From the Confederate Battle Flag to the Boys in the Boat

The flap about the Confederate battle flag brings out the admiration in me.

How do liberals do it? One liberal writer brings up the issue of the Confederate battle flag, that featured in the on-line rantings of the racist killer Dylann Roof, and immediately 30 million liberal hearts are beating as one to demand that the flag be taken down at the South Carolina statehouse.

Imagine if conservatives could come together on an issue and carry all before them, if only for a week!

I suppose the answer is: that's what liberals do. That's what it means to practice a secular religion and combine your religious and political practice in one. Everything is political, and everything is a moral outrage. And everything comes down to "The Issue."

For conservatives like me, things are more diffuse. Morality is separate from politics, because morality is about right and wrong, while politics is about strong and weak. And to me, "slavery" is a more complex subject than the peculiar institution that prevailing in the years in the South before the Civil War.

For instance, the plantation owners didn't choose African slaves to work their plantations out of racism. They chose them because west Africans four hundred years ago had developed a peculiar immunity to malaria. The plantation owners could have used white Europeans on their American plantations, and they did, bringing indentured servants to the Americas. The only problem was that the white indentured servants died of malaria in the malarial swamps of the east coast of North America.

Put it this way. The plantation owners that hired white indentured servants failed, because their workers all died. The plantation owners that bought west African slaves thrived, because their workers didn't die as much as the wimpy whites.

Yes, but how could those Southerners face themselves in the morning!

They could face themselves in the morning because we each of us write ourselves a moral blank check each morning, while checking the bank balance of others with admirable and searching rectitude.

That's how liberals manage to politicize the evil actions of an evil racist lone wolf while remaining silent about the black-on-black carnage in, e.g., the South Side of Chicago. And the cultural tsunami of fatherless boys in America. And the utter incompetence of government at all levels, including the apparent Chinese hack of all federal employee records.

I'm reading The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown, the 2013 book about the University of Washington crew that competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It follows a number of themes, from the horror of Nazism to the agonizing sufferings of Americans in the Great Depression.

But for me the overriding theme is the cultural differences between then and now. The heroes of the book, the boys in the boat, were mostly from the artisan class, and from unstable, fractured homes. Before enrolling at the University of Washington in the fall of 1932 they had faced formidable hardships in their young lives, including being chucked out by their father's second wife. There wasn't no welfare state; these young men had to find a job, had to find a place to sleep, had to find a way, somehow, to overcome -- and then pay for tuition at the UW. The book contrasts their privations, their grit, and their shame, with the easy effortless lives of their upper middle-class classmates.

Back in the 1930s in America it was white Northern European youngsters trying to build a life out of the economic chaos of a failed government and the social chaos of their parents' struggles and failures. Today in the 2010s, nothing has changed. Only now it is African American youngsters trying to build a life in the wreckage of failed government policies, and the chaos of their parents' struggles and failures.

But by all means let's stop selling Confederate flag memorabilia at Walmart.

Hey Millennials! Have I Got A Deal for You!

Everybody knows that Millennials looove the Democrats. Because gay marriage, or something.

But millennials are discouraged and demoralized. No jobs and punishing student debt.

Do you realize where no jobs and punishing debt come from? You should. A lousy economy and punishing student debt come from Democrats.

Let me explain.

The Democratic Party stands athwart the free-market economy saying Stop. That's because the Democratic Party stands for the following notions that really screw young people trying to get started in life.

• Entitlements Forever. You've been told that Social Security and Medicare are the best things since sliced bread. And so they were, for the first generation that enjoyed them. But now you chaps are stuck with the bill. Republicans stand for reform of entitlements, which will help millennials.
• Government Employee Pensions Forever. If you are wondering why the roads are a mess and that your school fees are so high, there is one overriding reason. Democratic politicians have promised pensions, payable by you, to their loyal Democratic-voting government employees at all levels of government. Republicans don't owe these folks a dime.
• Student Debt Forever. Sounds like a groovy idea. Borrow money from the government to finance your education. The only problem is that the higher education industry took the money and hiked their fees and hired a bunch of administrators that make things worse. And, of course, as you know, student debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Now I have a suggestion for you millennials. Forget cool. Forget progressives and social liberal rubbish. Forget the Democrats.  Think about Republicans, who stand, despite everything you have heard from your teachers and from your cool friends and from social media, for people without political connections, without a comfortable sinecure, without showers of subsidies for fashionable gentry liberal enthusiasms. Think about a party that, stupidly and blindly, actually represents your interests instead of misleading you with coolness and social media.

