Big Government and Big Business: What They Leave Out

In the middle of the 19th century, when sensitive souls first noticed the industrial revolution, they all agreed that the solution to the Moloch of bourgeois capitalism was more government.

And they had a point, for it looked as though the capitalists would rule the world. It took another 50 years to demonstrate that capitalists weren't much interested in power. After building their businesses, they turned to philanthropy, eradicating hookworm in the South and building universities and medical research insititutes and peace foundations.

But by then the momentum towards big government was irreversible, and so big government is what we got.

The trouble with government, all government, is that it is just an armed minority occupying territory and taxing its people, and it stays in power by rewarding its supporters with pensions and subsidies. It really doesn't give a damn about the rest of the people, the ones that don't support it. In fact it typically brands them as dangerous radicals and extremists.

The other little problem with government arises out of its nature as an "armed minority." It is organized for warfare, whether warfare against foreign enemies or domestic enemies. To government everything looks like a war to fight, because to a hammer everything looks like a nail. Republicans, over the years, have preferred foreign wars, but Democrats have concentrated upon domestic wars: against poverty, against pollution, against the rich, against fundamentalists, against the Koch Brothers. And there's one very tricky problem with government. Like an army, it is organized to pursue victory at all costs; it does not demonstrate the flexibility needed to navigate a complex world. It is very difficult for government to change its mind, on entitlements, on dietary fat, on health care, on education, on anything.

Now the other great modern invention, capitalism, is different, but similar. It ceaselessly roams the world looking for business opportunities, and when it finds them it turns things upside down. We talk easily about buggy-whip makers, but the truth is that business is putting people out of business and workers out of jobs all the time. Joseph Schumpeter called it "creative destruction" and people on the receiving end of creative destruction don't like it at all.

But there is another thing about business that people don't like. It is a certain blindness to people that aren't in the swim, that aren't one of us. The Venetians and the Genoese ran a pretty good trading system bringing goods from the East to Europe. But they also did a nice little trade in slaves: Circassian girls for the harems of Arabia, and young men for the slave armies of the Mamluks. Then, of course, it was Venice that invented the western sugar plantation, starting with Muslim slaves on Cyprus and then expanding westward across the Atlantic using slaves from Africa. Nobody seemed to have a problem with that, from the 13th century to the 18th century.

The Frankfurt School and Jürgen Habermas explain why both government and business can be so blind to other people, and use them up like resources rather than treat them like fellow humans. The problem is that both government and business are "systems" based on the application of instrumental reason, in which people act strategically. In government the strategic aim is to increase raw power over people and minds. In business the strategic aim is to increase power in the market, wealth and profits.

The solution is not hard to find. It is do develop the moral and cultural consensus that government's power over people should be limited, and that business's "creative destruction" should not destroy people.

This means that we have to look into the very foundation of our modern world and its worship of reason, for, as Horkheimer and Adorno wrote in the 1940s, we use reason to dominate nature and other men, for "What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men."

Now the point about human society and humans as social animals is that within the bounds of society we do not use pure reason and domination to force our way. We abjure force and resort to communication and cooperation. If we disagree about means and ends we talk with each other to try to discover a way that we can compromise our objectives so that everyone gets something out of the compromise. We set limits on what can be done to other people, the limits on treating them as means to an end. We think a little about other peoples' needs as well as our own needs. We "care" about other people, and we share in their suffering, through "com-passion" rather than merely obsess on our own problems and needs.

What is this thing that can moderate the strategic impulse of instrumental reason and its systems? It is, of course, everything, from friendship to kindness, to neighborhood groups to churches to charities to love. As Kant said, it is treating people as ends in themselves rather than means.

The question is, of course, how? In our society of vast instrumental forces from government to business to political movements, how do we dial back the relentless strategic drive for power and substitute communicative dialog and friendship?

That is indeed the question.

Hoarders and Wreckers: How Socialism Ends

I like to compare political party supporters to soldiers in an army. That's because I experience that government is always about war.

