opponents.

If we recognize politics as “civil war by other means” then we understand the truth that politics is a kind of shadow boxing, a ritual combat in which we reenact on the stage of the political theater what could, in another time and another way, be enacted in the real combat in a real civil war. You get the feeling that the president and his people just do not understand that they are playing with fire when they talk of “punching back twice as hard” and when they keep the president's campaign organization fully mobilized between elections. Liberals ought to understand that: during the Cold War they were quick to note the provocation that a big defense budget or offensive nuclear weapons represented to the rest of the world. If you are mobilized for political war between elections then you are communicating that you mean to crush your political opposition without mercy. You are telling the opposition that you just might stage some kind of a surprise attack while they are out to lunch. What sort of a message does that send to your political opposition?

But is that all that went wrong? Did our liberal friends just make a mistake on tactics, playing the stupid jerk when august maturity was wanted? Alas no. Because now we come to the real problem with today's America. It is the folly of the administrative state, the idea that human society could be or should be organized on the principle of the modern army or the national bureaucracy.

But that's for the next installment.

The Way Forward: What Went Wrong

By now nearly everyone in America senses that something has gone wrong, that somehow, after the promise of Hope and Change in the maelstrom of the Crash of 2008, things in America are going from bad to worse.

What is it?  What has gone wrong?  Why did President Obama's promise of an end to the mistakes and the corruption of the Bush years, an end to partisanship and polarization not turn America around?  Why has it seemed to go from bad to worse?

Is it because the president has tried to implement “fundamental change” when fundamental change wasn't needed?  Or did he not go far enough?  Perhaps the problem is that he has abandoned the good old All American Way for a farrago of untried and untested ideas.  Could it be that underneath the comforting assurance of the president's rhetoric hides a Marxist fanatic that wants to destroy America before rebuilding it as a neo-Marxist utopia?  Maybe the failure is nothing more than good old All American political corruption, the Chicago Way in black-face.

You'll be frustrated to learn that the answer is None of the Above.  Our problem here in America is not a specific problem but a generic problem, an old problem; perhaps it is the oldest problem in human government.  Our problem is not merely the good old human evil of bad government, or even worse, good old bad government incompetently conducted, but merely good old human folly, playing in endless repeat.  It is the problem of the ruling class that forgot what government is for.  Government is not instituted among men for the ruling class to indulge itself with glorious visions and pet programs, to admire itself in the mirror and reward its friends and punish its enemies, to legislate its evolved morality over the cramped visions of the great unwashed.

No, government must cringe and recoil before such self-indulgence or it is rubbish.  Government must sail, with ears deaf to the song of the Sirens of power, between the Scylla of defending its people against enemies and the Charybdis of free human flourishing.  Or, in left-wing terms, we must defend the road to enlightenment and liberation from exploitation and injustice, and that means defending our glorious vision of a world of peace and justice from the power of government, any government, as much as the power of corporations and the rich and powerful.

Yeah.  Pity the poor schmuck who thinks that the road to the future is paved with government programs, in other words with force. Because even if you delude yourself into thinking that government is nothing more than the slightly doddery kindliness of an absent-minded librarian that listens to NPR, it is still true that government is force.  As the saying goes: all power corrupts librarians, but absolute power corrupts librarians absolutely.

But if the path to the future is not paved with government programs and defended by force, how shall we find it?

Link to the next post in this series as we drill down.