How Politics Betrayed African Americans

We are right in the middle of the #BlackLivesMatter nightmare, which I presume is based on the notion that the biggest problem African Americans face is police shooting gentle giants in the back.

And of course, it is woe betide the Democratic presidential candidate that suggests that "All Lives Matter." Because racism.

But let us do a President Eisenhower. You remember him. He said that if you find you can't solve a problem then you should make it bigger.

So let's assume that blacks have a bigger problem staring them in the face than brutal racist white cops.

Here's African American Larry Elder discussing a few black problems under the rubric of President Obama making things worse.

By every key economic measurement, blacks are worse off under Obama. In some cases, far worse off.

Blacks in poverty? In 2009, 25.8%; in 2014, 27.2%.

Black median income? "CNNMoney says, 'Minority households' median income fell 9 percent between 2010 and 2013, compared to a drop of only 1 percent for whites.'"

Black net worth? From 2010 to 2013, black net work declined from $16,600 to $11,000. White net worth? Went up 1 percent to $142,000.

Black labor force participation? The lowest ever recorded, down to 60.2 percent in 2014.

Hey kids!  What do you think is to blame for all this? President Obama? President Bush? White privilege? White racism? Rape culture? Evil Republican haters?

OK, I will tell you. Answer #1 is liberalism. Answer #2 is the fatal black decision to become a block Democratic vote.

Let us review the bad things that have happened to black people in the light of liberalism and the liberal political agenda.

Blacks in poverty and not working? That's pretty obvious. There's the minimum wage that prevents unskilled blacks from getting entry-level jobs. There is the lousy government education system that is worst in the inner cities. Then there is big-time welfare and its associated 50 percent effective marginal tax rate, higher than on billionaires. Then there's the collapse of marriage in the black community. Married men work a lot harder and earn more money than unmarried men.

Black net worth? Well we know what the problem is here. It is the liberal attempt to game the housing market to benefit blacks and minorities with "affordable housing." Liberal activists bullied the banks into lending to low-income high-risk borrowers. The result in 2008 was to crash the financial system; the follow-on result was to wipe out minority borrowers than couldn't service their mortgages. Who could have seen that coming? Thanks liberals! How's that compassion working out for you?

All in all, I'm inclined to say that lefty politics is the most evil thing ever invented. It says to simple folk, just trying to get a toe-hold in the culture of teh city: Hey! You are being robbed! Sign up with our activist group and we will get you justice.

But the problem for the urban poor is not injustice; it is that the urban poor have not yet learned how to make it in the city.

They have not yet learned that the answer to life in the city is to surrender to the market; and that means work to serve other people with useful services. But the lefties teach them that their problems can be solved by marchin' and protestin'.

And nobody have responded to this siren song more enthusiastically than African Americans.

African Americans! Stop up your ears with wax! Tie yourselves to the mast! Do not listen to the Sirens, and do not listen to the community organizers.

Because politicians and organizers do not care about you. They only care about your vote.

And really, why would they try to get you a good job and a nice little nest egg? Your kids might end up voting Republican.

The Problem of President Obama's Deceit

It is not, I hope, an insult to say that President Obama is deceitful. I am using the term to avoid the word "lie" which is perhaps too strong. After all, all politicians lie, all the time. They lie because we insist upon it and we cannot stand the truth. We cannot abide the truth until it is too late.

However, there seems to be an etiquette about presidential lying. This surfaced in the late 1960s when President Johnson was said to have lost "credibility" over the porkers he told about the war in Vietnam.

Then of course there was the lying of President Nixon over Watergate and its aftermath. This was insupportable, and so the president had to go.

But when President Clinton lied about sex with Monica Lewinsky, that was OK because everyone lies about sex.

On the other hand, as we all know, "Bush lied, people died" over the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Politicians usually do shade the truth in the run-up to a war. See: civil war, US.

The question is: have President Obama's lies been better or worse than his predecessors?

Obviously, I'm a conservative and a Republican partisan, so for me, the president's lies matter a lot, and they matter to Robert L. Erhlich, Jr., who recites the president's lies on health care, on Syria, on capitalism, on religious freedom, on immigration, on world public opinion, on Benghazi, and now, of course, on Iran.

Is there something different about the president's lies, or are they just run of the mill and merely seem unprecedented to an opposing partisan?

