Mad Dog or Plain Vanilla?

In the aftermath of President Obama's 2016 budget of more spending and more complex taxes, and a veiled challenge to shut the government down, Scott McKay recommends going big:

Stop wasting time and pass a flat tax in the House and Senate. Pass gigantic block grants dissolving entire federal agencies (Department of Education, EPA, Department of Energy) and moving their funding and powers back down to the states.

But the strategy developed by congressional leaders McConnell and Boehner is to flood the zone with vanilla changes to the president's budget and insert a couple of items for veto bait, to be compromised away to as to keep the meat of the changes. You might call this "leading from behind."

Jonah Goldberg also likes the value of vanilla, as in Scott Walker for president. The point is that about half Republican voters want an anti-establishment candidate, and the other half want a safe establishment candidate.

Walker is in the golden spot. He can, like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day listening to Andie MacDowell explain the perfect man, reply “that’s me” to almost everything Republicans say they want. Executive experience? Challenge conventional thinking? Anti-establishment fighter? “Me, me, me.” 

Yeah. He's anti-establishment without being aggressive about it. The extraordinary thing about Walker's three campaigns for governor of Wisconsin in in four years in the teeth of a national liberal campaign against him was that he kept his cool. Liberals were foaming at the mouth, occupying the state Capitol, singing "Solidarity Forever" while getting arrested, threatening Walker's family and kids, but Walker stayed mild-mannered and "pragmatic." Then he drew the sting of compulsory paycheck deductions for state government employee union dues.

On the other hand here's Ted Cruz saying the Senate should hold up the nomination of Loretta Lynch to be Attorney General until Obama compromises on immigration. Yeah! Sock it to 'em, Ted!

Of course, even Ted Cruz, the mad dog, takes care to sound eminently cool and reasonable when he performs on TV. Yet Scott Walker, speaking at the Iowa Freedom Summit, came out from behind the lecturn to walk the stage and appear animated. Even so, the Daily Beast blasted "that Scott Walker speech" as "shallow, tedious, and wrong." Or vanilla. (My takeaway from the Walker speech is that he's going to get a lot of mileage out of protesters showing up at his house. Distaff voters don't like that sort of thing.)

Ultimately, Republicans need to be true to their center, and that is the culture of responsible individualism. Republicans believe that we need less government because people can and should be responsible for their own. Democrats believe that only protest and activism and government force can roll back the injustice of the age.

It's up to Republicans to make the case that it's pretty remarkable that the Democratic over-under coalition has any business protesting injustice, when most of the injustice in today's America is the consequence of the unjust power of the present liberal, Democrat, ruling class.

Every insurgent group forms out of the chaos of injustice meted out by the current ruling class. The only question is strategy: should we be mad dogs foaming at the mouth for justice, or should be just be mild-mannered vanilla eaters proposing a few mild-mannered reforms?

Steady as She Goes Towards the Waterfall

Yesterday I was busy all day loading up the data from the president's Budget of the United States Government for fiscal year 2016 into usgovernmentspending.com. It was a little more hectic than usual because I inserted a bug into my routine to project state-and-local finances out to 2020, and it took me all day to figure out what I had done wrong.

Everybody is aghast that the president's FY 2016 spending proposal is 7 percent higher than the FY 2015 spending proposal. But actually, the FY 2016 spending proposal is $100 billion less than the FY 2016 spending proposal in last year's budget. Here are the numbers. As you can see, half the difference comes from "Other Spending."

The big problem is that the president has proposed nothing to deal with the elephant in the room, which is that health care will eat the budget (and Obamacare does nothing to help).

Look, I understand the president's problem. Even if he weren't committed to crashing the health care system so the government could go to "single-payer," whatever that would actually mean in practice, there is no percentage for a center-left politician in proposing a reform (i.e. reduction) in entitlements. Government is force, and governments bid for support by offering free stuff to their supporters, exploiting the culture of the robber band, the dawn raid, the conquering army, and the cringing peasant in all of us. No doubt that's why 62% of Brits say they want more government. The whole point of the Democratic Party is offering free stuff to its voters, and the voters believe in getting the full amount they had in mind. Hence the president's offer of "free" community college.

