Why I Voted For Obama in 2008 and What Conservatives Should Do Now

Apart from my remark about the GOP establishment being "decent guys," the other thing that riled up the commenters at The American Thinker on Tuesday was that I have admitted voting for Obama in 2008.

Let me tell you why.

I take the position that politics is violence and therefore politics is civil war by other means. On this view the alternation in power of the two political parties is a way to ensure that the civil war by other means doesn't develop into actual civil war.

In my view the healthiest interval for exchange of parties is two presidential terms. Eight to ten years in power is enough. Why? Because after about ten years out of power the out-party enthusiasts starting looking under the bed; they start spinning conspiracy theories about how the system is rigged. After twelve years out of power the outs become paranoid.

That is why I voted for Barack Obama in 2008. I thought that after all the demagoguing of George W. Bush and all his works, particularly in foreign policy, we needed the Democrats to come in and actually show us whether they had a better idea. We now know: they didn't, and the voters know it even if the MSM can't admit it.

So imagine what is was like for Republicans when the Democrats won five presidential elections in a row from 1932 to 1948. How do you think it made Republicans feel? Well, one thing was that they started to look for Reds under the bed, which liberals have anathematized for the last 60 years. The noive (Cowardly Lion for "nerve")! It turned out that there were reds under the bed, which was worse.

But one good thing about that 20 year drought was that it spawned the modern conservative movement. It helped that conservatives could unite around their opposition to the Soviet Union, about which liberals were rather lukewarm.

Today the conservative movement that was is guttering out. Probably one reason is that 70 years is enough for any political combination. But another is that the enemy now is not economic socialism but cultural socialism. Back then we were being made to care about the poor and the working class. Now we are being made to care about transgendered bathrooms. I dare say it takes a different correlation of forces to fight a different civil war by other means than in the good old days of Bill Buckley and God and Man at Yale.

In my American Manifesto I have been conjuring up an ideological apology, using 20th century thinkers, to imagine a new United States based on limited government and unlimited civil society. But it is obvious to me that we won't achieve this without a fight, and that means drawing a bright line between our good vision of America and the alternative, the bad, corrupt, actuality of liberal America.

In other words, we are going to be casting liberals as utter villains in the next few years, because that's the way you do civil war by other means. I think that the way we do this is by copying the method of the socialists 150 years ago. Yes, they said, the bourgeoisie has created amazing things, but they are doing it on the backs of the working class, and for that they should be cast out into utter darkness while we socialists bring on the era of light.

What about our own time? On my Three Peoples theory, the People of the Creative Self are wonderful creative people and all that, but they have cruelly oppressed the ordinary People of the Responsible Self, casting them as gap-toothed bigots, and they have cynically used the People of the Subordinate Self as political cats-paws to enrich and empower themselves, Hillary Clinton.

Back then, the socialists demanded that the bourgeoisie have compassion for and open their wallets to the People of the Subordinate Self, through social insurance and other beneficial legislation to help the poor and the working class. This would be paid for by the bourgeoisie and would be directed by the People of the Creative Self.

Today I demand that the ruling class People of the Creative Self stop using the People of the Subordinate Self as their street thugs and treating them as "little darlings" too compromised to look after themselves. And I demand that the ruling class stop treating the ordinary middle class as racist sexist homophobic bigots and show some compassion for ordinary middle-class people who may not be as bright and privileged and creative as the scions of the professional middle class, and let them follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law without being hounded and humiliated by jumped up "activists" spawned by evil and divisive "studies" departments at our elite universities.

And that brings us to Donald Trump. Love him or hate him, his great talent seems to be that he's got the PC auto-destruct codes enabled on his Twitter account. He knows how to take it to the liberals. Nobody in the last 25 years has had the talent or the cojones to do this. Until Trump.

And people, right and left, wonder how it has come to this, that Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party in 2016.

Why Does Anyone Vote Republican?

The commenters at American Thinker gave me a good spanking yesterday for calling the GOP establishment a bunch of decent guys.

Because everyone knows the GOPe are liars that have sold conservatism to the voters at election time and knuckled under to Obama the rest of the time.

But it might be that they are compassionate leaders that don't want to send their followers into a wasteful bloodbath.