If there is a difference, I would say that it is because the president's lies seem to be deliberate attempts to disarm and humiliate his political opponents. I'd say that the presidential lies of his predecessors were more the normal lies of people trying to "get through the day." Even President Clinton's lies about Monica Lewinsky were the cheap sort of lies that everyone uses to avoid embarrassment and exposure.

The Obamacare lie was a lie thrown up in defiance of the opposition; the lies about the Iran deal are bound to infuriate Congress. Presidents normally just don't do that, because it creates too much ill will in the opposition. That's why most presidents spend so much time on the phone twisting the arms of wavering congressmen.

It seems clear to me that the president use of deceit has sailed the presidency into uncharted waters, with what has to be regarded as tactical brilliance on the part of the president and/or his advisers. After all, it is no small thing to tell the president "you lie!"

The question is, of course, whether his voyage into uncharted waters will make strategic sense or whether he will wreck his liberal ruling class and the Democratic Party on the rocks, charted and uncharted, and deliver a Republican president and a solidly Republican Congress at the next election.

Remember, the last time we elected a Republican president with a solid Republican Congress was in 1928.

The reason that presidents don't stick the opposition in the eye and instead try to build consensus for their policies with the lies of flattery and cajoling is that they don't want to unify the opposition. They would much rather pick off a couple of fence-sitters and divide the opposition.

On that view, the president is setting himself and his party up for a disaster.

But you never know. President Obama may get away with his lies and his cunning ways of getting around the Congress with regulation and with executive action, and the Democrats may come storming back in 2016.

But somehow, I believe that the Democrats are in for a long dark night, and that the old adage is true, that it is better to let the sleeping dogs lie, particularly the dogs in the other party.

From Legislation to Regulation to Executive Order

I keep coming back to the notion that in its campaign of "fundamental transformation" the liberal ruling class is setting itself up for a massive reset.

My point is that liberals and the left misunderstand politics at a fundamental level. Politics is not a transformative process. It is simply the brute force that is applied after ordinary social cooperation fails.

Katie Pavlich hit the spot today in an article reporting how the government is putting certain Social Security recipients on the government's list of people that can't buy guns. The Obamis have come up with a cunning plan to control guns by denying guns to Social Security recipients that have someone managing their benefits.

Amazing! How come nobody ever thought of that before? Katie writes:

If legislation fails, try for regulation. If regulation doesn't work, issue an executive order.

But that doesn't quite do it for me. My point is that when you have started in with legislation you are already making a mess. Because legislation is the camel's nose of force under the tent.

When you decide that Americans can't save for retirement on their own and need to be forced to do so by a government program then you have made the fatal step. You have gone beyond a pushing a cultural norm, that we should all save for our old age, to the rigidity of a government system: everyone will save for retirement, or else. And system is domination.

And so with every new law, we contract the zone of peaceful cooperation and we convert it into a hierarchical system where free people are reduced to subordinate drones.

That is why great legislative programs are usually passed in Congress with bipartisan majorities. Even though each and every bill passed in Congress and signed by the President is an exercise in force and coercion it is still thought necessary to hide the mailed fist of force with the velvet glove of consensus. We all want to pretend that we are all free people.

Unfortunately there is a problem with this newly created law. Legislation is a very blunt instrument with which to guide the behavior of millions of people. So regulation is necessary, to deal with the thousand and one contingencies that were not thought of in the original legislation. Hello Obamacare.

But regulation by bureaucrats and appointed commissions does not pretend to be the harmless consensus implied by a jovial bunch of politicians from both parties getting together while the president signs a bill into law in the Oval Office. It is just political appointees making a decision with the help of staff and the special interests.

Unfortunately there is a problem with newly created regulations. They are hopelessly inadequate to deal with the complexities of real life out in the world. And, of course, they tend to lean in favor of the current political party in power, its bribed apologists and its supporters.

Even so, the process of regulation is not fast or convenient enough for the supporters of the president's party. They want action, Now!  So presidents are reduced to the expedient of executive orders.