In the end, of course, the government runs out of other peoples' money, and you get Greece, or Argentina, or Venezuela. You get a devaluation, a seizure of assets, and the game begins again. Don't the people get it? No, they don't. They don't think beyond their world of subordination to a noble patron. The patron will provide, and if he can't it's because of the dark forces conspiring against him.

The only way out is for the people to develop a culture of responsible individualism that instinctively cringes at the thought of free stuff. How many people are there in the world that feel that way? It's hard to tell, but I don't think it's that many.

Plus, the big-government folks always have the people on their side who say "I paid into Social Security, so I got mine coming. And anyway, who would trust the stock market?"

There is a sturdy truth in that sentiment. The government will always have to hand out some sort of Social Security because if it didn't there would be blood in the streets. It would be much easier for the government to raid everyone's retirement account, or rob the corporations that represent the wealth in those retirement accounts.

Or maybe not. We hear this week that gentry liberals, through their elected Dem representatives, pushed back against the president's plan to tax their kids' college savings accounts. It makes sense. If there is one thing sacred, it is the right of the children of gentry liberals to go to selective colleges and acquire the right left credentials.

So maybe there's hope. Figure out how to appeal to the self-interest of gentry liberals and all will be well.

Hume Policing the Frontier Between the Observed and the Unobserved

Our judgments about cause and effect, according to David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature, are nothing more than projections of our sense impressions, prompted by the "force and liveliness" of those impressions.

But where do the debutantes of forceful and lively impressions go after their first presentation to the monarch of our mind? They subside on the couches of the Memory and the Imagination, says Hume, and memory is "much more lively and strong than those of the imagination." A "perfect idea" is an impression that has entirely lost its vivacity. Thus banished to a nether world without the strong light of vivacity, our perfect ideas in the imagination are subject to the fancy and may stray to thoughts of "winged horses, fiery dragons, and monstrous giants." The natural thing is for ideas of the memory to fade away and become mere imagination. But sometimes ideas of the imagination can reacquire force and vivacity and counterfeit as memory. It is the practice of "liars", says Hume, by frequent repetition of their imaginary ideas, to end up believing them as reality.

Obviously, we cannot use the perfect idea of the imagination in any process of inferring from the observed to the unobserved.

But Hume famously goes further than this. He argues that there is no basis in reason to infer the unobserved from the observed at all. All we can argue is "constant conjunction." When we experience impressions in constant conjunction we come to believe they are related, from the force and vivacity of the impressions and their constant conjunction.

But notice that Hume does have a theory of cause and effect. He assumes that when people see a constant conjunction their minds are driven to assume that if one event occurs the other must necessarily follow. So he does believe in reason. The other approach is to assume that everything is contingent, that mental conjunctions are just as unprovable as conjunctions between forceful and vivacious impressions, that everything is merely a tissue of unprovable assertions and predictions.

The modern approach is the way of settled science. The more that theory about separate impressions gets confirmed and the more that predictions about cause and effect are successful, the more we are justified in putting our faith in their causal connection. But you never know. The practical thing to do is assume that everything works as advertised. Until it doesn't.

Get a Clue from Magical Thinking

Everybody sneers at magic these days. Because we are all scientists now.

So Richard Fernandez chuckles as he takes a look at the widespread resort to magical thinking abroad in the world today. In Venezuela the government is out of money, but its leader President Nicolas Maduro is promising more free stuff.

Free school stipends, free housing. No cutbacks to social welfare. How would the bankrupt state pay for it?  He said, that while “oil will never cost $100 again but God will provide. Venezuela will never do without.”

Nor is Bolivarian Venezuela alone in this. There is a wave of "anti-austerity" politics in Europe. In addition to the Greek Syriza party, there is the Podemos party in Spain. All these countries are broke, relying on the kindness of strangers. But the politicians assure their supporters that God (i.e., the Germans) will provide.

The truth is that our modern scorn at magical thinking misses the point. If you read the literature you will find that primitive humans did not resort to magic as a first resort. They only went to the rain-man after the rains had failed. The point of magic is to keep hope alive when all hope is lost. Even the modern corporate types discuss how corporate leaders can keep hope alive in difficult times.