For myself I cannot contradict controversialist Vox Day who says that today's conservatism is doomed because it is basically defensive. And you don't win wars on defense.

That's been the bee under my bonnet ever since the Reagan Revolution. Only I wasn't smart enough to coin the Breitbart catchphrase that politics is downstream from culture.

He means that conservatism, or the free society, or whatever, can't just be a nuts-and-bolts policy analysis of tax cuts and spending restraint, or a retrospective look back at Edmund Burke. It has to start from a compelling vision for ordinary people in the United States in 2016 about life, the universe, and everything.

It would have to be a religious vision that captures the hearts and minds of Americans who just feel that something is wrong with the help-the-victims religion of today's educated ruling class.

It would have to be a vision for people did not think that it was a good idea for the government to regulate the labor market by increasing the wage limit subject to the time-and-a-half overtime rule, because it is just another cost on the employers that hire us all.

It would have to be a vision for people that did not think that the state should force schools and employers to make special bathroom provision for them.

It would have to be a vision for people that felt a slight revulsion every time they heard a politician offering free stuff.

It would have to be a vision that made people wonder why it was necessary for so many activities to be conducted under the shadow of government compulsion, when after all most people just want to get along.

Because right now in America most people are accustomed to thinking that anything they don't like ought to be fixed by the government. Which means by force.

It is said by Michael Barone that Republicans have historically always thought of themselves as "typical Americans." In today's context I think that means people that don't feel embattled. The whole point of Democratic Party politics is to encourage people to feel embattled, whether as workers, as women, as blacks, as gays, as artists, as anyone who wants force to be applied against his or her tormentors.

The "typical American," I imagine, is someone that says: "Don't bother me, government, by 'helping' me. Just let me get on with my life, and if I get into a really tough spot, I'll give you a call."

Or maybe that is wrong. Maybe the Republican Party is and must be people who have got fed up with the government. However victimized they may feel, they just decide that government doesn't help them, it just makes things worse.

The truth is that we all like free stuff; we like nestling under a powerful lord, and we like to catch the coins thrown into the street from time to time by his steward out of his private stash. Because we are all peasants.

Until we are not.

Meanwhile Donald Trump has won the Republican Party nomination for president by waving a magic wand promising to Make America Great Again out of pixie dust.

(I imagine he knows that what it takes is tax rate reduction and spending cuts and taking a pair of scissors to the regulatory state. But he can't say that. Why?)

I wonder if the bathroom brouhaha will cause a bunch of women to do the Ronnie and realize that they didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left them. Because one thing women really hate is men in the women's bathroom. You know, as in safe spaces.

The Fundamental Reality of Our Times, Four Ways

It's an insider's joke that politics is all about Four Point Plans, as in "my four point plan will reduce inequality by 50 percent. Why do the politicians do it? Because we are all Slaves, and we want our kindly Masters to save us from the Persians and tell us what to do. But the basic reality of our times is this.

Point 1: Per capita income has gone up from $3 in 1800 to $100 right now. There has been nothing like it in human history. Ever.

But why? Why did it happen now and now in Roman times? Or Babylonian times? Economic historian Deirdre McCloskey in her "Bourgeois Trilogy" writes that the reason is that only in the last five hundred years have individuals been allowed to try out their ideas for "betterment" without being stomped on by the ruling class.

You can see how the normal way works, because any time someone comes up with a new idea everyone stomps on them for a fool or a knave. And the established interests run to government to stamp it out. Right now we have the established scions of the educated ruling class running around trying to frighten people about "fracking."

Yes, but unregulated capitalism created cruel and unjust inequality. So government had to step in and fix it.

Point 2: Go and read Point 1.

Really, what difference would a war on inequality make? Let's say that, in the days of $3 per day we could have helped the poor. Actually we did, starting in 1598 with the Elizabethan Poor Law. But it didn't make a blind bit of difference to increasing overall prosperity. Not until advances in textile technology in the 18th century made it possible to make cheap textiles for the poor. About that time population started increasing and people started expecting to live better than their parents -- when the Poor Law was being eviscerated. So you tell me, what possible contribution could helping the poor and reducing inequality do in helping get from $3 per day to $100 per day.