Now in my view there is another factor in play. I believe that the liberal ruling class, over the decades since the Reagan administration, has become more and more frustrated with their inability to manage the United States into a proper expert-led system. It has become harder and harder to pass big legislation; so they have developed various strategies for implementing their agenda by regulation. We have seen this is numerous ways in the Obama administration, from the FCC turning the internet into a regulated utility to the National Labor Relations Board rewriting labor law on the fly and now the HUD regulation to direct suburban land-use planning from on high to enforce proper diversity in housing.

And now we have President Obama's Iran deal that has been passed by the UN Security Council before Congress even had a chance to vote on it.

But it has become harder and harder for liberals to get the results they want with regulation. For one thing, as F.A. Hayek wrote in the 1940s, the man in Whitehall (where the UK bureaucrats work) cannot begin to know what a million consumers and producers know. So the liberal ruling class has needed the emergency device of the executive order to implement the top-down managerial policies they want in order to make society progress.

But I think this is a monstrous and strategic mistake.

In the first place it is a mistake to imagine that you can replace the infinitely adaptable universe of market relations with a single government program. But people do this all the time because they are afraid of economic change. This was the situation in Europe in the mid 19th century when Marx and the socialists came out with their grand plans to tame capitalism. Something had to be done as the economy was being completely transformed by the textile revolution and the steam revolution.

But since the first intervention inevitably fails, due to the man from Whitehall problem, the government's economic managers have to rely on regulation and modification of the original plan to shield people from the mindless march of capitalism. This is called the Law of Unintended Consequences.

And since the regulations fail to produce the results required, the liberal ruling class demand that the president use his phone and his pen to implement their agenda anyway.

But this is a terrible mistake, the kind of mistake committed by military juntas. No wonder, for army officers are military bureaucrats, not practical elective politicians. They just aren't very good at making the arbitrary ukases of government bureaucrats look like the freely assented consensus of the people.

I think that the Obama administration will play out in a "backlash" for decades, as ordinary people come to experience in detail the cruelties and injustices of the programs regulated and executive-ordered into existence in the eight Obama years.

Because the basic fact is that the Obama agenda has been implemented without the consent of the governed.

This shows that the liberal ascendancy is approaching its point of inflection. It no longer tries to obtain the consent of the governed. It just rolls over the sheeple and deploys its bully boys to cow them into submission.

But when a ruling dynasty is reduced to bully boys it is a sign that it is approaching its denouement.

Hey liberals! Humans are social animals. All this force you have deployed is a fundamental denial of our human nature.

Unfortunately, in the years after Obama, it is not going to be a case of simply repealing the laws and the regulations and the executive orders of cruel and unjust liberalism. It's going to be much more complicated and much more ugly than that.

No ruling class ever goes quietly. Nor do its supporters.

Netroots Nation Boos Presidential Candidates

One of Sean Trende's dicta is that political coalitions always fall apart. As he wrote in an February 2015 article on the "emerging Democratic majority" thesis:

In the end, political coalitions in a large, diverse republic such as our own are, and always have been, inherently unstable. Issues that bind groups together in one election disappear, while new issue cleavages threaten to break groups off. Coalitions are ultimately like water balloons: When you press down on one side, another side pops up. The Democratic coalition of the late aughts proves to be no exception.

First, the "Out" party forms a coalition of the disaffected that bury their differences in their common hatred of the cruel and unjust "In" party. They combine under the banner of Time for a Change and soon become the "In" party. But after a couple of presidential elections things haven't really changed, and the members of the new "In" party coalition fall to bickering -- about everything from who got what. They start to realize that they never liked those guys anyway.

Yet if you are a conservative and a Republican it seems, from the outside, that the Democrats maintain an astonishing party discipline. How come our guys never seem to get it together?

But here is cheering news. The latest Netroots conference showed that the Democrats' "Coalition of the Fringes" (H/T Steve Sailer) is starting to get badly frayed.

According to Rachel Alexander the main problem was that a group of black activists weren't having no truck with the idea that all lives matter.

[Martin] O’Malley began his speech talking about the need for ending private prisons and income inequality... [But] about 30 protesters streamed into the auditorium, chanting “Black Lives Matter” and yelling, “What are you doing to stop the killing of black men?” The protesters stopped his speech, and one took over the microphone for 15 minutes.

Then O'Malley resumed his speech with the notion that

“Black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter.”

That stopped the speech. The Netrooters weren't having anything like that.

