"I Will Defend Americans from the Bullies"

I am trying to think how the next Republican nominee for President of the United States can tell the ordinary American people that he is on their side.

And that's how I came up with this: "If you elect me as your President," my candidate will say, "I will defend the ordinary American, not the just educated elite, not just the unfortunate that need the help of government, not just the well-connected businessman, but the ordinary American people that obey the law, that go to work, that follow the rules.  And I will defend them from bullies, foreign and domestic.  I am talking not just about foreign powers and local thugs.  I am talking about government officials that abuse their powers and call ordinary Americans potty names, and I am talking about the All-American moral bully."

"Men like power and will seize it if they can." That's straight from the horse's mouth, Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct. Next sentence: "But if they can't rule, their next preference is that no one rule over them."

No kidding!  Hey, I get it!  Let's adapt the sound bite for the Obama Age. "Liberals like bullying, and will bully if they can get away with it.  But Americans hate being ordered around, and sooner or later they rise up and kick the bullies in the keister."

I have no idea, no idea in the world, what "keister" means, but if Ronald Reagan used it, it's good enough for me.

The point is, of course, that liberals have developed, since Marx in the 1840s, a cunning trick for justifying their bullying.  They insist that all the bullying is in a good cause, helping the helpless.  First it was the working class that was being worked to death in the mines and the factories, and liberals had to help them. (Actually, according to modern analysts, the workers were getting a premium wage, for the times, in those mines and factories; that's why they migrated to the city in their millions. Duh!)

But once the working class got on its feet and started voting Republican, the lefties needed a new gig, and they found it with advocating for minorities and women.  Then it was gays.

In a long post, Alistair Roberts puts a name to this politics.  It is the politics of taking offence.  If you don't agree with the advocate of minorities you are a racist and a hater.  If you don't agree with the advocate of women you are a sexist and a rape enabler.  If you don't agree with government benefits for the workers you want children to starve.

The person that benefits most from this politics is the advocate of the persons "supposed to be offended."

The ‘subject supposed to be offended’ is especially powerful as a construction as it can include more empowered and privileged people in the offence game. In fact, the power of the culture of offence arguably owes more to this ‘subject supposed to be offended’ than to anything else. There are few people more zealous in offence-taking and outrage-making than persons doing so on behalf of the ‘subject supposed to be offended’. Few people who actually stand in a position to be personally hurt display anything approaching the degree of offence or passion for political correctness that the person taking offence on behalf of this posited individual can. Such persons regard themselves as sensitive and caring protectors of the weak and oppressed. Offence-taking and outrage-making is not a mere prerogative for them, but is a noble duty and calling. The more of an outrage they create on others’ behalf, the more virtuous they feel.

Amazing how that rings true!  But Roberts points out that the politics of taking offence does not just benefit the activist.  It has another effect; it can hurt the person "supposed to be offended." He quotes a couple of feminists that are concerned about the negative effects of Women's Studies on its students.

No doubt there were students who gained confidence and a sense of belonging from the sharing, caring, and calls to empowerment that pervaded feminist pedagogy. But we found that others felt excluded by the strict enforcement of whatever the prevailing feminist norms happened to be. And those who did fit in were taking on a worldview that militated against anything but a life as a feminist activist – and this by design. It is right for women to be alerted to the possibility of rape and violent assault and apprised of methods of prevention and legal recourse. But if such topics are to be discussed in a classroom setting, they must be dealt with carefully and analyzed as a complex social issue using the tools of social science. All too often the definitions and doctrines espoused within Women’s Studies seemed calculated merely to make women feel besieged. Their sensitivities were being sharpened to such an edge that some were turned into relentless grievance collectors or rendered too suspicious to function in the workaday world outside of Women’s Studies and were left with few possible roles in life beyond that of angry feminists.

Now the politics of "taking offence" is often called post-modern or multicultural, as though it is something more modern than modernism.  But viewed through Roberts' lens you can see that it is distinctly pre-modern.  And indeed this is true of the whole Left project.  It seeks to re-feudalize, or at a minimum, maintain feudal social relations for people struggling with adapting their lives to the ways of the city and the public square. That's when the Left rushes in and says: We will protect you from all this nastiness. The Left's agenda is not to ease the adjustment from feudal collectivism to modern responsible individualism.  It seeks to maintain pre-modern collective structures, or even reintroduce them.