It's not that hard. Governments fight foreign wars -- or at least border wars; that's just what they do. So the war is always about forcing the neighbor state to recognize the borders, or to submit to the adjustment of the borders in favor of our side. Governments also fight domestic wars. They descend on the productive sector and force it to cough up revenues, because social justice. These revenues are then distributed among the government's supporters.

Yes, of course these monies do wonders by helping the poor and educating our children. But stripped of "narrative" we are talking about taking money from the "other" and giving it to people that vote for our side.

Take Obamacare. Recent polls show that Democratic supporters say that they have benefited from Obamacare; Republicans say they have not. Here's Byron York on a recent Gallup Poll:

Looking just at those who said they have been affected by Obamacare, 27 percent of Democrats said they had been helped, while 15 percent said they had been hurt. 

Well, that's the way it's supposed to be! That's what Democrats vote for. But the rest of the nation isn't so happy:

Among independents, the numbers were almost the opposite: 16 percent said they had been helped, while 27 percent said they had been hurt. And among Republicans, just 4 percent said they had been helped, while 40 percent said they had been hurt.

I'll bet you wouldn't see numbers like that on Social Security and Medicare. That's the problem with them. Even though they are going to bankrupt the nation people still support them because they want to continue to get their checks from the government.

Here's my point. Once you sign on to the government's entitlements you are hooked. Everyone in America is hooked on Social Security and Medicare because almost everyone would take a hit if they were wound up and reformed into real savings programs.

But things are much worse for the average rank-and-file Democrat. Scratch a Democrat and you'll likely find someone with a government job. Or on welfare. Or getting some crony subsidy from a Pentagon contract or a crony green subsidy or a climate-change research grant. So if you try to cut any government program an angry wail will go up from the Democrat rank-and-file and the gentry liberals.

The result? Democrat politicians absolutely refuse to cut spending, calling it "austerity," and Republicans are hesitant to cut spending because the cuts will energize the Democratic opposition and may cost them their seats.

So the government stumbles on, trying to square the circle and appear to fix things, or fix things indirectly so that people don't notice.

The end game is what we see in Venezuela. From Instapundit:

SOCIALISM ALWAYS ENDS THE SAME WAY: Venezuela seizes warehouses packed with medical goods, food. It always starts with hope, change and social justice, and it ends with assaults on the “hoarders and wreckers.”

Think of the Venezuelan government as an army. It is marching to final victory over social injustice. But on the way it must keep its soldiers fed and content. It does this, like any army, by requisitions. It starts with taxes and nationalization of the oil business and continues with minor expropriations of unpopular corporations.

Then it gets into inflation and price controls and rationing.

Now the thing about a real army in a real war is that the generals know they need to get the war over as soon as possible, because the army takes resources away from the productive sector to feed its war machine. At some point the army exhausts the economy with its requisitions. At some point there is no more money. If you are in the predatory war business you want to get the war over, disband the army, and get the people back to normal productive work.

The progressive political army can never so this. It must keep upping the ante to keep its supporters happy. It eats its seed corn because the more that it extracts from the economy to give to its supporters the less is left to the businesses in the economy to make products and services and create jobs. But it can never tell its supporters to ease off on their demands, because the basis of its support is the hand-outs to its supporters.

So it all ends in an economic collapse and default with the government screaming at "hoarders and wreckers." The poor lose their benefits and their jobs, if any, and the widows and orphans lose their government bonds. Inflation destroys the savings and the wages of the middle class. Only the rich, who own real or productive assets, are left with anything, and if they have any sense they get the hell out before the government thugs come and expropriate their wealth.

The solution? Keep the government out of everything that isn't related to genuine war needs: defending against foreign enemies and domestic criminals. Because the human appetite for free stuff is unlimited.

And don't get seduced by William James and his "Moral Equivalent of War." That's the problem. Our progressive overlords are into moral equivalents of war on everything from saving our kids to saving the planet. But the failure of government education and green energy will not make them sadder and wiser. They will just think up something else. Because if we can go to the moon...

