Liberals Discover States' Rights Over Obamacare

One of the things I've been wondering about, vis-a-vis Obamacare and the King v. Burwell, case is how on earth you can dodge the fact that the Obama administration changed the plain meaning of the text of the PPACA in giving out subsidies to people in states that did not set up a state health insurance exchange.

As all the world knows, and Jonathan Gruber explained, Obamacare was set up with a gun to the heads of the states. Set up a health insurance exchange or forget the subsidies, says the text of the PPACA. But little Johnny and little Barry miscalculated on their little playground bullying. Most of the states didn't set up an exchange. So it follows that they don't get the subsidies. And that is what King v. Burwell is asking the Supreme Court to enforce.

So my question has been: how will the Supreme Court liberals justify their knee-jerk vote to uphold the IRS's illegal payment of subsidies to people in states without state exchanges?

Perfectly simple, writes The Wall Street Journal. You gussy up a states rights argument, a thing that liberals usually abhor.

But Justices Anthony Kennedy, Elena Kagan and others wondered if this arrangement crosses over from Congress merely attempting to influence state decisions into using spending and regulation to compel these sovereigns to join ObamaCare.

Gag me with a spoon, girls. You mean to say that all of a sudden you are worried about the federal government bullying the states into something? Why aren't you worried, e.g., about the Office of Civil Rights bullying state universities into convoluted and probably unconstitutional policies to fight the supposed "rape culture" on campus? And a hundred other liberal pet programs.

“From the standpoint of the dynamics of federalism . . . there’s a serious constitutional problem if we adopt your argument,” Justice Kennedy told plaintiffs counsel Michael Carvin.

Whoa, baby. Who'd a thought it? Constitutional issue with coercing the states? I'm shocked, shocked that there is political arm-twisting going on here.

Anyway, at least the liberal justices will have a peg to hang their kick-jerk liberal hats on. I mean, we wouldn't want to subject them to the humiliation of voting for Obamacare's illegal subsidies "just 'cos." That would be wrong.

A couple of days ago I wrote about "The Three Stages of Government and Law." My point was that any political dynasty rewrites the law to suit its convenience once it seizes power, because it can. This act of force has a beneficial result, from the point of view of the new ruling class, because it creates an aura of legality around its legislation as it enters into the zenith of its power. But at the end of a dynasty the rules that the ruling class set up no longer suffice to get it out of a jam like the Obamacare trainwreck.  So the ruling class starts flailing around and violating its own sacred principles every time it smashes up the family car after yet another drunken power binge.

The whole of liberal governance is based upon the idea that the Feds know best and that the sheeple should just shut up and accept that government by liberal experts and activists is just and fair.

So now, all of a sudden, liberals are invoking states rights? Now, at last, they are worried about the Feds coercing the states? Yeah, and I gotta bridge to sell you.

My point is that we are seeing, with the Obama administration violating its own law and digging up states rights arguments to justify its illegal and unjust Obamacare war on health care, the crumbing and ruin of the great liberal dynasty.

And it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Greece's Problem Isn't Socialism, It's Politics

It's easy to say that the problem with Greece is socialism. Or that the problem with President Obama is Alinskyism.

But look, socialism is just another apology for big government, and every ruling class has an ideology like that. In socialism the idea is that the working class is the biggest class and so they ought to rule -- through their evolved and educated leaders, of course. This is no different than kings talking about Divine Right or landed aristocrats talking about the rule of the best people.

The fact is that governments get into power by offering their supporters loot and plunder. It doesn't matter whether you are talking about Charlemagne looting and plundering eastward from Trier into the German lands, or whether you are offering the workers a bite of corporate profits. It still amounts to a promise of loot and plunder in return for support.

The problem is that loot and plunder eventually results in a wasteland. If people are licensed to go around stealing stuff, then less stuff will be produced, and there will be less stuff to go around. So every society must rail against thieves and robbers or go out of business.