Yes, but what about slavery and feudalism and all that?

Point 3: Go and read Point 1.

It is interesting to me that anti-slavery agitation began at exactly the moment that capitalism and the Great Enrichment began to take off. Before that nobody seemed to have any problem with slavery. Merchants of Venice and Genoa had no problem transporting Circassian slaves from the Crimean port of Kaffa to the harems of the Middle East. Dutch and Anglo-Saxon had no problems transporting West-Africans to the sugar plantations of the West Indies. Vikings had no problem carting Brits off to the slave markets of Dublin, Ireland. Also, nobody seemed to have any problems with slavery in the Soviet Union or in Maoist China. Or in Castro Cuba. Or in Khmer Rouge Cambodia. And US liberals don't seem to have a problem in taxing ordinary labor about 25 percent so they can play Lady Bountiful and give it back after buying a few votes.

My feeling is that the war on slavery was not so much a great moral crusade as a slow realization that slavery didn't pay. That's what the West Indian slave-owners decided. They found it better to relax their slave-driving to encourage the slaves to work more creatively.

At any rate, it is clear that leftist societies require a vigorous and ruthless neo-slavery just to keep operating in the economic basement. Just look at Venezuela right how.

Yes, but without wage and hour laws and safety regulations and labor law where would we be?

Point 4: Go and read Point 1.

What part of wage and hour laws got us from $3 per day to $100 per day? Back in the day of $3 per day, human lives were pretty cheap. You could easily get another starving hod-carrier when the last one wore out. But when you are inventing department stores in Paris in the 1850s you start to think that you need to pay your good salespeople a cut above the rest, because a good salesperson is hard to find. When you are Henry Ford expanding Model T production you advertise $5 per day because you need to attract labor to Detroit. And now the giants of the internet want the sharpest minds in the world working for them.

And as for labor law, you only see labor unions in a fight against decline. What about the Great Railroad Strike of 1877? The workers were striking against wage cuts. And why were the railroads cutting wages? Because of the Depression starting in the Crash of 1873. The railroads were broke. Same with the industrial unions in England in the late 19th century. They went on strike against wage cuts issuing out of low prices and heightened competition on industrial goods in the international market. So what part of union agitation got us from $3 per day to $100 per day?

The fact is that government always and everywhere responds to the demand for protection. From foreign invaders, from domestic criminals, and from the vicissitudes of the creative destruction of the Great Enrichment from $3 to $100 per day. But usually its protection doesn't make a blind bit of difference except to confirm the privileged in their privilege.

So whenever ruling class activists come up with new ways to increase their power there is only one question to ask.

How would this have got us from $3 per day to $100 per day? Let alone get from today's $100 per day to $1000 per day?

In the last 200 years of the Great Enrichment we have gone from $3 per day to $100 per day and more. There has been nothing like it. Ever.

Trump. That's What You Get After a Lefty Mini-Reign of Terror

Yesterday I suddenly woke up out of a sound sleep, where Trump is concerned, and here is what I realized.

Trump is Thermidor.

Thermidor? That's the name for what came after the French Revolution and its culminating Reign of Terror. It is the moment when Maximilien Robespierre, "the incorruptible," was kicked out and, in a while, Napoleon Bonaparte took over as the man on the white horse.

In Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution this is perfectly natural and physical (and not the holy horror that the left insists). Here is how I described Crane's theory of revolution in a blog post a year ago. It is well worth reading, if I do say so myself.

Fall of the Old Regime The old regime is discredited, and probably running out of money. But there is hope, for that is what the revolutionaries are selling.

Rule of the Moderates and Dual Power Typically the old regime is succeeded by a regime of moderates, but the moderates soon find themselves in conflict with extremists who act illegally and independently of the moderate regime.

Reign of Terror The extremists win for a bunch of reasons, including that they are more ruthless and better organized. Then they embark on a campaign of terror and virtue, ruthlessly purging the world of injustice and sin and vice.

Thermidor Humans cannot live forever in a fervor of holy rage; eventually the tension breaks and they fall back into a more normal life. But the solution typically involves a dictator, nationalism, and foreign conquest.