They booed until O’Malley left the stage, with one woman standing on a chair screaming, “Burn this s**t down!” 

Then came Bernie Sanders, and he didn't do any better.

[Sanders] yelled as loud as he could, and the activists yelled over him while he said, “Black people are dying because we have a criminal justice system in this country that is out of control.” CNN reporter Chris Moody noted that when Sanders brought up Obamacare, people shouted, "We can't afford that!" 

Yay! The Netrooters have decided that they don't like Obamacare. Of course, what they want instead is "single-payer" which they could afford but which probably deliver a lot in the way of bureaucracy but wouldn't deliver too much in the way of health care.

But you know what I think? I think that the Obama administration's "Black Lives Matter" campaign is going to ream the Democrats in 2016. It's a slogan you want to confine to your visits to black underclass communities. You don't want to bother the 87% of people who are not black about it.

And it's all lies anyway. If you really care about black lives you'd start with the 70% of black children that start out life without a married father and mother. Then you'd proceed to the problem of gangs which amount to proto-states that the governments tolerate within their boundaries. What is the world is any self-respecting government doing allowing any rival state, such as a criminal gang, within its borders? Then you have the problem that ordinary citizens won't testify in court against gang members because of intimidation. Then you have the problem that the police a reduced to arresting gang members for minor "broken window" violations. Then you'd go onto education. Then you'd start to think about how all the "redlining" and "affordable housing" policies have ended up screwing blacks.

If you thought about all that you might have a problem with the rent-a-mobs yelling "Black Lives Matter" as though the problem were just a question of police brutality.

All is proceeding as Sean Trende has foreseen. After seven years of Obama the Obama coalition is starting to fall apart.

What Does President Obama Want?

Conservatives find President Obama rather a puzzle. Here's Mona Charen wondering whether the president is "witless or witting." After analyzing the results of his Iran agreement about which he has lied repeatedly, she decides that he knows exactly what he is doing.

But from his first inaugural address onward, Obama both secretly and openly wooed the Iranian regime. In the process, he repeatedly lied to the Congress, our allies, and the American people, settling, to my satisfaction at least, that he is inflicting this potential catastrophe wittingly.

Then there are new revelations about Obama's Chicago connections, who all seem to be red-diaper babies with actual connections to Communist Party members in Chicago around 1950. That means, according to "Mencius Moldbug" back in November 2008, that Obama is a small 'c' communist.

Arguing that Barack Obama is not a communist is like arguing that Mitt Romney is not a Mormon. Barack Obama is a communist by birth, breeding, education, and profession. His grandparents were communists, his parents were communists, his teachers were communists, his friends are communists, his colleagues are communists, he's a communist. Duh. 

Then he goes off into a riff on Alinsky:

If there's one thing to remember about Alinskyism, or indeed progressivism as a whole, it's that it is the perfect mental framework by which the lordly can do evil, while convincing themselves and/or others that they are small voices sticking up for good. 

Does that ring a bell, or what? So let's read Moldbug on the whole logic of the over-under coalition and its "activism."

In the crudest, most Machiavellian terms, "grassroots activism" is easy to explain. When examined, the grass always turns out to be Astroturf. The alliance of underprivileged and ultraprivileged is always initiated by the latter. The organizer brings youth, privilege, often a trust fund, talent, energy and ambition. The organized bring mass, muscle, power. Julius Caesar would recognize the arrangement at once. No points for guessing who tends to profit most from the alliance. And indeed David Axelrod, Obama's producer, is in his spare time a master of Astroturf.  

It's all about the sweet taste of power.

In my view, politics and government is always about war. Because government is force, it must always have an object in view that requires force: in other words, a war. Historically, a government has two choices; it can conduct foreign wars or domestic wars. The left overwhelmingly prefers domestic wars through "grassroots activism."

So it makes complete sense that the Obama presidency has been all about retreating from overseas wars and lying about it, and making war on the American people, and lying about it. Because that is what lefties do. And really, domestic war makes more sense for electoral politics, for it is all about demonizing the opposition and tempting supporters with promised loot.

So now we know what Obama wants. The question is: are we going to do anything about it? 