In conversation with Hugh Hewitt the other day, the blowhard Donald Trump called for new leadership in America, a cheerleader that would inject a new optimism into America and Americans. Their conversation made me realize how singularly lacking President Obama has been in the optimism department. And they agreed with each other that the way to get the attention of millennials would be in the matter of college costs and student debt.

What would you millennials think of a presidential candidate that proposed to "do something" about spiraling college costs and crushing student debt?

Just don't look for a Democratic candidate to do much about the cost of education. You see, millennials, the most central part of the Democratic Party base is the education blob, professors and adminstrators, that has grown fat and sleek on government subsidies for education and unlimited student debt.

But hey, we still have a secret ballot. So you millennials can vote what you want and don't have to admit anything to your cool friends and your social media buddies.

Meanwhile just think about which side your millennial bread is buttered. Whether it makes sense to vote for the party of privilege and patronage, or the party of people building lives for themselves. And whether it is Time for a Change, to mend the torn and divided and demoralized America that has come out of the much advertised Hope and Change of 2008.

The Trouble with Scott Walker's Tax Policies

Scott Walker is the remarkable GOP governor of the purple-to-blue state of Wisconsin and he's running for president.

His record on taxes, Henry Olsen tells us approvingly, departs from supply-side orthodoxy. In Wisconsin, he reduced the marginal rate on the state income tax for the middle-class taxes from 4.6% to 4.0%. But he only reduced the top rate on the rich from 7.75% to 7.65%. And he sweetened the pot with middle-class deductions for contributions to HSA accounts and private school tuition. No general tax rate relief for corporations, of course.

The result is that Scott Walker got reelected in a landslide in Wisconsin, but Sam Brownback, running for reelection for governor in Kansas with an orthodox supply-side record, only squeaked in.

The fact is that the middle class cares about what the politicians do for them, and that means lower taxes on the middle class. The middle class resents anyone else getting a break. And that, I'd say, is a pity.

It's all very discouraging to me, because the way out of the welfare state box canyon is not to create more middle-class sweeteners while keeping tax rates on the rich high. Why? Because high tax rates on the rich and corporations are in fact catnip for political corruption. Lobbyists can deal small-ball exemptions and carve-outs below the radar with the politicians that benefit existing powerful interests. And high marginal tax rates make it hard for newcomers to accumulate wealth to challenge the status quo.

But you can't explain that to Americans. In fact, Rule One in politics is that if you are explaining, you are losing.

Henry Olsen calls Ronald Reagan to testify for his anti-supply-side arguments. Reagan didn't sell his tax reductions on the benefits to entrepreneurs but to ordinary people. And he made sure that his tax proposals included big middle-class sweeteners.

By indexing standard deductions and tax brackets for inflation, he steered hundreds of millions of dollars to middle- and working-class families, money that theoretically could have been used to cut top rates even more. And his 1981 tax cut allowed all workers to contribute to tax-deductible IRAs, exactly the sort of middle-class tax cut that today’s supply-siders deride.

Yeah. But the truth is that these carveouts for the middle class were bubba-bait, just like President Obama's claims that Obamacare would reduce premiums by $2,500 per year. The real thrust of the Reagan tax cuts was to lower the top marginal rate from 70 percent down to 28 percent, and get entrepreneurs out of their garages. Just like President Obama's plan was to force everyone to get health insurance, whether they needed it or not.

The problem with high tax rates mitigated by deductions and subsidies is that it turns the economy into a valley with high cliffs on each side. As long as you stay in the valley bottom in sight of the politicians you do all right. But to strike out across open country? Well, first you have to find a way to climb the valley walls.

Yes, but isn't it right that government should subsidize people into doing the right thing, saving for medical and education expenses and stuff? Maybe.

But is it really a good idea to subsidize billionaire Elon Musk in his electric car startup and his solar-panel venture? Green energy subsidies are based on the idea that we are running out of fossil fuels and/or that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is frying the planet. It's all based on current "settled science" or perhaps the latest gentry liberal fad.

My dream is for an America with low entitlements and low taxes, so that people just starting out don't pay 25% of their wages on payroll taxes, but use that money for health care, education, starting a business, saving for retirement.

But we'll never get started if we are all ruthlessly defending our own pet projects and carveouts like the proverbial dog in a manger.

The Wages of Politics is Betrayal

There's a long piece by Israeli pundit Caroline Glick about Israel's multiple betrayals of its allies.