 I concluded with this:

Whether the collapse (or "reaction") ends in a Republican president and Congress with a mandate to do serious reform of the administrative welfare and regulatory state is another question.

What a wimp. I didn't have the depth of understanding to predict that the next president would be a Napoleonic character running to Make America Great Again.

But I did make the point that Obama and his acolytes saw themselves as conducting a revolution (with fundamental transformation) and the whole left activism culture sees itself as fighting injustice. When you let the moralists have full rein they conduct a reign of terror and virtue, as in "you will be made to care."

And ordinary people hate it. And fear it.

You can easily fit the Sixties into this mold. After the kids and the African Americans got into the streets for several years the "silent majority" wanted peace and quiet and Nixon for a few years.

There will always be plenty of kids to enlist as the foot soldiers in the reign of terror and virtue. Hello Bernie.

The thing about Donald Trump is that he doesn't seem to care about the activists and the virtuecrats on the left. That fits Vox Day's idea that the only way to deal with the left is to say: "We Don't Care." Vox Day also says that conservatism has failed because its strategy is defensive. Rule One of strategy is that defense fails, and the conservative approach to the left's cultural domination has mostly been to cower and hide to try and go along so that they won't single you out for humiliation.

Say what you like about Trump, but one thing he doesn't do is cower and hide. Now, the whole point of political leadership is that the world is a dangerous place and we need a fearless leader to confront the dangerous world and fill our hearts with courage and determination. Golly. I wonder why the white working class, now reported to be dying from despair (yeah, in The Atlantic!), has rallied to his banner.

I've said all along, from an incoherent burble in the 80s when I felt that conservatives weren't ready to exploit the tactical Reagan successes, that we can't turn America around until we have a religious/cultural movement that captures the hearts and the minds of a significant cohort of Americans. And I still don't see it.

What we do see, every day, is the ubiquitous presence of the left-wing activism culture and its reign of terror and virtue that is "peacefully protesting" into every corner of American life to insist that you be made to care.

Yes, Let's Think About the First Principles of Capitalism, Rana Foroohar

Over at Time magazine, one of their managing editors, Rana Foroohar, has penned a long think piece about "American Capitalism's Great Crisis," and ends up with a typical non-ending:

Crises of faith like the one American capitalism is currently suffering can be a good thing if they lead to re-examination and reaffirmation of first principles. The right question here is in fact the simplest one: Are financial institutions doing things that provide a clear, measurable benefit to the real economy? Sadly, the answer at the moment is mostly no. But we can change things. Our system of market capitalism wasn’t handed down, in perfect form, on stone tablets. We wrote the rules. We broke them. And we can fix them.

The article is based, presumably, on Fohoorar's book Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business. But the article fails to address its subject in the same way that the AP's Seth Borenstein fails to address the question of climate change. When you are a media hack you really can't move too far from the conventional wisdom on your beat. It's not just that journalists are "Democratic operatives with bylines;" it is just a fact of life for a beat reporter that if you move too far from the conventional wisdom you will lose your audience and you will kill your access to powerful people.

So what do we learn from Foroohar?

There is, she writes, a crisis of faith in capitalism. In a poll, only 26% of millennials "considered themselves capitalists." Indeed, "Americans have plenty of concrete reasons to question their system." And it's not just a question of breaking up banks or raising taxes on hedge-funders or more or less regulation. The problem is bigger than that, as Foroohar's book explains.

In the old days from "the late 1790s to the early 1970s, finance took individual and corporate savings and funneled them into productive enterprises, creating new jobs, new wealth and, ultimately, economic growth." But now "only a fraction of all the money washing around the financial markets these days actually makes it to Main Street businesses." And that goes not just for the US but across the world. "Most of the money in the system is being used for lending against existing assets such as housing, stocks and bonds."

America’s economic illness has a name: financialization. It’s an academic term for the trend by which Wall Street and its methods have come to reign supreme in America, permeating not just the financial industry but also much of American business.

We are talking about everything from the size of finance to "debt-fueled speculation" to "risky, selfish thinking," public and private, the "increasing political power of financiers and the CEOs they enrich," and the ideology of "markets know best."

The rot started when post-WWII growth started to slow in the 1970s.