When feudalism broke down in China about 500 AD, the Chinese people became individuals within families.  There was no longer any great lord to take care of them: they were on their own.  The Chinese people responded to this challenge by becoming the world's hardest workers.  If you worked hard you could buy land and distribute it to your sons.  Without enough land to support a family, your sons would have to sell their land and would regress into becoming hired laborers and would never marry and have children.  Social Darwinism, if you like, avant la lettre.

A related thing happened in Europe when feudalism broke down.  People became individuals, responsible for their own lives.  In Britain they responded to the challenge by kicking the kids out of the house at puberty; they became apprentices or domestic servants.  If the kids could figure out a way to earn a decent living they could afford to marry and reproduce.

Our friends on the Left like to call this event a cruel and anti-social disaster.  They have a point; but the change is also clearly the parent of today's growing economy.  As a serf, you might as well ease off on the work department, because hard work isn't going to get you anywhere.  But under individualism, hard work does make a difference.

Just to make the point clear.  In last two hundred years, in those areas of the world that allowed economic individualism to flourish, the daily income of ordinary people has gone from about $1-3 per day to $100 per day.  The average poor person in the US today has air conditioning.

Individualism is hard, as longshoreman Eric Hoffer admits in The Ordeal of Change.  The modern worker works hard because he has to. But he reckons that there really are only two choices for a society if the work is to get done.  Either the worker takes on the burden of supporting himself on his own back, or he works at the direction of a master, who really then amounts to a slave-master.

And we have seen how things work out when the state takes on the responsibility of getting the work done.  It has made the masters of the old slave plantations look like pikers.

Last week I watched a YouTube video of investment guru Peter Schiff at Occupy Wall Street in 2011. He was telling the Occupiers that government was their problem, not Wall Street, although he agreed that Wall Street was complicit in the whole mess.  But the protesters mostly would have none of it.  What they wanted was a government with a gun to the head of Wall Street and a gun to the head of their employer.  They wanted force, because that was the only thing they understood.

That is the basic political philosophy of the Left.  They believe, starting before Marx, that the only thing that will yield prosperity for the working man is for a new class of revolutionaries to get political power and hold a gun to the head of the titans of business.  Doesn't matter whether it's a labor union striking the greedy bosses, or government legislating wages and hours and safety and benefits.  They don't believe that the market delivers those benefits.  They think that only political force can do it.

Let's say that the factory owners of the Industrial Revolution were bullies.  They knew they had power over the workers and they exploited it. So what about union bosses?  You don't think that union bosses take advantage of the workers?  What about political bosses?  You don't think they take advantage of their power over business to exploit them and to shake down business for money in return for favors in the practice we call crony capitalism?

I say: Sure, let's come down like a ton of bricks on corporate bullies.  But let's level the playing field.  Let's ride herd on union bosses, as the Obama administration does not do. Let's ride herd on crony corporate public-private partnerships as the Obama administration does not do.  Let's ride hard on proud federal bureaucrats that use potty language to describe opposition activists. That is the minimum that we expect from the next Republican president.

But now we have a new kind of bully.  Let's call him the activist bully, and let's go back to Alistair Roberts and his discussion of the offence culture and the person leading and representing the "subject supposed to be offended."

One of the effects of the ‘subject supposed to be offended’ is a sort of competitive offence-taking on the part of certain persons in positions of power or influence. The most virtuous person is the person who is most successful in kicking up a fuss on behalf of the subject supposed to be offended. The accumulation of such virtue is generally fairly painless, but can win people great adulation, and a sense of moral superiority (which can conveniently serve as absolution for other faults). It is also a perfect way for officials to deflect attention away from other issues and to feel good about themselves. The temptations of this easily-won virtue are considerable, especially when the espousal of politically correct views can be sufficient to outweigh the personal vices of a life that demonstrates little evidence of a commitment to self-binding virtue.

I tell you, does that guy nail it, or what?