In 1994, Israel betrayed the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza who had helped us fight against PLO terrorists for decades. 

That's because when Yasser Arafat and his boys entered the scene they immediately neutralized the folks that had collaborated with Israel.

Then, in 2000, Israel abandoned its allies in South Lebanon.

After 18 years of fighting shoulder to shoulder with the IDF, Israel left the soldiers and commanders of the South Lebanese Army and their families to face Hezbollah alone.

Now, Glick worries, Israel needs to help their old allies, the Druze in the Golan Heights, else they will be wiped out in the aftermath of the Syrian civil war. And then there are the Kurds.

You can make an argument that Israel should have helped its former allies. But that forgets the fundamental axiom of politics, attributed to the British Lord Palmerston.

I say that it is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow. 

This is too narrow a view. Not just in foreign policy, but in politics in general, there is only expediency, only interest.

So Israel abandoned its Palestinian allies. What did those Palestinians think would happen when they were no longer useful to Israel?

The same applies to US domestic politics. What did the white working class expect when the liberals and the Democrats declared themselves the eternal friends of the exploited working stiff?

What did women expect when liberals and Democrats declared themselves the eternal friends of women? And now liberals and Democrats have destroyed companionate marriage and turned mothers into wage slaves.

What did African Americans think when they elected the First Black President? What blind bit of good has it done them, except to confirm them in a bitter racial and cultural ghetto?

That is what the old Biblical line means: you live by the sword, you die by the sword. Live by politics, die by politics.

Marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher today writes about the lefty notion of the "social construction" of race and gender that the left demands we believe or else. But what about sexual orientation?

Oh no. That's different, and the lefties are attacked reprogramming therapists that propose to help LGBT people of faith reorient themselves towards a heterosexual orientation and traditional marriage.

What does it all mean, you ask?

The answer is that the left is all about politics, all the time. Just like the British Empire, its sole interest is in the eternal and perpetual interest of power. Today its interests include promoting black racism, feminist anti-male activism, social construction of race and gender, and "gay genes" in sexual orientation.

But if you are foolish enough to believe in any of those fantasies, be warned. The day will come when the interests of left-wing power will move on. The political colonels and generals will get in their private jets and scoot off to the next gig. You will be left by the roadside, abandoned and scorned.

That is why conservatives promote limited government and the full flourishing of civil society. Government is force; it only knows how to make war. Politics is division; it only knows how to set brother against sister. But civil society, in our notion, is about the cultivation and the flourishing of friendly relations, anchored in the natural human instinct that to get a friend you must be a friend.

In civil society if you lose a friend, well, there are others. But in politics if you lose your patron you are screwed.

That is why I feel a lot of hope for 2016. There must be a ton of Americans right now that are wondering more and more what happened to all the Hope and Change of 2008?

And the answer is the old one. Put not your trust in princes, for the wages of politics is betrayal.

Because Life is Too Easy

The excellent John Derbyshire opines today that "In advanced societies, the average amount of reality people can bear has declined across the past few decades."

He proceeds to talk about about the denial of reality involved in the Jenner and the Dolezal affairs.

There is nothing world-shattering in this, says Derb. After all, T.S. Eliot reminded us that "human kind cannot bear very much reality."

Derb writes about the decline in reality:

This, I believe, has something to do with the ever-increasing availability of screen-based entertainment (movies, TV, the internet), something to do with the decline of religion, something to do with the revolution in manners that we call “political correctness,” and something to do with the falloff in violence, as chronicled by Steven Pinker.

While I agree with Derb's assignment of blame I think that the first reason for the falloff in reality is that we can afford to.

When nearly all children survive infancy and we are not losing 0.5 percent of people a year to violent death then the urgency of getting children on the ground and fed and off the nest becomes rather less urgent.

When most of us can get a decent job by sleepwalking through school for 12 or 16 years, then we can afford to indulge ourselves in a bit of fantasy in between the times we have to show up for work.

We can afford to have educated twentysomethings wasting their youth pretending to be artists and writers in some yeasty urban "ideopolis." We can afford to have people experimenting with gender. We can afford to have and "underclass" of violent gangbangers and welfare scroungers. We can even afford to have people bullying other people around with their stupid and twisted doctrines of social justice. We can afford to have a huge government edifice doing useless things with extraordinary ineptitude.

We can afford this because we are so rich, as a result of 200 years of the Great Enrichment. If and when things turn south than the penalty for living in a fantasy will go up.