[Instead of making tough decisions] politicians decided to pass that responsibility to the financial markets. Little by little, the Depression-era regulation that had served America so well was rolled back, and finance grew to become the dominant force that it is today. 

So we got the "Carter-era deregulation of interest rates," Reaganomics "that favored Wall Street," then Clinton era deregulation to get out of the late 1980s doldrums, and Greenspan era loose money that led to today's "near-zero interest rates to keep from falling back into recession." We have a financial policy that amounts to "let them eat credit," a "palliative" to medicate the "downward mobility in the middle class" instead of facing the nation's problems.

Of course, there are many reasons for America's "low-growth economy," from "globalization to technology-related job destruction."

But the single biggest unexplored reason for long-term slower growth is that the financial system has stopped serving the real economy and now serves mainly itself. 

And now small business formation is down and big corporations buy back their stock rather than invest in R&D. Apple borrows money so it doesn't have to repatriate profits and pay taxes on it.

But hey, help is on the way.

Remooring finance in the real economy isn’t as simple as splitting up the biggest banks (although that would be a good start). It’s about dismantling the hold of financial-oriented thinking in every corner of corporate America. It’s about reforming business education, which is still permeated with academics who resist challenges to the gospel of efficient markets... It’s about changing a tax system that treats one-year investment gains the same as longer-term ones, and induces financial institutions to push overconsumption and speculation rather than healthy lending to small businesses and job creators. It’s about rethinking retirement, crafting smarter housing policy and restraining a money culture filled with lobbyists who violate America’s essential economic principles.

This is, of course, mainstream conventional wisdom, as it should be, coming from Time magazine. It's full of standard liberal memes, from the good old Depression era regulation to the crazed Reagan era to the greedy banker stuff to short-sighted CEOs. It is the view of someone "in the arena." And it assumes that the answers come from the usual experts "crafting smarter" policies. Oh yeah.

But maybe there is another way to look at Capitalism 2016. Maybe we need a whole new narrative.

The first thing to establish is that government and finance are joined at the hip. To understand that, go and watch The Tudors on Netflix. In an early episode, Henry VIII proudly points out of his window to a warship at anchor. How do you think that warship and its heart of oak got built? On the profits from Henry's royal estates? Or watch Admiral on Netflix, and then go and read up on Dutch national hero Admiral Michiel de Ruyter on La Wik. In the mid 17th century the Dutch merchants had to do something about the Russian and the Brit and the French monarchs mucking about with their trading system. For that they needed a navy to protect their argosies and teach the monarchs a lesson and for that they needed to give money to government to build a navy to make the world safe for capitalism.

That is the story of capitalism from that day to this. Capitalism can't bring us fabulous goods and services unless government keeps the peace. So merchants have provided credit to governments so that governments could finance navies and keep the trade routes open.

But things never stop just there. After inventing the central bank and national debt and financing their war of independence from Spain, the Dutch launched a 500 ship invasion force on the Brits in 1688 and then installed Willem of Oranje as King William III and set up the Bank of England and the National Debt and used Britain as a base for a Second Hundred Years War against the French, won in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo. British national debt went from nothing in 1688 to 250% GDP in 1815.

National debt won the US Civil War, and World War I and World War II. And probably the Cold War too. The point is that the incredible wealth of capitalism allows government to borrow and spend. On wars, on education, on entitlement programs, on anything that buys votes.

For over a century, from 1848 to 1990, high-minded intellectuals tried to bury capitalism with the romantic idea of socialism and a money-free administrative system, but by the 1980s even socialists realized that a much better system would be to use the wealth of capitalism to finance their agenda rather than replace it with administration and bureaucracy. So now government is busy using the credit system for all sorts of projects. Most notably it subsidized home mortgages, first with the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, and lately with mortgages for people that couldn't service them. What could go wrong?

According to Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street, the credit system needs two things. It needs loans that are properly collateralized, and it needs borrowers that can be relied upon to make their payments. Looking back at the sub-prime mortgage era, what could go wrong? In fact, looking at everything that government does with borrowed money, what can you expect but mayhem?

