Net Neutrality: Liberals Want More Power

Liberals think of themselves as selfless educated servants of the people. But what they do is seek more power.

Take net neutrality. The government might do nothing about the internet, and just let it evolve on its own. But that throw away a great opportunity to wield political power. So why let sleeping dogs lie? Why not get in the middle of internet pricing and mandate net neutrality, and make sure that everything is fair?

President Obama is all in favor of net neutrality, and he told the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Tom Wheeler, on November 10 how he wanted the internet to be classified as a public utility. The FCC, of course, is an agency supposedly independent of politics, one of the products of the Progressive Era that believed in government by disinterested experts, and is not answerable to the president.

Why would the president want to stick his political oar into the internet?  Well, it's all about politics and power. Liberals say they care about you, but what they really do is care about power for themselves. It's nothing peculiar to liberals. People that are attracted to power -- people that want to control other people -- are attracted to politics and government. The proof is that successful politicians hang around in their elected positions forever, while successful businessmen, from John D. Rockefeller to Bill Gates, tend to quit business and go into philanthropy.

Notice the interesting difference between the politician and the philanthropic businessman. One gives away other peoples' money and one gives away his own money.

Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal uses President Obama's directive to the FCC chairman to create a functional diagram of the liberal power machine. Let's pull some quotes and look at the parts diagram.

So why is Mr. Obama promoting strict regulation? Because liberal mau-mau groups like regulation. It’s that simple: If government controls business and they control government—well, you get the idea.

Remember what I said about power and control? The point about all political regulation is that it forces the private sector to pay court to politicians and activists.

Congressmen can’t extract donations from the auto industry or telecom industry or health insurers if costly, consequential rules affecting those industries aren’t being drafted.

And really, if the government isn't drafting regulations and special interests aren't paying tribute it's a fate worse than death. The horror!

Bureaucracies can’t expand. “Public interest” groups that align themselves with Democrats can’t collect scalps and orchestrate episodes in which businesses and politicians are taught to fear their power.

Would you please read that quote again, pausing for a moment on the word "scalps" and the phrase "fear their power"? Thank you.

Imagine a world in which budding social justice warriors didn't have a chance to name and shame.

Jenkins observes that probably nothing will happen on net neutrality anyway.

But even this outcome suits the machine, since the machine is really interested in process—endless, high-stakes process that swells Washington’s ranks of lawyers and lobbyists.

Now the punch line:

Whatever “liberal” used to mean, it now means a self-interested machine of influence peddling and rent extraction. 

What this country needs is a national politician that can teach the American people to hate the "self-interested [liberal] machine of influence peddling and rent extraction." And hate the hypocrisy. 

Suppose the Democrats Became the "Black" Party

I have an acquaintance who's almost as radical on education as I am. Recently he attended 7th grade for a day in two public schools in Broward County, Florida, the area around Fort Lauderdale.

One school was the "worst" school and one was the "best" school in the district. The worst school was chaotic, with nobody paying any attention to the Civics class. The best school featured good dutiful students listening and participating. You won't be surprised to learn that the worst school was mostly black with some Hispanic. The best school, on the other hand, was composed of all races and my acquaintance had trouble determining just what race each kid came from.

It just so happens that the same day I had read a piece by Steve Sailer where he talks about politics as "core vs. fringe." Maybe, he suggests, the Democrats will start to get into trouble with their inherently fragile "Coalition of the Diverse" that unites all the non-white, non-white middle-class fringes together.

Hey, if the Democrats want to make the Republicans into the White Party, he writes, maybe "the GOP should slyly work to rebrand the Democrats as the Black Party."

Ironically, in 2014 the Democrats made themselves the Black Party by anointing the late Michael Brown, the not-so-gentle giant of Ferguson, the face of the Democrats. Not surprisingly, Asian voters appear to have reacted with dismay.

If the 20th century was the century of ideology, Sailer writes, maybe the 21st century will be the century of identity.

But think of those schools in Broward County. The point is that the racial mixture of kids in that good school are not really mixed at all. They are all good dutiful middle-class kids, whether they are whites, Cubans, Hindus, or East Asians. If we are going to have real identity politics, we should recognize the monoculture in that good school. The monoculture is civilized middle class. I am using "civilized" in the strict Latin sense meaning "city person."