Explaining the Japan Syndrome: Quantitative Easing, Slow Growth, and Low Inflation

When Japan's post-Plaza Accord bubble economy popped in 1991 its government applied conventional Keynesian remedies, including low interest rates and big government deficits. All the experts were shocked when the economy failed to revive smartly from the crash, and even more surprised when "quantitative easing" also failed to revive the economy and ignite inflation.

The problem couldn't be Keynesian economics, so it had to be that Japan was a special case. But after the crash of the 2000s real estate bubble in the US and Europe the same thing happened. Interest rates were reset to zero, as in ZIRP, quantitative easing was implemented to flood the world with money, and growth was pitiful. So What Went Wrong?

In a recent paper "Understanding Benign Liquidity Traps: The Case of Japan(pdf)", Stefan Homburg of Leibniz University, Hannover, Germany, runs a couple of computer models and comes up with an answer.

The reason that Keynesian economics didn't work is because of "credit constraints" that prevented corporations from issuing as much debt as they might have wanted. And then meant less growth and lower prices. At least, Homburg's models can repeat the Japan experience if you assume that some sort of credit constraint applies.

But what sort of credit constraint? After all, the whole point of Keynesian expansionism is to take the safety valves off the economy and let her rip. Homburg cites the following possibilities:

• Lack of collateral and declining land values.
• Direct financial regulation, e.g., Basel Accords.
• Unanticipated consequences of financial regulation.

We saw that in the United States mortgage borrowing cratered after the crash because so many people were underwater on their mortgages.

The first round of the Basel rules were applied in the early 1990s. The idea was to constrain bank lending to avoid bank failures. Some people might say that bankers know how to run their businesses better than professors and international bureaucrats.

I suppose you could say that in the aftermath of a crash the politicians and the bureaucrats rush to "do something" and typically that something is to impose tough new financial regulations at the very time that savvy investors like Mr. Potter are buying up bankrupt Bailey Building and Loans.

In other words it is during the post-crash period that credit standards should be relaxed, and then gradually resumed as the economy improves and animal spirits start to revive. But in the US we implemented Dodd-Frank and its evil twin the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to bury the financial system in regulation and paperwork.

There is another explanation, and that is that the the government's first priority is the financing of its debt. Low interest rates and credit constraints actually help the government in the post-crash period since it keeps the government's interest cost down and allows it to continue to reward its supporters without interruption. So it is possible that the "lost decade" in Japan and the slow Obama recovery are not a bug but a feature within the halls of the ruling class. After all, there hasn't been a revolution or riots in the streets. So what if the people are suffering under low growth! They don't seem unhappy enough to change their ruling class.

Greece, on the other hand...

Obama Ends Post-Ottoman Era

After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I western diplomats got to carve up the Middle East in the Treaty of Sèvres, the Treaty of Lausanne, and the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Etcera, and don't forget the Balfour Declaration.

The result was an arbitrary drawing of boundaries that had little to do with tribal and religious reality on the ground; the Middle East became a plaything of the western powers. It existed under the hegemony of the winners of World War I, for such is the logic of war.

But now that hegemony is over, signed away by President Obama.

Now all good conservatives think that President Obama's Iran Agreement is utter folly, for it gives Iran a pathway to nuclear weapons. It is merely a side-effect of the agreement to end US hegemony in the Middle East.

If you think about it, Obama's apparently chaotic foreign policy does have a point. It seeks to end US hegemony as the world's dominant superpower. The reason it appears chaotic is that Obama can't really admit to us what he is trying to do. He uses the shibboleths of a century of foreign policy politics as a shield to distract attention from what he is really doing.

And that is the theme of his entire administration. He and his appointees have been trying to advance a left-wing agenda as fast as they can while pretending that there's nothing to see here: move along.

But maybe it is time for the west to end its Middle East hegemony. It has reduced the peoples of the Middle East to the status of spoiled children competing for the attention of Daddy.

Now that Obama in his feckless left-wing way has withdrawn the US from the Middle East, because colonialism, the first thing that has happened is that Israel and the Sunni Arabs have started to form an alliance. Who could have seen that coming?

Obviously there will be war in the Middle East, with horrible atrocities and casualties. And from time to time there may be a stoppage of oil, although I suspect not for long since oil is money.

The point is that it is probably past time to let the Middle East sort itself out, and let the various tribes and religions compete for supremacy. And meanwhile we in the rest of the world should frack, baby frack.