You can see that the problem is mission creep. It's one thing to finance old Grandad de Ruyter to teach the absolute monarchs a lesson on the North Sea, or put the French in their place at a little town in Belgium. That is national debt serving the interests of commerce. But when government becomes 35% or more of GDP and the whole economy is riddled with government credit subsidy schemes, then something has to give. And don't forget that all the time the financiers are joined at the hip to the government. That's because, as I read years ago, the most important government program is the selling of the debt to the financiers. It misses the point to talk about breaking up the banks, or jiggling financial regulation. The elephant in the room is the government and its finances, and the various shifts and tricks it uses to get itself out of the latest jam.

It misses the point to complain that the finance industry doesn't finance growth. It never has. Credit and debt are for solid, no worries, ongoing operations, like financing a store's inventory, or lending money to get goods from where they are to where they are wanted. Financing growth is about startups and private equity and mad money.

It misses the point to complain about CEOs shorting R&D for buying back their stock. Big public corporations are usually reaching the end of their growth phase. They are just money machines until the inevitable day when some little startup puts them out of business.

It misses the point completely to write about American Capitalism's Great Crisis. Capitalism never had a crisis and never will. Capitalism uses credit as it is supposed to be used, to finance ongoing operations. And it can supply, from time to time, mad money for startups and other risky ventures which is the real engine that gets us from $3 per capita per day in 1800 to $100 per capita per day in 2016. The problem is the intersection of capitalism and government. When government grabs all the credit to fight a war, it really bollixes up the economy. When government encourages deadbeats to borrow money to buy a house, it leads to a Crash of 2008. And when government goes the easy money route to get out of a jam, the money sluices into all kinds of cracks and corners and encourages financial shenanigans from all sorts of shady characters.

But don't expect a Rana Foroohar to say that. A mainstream journalist has to stay mainstream. Just like Seth Borenstein, the AP's climate change guy. Really, how could an AP reporter on the climate beat do anything but breathlessly retail the latest wizard wheeze from the $1.5 trillion a year global climate community?

And how could a reporter on the finance beat do anything but retail liberal blame-the-bankers scapegoating?

Liberals Don't Bother to Pretend Any More

The great con about welfare state government is that the free stuff is really "social insurance." That was the idea when Bismarck opened the game in the 1880s. And when Social Security was passed in 1935 it was decorated with all the paraphernalia of insurance, with Trust Funds and Boards of Trustees. If you look at the UN's government spending categories, there is a item for "Social Protection."

But when Medicare passed in 1965 only the Hospital Insurance, Part A, was funded by a Trust Fund. The rest of it came out of regular revenue.

Looking back, we can see that the Insurance scam was just a way of hiding the taxes. That FICA tax wasn't a tax; oh no, it was really an insurance premium. Don't believe your lying eyes, and all that.

But Medicare Drug in the Bush administration didn't bother about Trust Funds and such. It was just a new entitlement. And the level of lying ramped into the stratosphere with Obamacare that would let you keep your plan and your doctor. I don't think.

So Mytheos Holt's piece on "ObamaDontCare" about "Andy Slavitt, acting Administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Studies (CMS), willfully misle[a]d[ing] Congress on the amount of money spent on Obamacare’s exchanges" is par for the course. Who cares what was spent on the exchanges, "the program’s true legacy appears to be nothing less than pure graft and payola for administrations in safe blue states."

Here's Chris Jacobs warning us that Medicare is broke, even as Democrats are proposing an expansion. to 55 year-olds. Well, yes. But Medicare will keep on keeping on until the government runs out of other peoples' money. And then, really, who cares? It's not as if seniors are valuable workers that are integral to the nation's economy, or bringing forth babies to enroll in the next generation of taxpayers. We are just a cost.

Here's George Will worrying about Amtrak. Is is a government entity or a private corporation? The courts can't seem to figure it out. Well, yeah. Amtrak is a shabby racket. Next question.

Let's clear the air here. When the government proposes some new program it may feel the need to talk about insurance, or clearing up the mess on drugs, where surgeries for seniors were covered but drugs were not. Or it may sell an Obamacare that will make things worse for most Americans while benefiting a few. Or it may sell some crackbrained idea of Amtrak as a private corporation that is supposed to make a profit.