Now the truth is that all governments, from a band of insurgent guerrillas to a mighty nation state, occupy territory, defend it with a armed force, and tax the inhabitants for the right to go about their daily business of producing and consuming. The question is: How much? How much expropriation of peoples' livelihood is enough? The answer is simple. A government will stop taking more to give to its supporters when: a) it runs out of money, or b) it provokes a head of rebellion.

That is the way to understand the Greek situation. Governments in Greece have bought the support of ordinary voters for decades with the promise of free stuff. But now the money is running out. Under pressure from other European governments the Greek government has implemented a policy of "austerity," meaning it has eased off on some of the free stuff. But austerity is very unpopular with the government's supporters and so a new party, Syriza, has arisen and obtained the support of the voters by asserting that all the cutbacks are unnecessary and a cruel trick of the Germans.

No doubt. But here is what a McKinsey report had to say in 2012.

Large scale business operations had been discouraged by hostile regulations. The generally small scale of businesses that remained, combined with over regulation, complex and restrictive licensing, and a highly volatile tax framework, has deprived the Country of an industrial base sufficient to support its spending.

The public sector had become too expensive and offered low quality output.

A framework of collective, inflexible, and binding labor agreements had led to a disconnection between education and the job market, which led to reduced innovation and under representation of women and young adults in the workforce.

A cumbersome legal and judicial system led to an over abundance of vague and sometimes conflicting laws, which discouraged economic activity.

Widespread tax evasion, which had become endemic in Greek culture, had led to substantial wealth creation outside the formal economy, and had led to a seemingly permanent fiscal shortfall.

Apart from the "widespread tax evasion" you could say the same thing about the US economy, unless you count the widespread use of illegal alien labor and general off-the-books work, condoned by our liberal masters, as "widespread tax evasion."

In my Story So Far about the last half century, I like to say that, in 1980, the liberal consensus had failed, and that made it possible for a right-wing extremist like Ronald Reagan to get elected as president. Reagan implemented a bunch of supply-side reforms, including hard money, that created a 20 year boom. The ruling philosophy of Reaganism was that there is a limited set of things that government can do; it's best for it to stay out of the economy as much as possible and let the people get on with it. The liberal ruling class was flummoxed by this, because it knew that such a thing could not work. Still, after three successive Republican wins they had to do something, and they got it in Bill Clinton, who ran for president as a moderate and then nearly self-destructed with HillaryCare. As time went on, Democrats reverted to the norm, forgetting the lesson of Reagan and the faux moderate tone of Clintonism, and we ended up with Barack Obama who is clearly a left-wing president that believes that everything begins and ends with government dangling free stuff in front of the people while liberals march through the institutions to implement their social agenda and gentry liberal environmental policies.

The problem with Obama-style politics is that it ends up at Greece, because the whole economy gets to be seized up in high friction politics and bureaucracy, crony capitalism and Chicago-style thuggery, and wasteful pet projects for gentry liberals from bike paths to biofuels.

The point is that government is force, and there is only a limited set of things you can do with force, because government force tends to destroy things, to loot the economy for the benefit of its supporters. With big government you get a lot of people sitting around on government pensions and not contributing to the economy. You get a lot of government bureaucrats sitting around and not doing anything to contribute to the economy while they compile regulations to benefit the supporters of the government. You get crony capitalists capitalizing on the governments fashionable enthusiasms, from wind and solar power. And of course you get left-wing activist groups interfering in everything.

Eventually the whole thing goes down the tubes.

My guess is that ordinary middle-class Americans are probably pretty confused and upset by the Obama years. But as yet, they don't really know what to do about it.

In my view the ordinary American middle-class is composed of people that believe, more or less, in responsible individualism. They will respond to a politics that celebrates responsible individualism as a way out of our current malaise.

Because politics isn't the solution to our problem. Politics is just civil war by other means. The solution is for people to go out into the world every morning as a responsible individual asking how they can give to the world.

Politics is all about how much to take, and eventually you run out of things to take.

The Three Stages of Government and Law

Here's a new and brilliant idea. Governments start out as lawless rebels; then they change the rules to suit themselves. Finally, they find that the rules they set up don't work any more, so they start to break their own rules.