Right now the political division is between the middle-middle Republican Party, representing what I call the People of the Responsible Self, and the over-under Democratic Party, composed of elitists that promise "if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor" and the underclass, the People of the Victimized Self.

So really, we are already divided into the Black Party and the Middle-class Party. It's just that a bunch of educated people that ought to know better are going for the power trip of thinking themselves potential Peter Grubers "trying to confuse people" about Obamacare.

So what happens next? I suspect that, after the social justice warriors have totally marginalized the Christian Right and anyone that disagrees with gay marriage, ordinary libertarian-type professionals will start drifting back to the Republican Party. That's because Obamanomics is not very good for your average upward-bound professional, and that kinda makes all the culture war stuff irrelevant. The modern middle-class professional needs a good economy, the kind of economy where you can up sticks and move to a new job without worrying about whether your mortgage is underwater. Only trust-fund babies and folks with good inside contacts in the liberal ruling class can feel secure in the Obama economy.

Ten years ago Democrats did a good job of making libertarian professionals embarrassed by the Christian Right. But I think they overdid it, and bashed the ordinary middle-class believers into the shadows. Now they are reduced to Wars on Women and ginning up the black vote with phoney-baloney race incidents.

I tell you what I think. I think that the Obama race politics is going to isolate African Americans from the rest of America even more than they are today. Yesterday, Veterans Day was coupon day at Half Price Books in Seattle. I visited the University District store, and it was all white liberals. But out at the Half Price Books store in Microsoft's Redmond, the store was filled with South Asians, East Asians and Russians. No African Americans in either place. I wonder what those folks out in Redmond think about the Democrats' race politics?

I read a guy a year ago -- I think it was Roger L. Simon -- that said he could never vote for the Democrats again on account of what they've done to African Americans. Of course, Democrats have done the same thing to the white working class, turning its lower regions into the underclass, which is why the white working class is slowly but surely moving into the GOP.

Of course, the Democratic Party can never really be the Black Party. There just aren't enough African Americans to make a majority. So they'll still have to figure out another way to divide American from American.

Don't worry, I'm sure they'll find a way. That's what politicians do; they divide people.

Please, Mr, President. Don't Do It

President Obama seems to be determined to get an immigration bill by the end of the year, or, he says, he'll do it by executive order. I have one thing to say to the president. Don't Do It.

Here's why. It will be bad for the country, bad for the Democratic Party, and bad for the president.

Bad for the Country.  According to the Gallup Poll Americans are in favor of immigration reform. Over 80 percent are in favor of a security fence and employers checking immigration status. And 88 percent are all in favor of giving illegal immigrants a path to US citizenship if they pass certain requirements including "paying taxes and a penalty, passing a criminal background check and learning English."

So it oughta be easy for the president to push an immigration bill through Congress with overwhelming support. Right? Except that the devil is in the details, with Democrats against a fence and penalties and English, and Republicans thinking that maybe illegal immigrants should never get citizenship. And then there is the little problem that nobody wants to deal with the president, not Republicans, not Democrats.

The way to pass comprehensive legislation is by comprehensive legislation in which both parties sign off and we get a "consensus." Legislating without Congress and without a consensus is called "ruling by decree." It's the sort of thing that tin-pot dictators do. And it ends in tears.

Bad for the Democrats. What a surprise! The Republicans totally cleaned up in the 2014 midterms. The GOP now has more members in House of Representatives than any time going back to 1929. How could that happen?  Could it perhaps be that President Obama has been governing by partisan division? That his nominees have been bending the law anywhere and everywhere to advance the progressive agenda by any means possible? Today Dennis Prager is laughing at the NYT pundits writing about a "dysfunctional" politics. Dem defeat for them means that the people got it wrong.

Here's my prediction. If President Obama changes immigration law "by decree" he will further erode voter support for the Democrats. Surely, right now, a lot of Democratic officeholders must be talking to each other and saying: Wow, I don't know how he is doing it, but this guy is demolishing the Democratic Party right before our very eyes. We've got to stop him before the tsunami gets to me.

Bad for the President. It may be that the president has no ego. It may be that he is just trying to push as much of the progressive agenda past the American people as he can, full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. But I doubt it. I think the president is human and he wants his place in the pantheon of great presidents. But like anyone in a tough spot, he doesn't know what to do except do what he knows. As the airplane accident guys say: when an airliner hits an emergency the crew instinctively do exactly what they are trained to do. The president is trained to be a community activist; that's what he does. So he keeps doing it because that's what he's trained to do.