But that is all bullshit. In the end it all comes down to betting the nation on the ruling class's wars, which may be wars against communism or wars on poverty or wars on climate. And it comes down to rewarding the government's supporters. So Hillary Clinton is proposing a child-care initiative which will provide that nobody has to pay more than 10% of their income on child care. Golly, I wonder who will like that program?

The bottom line is, of course, at what point the government starts to go Greece, or Argentina, or Venezuela, or Brazil. You can give out all the money in the world, but every dollar that you give out to your supporters reduces the private sector -- the social organism that makes products and services that people are willing to spend their own money to buy -- by a dollar.

Back in the day, liberals used to pretend they were moderates that cared about the middle class and its responsibility culture. These days they don't seem to care; they just propose more free stuff, because that's what they do.

Is this because the American people don't care or because liberals are just going for broke? It is hard to tell in this era of political correctness where you are not allowed to disagree with the ruling class without losing your job.

All we know is that since Obama was elected the opposition has been getting angrier and angrier, to the point where the opposition voters have fired the opposition politicians in the Trump effect!

Nobody knows what will happen. But I suspect that we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Government by Executive Action is Not Just Wrong, It's Evil

If you want a sign that the current era of expert-led top-down administrative government is dying of its own internal contradictions, look no further than France.

The Socialists are going to bypass parliament in order to force through labor reforms administratively. From a BBC report:

The French cabinet has given the go-ahead for Prime Minister Manuel Valls to force through highly controversial labour reforms.

An extraordinary cabinet meeting invoked the French constitution’s rarely used Article 49.3, allowing the government to bypass parliament.

It came after rebel MPs from the governing Socialist party had vowed to vote down the bill.

The reforms will make it easier for employers to hire and fire workers. […]

The government says relaxing workers’ protection will encourage businesses to hire more people and help to combat chronic unemployment.

And, of course, the French are striking and protesting against the government's administrative actions.

Here in the US Hillary Clinton is proposing to go around Congress in order to enact her child care subsidy plan.

Just between you and me, I'd say that this represents a systemic failure. If you can't get to do the right thing through the normal political process, then maybe you shouldn't do anything at all.

Yes, I know. The normal labor law in the West is a foolish mess, because it gives workers property rights in their jobs that cannot be sustained in the market.  Yes, I know, child care costs are a huge burden, especially if you are a single mother.

But I say that if you can't get a majority in parliament to pass a law easing labor law rights and restrictions then you gotta wait until you can persuade the people to support a change. That's the idea of democracy, right? You run for office on a platform and that platform gives you a mandate for change, which you execute in the legislature. Consent of the governed, and all that.

And France got in this mess by pushing the poisonous idea that the woikers was bein' robbed! They got their rights! Actually, they don't, not unless they can force the costs of labor regulation off on consumers or "the rich." And now France is having to pay the piper for giving people rights that would gum up the economy.

You are outraged that families spend too much on child care? Then you run for office and try to persuade Congress to change the law. If Congress won't change it, then too bad. You better get out and persuade the American people to change Congress so you can change the law.

But wait, you say. We can't wait. People are suffering right now! The president needs to act. Well, you should have thought about that when you pushed the sexual revolution, when you made it OK for men to desert the mothers of their children, when you enacted welfare programs that made it easier for women to marry the state than to marry the fathers of their children, when you jacked housing costs into the stratosphere with subsidized mortgages and restrictive zoning.

I don't know how we are going to retreat from the gummed up mess of the big-government administrative state. I suppose that we won't until the whole structure literally freezes up and fails to deliver anything, so that people are forced to look elsewhere for the services that government presently monopolizes.

Of course, the Trump phenomenon feeds into this. Lots of people think that the government doesn't care about people like them; it only cares about out-and-proud liberal activist groups that grab the national bandwidth with their peaceful protesting and their march through the institutions.

But the Trumpers haven't looked around the corner. The problem is that all government is a waste and an injustice. It is pure power play, smashing down the clunking fist, and forcing them to pay for your goodies because you have the power. Don't forget that if you have the power today, you may not have the power tomorrow. If you really want to wive and thrive, then cut loose the government, its taxes and its injustices its administrations and its regulations, get a job, and don't ever think that you've got a job for life.