There surely is a place in this world for activists to lead the marginalized, the folks in this world that are getting a raw deal in the new individualist society where you have to shoulder the responsibility of organizing your own life. It's new; it's frightening; it takes a generation or two for people to learn. But the problem is that, in order to get on in the modern world, people need to get out of their collective silos and into the public square.  They need to measure themselves against the world and if they find themselves wanting, they need to do something about it.  Roberts again:

Strengths are developed as people refuse to pander to our weaknesses, viewing these weaknesses as obstacles that we both need and are sufficient to overcome. While we may not yet be prepared to face certain challenges, and need support and protection in such cases, we need to be pushed beyond our existing limits, to attain to new levels of independent strength.

You mean flush the positive self-esteem racket down the toilet?

Where can you find, in the system of left-wing activism, any process that actually encourages and leads people to develop strengths as individuals and to overcome their weaknesses?  The cycle of left-wing activism is: 1. Identify a marginalized community; 2. Show up and demand that injustices be addressed through government benefits; 4. Celebrate victory; 4. Head off to your next activism gig.  Emile Zola already had the activism game nailed a century ago and more in Germinal.

What we have seen, in the years of the Obama administration, is that these left-wing activists are not just hungry for the street power of leading peaceful protesters to demand justice and benefits.  They also want to bully and humiliate anyone that disagrees with them.  As culture and political warriors they understand that there is no high ground that can compete with the moral high ground.  And once you have captured the moral high ground you have your opponents at your mercy.  If people disagree with you then they must be a hater or a bigot.  Or a racist, sexist, and a homophobe.  And a fascist.  Of course a fascist.

There is something wrong with this.  Do you know what it is?  I will tell you.  These liberal bullies deny their opponents the right of moral agency.  They say: if you don't believe as I do then you are a bad person, a hater, a racist or a bigot, and you don't even deserve to stay in your job.

I say it is the job of government, especially a government with a First Amendment that says that there shall be no establishment of religion, to make sure that the people are defended not just against foreign invaders, not just against domestic criminals, but also against moral bullies.

And that is why I say that the next Republican that runs to become the Next President of the United States must run under this banner:

"I will defend the people of the United States against all bullies: against foreign princes and potentates; against domestic thugs and crooks; and against the most despicable of them all, the moral bullies that want to criminalize people for having the wrong opinions."

 I am not just blowing smoke here.  I think that it is a powerful message for the GOP nominee to make.  It gets around the difficulties of getting down to detail.  But it appeals to the millions of people in America who are frankly afraid today of saying something wrong, doing something wrong, and waking up to find that some left-wing activist has decided to make her career on exposing them as moral monsters.  And it stands on the unquestionable responsibility of any government, and that is defense against enemies, foreign and domestic.

I am not saying that we need a bunch of new laws about this. I am just saying we need a president who calls out people that deny their political opponents the right to believe in their own vision of America.  And not only that.  They deny their opponents the right to be wrong.

If there is one thing we have seen from President Obama it is that he doesn't accept the right of people to disagree with him.  Republicans that disagree with Obama are apparently all cynical and playing politics.  Well, of course they are: they are politicians.  But they also fundamentally disagree with his political agenda and they have a right, under our system, to disagree with the president and to push that agenda to their best ability and appeal to the American people to support them.

I can't predict the future, but I have an instinct that a president that called out the bullies would find himself a very popular man.  Of course he'd have to call out a conservative or two, but this would be an opportunity for a bit of moral discourse.  I can see liberals calling for the head of some conservative and the president saying, in a Reaganesque way with a dip of the head: "Well, he was a bit forthright, but you media mavens will recall that my problem is with moral bullies that deny the opposition the right to moral standing.  I don't think that Ron Righty's comment violated that standard."

Do you see how this approach trumps the left's game of grabbing the moral high ground with their politics of offence and then denying their opponents the right to disagree?

I'm going to be writing more about this.

Founding Principles for a New Age

The great question of our age is how to remain human in the white heat of technology.  And that means not just the white heat of techno gadgets but the systems that our technology has spawned.

Way back in the 19th century Marx wrote about this, in his riff on the two paradoxical forms of value that classical economics had thrown up.  There was use value and exchange value, yet how could you make sense of the fact that some things that were useful had a low exchange value and vice versa.