Here's my prediction. The president's divisive governing style is going to make him an example of How Not To Do It for the next 100 years. People will say: if you want to divide the country and provoke a massive backlash, if you want to ruin your political party, and if you want to go down as the Worst President Ever, then do what Barack Obama did.

Don't do it, Mr. President.

Dueling World View Monday

I picked up a straight-from-the-shoulder definition of the left's world view over the weekend. It's from Danusha V. Goska. To the left there are three kinds of people: the oppressors, the oppressed, and the champions of the oppressed.

There's a soft version, of course. It says that there are the privileged, the underprivileged, and the activists.

The point of such a simplistic world view is to reduce all human life to politics, because if there are oppressors, they must be smashed. If there are privileges, they must be erased. And we, the evolved, the enlightened ones, the champions of the oppressed, are the ones to do it.

But the problem is that it reduces human life to war. Of course it does. If you reduce life to politics, it means you reduce life to us-and-them. It means that life is merely a fight between our kind and the other.

I suppose you can soften the paradigm down to mere advantage and disadvantage, with knowledgeable experts applying settled social science to fix the disadvantage.

But this is a world where something is missing. You know what's missing? Humans, the social animals.

Weird, isn't it, that the folks that talk endlessly about peace and justice are the ones that believe in societal war.

Now I have my own three-sector world view. In my world there are three kinds of people. There are the People of the Creative Self, who believe in the German cult of creativity. There are the People of the Responsible Self, who believe in responsible individualism. And there are the People of the Subaltern Self, who believe that they are the pushed-around.

But there's a problem. People who believe in creativity are usually going to be disappointed, because very few people get to be creative and create a new thing. I like to say that my ambition is to have one original thought in my life. That's almost impossible, because almost all knowledge is social, something we learn from other people or in combination with other people. So what are the not-very-creative also-rans among the People of the Creative Self going to do? It's obvious. They are the champions of the oppressed, the activists doing their advocacy. It's the dull person's way out of the creative problem, that many are called but few are chosen. If you can't create, then the next best thing is to break things.

By contrast, almost anyone can be a responsible individual. Individualism gets a bad rap as selfishness, but that misunderstands the situation of the human individual. Humans are social individuals whethet they like it or not; they must make their life in society. The question is: shall they be compelled in their sociality or shall they find their own way to contribute to society, by making and doing things that help other people?

The great problem is the under-people: the oppressed, the victims, the underprivileged, the disadvantaged, the dependent. Used to be that they were simply slaves and serfs in some hierarchical society with the big men on top and the subservient underneath. That was in the old days, when, as Eric Hoffer writes, work was dishonorable and the rulers told the people what to do. But in our days work is honorable and work is the responsibility of each individual worker. Those workers who have not joined the culture of work live indeed at a great advantage.

There are many different ways of thinking of the three Peoples: Creative, Responsible, and Subservient. We could think of their self-image: Evolved people, Responsible people, and "the" People. Or we could think of pejorative descriptions: Educated Snobs, Selfish Careerists, Slave People. But you get the point.

And you can see how our national politics breaks down. The Democrats are a coalition of the Creatives and the Subservient. The Republicans are the party of the responsible individuals. That's why Mia Love and Tim Scott are Republicans.

The thing is that to win the culture war we have to scotch the creatives as fakes and pseudos. And exalt the responsible individual as the best and noblest kind of person. And we have to find ways to help the Subservient lose their addiction to free stuff in the service of some great One and join the modern world as responsible individuals.

One good thing is the the liberals of 2014 seem to be Bourbon retreads. They seem to have forgotten nothing and learned nothing. But I suspect that in the next few years we will see something like the Clinton New Democrats, trying to look like Republicans only not so much.

Well that's all today, except that I thought of a real good word for the Under People, but I forgot it. Hopefully I'll remember and put in an update.

The Farmer and the Oilman Should Be Friends

Flying east on Thursday to visit my daughter and family I got to talking to a pleasant women from British Columbia. Her whole family seemed to be working in the oil business in Alberta.

Funny how you can learn something from anyone you meet.

I mentioned the Keystone pipeline and the safety and costs problems associated with the rail shipment of crude oil.

Oh yes, she said. And there's another problem. The farmers can't get their grain shipped by rail. It's too expensive.