Liberals and their Illusions

Even good liberal Thomas Frank is starting to break away from the Obama infatuation. Why do liberals keep believing that presidential candidates like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama are non-ideological, he asks at Salon?

Up to now, Frank has rejected the comparison between Carter and Obama as mere partisan insult. What's changed his mind is Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge about the 1970s. Rick includes a detailed account of the 11976 Carter campaign. Carter ran on "pure idealism—idealism without ideology, even." Even his speech-writer James Fallows thought Carter “might look past the tired formulas of left and right and offer something new.” Liberals fell in love with an idea. Sound familiar?

To Thomas Frank, of course, neither Carter nor Obama governed as liberals. Carter's stimulus was too small, and he "was always drawn to fiscal responsibility and 'hard choices.'" Of course Frank hasn't a clue about Fed Chairman G. William Miller that engineering the double-digit inflation of 1979-80. Good solid inflation. That's as lefty as it gets. Ask Venezuela or Argentina.

We liberals are "such losers," writes Frank.

We still “yearn to believe,” as Perlstein says... We persuade ourselves that the answer to the savagery of the right—the way to trump the naked class aggression of the One Percent—is to say farewell to our own tradition and get past politics and ideology altogether. And so we focus on the person of the well-meaning, hyper-intelligent leader. We are so high-minded, we think. We are so scientific.

Well, Thomas Frank, I have a couple of thoughts for you. The point of the "well-meaning, hyper-intelligent leader" is that if you liberals ran Obama as the partisan campus radical he really is you couldn't win national elections. But we savage righties understand that behind the centrist, expert-led rhetoric are the battalions of left-wing "activists" and their advocacy. They do most of their work beneath the radar, and it doesn't hurt chaps like you that the MSM turns their radar off during Democratic administrations.

But the "well-meaning idealism" is not just intended to mislead the rubes. It's also part of the way that liberals mislead themselves. Liberals do not say to themselves that they are going to sicc their activists on anyone that disagrees with them and name and shame them as racists and sexists and homophobes. They say they advocate for tolerance and diversity. They do not say they are going to force people into a one-size-fits-all government program; they say pretty things like "government is the name for things we do together."

Like I say, government is force, politics (i.e., activism) is division, system is domination. But it would never do for nice gentry liberals to realize what their comfortable idealism means in practice.

So liberals will always fall in love with professional politicians that present themselves as "anti-politicians" in love with idealism. Such politicians pander to liberals' self-image of themselves as educated, evolved idealists that just want to build a better society.

The truth is too hard to bear, that "gentry liberals" are just a common-or-garden ruling class in love with themselves and in love with political power. Like any ruling class, they live in a bubble of lies and illusions; they ruthlessly deal themselves subsidies and privileges while the rest of America suffers.

Liberal Mixed Messages

Charles Krauthammer writes today that Obama has lost the plot. The whole world is falling down around his ears, with failures everywhere you look. Obama's response? He's "angry."

Yet once upon a time Barack Obama had a message for America.

There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.

We were going to stop the rise of the oceans. Then Obama became president and governed like the Alinsky acolyte he is. He governed by demonizing rather than understanding.

What happened to the narrative of all together?

So on the same day Jonah Goldberg writes about the power of "narrative." Forget ideas.  What you need, if you want to win the world, is a good story.

Ideas are surprisingly easy to let go of, if pried loose by the right story. Stories, meanwhile, are shockingly difficult to let go of, even if they convey a bad idea. Just try to tell someone who has gotten a raw deal in life that their story is not typical of America. Or, if you prefer, try to tell someone who’s been fortunate at every turn that their story isn’t typical either.

President Obama's problem is that his story has broken down. The life that individual Americans are living doesn't match the pretty story that President Obama pitched when he was running for president and running for reelection.

Here's another story that's breaking down. It's the Democrats' "Republican War on Women" meme. Why? Well, I suspect it starts with the fact that women are afraid for their safety. Obama booster Tina Brown is now saying women don't feel safe under Obama. Remember 2001? When the "soccer moms" turned into "security moms?"