We found the answer to this in the marginal revolution of 1870.  The value of a commodity is what the marginal buyer will pay, today, but meanwhile Karl Marx made a scandal out of the classical theory of value.  He saw that use value was the old valuation of the face-to-face society of primitive communism, and exchange value was an abstract value of the modern bourgeois system and capitalism.

In our time the Marxian scandal has been domesticated by the neo-Marxist Jürgen Habermas.  In his world view the world is divided into system and lifeworld.  System is the rational domain of capitalism and administrative government.  Lifeworld is the face-to-face world of communicative action.  In the system the world runs by rules and decisions, up and down, buy and sell, right and wrong, dead or alive.  In the lifeworld it runs on human-to-human conversation that moves naturally towards consensus.

Marx's idea was to save the world from system by a revolutionary spasm to inaugurate the perfect realm of socialism, a vision retrieved from the fading memory of primitive communism.  The verdict on this sentiment has long since come in.  We cannot go back to a perfect world of social cooperation operating exclusively in the lifeworld.  We live in a world, for better or worse, of system and lifeworld.  The problem in this dual-reality world is the same as the one projected by the environmentalists.  How do we keep the system side from stomping the lifeworld side to death with its systematic power?

But that's not the only problem.  Despite its power the systems world is remarkably fragile.  Its powers can be demolished by carelessness or vengeful action from the lifeworld.  You can demolish the free-enterprise system with administrative regulation by the state.  You can demolish the administrative state by bulking it up with unsustainable entitlements.

Phone and Pen: End Game for Liberalism

The reason that President Obama resorts so much to illegal executive orders is that big government is now so big that it's impossible to legislate entirely from the legislative branch.

You do something like Obamacare and it's impossible to put all the details into a 2,000 page bill.  You have to be able to tweak it administratively by executive action.  Problem is that the constitution says that Congress gets to write the laws.

Or, as Scott Johnson writes in a review of Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful?

The practice of rule by decree is of dubious constitutionality, to say the least, and Obama is extending it to the breaking point. While of dubious constitutionality, the practice is not without precedent. The precedent, however, is the prerogative power claimed in the past by the British king. It is the power against which the British revolted in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and against which we revolted in 1776.

See the point?  It was precisely against administrative law that we rebelled back in the old days.  So how do we get today and President Obama recklessly ruling by decree?  According to Professor Hamburger it started with the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887, got a big boost in the New Deal, and triumphed with the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946.

But why?  How come the ICC, the New Deal? The answer is: that's what liberals wanted.  The educated New Class that came into its own in the 19th century wanted to rule, in detail.  It wanted to supervise children's education, the terms of employment, commerce, advertising, racial percentages, everything.

The problem is that you can't do that with a small government and a legislature.  You need battalions of rulemakers dealing with the intricate problems that arise in any human endeavor.  The bandwidth you need to take care of all the contingencies just can't be provided by a committee of 535 politicians and their staffers.

It can't be done by battalions of rulemakers either.  Because Hayek.  But that's another story.

Common sense tells you that things would get worse as time goes by, as the thicket of regulations grows and as the memory of old days, when law was legislative law, grows dim.  Also, the government leaders are forced into more and more desperate work-arounds as the tangle of administrative law grows and interferes with the smooth running of the economy and society.

Obamacare is the poster boy for all this.  It was a law written behind closed doors.  And then it was passed in a hurry in draft form because Scott Brown's election to the Senate broke the Democrats' filibuster-proof majority.  The result is that the president has been forced to break the law in order to save the law.  He has needed to issue all kinds of administrative decisions to prevent Obamacare from collapsing under its own weight.

There's something else going on too.  Liberalism is old and it is losing legitimacy.  The things it wants to do -- Obamacare, marriage equality, green energy -- are minority or fringe concerns.  It is no longer offering -- Wow! -- free education for Our Children or health care for Our Seniors.  Most people have health insurance.  Most people are heterosexual.  Most people want cheap energy.  In order to get their agenda implemented, liberals have more and more relied on administrative dodges, because they can't get their agenda passed the honest way.

Think of corporate executives fiddling with the numbers when they don't hit their projections. It usually doesn't end well.

