Is This the Best, or the Worst of Times?

I always appreciate the juxtaposition of op-ed links on the home page of RealClearPolitics.com. On the one hand you get an end-of-the-world piece for Republicans, but right below it, an end-of-the-world piece for Democrats. As in:

Could Obamacare Save the Democrats? John Cassidy, The New Yorker
The Delusional Dems of 2017 Matthew Continetti, Washington Free Beacon

And so on. Today there's a big battle between those that think that the nation's spies are a problem and that Trump's response to the spies is a problem.

What I would like to see is a serious Republican effort to use the Obamacare meltdown to set health care on a new path, away from bureaucratic centralism and towards market innovation.

But you can see the problem. The Democrats think they see blood, as is their latest catchphrase "Make America Sick Again." And the general liberal line on health care is "universal health care." By which, I assume, they mean a centralized bureaucratic regime where all the decisions are made by liberal bureaucrats, liberal activists, and liberal politicians, because social justice. (Although in reality, the universal system would be a cesspool of special interests and crony capitalism.)

And, as Charles Krauthammer points out, as soon as Republicans touch Obamacare, "they own the entire health system." By which he means that the entire Democratic-media-activist-academic complex will all combine to blame Trump and Republicans for everything.

Hey, Dems! How about the 26,000 bombs dropped by the US in 2016? I thought that President Obama was going to end our endless wars.

I guess, for me, the central question of 2017 is whether President Trump will be able to push back on the liberal narrative that blames Republicans for everything and observes total Democratic meltdowns in silence. I call it Cut the Cringe, meaning that Republicans have got to stop apologizing and living in feat that the Democrats will call them racists, sexists, homophobes. And take the battle to the Dems, and make them the issue.

At least in 2017 we will have a president that you can attack without being called a racist.

A Liberal Asks: What is the Justification for the Stock Market?

I spent time with a liberal friend over New Years, and he asked me what justified the stock market. Because the day-to-day stock market doesn't raise capital. It just shuffles it around.

I have to admit that I didn't have the answer right on the tip of my tongue. Another case of l'esprit d'escalier, alas.

Eventually, as I was "descending the stairs" I did start coming out with good reasons: a whole cascade of them.

First of all, the stock market provides an exit to the investor. Suppose I worked for a company for years and got stock options that I converted into stock. Now I want to retire, and I want to change my stock in a growth company into a dividend stock. If I want to do that, I need a stock market full of buyers and sellers so I can get a good deal on the stock I want to sell and a good deal on the stock I want to buy.

Secondly, the stock market lets me, the little guy, get in on the next big thing. Not on the ground floor, of course. Startups get ground-floor money from venture capitalists that get their money from rich guys. But when a company goes public and the founders make billions, then the little guy has a chance to make millions. Suppose I bought $10,000 of Microsoft in December 1989, before its second split, at what would now be $0.6 per today's share. Suppose I then sold it some time between 2002 and 2012 when Microsoft was pretty well flat at $24 per share. I'd have walked away with $400,000, which ain't too shabby on a $10,000 investment.

But all that is just nickels and dimes. Let's do an Ike and make the problem bigger.

The main thing the stock market does is put a price on a corporation. It says: here is what we, the whole marketplace of buyers and sellers, think the present value of all future revenue is from this company. That is why, in J.P. Morgan's famous phrase, the stock market fluctuates. Nobody knows the future, and opinions about the future fluctuate from day to day. This is a very big deal, both for the company and for the rest of the world. It tells the company whether it is doing the right thing or not. It tells the rest of the world whether to buy the company's bonds, whether it is growing its business, or whether, like New York Times, it is failing and needs to be bought by a foreign crony capitalist if it is to survive at all.

But that is not the basic point about the stock market.

The main thing about the stock market is that prices are the only way that we can make decisions on what to buy and sell. Administrative ukase doesn't do it; administrative froo-frar didn't help Obamacare, because Obamacare thought it could fool the market with clever manipulations and regulations thought up by Jonathan Gruber. Government regulation doesn't do it. Did financial regulation prevent the Crash of 2008? Did financial regulation by the Securities and Exchange Commission stop the fraudster Bernie Madoff?

So the very idea from a faithful liberal that raises the question, should we allow the stock market, is false on its face. The question is not: should we allow the stock market? The question is: should be allow any political intervention into the stock market at all? Should we do anything except punish the fraudster after his exposure? Should we allow any politician to mouth off about any economic issue at all without applying a sharp blow to his solar plexus?