Hey GOP! How about telling a story that America isn't safe under Obama/Democrats? How safe are you when the government runs health care? How safe are you when the government says that terrorist acts are "workplace violence"? How safe are your kids when the government takes them off to government schools for the duration?

When Democrats talk among themselves they probably talk ideas. But when they run for election they tell stories.

When Ronald Reagan bestrode the world, he annoyed the heck out of reporters by telling stories.

Here is Ted Cruz telling the story of his life to Values Voters.

The postmodernists have been telling us for decades that it's all about the "narrative." They use the term pejoratively, in the sense of the ruling class's narrative that justifies its power.

Don't get it? Then what do liberals do when they tell the story of modern government. Back in the Dark Ages before liberalism children worked in mines, women were dominated by the patriarchy, and people that lost their jobs would starve. Then came liberals with with free education, wage and hour law, labor unions, health care, pensions, civil rights, equal pay for women.

If you ask me, conservatives are in a great position on the story-telling front. Ever since Reagan, liberals have had a real problem getting their story straight. And the Obama era is a splendid example of saying one thing and doing the other.

Conservatives have a wonderful story to tell. The rise of the common man. The dignity of the responsible individual. The surprise of the free market system against the slow death of the administrative state. The brilliance of the separation of powers. The necessity of separating politics, economy, and religion in the Greater Separation of Powers. And so on.

And here's another point, just for you girls. The more freedom, the smaller the government, the safer you and your family will be, and the more opportunity there will be for your children.

How Liberals Wrecked Upward Mobility

As I get older I can afford to get more radical. Because I don't have to truckle to the boss: not the corporate boss, the political boss, or even the moral/cultural boss.

And I don't get more radical on anything more than education. Government education? I'm opposed to it. Period.

Why, you ask? How can anyone doubt the benefit our society has obtained from universal free education?

Don't get me started, but let's just say that government education means government run by the ruling class and the ruling class is usually clueless about everything except fighting for its power.

So my recipe for education is child labor and apprenticeship.  That way most people can finance their own education and parents are stuck only with education in the early years, which can often be done at a neighborhood school run by a couple of neighborhood mothers.

Hey, here's an idea!  The neighborhood mothers home-school and get together for projects and outings!

Peter Thiel, entrepreneur, billionaire, and "celebrity genius" agrees. His Thiel Fellowships pay kids to skip college!

Now comes a helpful article by Bill McMorris to explain how we got into the current college education mess, where everyone has to have a degree, college costs an arm and a leg, and a whole generation has been buried in debt.

It's all about race, and it all started with the US Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Griggs vs. Duke Power Company.

The saga began in 1969 when Willie Griggs, a black man born in the segregated South, decided he was overdue  for a promotion. In order to get one, per Duke Power Electric Company rules, he had to pass two aptitude tests and possess a high school diploma. Griggs smelled racism. The tests surveyed employees on basic math and intelligence questions. None of Duke’s fourteen black workers passed. Griggs and twelve others sued the company for discrimination. 

Oh oh. Can you spell Bell Curve, by Charles Murray?

Aptitude tests had their heyday in World War II when the armed forces used them to separate the sheep from the goats. It worked so well that corporate America jumped right in after the war.

But the Supreme Court ruled against Duke Power Company and so corporate America swerved away from aptitude tests. Instead the SAT and the colleges did the work for them. At enormous expense.

Even today, corporate America is careful to pay people according to their education rather than their results because racism.

Of course the joke is that the current system is shockingly biased against minorities, indeed against anyone without rich parents. And I dare say it is particularly biased against young white working class males, because common sense.

So here we are in American in 2014, with the middle-aged generation hammered by the real-estate bubble from the unintended consequence of trying to help minorities get a mortgage, a whole generation buried in college debt from the unintended consequence of trying to help minorities get a better job. And don't get me started on the current rage to fix the campus sex scene with lawyer-like regulations on sexual behavior.

The question is what comes next? We are conservatives; we don't want to change the rules on everyone though a political coup like Obamacare. We want to change America by persuading America.