Self-obsessed with their own agenda, liberals don't seem to have thought about the message they are sending out to the rest of America.  They should think back to the days of the 17th century; they should recall the rage over the tax on tea (which was a crony capitalist deal to protect a crony capitalist monopoly, the East India Company).

The whole rigmarole of parliaments and legislatures is a cunning dodge to hide the mailed fist of government in a velvet glove.  When Congress passes a bill and the president signs it there is an aura of consensus: the nation has decided.  In fact, of course, as Buchanan and Tullock show in The Calculus of Consent, the bill was passed with hard-knuckle wheeling and dealing, the triumph of the majority over the minority.  But when the government resorts to the royal prerogative, or rule by decree, or executive order, it is displaying the true mailed fist of government force without the comfortable illusions of parliamentary solidarity.  And people don't like it.

The question is, as it always is, how much do people dislike the Obama rule-by-decree?  Are they angry enough to do something about it?  The answer to that will come in the next election, and thereafter.

Occupiers Like Government

I'm in the middle of investment guru Peter Schiff's video on his visit to Occupy Wall Street.  The setup is that he's wandering around the Occupy encampment in the fall of 2011 with a camera crew from Reason magazine and a protest sign that reads: I AM THE 1%. LET'S TALK.The full version goes on for 1:48 hours.  Or you can get the gist with the 18 minute cut.

My takeaway is that the Occupy protesters all agree that they need government holding a gun to the head of their employer if they are to get a fair shake in the world.  They've internalized all the lefty talking points but are completely ignorant of the righty talking points.  As far as they are concerned, without government they'd all be getting paid subsistence wages in sweat shops with no health care, no pensions, no benefits.

So, they don't understand the market, they don't understand business, and they don't understand government.  Otherwise they are pretty smart; they know all about memes and protest tactics.  But what would you expect after a K-graduate school education conducted by government functionaries?

Look, I get it.  Most people work as employees for The Man.  Their uppermost thought is a worry that they'll get laid off. They do not think: Hmm, I wonder how my employer is doing, how many projects are in the pipeline, how well the company products are priced.  They just think: Wow, I could get fired tomorrow.  Then they think: Wow, if only the government could stop my employer from laying me off.

To understand that the market is a regulating mechanism that coordinates the activities of millions of people and hundreds of thousands of businesses through the price system is completely outside the reality of most peoples' lifeworld.  The idea that surrender to the price system is the first step on the road to prosperity sounds completely crazy.

The other side of this game is that lefty politicians understand instinctively that people must believe that the corporation, not the price system, rules the world if the left's agenda of enlightenment and liberation is to win.  Otherwise voters will hesitate to vote for bigger government.

And that's the key.  People must believe that force is needed before they'll vote for more government.  If you listen to the Occupy protesters talking to Peter Schiff you realize that our millennial young 'uns have been perfectly socialized to vote for more government.  They all believe in force.

But what's the reality?  Daniel J. Mitchell has a nice little link to a piece on the history of sweatshops from Ben Powell of the Independence Institute.  Did you know that workers flocked from the countryside to the sweatshops in the early 19th century?  Yes, conditions were horrible, compared with today's Third World sweatshops, and in some of them people worked for 16 hours per day.

Yet workers flocked to the mills. …sweatshop workers…were attracted by the opportunity to earn higher wages than they could elsewhere. In fact, economist Ludwig von Mises defended the factory system of the Industrial Revolution,…writing, “The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them.” …Mises’s argument is supported by historical evidence. Economist Joel Mokyr reports that workers earned a wage premium of 15 to 30 percent by working in the factories compared with other alternatives.

And so the population in Britain tripled and then doubled in the 19th century.

The truth is that nobody has any problem with paying people a premium of 15% to 30%.  What gets everyone riled up is when the business cycle turns down and the factory owners want to cut wages.  This is regarded as an outrage.  And a guy like worker Joe Soptic thinks it is monstrous for private equity guy Mitt Romney to restructure his steelworker job out of existence.  Because in the mind of Joe, he has a property right to that job, and the bosses have a moral obligation to pay his wife's health care bills.

In my mind, Joe Soptic thinks like a serf, and so do most of the folks in the Occupy movement.  And in my mind it is a bloomin' shame that the political leaders on the left won't educate their followers to the facts of life in the industrial age and lead them to the golden future of responsible individualism. Liberals get their power from keeping their voters on the liberal plantation and don't see why anything should change.