And here is a bigger question. Should we allow liberals that think they are better, wiser than spontaneous economic and social phenomena that birthed and grew and contributed to human welfare and decency without a single liberal (or indeed anyone else) having a clue what it did and why.

Are not liberals outrageous economic deniers that -- in the face of overwhelming evidence over the last 200 years that government has no clue when it comes to the economy, and economic theory that says that socialism/government programs can't work because they can't compute prices, and regulatory theory that says that the government regulators always get "captured" by the regulated -- persist in their pre-Cambrian superstition that politics should be in control of the economy?

Politics in control of the economy? Did not Mao ZeDong write that "politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed." So liberals think that they have a holy right to wage a bloodless war on the capitalists, that have raised per-capita income from $3 to $100 in the last 200 years with government trying to hobble them every step of the way.

You ask: what is the justification for the stock market?

I say:  what is the justification for liberals?

How to Finesse the "Pre-existing Conditions" Issue

My man Kevin D. Williamson has it exactly right. How you gonna keep Obamacare down on the farm when we the people like the gay Paree of "pre-existing conditions," or being able to sign up for health insurance after we get sick?

That after all is what the "individual mandate" was all about in Obamacare. Says Kevin:

We have to have an individual mandate because we want a preexisting-coverage mandate. If insurers have to pick up the expenses for everyone who shows up at their door with lung cancer or HIV or severe diabetes, that has to be paid for. 

But, of course, the whole point of practical politics is to figure out how to let your supporters off the hook while sticking it to the supporters of the other party.

But let us step back and think about this for a moment. What is it that people really want?

People want to get health care when they get sick.

Very good. But then things get sticky.

If someone has assets, then they will want to protect their assets from the health care bills. These are the kind of people that need health insurance, and they usually get it.

If someone does not have assets, then they are not going to be that interested in getting health insurance. Why? Because if they get really sick then they are not risking their entire life savings. They can always declare bankruptcy. So why pay good money to protect non-existent assets?

However, it is clear to me that anyone that does not have good insurance, or that does not pay their bills, is not going to get good health care. That's why Medicaid patients have worse health outcomes than people of the same income that don't use Medicaid.

I've talked to health care professionals. They hate Medicaid with a passion. Not just because of the low reimbursement rates, but mainly because of the huge cost of interacting with the bureaucracy. They would rather give it away for free than deal with the government.

It doesn't matter how you slice it, the health care system is not going to "put out" for you if you don't pay your bills or you have the bureaucrats at the DMV paying for you.

Let's put it in terms of my reductive Three Peoples theory. If you are a Person of the Responsible Self then you will make arrangements to protect your loved ones and your assets in case of catastrophic illness. So you will probably buy some kind of catastrophic health insurance, and you will probably get good health care when you or yours gets sick. If you are a Person of the Subordinate Self then you will rely on the lord of the manor to take care of you. But the lord of the manor, or his modern equivalent big government, really does not care about people like you, whatever he says. So you will get pro-forma health care. If you are lucky.

Now, I don't know how things work out there in the murky world of the health care system's billing department. But I recall reading that your average hospital will usually try to enroll you in Medicaid if you show up at the ER without health insurance. So there is that.

Maybe that's the solution. Sure, we'll take care of you if you show up without health insurance. But if you do we'll enroll you in our Affordable Pre-existing Condition program, for life, and you will be taxed X% of your income to pay for it for life.

And the health care you get will probably be a very much like the care you get at Britain NHS and America's VA.

Or, you could graduate from the People of the Subordinate Self and become a Person of the Responsible Self. You will find, apart from improved health care, that you will also get a lot more respect.

I am Changing My Mind About Government

Up to now I have been using the following definition of government to show that government is not the collection of kindly librarians its PR people like to pretend.

Government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

I came to this definition by realizing that there is not that much difference between a government and a guerrilla group. They both occupy territory and draft young men into their army and tax the folk living inside their boundaries to fund themselves.

But something changed for me in the last month. I think it began with my conversation with a retired special forces officer, who explained Trump as a leader that was speaking to people that felt "unprotected."

It made me realize that all governments must offer protection, so that people will put up with their taxing and their bullying.

Of course, "protection" is something that criminal gangs do as well as governments, as in "nice little business you got here, shame if something should happen to it." What is the difference between the gangbanger and the government that says: "nice little business you got here, Bill Gates. Shame if the Anti-Trust Division should have a problem with it." The protection is always offered with a threat.