And I ask myself: how would I persuade the nice well-born liberal women I know about this? How could anyone persuade the activism/advocacy brigade that politics and Supreme Court ukases are usually not the answer to injustice and inequality?

How do we change the culture, given that liberals own the culture from schools to music to movies to TV?

I just watched Mark Steyn tell Hannity that "I like Ted Cruz" because Ted Cruz is trying to get around the little problem that conservatives have. Sure, we can win a midterm election, he says, but how do we win the culture war for the other 364 days of the year. Steyn likes Ted Cruz because Cruz seems to be trying to move the yardsticks on the culture front.

That's why I keep hammering on the idea that Government Is Force. You think the best way to educate kids is by force? You think that the best way to reverse centuries of cultural backwardness is by force? You think that the way to regulate students' sexual behavior is by force? I thought you chaps were in favor of Peace and Justice.

Here's the irony: liberals obviously believe that the way to change things is by changing peoples' minds, because they work night and day to dominate the culture and shame anyone that disagrees with them. But the only way they know to do it is by force.

Meanwhile we have a whole generation of underprivileged kids buried in the gross injustice of the current education and qualifications system. And nobody is going to jail.

Teach Liberals Not to Rape

I'm not talking about President Obama grabbing a girl at an early-voting station in Illinois and kissing her without permission. That's just a comical instance of liberal hypocrisy.  They get all worked up about sexual harassment by eevil fraternity brothers on campus. But it's not sexual harassment when a Democratic politician does it.

No, I am talking about dead-stupid stuff like lesbian Houston mayor Annise Parker turning the dogs of war on Houston preachers that don't like trans-gender bathrooms. Hugh Hewitt calls it "thugocracy." Or take the government officials up in Idaho(!) that want to force a wedding chapel to serve gays or face jail or a fine. Dr. Ben Carson had a good line on this; it explains the behavior of our lefty friends. The point of lefty politics is to prevent conversation and reduce everything to verbal conflict.

That is the reason famed community organizer Saul Alinsky, in his book "Rules for Radicals," stated that you should never have a conversation with your adversaries, because that humanizes them, and your job is to demonize them. When your agenda is to fundamentally change a society, it is a much easier task when you stifle conversation and debate.

But I think that our lefty friends are making a strategic mistake with their thug tactics, unless they are prepared to go full Stalin and terrorize their opponents into silence.

In my view politics occupies a peculiar position: its purpose is to create division and use government force to please its supporters. But it has to hide its iron fist in a velvet glove of "consensus."

Why would this be? It is because the show of force, as practiced by Houston mayor Annice Parker -- and actual acts of force as well -- rile up the opposition and prompt them to mobilize against the government. The government, executive committee of the ruling class, finds that it has stirred up a hornet's nest.

Thus gay marriage works as an issue when it is using gays as helpless victims, but stops working as soon as gay Nazis start marching around in jackboots.

Saul Alinsky's famous rules for radicals assumes that the radicals are the outsiders attacking the fortifications of the ruling class. He assumes that the ruling class is the enemy and that outrages by the radicals will be forgiven by the mass of people struggling for liberation.

Liberals have taken these tactics and applied them without thinking to a situation where liberals and their little darlings are the ruling class. But this is not 1886 and the Haymarket affair; it is not 1937 and the Battle of the Overpass. Today liberals are waging war on ordinary people -- modest people running modest businesses -- using the power of the state.  That is no longer the aristocratic rule of the best and brightest, a rational politics informed by science and experts. It is just the rule of the thugs.

So President Obama's extralegal acts, from the condoning of IRS harassment of regime opponents to the administrative fine tuning of Obamacare, are not harmless corner cuttings. They are acts of violence on the body politic. They are injustices that will raise a head of rebellion against the liberal cause.

Liberals are blind to all this because they believe that their politics is salvific; they completely miss the fact that all their political initiatives come down to bullying and force, especially when they don't bother to create a "consensus." They completely miss the fact that their conflation of secular culture and politics is totalitarian. They miss that because they refuse to have a conversation; they are too busy classifying other peoples' ideas as "hate speech."