And yet.  The interesting thing is that the working stiffs of the 1930s grew up into 1950s suburban householders.  And now there's a new generation on the way up. I saw a construction truck near my house yesterday that had "Chavez LLC" emblazoned on the side.

Despite all the propaganda about the horrors of big corporations people still want to start their little business; they still want that little house in the suburbs.  They still want the peace and tranquility of middle class respectability.

But how?  How can this be happening when 100,000 liberals chant with one voice and 100,000 liberal hearts beat in unison about the wonders of marriage equality and the horrors of the Republican "war on women."

I will tell you what I think.  I think that there are millions of black women who ache for a marriage and a house of their own and two kids growing up straight and true far from the roar and the violence of the big city.  But these women have been cruelly and corruptly misled into a reactionary racism and kept on the liberal plantation where their desperate votes can be used to keep the current liberal ruling class in power.

One beautiful day, un bel di, the world will change, even if it changes too late for Butterfly and today's adult black women.  The rage of those black women, cheated for half a century from the good life of middle class respectability, will be something to behold.

Liberals say Ted Cruz isn't very smart

One of the eternal verities, to liberals, is that Republican politicians aren't too smart.

George W. Bush was notably stupid -- except that he had better grades than John Kerry.  Ronald Reagan was an "amiable dunce" when he wasn't a dangerous extremist.  And Ike was an aging bumbler who liked to golf in the afternoons.

It all probably got started when Alice Roosevelt Longworth wrote that Calvin Coolidge looked like he had been "weaned on a pickle."  And Dorothy Parker, upon learning that Coolidge had died, reportedly remarked, "How can they tell?"

Har de har har.

Now the meme is getting started on Ted Cruz.  Unfortunately, with Cruz there's a bit of a problem on the stupid front because Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard Law. Here's Wikipedia with six (!) citations:

Referring to Cruz's time as a student at Harvard Law, Professor Alan Dershowitz said, "Cruz was off-the-charts brilliant."

Then Cruz went on to clerk for a federal appeals court judge and then clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist on the US Supreme Court.

You can see the problem for the liberal "GOP stupid" brigade.  Cruz has a perfect educational resume that any liberal would kill for.

So there must be something else wrong with him.  And here it is (H/T NRO).

According to Nathan Robinson at Salon: “The ‘Ted Cruz is smart’ trap: Why this garbage is false — and dangerous.”  You see, according to the folks who know Ted Cruz has never changed his mind.

David Panton, Cruz’s law-school roommate and college debate partner, who told The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin: “Ted’s views today politically are almost identical to when I met him. There’s nothing he says today that I didn’t hear in college.” “Ted Cruz,” Robinson declares, “does not in his life ever seem to have taken on board a single challenge to his worldview”

Golly.  I mean, like, has Barack Obama, like, ever taken on board a single challenge to his worldview? Like, ev-er?

You can see the quandary liberals are in.  They can't really take the usual route of making Cruz stupid because he hadn't punched his ticket at all the liberal way-stations.  Did you know, darling, that Ronald Reagan never even clerked for a district judge, let alone the Supreme Court.  Not our kind, darling.

So Ted Cruz has to be rigid, ideological, inflexible, a guy that hasn't grown into a liberal world view.  In fact Cruz is a scandal.  How come, how come that a naive immigrant's sone didn't get converted to the liberal world view in the liberal secular seminary?  That's what college is for, after all.  Somehow the system failed, and I suspect sabotage from the Koch Brothers.

OK, liberals, go ahead and underestimate Ted Cruz.

Remember back in Fall 2013 when Ted Cruz did his 21 hour filibuster.  "Everyone" said it was a stupid gesture that made Republicans look like obstructionists.

But then I got an email from my sister suggesting that Ted Cruz was her man.

You see, liberals, if you are a conservative in these Obama dog days, the one thing that really annoys you is that nobody is willing to stand up and take the fight to Obama.  And we know why.  It's because anyone that criticizes Obama gets called out as a racist.  (Hey, maybe I'll never vote for a non-white-male again unless they are to the right of Attila the Hun.  Because what's the point of voting for America's First Whatever unless you get a hall pass?)