Of course, I think, following my piece "The Age of Ineptitude," that the big problem at any time is the notion, common among ruling classes, that the rulers are ordained by God to rule over their subjects with compassion and wisdom. This, I believe, is a vicious fantasy, and it always has been. It was bad when the king was the representative of the sky god on earth, and it is bad when the ruling class is an educated, evolved class of administrators and experts, ordained to rule by their knowledge and their expertise.

Government is force. Its job is to do the things that cannot be done by social cooperation, because of bad guys. There is nothing of wisdom or of compassion in the workings of government. It is an armed minority occupying and defending territory with armed might, and it can only stay in power by rewarding its soldiers and its supporters. It is a bad idea, but better than the alternative. Government always and everywhere is accompanied by chicanery, cruelty, injustice, ineptitude, folly, and brutality.

Some men, in some times, have advanced the notion that the way to deal with government is to limit it -- to limit its powers and limit its scope. But that notion imposes a harsh reality on people and requires them to look to themselves and their neighbors for safety and prosperity, and they would rather not. Only in times of trouble are people are forced get serious and lose the fantasy or lose their lives.

But in prosperous times like the present, when life is too easy, there is no need for every person to lose the fantasy.

Derb finishes with an important apércu. In the old days, religion focused wishful thinking into sensible channels like "kindly Sky Fathers listening to our prayers." But not any more.

With that focusing lens gone, wishful thinking runs amok. “I feel female/black, so I am female/black!” “Race creates tensions we don’t know how to manage, so let’s pretend it doesn’t exist!”

Still, with the Great Enrichment we can afford to have half the country zoned out. The only problem arises when the Great Emergency arises and we all have to pay attention.

But will we know it when we see it? There are always alarms and excursions and would-be saviors telling us to mind our ways because the End of the World is nigh. How can we tell if it really is the End of the World, or just another political/religious scam, like global warming?

The Age of Ineptitude

What is wrong with our government that it can't, e.g., keep the data on its own government employees out of the hands of the Chinese? Why doesn't President Obama do something?

And why, to ask an impertinent question, does the director of the Office of Personnel Management still have a job? Last week a Nobel Laureate resigned his sinecures because of a stupid joke. But OPM Director Katherine Archuleta, testifying before Congress, declined to resign.

I will tell you what is going wrong. There are two things.

First, our government class operates under the world-view that a perfect society is possible with government by the right sort of people with the right sort of evolved world-view, and government should be conducted by rational processes advised by technical experts. To them, the only problem is that we have not yet applied a sufficient amount of reason and expertise.

This, you will agree, is a new idea, at least since the notion of the divine right of kings took a tumble. In the high ascendancy of Dickens in Bleak House, for example, it was received opinion that government was corrupt and inept, from its law courts to its Circumlocution Office staffed by Barnacles and Stiltstockings. But no longer. Today we are all taught from our cradles that the failures of government result from insufficient government.

Second, under Chantrill's Law of Government, the sole purpose of government is to occupy territory, tax its inhabitants, and reward the government's supporters. So of course the government lets Lois Lerner retire on full pension. And of course all the failures don't result in anyone getting fired. These are the government's supporters, silly.

It all dovetails. Government failures don't faze the governing class because their faith in their own rationalism and social evolution and expertise blinds them the possibility that they could be horribly, foolishly wrong and inept.

And this inability to see no evil, hear no evil, descends down to the everyday tasks of government like health care and education. Nobody really serously looks at the government failures in things like health care or education. Because that would mean casting aspersions on Our Healthcare Professionals and Our Teachers.

And yet it is nothing for people to blast capitalism to kingdom come whenever some tiny safety defect turns up in a consumer product.

I am reading Jürgen Habermas' Between Facts and Norms and it is driving me crazy. This is a guy that wrote a two volume tome on The Theory of Communicative Action where he developed the notion to have the dominative systems of the modern world in government and business balanced by the intersubjective dialog in the face-to-face "lifeworld." But Between Facts and Norms assumes that the rationalizations and actions of people like him are the sole requirement for a just and flourishing society. Everything can be solved by passing laws, administering bureaucracies, and issuing regulations.

No! The requirement for a just and flourishing society is that we can and we do fix our mistakes, starting with the recognition that almost everything humans do is wracked with mistake and error and that only painful effort enables us to undo our mistakes and move forward. That must mean, for starters, that when educated and evolved people lead society down a rabbit hole following their religious or secular faith there is a possibility for someone to say: "hey, this isn't working" and to have people listen. It means that the governing class should not have the power to inflict their faith on the rest of us without the rest of us being able to rise up and say: No!