Stage One: Outraged citizens decide they can't take it any more and combine to form a head of rebellion.

Stage Two: Victorious revolutionaries rewrite the law to make their kind of justice legal.

Stage Three: Ageing dynasty starts to cut corners as its popularity and influence starts to decline.

You know what this is all about. The Obama Age of Lawlessness illustrates the point perfectly. Right now, liberals are in such a pickle that they are reduced to lawlessness.

Liberals wrote the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in Congress, but they could only pass it by cheating. Then, once the bill became law, President Obama started violating its provisions, because the Act wouldn't work as written. Then liberals got so scared by the Tea Party that they sicced the IRS on the Tea Party. Without an election to fight the president has tried to implement immigration amnesty by executive action. Now it's reported that he'd like to increase taxes by executive action.

And liberals are fine with all that. So we know that the liberal

Actually, the trajectory of the liberal dynasty hasn't quite followed the three-stage script. Their "revolution" was the Progressive Era when they got to rewrite the constitution for direct election of senators and the income tax without actually taking to the streets. All done by the book. They took the US off the gold standard. All by the book. And then they dominated politics for most the the last century and built up the welfare state. All by the book.

But now they are running out of other peoples' money and other peoples' votes, and they need to take short cuts in order to live from paycheck to paycheck.

In my view, the only reason that governments ever obey the law is to avoid pissing people off. When people get pissed off they start muttering about revolution, so a prudent government abides by its own rules.

But when ruling dynasties get into trouble, that's when they start cutting corners. They have to, because they can't get what they want by following the law. That's when they start pissing people off.

That's good news. Liberals are in trouble and they are starting to cut corners, and that will piss a lot of Americans off.

So for conservatives, we should be in Stage One, where the disaffected start to form a head of rebellion and refuse to obey the unjust laws of the failing dynasty.

Do we really have the stomach for that? Or will we just sit around just talking about rebellion, like the Republic of Texas, and let the state's police come in and take all our cellphones from us with nary a whimper?

In the best of all possible worlds revolution wouldn't be necessary because the pissed off voters would get to vote for a new political dynasty without the blood and guts of a real revolution.

I wonder what will happen this time around.

The Real Challenge for 2017

Linked today on RealClearPolitics.com is Russ Smith, once "Mugger," on Scott Walker and the Republican candidates for president. He writes that

not a single candidate has articulated a coherent strategy to resuscitate the United States once Barack Obama’s tenure mercifully ends.

Then he notes that Scott Walker is pretty light on foreign policy.

I think that's baloney. I think that it's pretty clear what is needed to "resuscitate" America in 2017. The big question is how.

By that I mean that it's pretty obvious that we need honest money, budget cuts, an honest Obamacare that puts the subsidies into the federal budget and leaves the rest of the health insurance market alone. It's pretty obvious that we need a generational cleansing of the income tax code and a start on entitlement reform. It's pretty obvious that we need to reformulate our strategy vis-a-vis Islamic radicalism that stops short of occupying the Middle East. We need to draw a line on immigration somewhere between the people that want to send all the illegal immigrants home and the open-borders folks that want to register as many new Democratic voters as soon as possible.

The problem is that we conservatives don't want to do this the liberals did it, by ramming everything from Obamacare to gay marriage down our throats either by partisan cramdowns or by Salem-style witch-hunts. We want to reform America with bipartisan bills that represent a rough consensus of the American people. We want to observe the Moynihan rule, that you want to pass important reforms by 70-30 votes in the US Senate. Otherwise we have done nothing except stir the pot and create opponents to our programs.

Do we want to reverse all the Obama executive orders on January 20, 2017? Should we cram down a reform of the independent regulatory agencies so that the FCC Obamanet decision can never be repeated? Should we reverse Obamacare with a partisan vote without bothering to get a single Democratic vote? I don't think so. Because then we have licensed Democrats to do the same to us in eight years.