When Ted Cruz staged his photo-op filibuster he was telling people like me and my sister that he's willing to fight for us.

Oh yeah, I know.  It was all staged, a photo op that was never going to roll back Obamacare.  What was the point? But then you could say the same about all politics.  It is all staged, a sham fight, or as I like to say "civil war by other means."

But there was a point to the filibuster.  The point was to communicate to the frustrated GOP faithful that here was a guy who would stand up for us, and fight for us.  And the message came through loud and clear.

But go ahead liberals.  Get your "Ted Cruz is dumb or something" meme going.  Just don't forget that when liberals say a conservative has "grown" it's a sign to us that he's betrayed us in order to go along to get along inside the Beltway.

Outlook Impoved, say Medicare Trustees

The annual Medicare Trustees Report came out yesterday, and the official line is good news.  You can see that from Googling the news reports.

Not surprisingly, administration spokesmen have claimed that the Affordable Care Act is partially responsible for this. Maybe.  After all, the ACA is supposed to raid Medicare of something like $700 billion over ten years to pay for the ACA.  Or maybe the answer is Medicare Advantage, which encourages large deductibles and limits the front-end "free stuff" aspects of conventional Medicare.

What has happened is that Medicare costs have moderated in recent years, although they are expected to start to climb significantly by 2020.  But the result is that, according to my analysis at usgovernmentspending.com, Medicare costs will reach 4 percent of GDP by 2023 -- instead of in 2020 as forecast in last year's report.  Long term, at the end of the century, Medicare is forecast to approach 7 percent of GDP.

Think of it.  By the end of the century the American people will be forking out 7 percent of every dollar just for the government share of senior healthcare, and that doesn't include Medicaid expenditures for the low-income elderly.

Something, as they say, will have to give.  And way before the end of the century.

In a way, it's nice that the government takes care of our retirement income and health care.  It relieves us seniors of the big worries of our declining years.  Feel a pain, head for the doctor.  But I worry about the young 'uns.  Is is really fair or just to saddle them with such enormous burdens?

If you raise the question with a liberal they will ask you whether you want grandma starving in the street.  Good point, liberal.

But, as the Brits are finding out, if you tighten up on welfare eligibility, more of the poor go out and get a job.  In other words, marginal economics works, even with welfare.  If you change the rules a bit, people will change their behavior a bit.  Maybe we could try that with Medicare, especially as old people are the richest kind in America.  What a concept: make seniors more individually responsible for their health care.

John Hawkins, in a typical "5 Obvious Principles of Human Nature That Baffle Liberals," points out the central principle of responsible individualism.

[I]t’s bad for people to have someone else making the decisions about their kids’ education, their retirement, and their health care[.]

That's because the person that has other people make the big decisions about their life is, de facto if not de jure, a slave.

Hawkins also mentions a corollary of this truth: "it’s even worse that the government officials that take those decisions away from people are usually given a free pass when they screw-up."

Yeah.  Why is that?  Oh all right, we know why.  The whole point of government power (as opposed to market power) is that you don't get called on your mistakes.  If you can get called on your mistakes then you don't have power, you just have responsibility.

The whole point of responsible individualism is to reduce the amount of power and domination in the world and increase the amount of responsible individual acts in the world.

So here's a question.  Under what conditions would seniors like me demand of the government: take it away?  Take Medicare away and let me get my own health care in my old age. Hey, I'll even kick in a little for the aged poor.

Don't hold your breath.

The Seeds of Destruction

For conservatives there is much in Obama's America that doesn't make sense.  Why is Obama so terminally divisive? Why would gays, on the cusp of winning their "marriage equality" want to rub out a techie like Brendan Eich?  Why would feminists, after a half century of feminist progress, now be subjecting college boys to the witch hunt of the "rape culture?"  Don't these people understand that they've won?

Jim Goad describes what is going on here.