Now there's something I'd never thought of. Imagine! The environmentalist war on pipelines doesn't just hurt the oil business so that it costs $12 per barrel to ship Bakken oil on Warren Buffett's trains to the West Coast, doesn't just hurt consumers who must pay more for gasoline, doesn't just put money into the pocket of Mideast jihadis, doesn't just pour money into the pockets of the world's richest man, Vladimir Putin, said, according to an official, to be worth $180 billion after a lifetime in business.

Yeah. A pipeline-less world also hurts farmers, because the oil guys can outbid the farmers for rail capacity.

Of course, there are still a dozen grain ships on any given day anchored in Vancouver's outer harbor ready to load grain from Canada's prairie. But the farmers in Alberta are reduced to shipping their grain by truck, and they lose on every truckload.

That's not the only problem with shipping oil from Alberta's oil sands play. A lot of the oil gets shipped by heavy truck, according to my Canadian friend, and you should see the mess they make of the region's roads.

Nice guys, those environmentalists. They got their principles and other people have to suffer.

I mean, come on. Pipelines are safe, and they are buried underground, and they are way cheaper than railroads. Why in the world would anyone object to a pipeline?

Well, you can make an issue out of anything. You can gin up a crowd to object to anything; you can create fear and loathing with anything. See Race card, playing of.

I just wish that liberals would get themselves a real religion, one that's all about liberals committing themselves to a higher purpose, rather than committing other people to a higher purpose,keeping the little people poor and unemployed while liberals live off the fat of the land on ample stipends and lifetime tenure.

It's ironic. Used to be that the highest calling of a politician was building farm-to-market roads. Now the roads and the rails are clogged with crude oil because the politicians and liberal special interests won't let businessmen build pipelines.

Could we get back to basics, and just let the farmers get their produce to market?

Suppose the Democrats Run from Obama?

OK, so the GOP establishment won the Senate with groomed and trained candidates. We should congratulate them on that. Good play selection and good execution.

But I see movement conservatives worried that the new GOP Congress will go along to get along with the president -- and the MSM -- to avoid shutdowns and things that make Republicans look bad.

But, as Rush Limbaugh and Jeffrey Lord insist, the voters sent a message with the midterms. The message was simple and direct. It was Stop Obama. Here's the money quote from Rush:

[Americans] didn't think the president, when he was promoting Obamacare, meant that they were gonna get fewer hours to work. They didn't think it meant that they were gonna lose their health care. They didn't think it meant that their premiums were gonna skyrocket. The American people showed up yesterday and voted in numbers and voices with one message: "Stop this!" There is no legitimate alternative analysis.

That just about "nails it." Read what Rush said. "Fewer hours to work." "Lose their health care." "Premiums... gonna skyrocket." Americans are deeply worried about things like that. It really looks like the foundations of their lives in America are shaking.

When people are frightened they look for a leader. Our liberal friends sometimes like to sneer about this and talk about "demagogues" and "fascism." But it's a basic part of our nature as social animals to bind together when danger threatens.

Medium term we are talking about the Republican presidential nominee in 2016. Of course, my guy on all this is Ted Cruz, because I think that he is executing already on a plan to be that leader, articulating a route to the Promised Land of freedom and jobs and decency, and offering to lead us to that Promised Land.

What Cruz has to do is paint a vision of a better America. It doesn't have to be detailed. He just has to show that he has a plan and he is ready to lead.

And above all, I would say, he has to be the leader that will bring us together, men and women, married and single, black and white, young and old, and be the opposite of the narrow, mean, and divisive President Obama.

Meanwhile here's a thought for today.

We have already had Harry Reid's chief of staff briefing the media against President Obama. Because the Democrats are furious at losing the Senate. Job One for them is to get the Senate back in 2016. And if President Obama can't or won't help, then to hell with him.

Suppose the Democrats are about to throw President Obama under the bus? Suppose they will now vote in favor of pro-energy Keystone XL pipeline? Suppose they will now start voting to repeal the medical device tax? Suppose they are now ready to abolish the cruel and unjust provisions of Obamacare that are forcing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans into part-time jobs?

Yeah. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Democrats in Congress are looking at their majorities, and wondering how much worse it could get. For instance, what happens when people get their health insurance premiums increases in the next few weeks?

The present defeat could turn into a rout.