They are completely missing the point that human society is the realm within the boundaries of force. Inside the boundaries we settle things by conversation and compromise. It is only outside the boundaries that we resort to force. But liberals, by mixing politics with everything are assuming that everything must be decided by force.

The only question then becomes: how far are liberals prepared to go? Full Stalin? Full Mao? Because once they start bullying and intimidating their political opponents they must either go all the way to Terror, or find that they have raised a head of rebellion that will sweep them out of power.

Of course we experienced all this back in the Clinton administration. Workplace sexual harassment, about which liberals had made a huge fuss with respect to Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, wasn't harassment if the president did it. Back then the Republicans thought they were onto a good thing by impeaching the president for his lies and his hypocrisy. But they were wrong. The impeachment merely energized the president's supporters and so the 1998 midterm was a net loss for Republicans, and it kept liberals in permanent campaign mode for the next ten years.

Like I said, the Obama Democrats' abuses of power will rebound upon them and drive them out of office, unless they are prepared to ramp up to the ruthlessness of a Robespierre, a Stalin, or a Castro.

Make that a fearless prediction for the midterms and beyond.

Republicans and Women

Everybody knows about the "gender gap" and how that's a problem for Republicans. Meanwhile, according to Mona Charen, Republicans just seem to throw up their hands at the problem.

Republicans, whipsawed by the results of 2012 races that featured large gender gaps, particularly among single women, and aware that women have trended Democrat for decades, seem bewildered... The candidates themselves, uncomfortable with the whole subject and wondering why they can’t just discuss the capital gains tax, mumble about how much they love their wives and eye the exits.

But when Charen gets down to first principles, she notes that women just like big government.

A CBS/New York Times poll [in 2012] asked respondents whether the United States is more successful when government emphasizes “self-reliance and individual responsibility” or “community and shared responsibility.” Among women, 37 percent chose self-reliance compared with 46 percent of men, while 55 percent of women chose community. 

This rather puts the lie to the Simone de Beauvoir's notion of the "independent woman."  And now we have the campus rape crisis, where feminists are suddenly waking up to the horror of the decades-old hookup culture where college men and women need to chug half a bottle of vodka to get the Dutch courage they need to venture out into the sexual battle zone. Where have you been for the last 50 years, ladies?

Everyone is proposing tactical political approaches to the gender-gap problem. Obviously single mothers are going to go to find resources somewhere, just as married mothers are going to tend to want their husbands relatively untaxed and unregulated so they can contribute maximum effort to their own family.

In the current situation women are obviously more inclined towards government solutions. And don't forget that liberals have unlimited access to their minds from K thru graduate school.

If we want to change things, and turn women more towards "self-reliance and individual responsibility" and to experience big government as the complete negation of "community and shared responsibility" we need to think strategically. Here are some ideas.

Break up the government school monopoly. Right now a lot of people think that spending money on schools equals helping our kids. But well-born mothers are moving away from this with home-schooling; conservatives should help boost this movement. We want to get girls away from lifer government teachers.

Chip away at the entitlement monolith. Why shovel payroll taxes from workers' wages to politicians? Shouldn't workers keep more of their own money to support their families?

Conservatives care about people.  That probably starts with memes that show that Democrats don't care about people. Think VA, Obamacare cancellations, school failures, etc.

For a conservative, it always seems that the Democrats and the liberals have the place completely dominated. And yet.

Why would Democrats need to run their "war on women" meme all the time and gin up the pay gap with a new equal pay bill every election? Maybe because they have to scare the wits out of single women to get them to the polls?

Why would the Democrats need to run their "back to Jim Crow" meme all the time to strike fear into African Americans? Could it be that without the constant application of fear that African Americans would start to drift away from the Democrats?

Back in the Cold War the Democrats were always criticizing the Cold War warriors for whipping up fear among the people. There was President Carter talking about an "inordinate fear of communism." I have to say they had a point.

But when you are desperate to win an election then any politician knows that you have to trade on fear.