An outbreak of magical thinking tells us that things are not going well. Indeed, the outbreak tells us that, absent a miracle, things are going due south.

Fernandez runs the gamut of magical thinking in the world today, from the lefty parties telling their followers that the free stuff will continue to Iranian mullahs that think that the death of a king called Abdullah in the Hejaz "will mark the beginning of a chain of great events that will shock the world." Then there is the ongoing cultural crisis of Islam that inspires its adepts to fly planes into tall buildings and assassinate cartoonists.

The world is full of this. The last months of every war tend to be the bloodiest, and the cornered rat is said to lash out in a final attempt to stay alive.

My point is that when you are in a tight spot, magical thinking is completely natural. When you are toast then you have two options: lie down and let the world roll over you, or double down. If you double down then you either go out in a blaze of glory or, against all odds, you win through.

Observe that this applies in spades to a leader, whether military, corporate, political, or patriarchal. An ordinary person can go into a hole to die, but not a leader. The leader's followers are expecting him to do something. Why? Well, it solves their problem. As long as the leader leads then they don't have to think about what to do. As long as the army is marching down the road, with the hope of supplies a day's march ahead, then the soldiers will go with the program. It is when food runs out and the unit leader has scarpered that the army falls apart. And once the army, or the government, or the family falls apart then people are in real trouble. That's because humans are social animals; we are nothing without the group.

Let us return to firm ground: the president's recent State of the Union speech. A number of commentators, from left and right, have noted the president's magical thinking. Particularly on foreign policy, the president was asking us to believe that everything was hunky-dory. I myself wrote yesterday about the absurdity of saying that "mandated sick leave and maternity leave, another equal pay law, and a higher minimum wage" have anything to do with what the president calls "middle class economics." Middle class economics, I wrote, is about responsible individualism, people taking responsibility for their lives, not government-mandated benefits for the peasants.

All I am saying is this. When you see people descending into magical thinking, whether a gambler in Las Vegas or the president speaking before Congress, it is not the time to sneer. Magical thinking is as human as sex and violence. When you see someone doing some magical thinking, it is just a sign that they are in deep trouble. You should act accordingly.

What Middle-Class Economics Really Looks Like

President Obama introduced a new catchphrase in his 2015 State of the Union speech: Middle Class Economics. As he put it:

[M]iddle class economics is -- the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, everyone plays by the same set of rules.

Then he sharpened his definition.

[M]iddle-class economics means helping working families feel more secure in a world of constant change.

What does that mean? The president says it means government subsidized child care, government mandated sick leave and maternity leave, another equal pay law, and a higher minimum wage.

Of course these benefits have nothing to do with any kind of economics. They are simple government welfare state benefits, and the idea is to attract the votes of women and low-paid workers.

Nothing wrong with that. If women and workers want to subject themselves to the feudal mercies of the Great Lord Obama, that is their choice.

The telling point is that President Obama feels he has to cover the ugly reality of his class-warfare authoritarian welfare state in the clothing of the middle class. He's not just handing out loot to his faithful voters; he's upholding middle class values. He's not just appealing to the narrow interest of low-income voters; he's upholding justice for all. The Democrats have been doing this for a while, ever since they stopped openly pitching for the working-class vote. It tells us that they think they are batting on a sticky wicket.

The Wall Street Journal's Dan Henninger charmingly calls the president's policy "Obama's Peter Pan Economics."

In Mr. O’s world, tax revenue is sort of like Tinker Bell’s pixie dust. You just scoop up another handful and spread it wherever you want. As he said Saturday: Middle-class economics “means making it easier to afford childcare, college, paid leave, health care, a home, and retirement.”

 Henninger is right. Middle-Class Economics is a fairy tale. Here's how.

Government doesn't make childcare more affordable; it strangles it in regulations and certifications and makes it more expensive. Government doesn't make college more affordable; its subsidies have encouraged colleges to jack up tuition into the stratosphere so students can't any more work their way through college. Government doesn't make paid leave more affordable; it just forces workers to work for lower wages while their employers bank their vacation pay for them. Government doesn't make health care more affordable; it makes it impossible to afford unless the government is paying for you -- and that's assuming that the government covers the procedures you need. Government doesn't make homes more affordable. It doesn't make a home more affordable. It just crashed the housing market with its "affordable housing" policies and the people hardest hit were the blacks and Hispanics the very people that the policy was supposed to help. Government doesn't make retirement more affordable; it just sequesters middle-class savings and spends the money on buying votes for 30 years.