One of the reasons I don't want to shove conservative victories in liberal faces is the grim message of René Girard's notion of mimetic rivalry. His theory may not explain everything, but it does illuminate pretty well the tit-for-tat folly of excessive partisanship. Full-on partisanship doesn't achieve lasting reforms and social consensus. It just inflames passions and raises the stakes, as the presidency of Barack Obama has done.

The problem is, of course, that Gramscian strategies of a march through the institutions, the Alinsky tactics of constant street action and deliberate humiliation of the opposition, the grievance ideology of the left-wing academy, all these left-wing notions are innocent of the idea that we humans are social animals not soldier ants. They completely miss the point that the point of politics is to damp down differences before they escalate to civil war. It is one thing to rail against the Man when you are outsiders battling the system. It is another thing to continue such "outsider" tactics when you own the culture and the elite institutions as liberals do.

But how can we communicate to liberals the danger in their tactics? How can we implement a program of conservative reform by co-opting liberal fence-sitters instead of ignoring them?

Chances are that in 2017 Republicans will have a Republican president and decent majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since the 1920s. But it's not enough to have the power. The challenge is to persuade your adversaries, not just roll over them.

And that is the real challenge of 2017.

Net Neutrality: Liberals Ignore Settled Science on Regulation

John Fund writes that George Soros and the Ford Foundation have spent about $196 million funding the "net neutrality" campaign. And the long-term goal is control of internet content -- and funding public news organizations.

And now they have got what they wanted, with the Federal Communications Commission decision to regulate the internet as a public utility.

The price of moving data across the Internet has been falling by about 30 percent per year, according to the Wall Street Journal edit page.

That isn't good enough for the likes of Netflix, which now generates more than a third of all Internet traffic, and other major bandwidth users that are the chief lobbyists for the new FCC rules. Netflix doesn't detail its spending on Internet transport, though a telecom source estimates Netflix spends less than a penny for every movie it sends to a customer. 

Now, for some reason all our liberal friends are worked up about "net neutrality" and the evil bandwidth barons like AT&T and Comcast. Don't they know about the settled science? That the regulators always end up being captured by the interests they regulate? Are they determined to deny the fact that the price system almost always guarantees a more just distribution of resources than government?

Yeah. Like maybe Netflix and its customers should actually pay for hogging one third of Internet bandwidth. Hey, maybe a big greedy corporation like Netflix with its sky-high market valuation could afford to pay $0.02 per movie downloaded. Whatever.

But that's not the point. Nobody knows what Netflix should pay for bandwidth: that's what the price system is for. People compete for the use of a scarce resource by paying for it. If your customers can't afford to pay for the resource at market prices maybe that is an indication that your business plan has a flaw in it. The price system is much better and much more just than getting Congress to vote you a subsidy or cuddling up to a regulator. Or getting the president to bully the Federal Communications Commission into giving you free stuff.

Really, sometimes you have to wonder. Are liberals and their activist lefty pals really as educated and evolved as they claim?

I suppose that the liberal universe is divided, as Steven F. Hayward writes of the university, between its educated wing that believes in tenure and government by experts and its activist wing that believes in grievance and government by activists. Nowhere in these two world views is there space for the idea that maybe the experts and the activists should bug out and leave people to settle their differences without the option of going nuclear by calling in the strategic air command of big government.

The way to understand President Obama and his actions is to simply understand that he represents the Democratic Party coalition. The "over" part of the coalition wants to save the planet from global warming and legislate liberal morality and put everything in America, e.g. the Internet, under the supervision of liberals. The "under" part of the coalition just wants free stuff. Hey! That's what Obama delivers! Does he know his base, or what?

But if you are in the middle, neither over or under, you have to be feeling by November 2016 that Obama's America is not your America, and that it's time for a change.

Gov. "Stay-on-message" Walker and America's Worries

Hey, how about that Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI)? He's just penned an op-ed for USAToday. And he says that he's concerned about the problems of average citizens, not about the religion of a man he doesn't know.