Howard Bloom’s book The Lucifer Principle goes into great detail describing how social movements that initially claim to merely seek “equality” morph into insatiably power-hungry predatory super-organisms once their alleged oppressors are willing to grant them equal treatment. While those making the concessions may think they’re doing so in the name of “fairness,” groups who are on the ascent tend to smell blood instead. Once even a semblance of “equality” is achieved, the mask falls off and it becomes a naked drive for power. They never seem sated by equality and keep moving the goalposts, ultimately becoming every bit as oppressive and intolerant as their former masters.

The point is that any political movement is about politics.  It starts, no doubt, with a sharp experience of injustice.  That is not hard to do because all government dispense injustice, because they write their laws based on their ruling-class interpretation of justice. Others find their so-called justice the acme of injustice.

Very well. But politics is politics, and involves mobilizing people into a political army that is trained and inspired to fight, whatever the cost, for truth and justice.

What happens to the political army once it has achieved its goal?  Nothing.  So it looks for new fields to conquer, and that is the moment that the political movement transforms itself from a movement for justice into a cruel agent of injustice.  We've seen that happen to the civil-rights movement, to the environmental movement, to the feminist movement, and now the gay movement.

But why is Barack Obama so insistent on dividing America?

I've been reading a piece by Harry Stein on his father, Joseph Stein, who wrote the book for Fiddler on the Roof.  Joe was a lefty-liberal all his life, and couldn't understand his son's journey to the right.

My father simply couldn’t fathom how any thinking person, let alone someone who’d imbibed politics at his knee, could have ended up a . . . well, he never actually used the word, at least not directly. 

The word, of course, is Fascist.

The point is that Barack Obama has lived his entire life in a left-liberal bubble.  He is part of a political movement that is dedicated to "fundamentally transforming" America.  The point about such a political movement is that, by its nature, it doesn't know when to stop.

Back in the 2000s I was worried by books like The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira.  They projected that a new majority of blacks, Latinos, women, the educated, and the young would form a new majority that would rule for decades.

But the problem is that Obama has rained hardship on this new majority. Blacks have lost the homes that the real-estate bubble got them into, and are devastated that the the new dawn promised by the election of a black president has turned into a mirage.  Hispanics want jobs and they don't see them. The educated are confused, and the young are totally screwed.  College educated youth is buried in student debt, and the rest of the youth are buried in the slow recovery.

The most telling thing is that inequality has got worse on Obama's watch.

Yeah, well, say conservatives and libertarians.  What do you expect when you boost welfare and food stamps, and you implement Keynesian cheap money?

The point is that Obama and his acolytes in the liberal bubble don't get it.  They think that cheap money "stimulates" the economy.  They think that their programs to help the poor alleviate inequality.  But somehow it's all gone wrong.  That's why they are looking for scapegoats and reckon that some dastardly Republican plot masterminded by the Koch Brothers has destroyed the president's agenda. They are like Harry Stein's father. They can't wrap their brains around the notion that they could be wrong, and that it is the president's policies that have caused the present malaise.

That brings us to the good news.  The polls say that the American people are coming to the notion that we need different policies to attack America's problems.  There's wisdom in that poll question and in the response of the voters.  Americans don't know the first thing about economics and how to promote prosperity.  In fact they believe a bunch of contradictory things about the economy.  Think of their ideas as a muddy precipitate of all the sound bites that are flung at them every day.

There's one thing that the voters can decide for us.  When they sense that things are on the wrong track, they can vote for a change.  That's what happened in 1980 when voters repudiated the McGovernite Sixties generation.  It took nearly a generation after the debacle of the Sixties New Left before Americans could vote for an unapologetic leftist, and even then the media hid Obama's leftism from the voters.

But now the voters sense that things aren't working.  Probably they'll surprise us in November with a wave election that unseats a couple of Democratic senators that nobody thought were in trouble.  And then it will be on to 2016 when Republicans will have at least three bright and energetic young candidates -- Cruz, Rubio, Paul, Ryan: your list is as good as mine -- that will be telling the American people that it is time for a change.

Oh yeah.  The Democrats will be flogging their base with wars on women and gays and finding racism in every living room, board room, locker room, and classroom.  But there comes a moment in flogging a cart horse when the light goes out of its eyes.  It just doesn't have the strength or the will to shove its weight against the harness.  It just stands there, under a rain of blows, and does nothing.

Because politics is about power, government is about force, and human society is about something better than power games and brute force.