Hey GOP candidates for 2016! Here's the germ of a stump speech!

OK. Let's get back to first principles. On my view, government is force, and what governments do is distribute loot to their supporters. No loot, no supporters. The purpose of election campaigns and State of the Union speeches is to dangle the promise of loot before potential supporters, and entice them to vote for you.

But real middle-class economics and real middle-class culture is opposed to this. It imagines that it has evolved beyond the child-like complaint of "it's not fair", the wail of the people of the subordinate self. The middle class believes in responsible individualism. It says "tell me the rules, and I will follow the rules, go to work, pay my taxes, and obey the laws." And I will take responsibility for contributing my share to society. I will take responsibility for childcare, meaning that I will work to care for and raise my children. I will take responsibility for college, meaning that I will save for my childrens' education. I will take responsibility for paid leave, meaning that I will work to save money so I can take time off for a vacation, for sickness, for family emergencies. I will take responsibility for health care, meaning that I will select a health insurance plan that meets my particular needs and protects my assets. I will take responsibility for buying a home, meaning that I will save up money for a mortgage and buy a house that I can afford and that won't wipe me out if there is a recession. I will take responsibility for retirement, meaning that I will save money on my own time in my own way, and when I've saved enough (government mismanagement of the economy notwithstanding) I will retire.

That's what middle class economics really means. It means that people of the responsible self surrender themselves to the mercies of the market in the faith that by working and saving and doing useful things for other people, and constantly improving their skills,  they will wive and thrive in a world of constant change. The point of responsible individualism is that it is the taking on of responsibility that makes life meaningful. Otherwise you are just a peasant or a serf.

All the middle class needs is a government that keeps its cotton-picking hands off the levers of economic intervention, and do simple things like defend the nation against enemies foreign and domestic, provide a sound currency, provide a job market free from credentialism and a business environment where you can start a business in one day with one form.

That would be real middle-class economics.

Free Stuff, Public and Private

We all know about government "free stuff". It's what governments do; they keep their supporters on-side with free stuff. What could go wrong? The answer is: Greece and Argentina. At some point, governments tend to run out of other peoples' money to give away. What do they do? Generally, they lie, cheat and steal some more, through devaluation of the currency and seizure of bank accounts.

Then they return to their profligate ways. That's because the one thing that brings people out into the streets is when their government pension is cut. I am talking about government pension in general: any government benefit, from an actual pension to subsidized health care or subsidies for green energy.

If governments dangle free stuff in front of their supporters, it must be because it works, and it must be because getting something for nothing is hard-hired into the human psyche.

So what about evil corporations?  What do they do on the free-stuff front? The simple answer is: a lot. Corporations provide free TV programs that are paid for by advertisers. They publish newspapers that are partly or wholly financed by advertisers. Supermarkets have weekly specials. And airlines have their frequent flier programs.

Here's a story about corporate free stuff. Lady Marjorie and I plan to take a trip to Australia later this year, so my daughter offered us the use of four free upgrade coupons that her husband had racked up as a very-frequent flier. We made the reservations in coach and gave my daughter the confirmation number so she could access our reservation and upgrade it to business class using her husband's coupons. Only, it turned out that the coupons were only valid for certain economy fares. For our low-low fare there would be a fee!

So businesses are strategic about their free stuff. They want to service their customers and feed their appetite for free stuff. But there is still the need to make a profit. The free giveaways areneeded as sweeteners to get the customer to feel good about the corporation. But there is a limit.

You can see what is going on when you remember that the corporations call their free stuff "loyalty programs." They are playing the role of the lord of the manor handing out little presents to the peasants on the annual fete for the renters, rather like the fictional fete given by Squire Donnithorne to the people of Hayslope in Adam Bede.

Governments do the same thing for their supporters. The regular payment of free stuff to the voters is supposed to ensure their loyalty at election time.