If the monolithic Democrats in Congress were to crack, and run from Obama and his cruel and unjust administration, then we wouldn't have to worry about go-along-to-get-along Beltway Republicans.

We could have a whole new ballgame.

Voters to Dems: You Suck!

Every society is ruled by a ruling class. That includes democratic societies. That means that, as Joseph Schumpeter wrote in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, democracy is not the rule of the people; democracy is the rule of the politicians.

In a democracy, all the people get to do is decide which people shall rule over them. In the US, the people get to decide whether Democrats or Republicans shall rule over them, or some combination of the two.

If we reduce this concept to the modern vernacular, the voters have a choice. They can say: "You Rock!" as they did to President Obama and the Democrats in 2008. Or they can say: "You Suck!" as they did to President Obama and the Democrats on November 4, 2014.

That is all.

This means that the people do not get to decide whether we shall have a welfare state or whether we shall recognize the Islamic State. The ruling class gets to do that.

The people had no notion, in the 19th century, of wanting free education and social insurance. They paid for education for their children, when they could, so that they wouldn't have to go down the mines. They joined labor unions and fraternal associations to share the risks of life with their brothers and sisters. It was the ruling class that came up with the idea of free education, and the ruling class that came up with the idea of government social insurance.

The ruling class said to the people: how would you like free education and free social insurance, paid for by the bosses that exploit you? The people said: Yay!

This was at least plausible in the middle-to-late 19th century, as advertised by Marx and by the Fabians. But then the science started to undermine their narrative.

In 1870, the marginal revolution invalidated the Marxian theory of surplus labor value by resolving dichotomy between "use value" and "exchange value." There was, it seemed, only "marginal value." But the Marxists went on as though nothing had happened.

In 1920, Ludwig von Mises showed that socialism could not work because the socialist planners could not compute prices. They would never know the real cost of things. Socialists argued the toss for a while and then just continued building socialism.

In 1944, Friedrich Hayek showed that the "man in Whitehall" could never approach the knowledge of the millions of consumers and producers in the market, so they could never deliver the goods as well as producers linked to consumers via the price system. Labourites in Britain and liberals in the US ignored this finding and continued building big government and big bureaucracies.

In 1944, Horkheimer and Adorno admitted that the enlightenment project had a problem. It was a project of domination over nature and other men. But liberals just ignored them and offered the people more free stuff administered by dominatory government bureaucracies.

Later, in the late 1970s, what with inflation and recession at the same time, liberals decided that the modern state was so complicated that nobody could effectively govern it. Then came Ronald Reagan, using the science listed above, and set the economy back on track. Liberals said it was all smoke and mirrors.

So here we come to 2008 and a young president who had never ventured out of the liberal ideological bubble. He and his associates in Congress pushed the pedal to the metal on big government health care, big government stimulus, and big government green energy. As though they had never heard of the science of big government.

So here we are. The big government stimulus was a failure. The big government Obamacare program has been a disaster of epic proportions. The big government green energy program has been a disaster of crony capitalism. Who could have seen it coming? Only someone who had read up on the science of big government.

And the people have said to the Democrats: "You suck!"

So what happens next?

The answer is: Nothing. Nothing can happen until the ruling class, the gentry liberals, wake up and say to themselves: "We Suck!"

And what chance is there of that? Liberals have convinced themselves that their big-government governance is the most just, evolved society that humans have ever conceived. The only thing in the way of the millennium is the bigoted racists, sexists, and homophobes that oppose them.

What about the conservatives? Why can't they offer a new way to the people?

We all like to rag on our Republican politicians, but they have a problem. If they were to propose a voyage to start slimming down big government and the welfare state that would mean reducing the amount of free stuff. You will note that whenever Republicans suggest such a thing the Democrats accuse them of pushing granny over a cliff.

So, really, nothing can be done until the gentry liberals change their minds about big government, until liberals cry "Uncle" and tell their Republican counterparts in back rooms that we need to do something about the cruel and unjust welfare state.

Most likely, nothing will happen until the government runs out of money. And maybe not even then, as Greece and Argentina seem to show.

But eventually, every ruling class that covers its eyes and refuses to see reality gets replaced. The problem is that when the ruling class gets replaced the people get wiped out by famine, war, and disease, or maybe a Dark Age. Because nothing is so blind as a ruling class that will not see.