It Must Be The Greedy Bankers, Otherwise...

I just had an epiphany on the Blame the Bankers meme that every Democrat and every liberal instinctively believes as the cause of the Crash of 2008.

I'd always assumed that it was pure cynical political blame-shifting, the natural instinct of the ruling class to find a scapegoat to take the blame for its feckless and foolishness.

Of course, that's what it was, mostly. You can't run a country and admit to your foolishness. That's chalk and cheese.

But you can't discount the bigger picture. You can't discount the fundamentalist faith that liberals have in a wise, educated elite dispensing rational, expert governance from on high.

When the real-estate crash began and then nearly buried the country in the fearful days of September 2008 when the Dow could fall 500 points in one day, the one thing that liberals could not admit even to themselves was that their policy of pushing low-down payment mortgage loans on sub-prime borrowers was just about the most stupid thing anyone ever made into national policy.

It couldn't have been, because liberals are the most educated, most evolved, most compassionate people in America. They could not have just about ruined America as a result of their generation-long pursuit of the great white whale of "affordable housing" for minorities and especially for minorities in "red-lined" neighborhoods.

No. That was unthinkable. It must have been the Greedy Bankers.

Needless to say, the same thing applies to the rest of the failed liberal project. The endless failures of top-down expert-led government can't be due to the nature of the beast, that government is useless for everything except wars. No the failure must be due to corporate greed, or racism, or sexism, or some other enemy of the good and the great.

I think that is an important thing to understand about liberals. Yes they are unjust. Yes they are cruel. Yes they are mind-numbed robots that can't think for themselves.

But the point is that they really believe in their right to rule. They cannot face themselves in the morning and admit that their governing philosophy is a crock. They have to believe, and they will continue to believe until their dream has punched them in the face and knocked them out.

And even then there will still be a remnant that continues to believe. Hello Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

Yes, but what is the solution? Let's go to JayMan on "National Prosperity."

All that matters are two things: high average IQ, and high-trust people. 

Obviously, IQ is a given. But liberal politics is all about sowing mistrust, and dividing up people into clans. The results are just what you would expect. 

Gentry Liberals are Uneducated Idiots

I know a guy that knows a guy that used to be married to Kshama Sawant, the Seattle Brahmin from Puna who's leading the liberal war on jobs by raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour.

I guess that's close enough to the old song of the girl that danced with a boy who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales.

Anyone that knows anything about science knows that the minimum wage is a job killer.  The minimum wage, as Milton Friedman told us, is $0. That's the wage earned by a guy without a job.

Anyway, the chickens are coming home to roost in Seattle as low-wage workers that have had their wages jacked up by the minimum wage legislation in Seattle are having to deal with the Unanticipated Consequences of the higher minimum wage. They are asking their employers to lower their hours worked so they can continue to qualify for welfare benefits.

Oh really. Who could have seen that coming? After all, liberals are the educated, evolved ones that go with science every time.

Then there's Hillary Clinton proposal for a new complicated and higher capital gains tax, to discourage that old liberal chestnut, capitalism by quarterly results, and fight inequality. Hasn't she heard of the science of marginal utility, already over a century old?

We are also hearing about the utter failure of state Obamacare exchanges, usually costing a cool $100-200 million a pop, of which former Maryland governor and presidential candidate Martin O'Malley is the poster boy. This of course is fruit of the old Progressive Era faith in experts and rational administration. Except that the science of the last century says that it is all baloney. Politics is politics, and to get results you need the market economy.

Then there is "climate change." Who knows what is in the stars, as far as climate is concerned. But one thing we know. The headline climate scientists, chaps like Jim Hansen and Michael Mann, are not behaving like scientists. They are behaving like politicians. Science proceeds by trial and error of theory and experiment. Politics proceeds by declaring emergencies and demanding emergency powers, and damning opponents as corporate shills and "deniers."

The acerbic Angelo Codevilla has an article out that takes eminence-grise Henry Kissinger -- and most post-WWII foreign policy -- to the woodshed. He blames Kissinger for the follies of US foreign policy from Vietnam to Iran.