But you can see that the whole thing needs to be carefully managed. You need to manage expectations carefully, because people get really annoyed when the squire suddenly decides to cut back on the parties because he's had to pay the young squire's "debts of honor."

For corporations there is the feedback from the constant need to turn a profit. Not enough free stuff, and the customers go buy elsewhere. Too much free stuff and the corporation goes broke.

For governments the same applies, only governments can go on much longer borrowing money than corporations can. This means that it always pays for a politician to offer free stuff now and worry about national bankruptcy later.

Politicians can always blame the greedy banker for their mistakes. Corporations, not so much.

Meg and Rodrigo: I Would You Would Accept of Grace and Love

Of course I get the point, Rodrigo Kazuo and Meg Perret. Your op-ed "Occupy the syllabus" in The Daily Californian was designed as a performance in the politics of "taking offense." It is a model of its kind, almost perfectly constructed and executed. The outrage, the injustice, the offense! That two such as you, multiracial differently gendered students should be subjected to non-stop recitations about dead white males without balancing narratives from non-whites: it is insupportable.

So you call for an "occupation of syllabi." So you wish to oppose the violence of western civilization with a new violence. You want to forcibly replace the old oppressive syllabi with a new liberated  syllabus. That means, of course, that you will have blood on your hands, because government is force, and politics is civil war by other means. And when politics wins its war of the streets it imposes its will. By force. It must be so, because government is force.

I'm sure that you have never thought beyond the idea of "peaceful protest". I've noticed, over the years, that my lefty friends seem more and more to gravitate towards euphemisms in their discourse that rather elide the irreducibly violent nature of all "activism" and politics.

Thus "street riot" becomes "demonstration" becomes "peaceful protest." But it is still a show of force.

If you really believe that your grievances are so deep that violence is the only recourse, then go ahead: occupy the syllabi. Name and shame; conduct your campaign of intimidation and domination. Impose your ideology and stamp out all the evil patriarchs and neo-colonialists. We will meet at the barricades.

But if you think that the solution to our problems can be achieved short of bloody violence, then I beg you to accept of grace and love, and stop before you cross the Rubicon into the wilderness of mirrors that is the world of left-wing activism beyond the windows of the university hot-house. Start to talk to people outside the walls of your cramped left-wing seminary.

I admit that for you, Meg, it is probably too late. You seem to be deep in the secular religion of gender, and probably confirmed in the faith. But you, Rodrigo, appear from Google to be an artist more than an activist. For you it is not too late.

One thing disturbed me in the list of dead white males that you recited in your manifesto of offense, apart from the omission of Immanuel Kant. You didn't mention the social theorists Horkheimer and Adorno. They represent, for me, a point of inflection in left-wing thought. They proposed, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, that the problem of domination starts with reason and enlightenment, for what does woman want from reason but to dominate nature and other women?

Has it occurred to you that you want to dominate the culture at Berkeley and impose your ideas upon it, just as white males dominated the world from about 1500 until now?

From Horkeimer and Adorno we get to the left-wing sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas. He realizes that all social systems, governmental and economics, are dominatory. It all ends in one person or a group of people imposing their way on others. The only way to get out of this, in Habermas' mind, is to enter into genuine discourse where two or more people are genuinely trying to understand the other's point of view and try to come to a common understanding.

Have you seen the research on this? It says that if you put a bunch of Americans into ta room to solve a problem -- without politicians -- they will do so, usually in a way that gives everyone a piece of the solution. But you are already politicians; so it wouldn't do any good to put you guys into the room. You have already learned the tricks and the games of politicians, and how to manipulate other people into serving a political movement rather than acting as free and cooperative citizens.

I am afraid I do not understand how your agenda of the occupation of syllabi can be achieved by cooperation and non-violence. I can only hear the crack of the overseer's cowskin whip and feel the cold frown of the reeducation camp's commandant. For me, you are replacing one evil with another. I do not call that liberation; I do not call it emancipation. I call it revanchism, back to the totalitarianisms of the 20th century.

I want to close with this recent thought from a Chinese man.  Where does it come from? You could look it up.

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.

How far is each of you from beginning to be able to understand what that Chinese man was talking about? You'd certainly need to learn a lot more about the world than the pearls of wisdom cast from a brief introductory course in Classical Social Theory.