It all makes me wonder if Rudi Giuliani was actually supposed to talk about the president's lack of love for America at the Walker get-acquainted session. Just to plunk Gov. Walker down in front of the target acquisition radar of the mainstream media.

Let's get down Gov. Walker's talking points, the things that he says the average people he meets are worrying about. To me, they scream "strategy" and signal what sort of a campaign he is planning to run. Here's what people are worrying about.

Worries about their children finding a job after college. Yeah. Interesting that Gov. Walker puts that at #1. I was talking with a neighbor whose daughter is just back from school with an Environmental Science degree. She's working as a waitress.

Worries about terror and ISIS. I tend to think that terror and ISIS are a bit overblown. The trouble is that there is ISIS video all over the TV news to make it look like the supposed JV guys are taking over the world.

Worries about getting back to their 2007 paycheck.  "I hear from people who lost their jobs and are back in the workforce but who still have not quite made it back to where they were before the recession — and they wonder when, or if, they'll ever get there." I'll say.

Here's how Gov. Walker sums up before he gets down to the media and the double standard:

Across party lines and state lines, Americans want America to be secure and prosperous again. And they're looking for leaders who can focus on that goal and who will get results.

I expect that this op-ed tells us everything we need to know about Gov. Walker and his campaign. He will focus on the worries people have about themselves, worries they have about their children, and worries they have about the nation. He will address how he will make America secure and how he will make it prosperous, for us and for our children.

When you think about it, that just about covers everything a politician should address when running for office.

One thing I suspect that Gov. Walker will not address: Fundamental Transformation.

NYT Crows Over Net-Neutrality Victory

It looks like President Obama is going to win his effort to fold the internet into the government. The smaller internet content providers have mobilized an army of activists to flood the zone at the Federal Communications Commission and it looks like Republicans are throwing in the towel on opposing the president. Here's how Jonathan Weisman at The New York Times describes it:

A swarm of small players, like Tumblr, Etsy, BoingBoing and Reddit, overwhelmed the giants of the broadband world, Comcast, Verizon Communications and Time Warner Cable. Two of the biggest players on the Internet, Amazon and Google, largely stayed in the background, while smaller participants — some household names like Twitter and Netflix, others far more obscure, like Chess.com and Urban Dictionary — mobilized a grass-roots crusade.

The issue (supposedly) is whether the bandwidth providers can charge content providers for getting a "fast lane" on the Internet and whether the bandwidth providers can "throttle" content providers that don't want to pay.

At the center of the issue are the content streamers like Netflix, which is said to use up to 1/3 of bandwidth with its movie streaming. Should Netflix pay to get the bandwidth it needs to stream without glitches? Should the government decide that or the market?

The deciding factor, apparently, has been the Millennials.

“We don’t have an army of lobbyists to deploy. We don’t have financial resources to throw around,” said Liba Rubenstein, director of social impact and public policy at the social media company Tumblr, which is owned by Yahoo, the large Internet company, but operated independently on the issue. “What we do have is access to an incredibly engaged, incredibly passionate user base, and we can give folks the tools to respond.”

So here is the first entry of the Millennials into national politics. And what do they want? They want free stuff: uninterrupted streaming of their movie and video downloading. And they want to screw the evil bandwidth providers to whom they have to pay monthly payments.

In health care we have the evil insurance companies; in the internet we have the evil bandwidth providers.

Well, Millennials, you may not like it when you get what you ask for. Because you are licensing the government to start monkeying around with bandwidth and content providers, and don't doubt that ObamaNet will turn out like ObamaCare.

Oh yeah. Remember Obamacare? That was Obama promising you can keep your health plan and your doctor and it would all cost less. Only what actually happened was that Obama bought the support of the insurance companies and the drug companies with your money, and you can't keep your doctor or your health plan and premiums and deductibles have gone up.

Don't doubt that the same thing will happen with ObamaNet. Because that's how politics works. It's not about helping people. It's about fighting over the loot. And the corporations and insiders have more money and more access than you do.

Let's close with a quote from Milton Friedman: "The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem."

But our Millennial friends will have to find that out the hard way.