Jim Geraghty writes that "An NR commenter calls our current system of government an “ineptocracy.”" I tell you what I call that. I call that a start.

We have got to lose the current Panglossian zeitgeist that looks fondly on our present age as the best of all possible worlds as long as the right people are in charge, and we must rebrand it as the Age of Ineptitude. There is no silver political bullet that leads us from the dusty plains to sunlit uplands. There is only the climb, one step at a time, interspersed with discouraging retreats whenever we find that we have been on the wrong trail that leads to the bottom of an unclimbable cliff instead of around it.

Meanwhile, we must go work in the garden.

Dolezal's Resignation: A Window into the SJW Mind

We conservatives don't often get to read the internal communications of the social justice warriors, the jargon, the corporate bubblespeak, that they emit when talking to each other. But Rachel Dolezal's resignation letter, penned by the fake black head of the Spokane NAACP to her fellow SJWs, gives us a window in the the lefty soul.

Dolezal starts with delicious bureaucratic gobbledegook.

Many issues face us now that drive at the theme of urgency. Police brutality, biased curriculum in schools, economic disenfranchisement, health inequities, and a lack of pro-justice political representation are among the concerns at the forefront of the current administration of the Spokane NAACP.

Notice what is missing: Jobs, jobs, jobs.  Because our liberal friends these days, and presumably their social justice clients, aren't really that interested in jobs. (I'm assuming that "economic disenfranchisement" is really about access to some sort of government privilege rather than ordinary access to the job market.)

Then Dolezal segues into delicious corporate PowerPoint-ese.

While challenging the construct of race is at the core of evolving human consciousness, we can NOT afford to lose sight of the five Game Changers (Criminal Justice & Public Safety, Health & Healthcare, Education, Economic Sustainability, and Voting Rights & Political Representation) that affect millions, often with a life or death outcome. 

Yay! Gotta love those "Game Changers." It's really delicious to see these anti-capitalist SJWs using the very language that sales managers use to motivate their sales crews out there in corporate-land.

And of course we are all interested in the Game Changers, even the lowest of the low: the racists, sexists, and homophobes that so pollute our world. Let's take those bullet points and restore some sanity:

• Criminal Justice & Public Safety. Because of gangs in the inner city it is very difficult to get residents to testify against gang thugs. So we must restore the "broken windows" policing policy that the Ferguson Effect has stopped. Why is "borken windows" so important? It gets around the fear of "snitching" by using the testimony of police officers when arresting and trying gang members. So it puts them away for minor infractions, when people are too afraid to testify against them for their drive-by shootings.
• Health & Healthcare. Let's repeal Obamacare and convert Medicaid into a cash subsidy with which low-income African Americans can buy real health care, instead of the second-rate care they get with Medicaid.
• Education. Let's implement school choice nationwide and give black mamas the chance to get their kids out of violent inner-city schools that basically act as jobs programs rather than tickets out of the ghetto.
• Economic Sustainability. Goodness knows what the twisted liberal meaning of that is. I suspect it may be that people with jobs can never be fired. But the truth about the economy in the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is that there is no "safe space" where today's workers can hide from the gusty winds of economic growth. People need to get a decent education and they need to surrender to the market. Any policy that "saves jobs" is a policy that is taking money away from Hillary Clinton's "everyday Americans" and giving it to people with powerful friends.
• Voting Rights & Political Representation. I suppose this is all about the Democrats' efforts to gin up the black vote by insisting that Voter ID and limited early voting is about bringing back Jim Crow. But if I were an African American I'd be thinking about illegal immigrants voting and taking jobs away from people like me.

Dolezal finishes with the usual call to action that every motivational speaker uses at the end of a speech.

It's about moving the cause of human rights and the Black Liberation Movement along the continuum from Resistance to Chattel Slavery to Abolition to Defiance of Jim Crow to the building of Black Wall Street to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement to the ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬ movement and into a future of self-determination and empowerment.

I like that "future of self-determination and empowerment." It reads a lot like my own notion of "responsible individualism." And indeed I have faith that most white Americans that haven't given in to the temptation of putting on a fright wig to access the benefits of politicking-while-black would like nothing better than for African Americans to come out of their self-imposed racial ghetto and join the rest of responsible individual Americans trying to make a decent life with work and marriage and children in the greatest country in the world.