Facing an adversary, U.S officials assume that it is amenable to compromise and thus open negotiations with preemptive concessions of U.S. interests. Discovering that the adversary persists in its purpose and in fact is hardening its demands, our officials, falling back on Kissinger’s “creative ambiguity,” craft “agreements” based on the pretense that the adversary accepts the U.S. understanding thereof, and that our officials do not accept the adversary’s understanding.

As I understand this, Codevilla is insisting that, contra Kissinger, international politics is power politics. You want something; you push. You do not talk about "peace processes," because in proposing a peace process you are advertising that you don't really want to fight, you just want to get out of the fight.

There is no-one more annoying than that one that thinks he is smart but who really doesn't have a clue. Our liberal friends get massaged everyday by the knowledge that listening to NPR and reading the New York Times are markers of educated sophistication.

But the truth is that educated sophistication is only obtained by doing the hard reading that goes beyond the approved texts and approved opinions that you pick up at the university and the elite media.

And as the current presidential campaign season progresses liberals are going to discover that their take-no-prisoners politics of the last 20 years, inaugurated during the Clinton impeachment when liberals decided that issues that sent Richard Nixon out of the White House in disgrace didn't apply to a Democrat, has flown them into a box canyon.

What should an educated progressive politics be in an age of global commerce and diverse cultures? Liberals haven't thought about it, except to declare a fight against inequality and agree that all conservatives are haters and should be forced to wear a "C" on their chests.

Are We All Just Peasants at Heart?

As I weave my ideas about a better world, in which the domination of the welfare state administrative system is replaced by a just world where people cooperate to help each other rather than compete for freebies, I wonder.

Think of things this way. A couple hundred years ago most people were serfs on some lord's estate. They were, in a profound way, his dependents, living at his pleasure and subject to his power. Yet people owed, and felt they owed, loyalty to their lord, and expected in return the lord would protect them, after a fashion. And he usually did.

The commercial and industrial era changed all that. Now the subordination was dissolved -- and also the privileges of rank.

But no sooner had the industrial era got started than a counter-movement began, that the rich owed the poor a duty of care, that "rights" were not simply rights of legal equality but rights to a decent standard of living.

The result has been the construction of the vast administrative welfare state, the principle of which seems to be that people have access to economic benefits as a right of social membership. Just like in the days of the agricultural age and what we used to call feudalism.

So now we have a politics divided between those that believe in this new subordination, this neo-feudalism, and those that believe in freedom from subordination through responsible individualism.

But how do you speak of freedom to the new subordinates?

Mona Charen chides the Republican Party, the party of freedom and responsible individuals, for a lack of outreach to such people.

A number of Republican candidates for president have been seeking to recast the Republican Party as the party of reform and outreach. They recognize that a party that lost not just the Hispanic vote, the black vote, the women's vote and the youth vote, but also the Asian vote has an image problem.

But the thing about the Hispanic, black, women's and youth vote is that these are people that think like peasants. They look to a community organizer or a political boss or a union leader to deliver the goods. They do not believe in surrendering themselves to the market, but to a human, political leader.

It is said that the core of the Republican Party is people that think of themselves as "typical Americans." This means, if it means anything, that such people are willing to submit to whatever America is. They do not experience themselves as being peculiarly defined or disadvantaged by some particular identity.

The point of all the Democratic Party identity groups is that politics can in some way advantage their members against oppression and "economic injustice". The world is stacked against them and only force can rectify the situation, by forcing employers to pay more to low-wage workers, or forcing employers to hire and promote more women, or a forcible system to deliver old-age pensions and health care.

To believe in the essential justice of the market, to abjure the resort to force and the political fixer, this is what requires the leap of faith.

It is, of course, a leap of faith that is based on the imperfect science of economics, that the price system is the best and most just and most efficient way of signaling what should be produced and sold and exchanged, and that the surrender to this faith is the royal road to prosperity both for individuals and for humans as a whole.

For many people it seems that the leap of faith in the market is only possible after the faith in politics has been crushed by bitter experience.

And that's easy to understand. The market is a rational abstraction; the sauntering politician is real and tangible, part of the always already familiar lifeworld of the everyday.

And yet it is the market that has delivered a world of $100 per capita income per day compared to the world of two hundred years ago that delivered $1 to $3 per capita per day.

What does it take to turn a subordinate peasant into a believer in freedom and responsibility?

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.