So I think that my definition should be reworded. To something like this:

Government is like a criminal gang, with its territory and its enforcers, and it forces the inhabitants of its territory to fund it and its supporters through the threat of terror and the offer of protection.

Some governments keep their enforcers decently hidden, but the fact is that if you don't pay your taxes and bow the knee, at some point the government will send out its enforcers, its men with guns, to change your opinion about taxes and regulation. And some governments, such as our own, use intellectual terror, e.g. the accusation of racism rather than the knock in the night, to terrorize the population.

And every government governs with a combination of threat and the offer of protection. It was said of Mao ZeDong's government in his Red Base in southeastern China in the 1930s that it governed completely using terror. It had to because it offered no services and no protection to the peoples it ruled, beyond the accidental protection of being within its borders. But even Mao combined terror and protection.

Of course, every government also manufactures a sacred history to show how God or Providence or Nature or The People or the arc of history has sanctified its rule, and how the people have been saved from a fate worse than death by its rule.

In most places most of the people under a government's rule most of the time believe in that sacred history. That is the purpose of the sacred history: to make it easy for people to submit.

But ultimately, a government rules by virtue of the fact that it has the guns and we have not, and that the better part of valor is to go along with the government and its lies rather than form a head of rebellion and bravely outdare the dangers of the time.

No, Mr. President. Don't Do It

The latest flap is the idea that President Obama might put his Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, on the Supreme Court during the five minutes between the moment of "intercessionary recess" of the Senate between the last gavel of the 114th Congress and the first gavel of the new 115th Congress.

That's because the president has the power to appoint federal officers temporarily without the advice and consent of the Senate when the Senate is in recess.

You can go read the article at the Washington Times where the experts hash over whether this gambit would work. Apparently Teddy Roosevelt tried it in 1903, although not with a Supreme Court appointment.

I guess my reaction would be: Go ahead, Mr. President, Make My Day.

Because this sort of in-your-face phoning and penning from President Obama destroys the comity between the parties and between the lefty culture and the righty culture. It makes us mad. And it takes us another notch towards civil war.

Think that's a bit overdrawn? Maybe. But my Greek-American friend George Maroutsos explained it all to me years ago. It was during the aftermath of the Greek colonels episode from 1969-74 when democracy had been restored to Greece. The key, George explained, was that both the left-wing party should lose an election and give up power to the right-wing party, and that the right-wing party should lose an election and give up power to the left-wing party. That would prove that both parties accepted the right of the other party to exist.

The problem with Obama's executive actions and his transition ukases like putting vast areas of the continental shelf off-limits to exploration and declaring huge parts of Utah as a National Monument -- not to mention Harry Reid's gambit to prevent the use of the filibuster to oppose most federal nominations -- is that it signals to the other side that "these guys will pull every trick in the book" to get their way.

My judgement on the left is that they believe that the rules don't apply to them because they are on the right side of history and represent the oppressed and the marginalized that have been exploited and kept out of the full enjoyment of their human rights. So it is right and proper that young Obamas should act as community organizers and lead the people into the streets in "peaceful protest."

The left might have had a point, back in the day when the workers didn't have the vote, back in the day when Jim Crow disfranchised the blacks of the South.

But the whole point of votes and elections and legislatures is that every significant voice gets heard. So there is no warrant to take to the streets to advertise your grievance. Instead, you can form a committee and talk to your local representative. Mostly, representatives are very responsive to organized committees because they understand that organized groups tend to swing weight at the next election.

The problem with our liberal friends is that their whole political ideology says that only they are on the right side of history, and only they have the right to protest and to demonstrate. If anyone else does it it's fascism.

I'm here to tell my liberal friends that it is this liberal attitude that has brought us Trump. If you are an ordinary middle-class person that doesn't fit into the magic circle of "traditionally marginalized groups," then liberals don't care about people like you. Eventually, you get the message and vote for Trump.

So if President Obama pulls a trick and puts Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court for the next two years, then it will just firm up the growing sentiment in non-liberal America: no more Mr. Nice Guy.

Look, it's right there in the iterated Prisoners Dilemma. You trust everyone the first time, and keep trusting them as long as their actions are trustworthy. But as soon as a counterparty "defects" you stop trusting them. Period.

That is something that our liberal friends don't seem to understand.

Mideast: Replay of Europe 1600

The Middle East is the despair of well-born western elitists everywhere. Educated to a fare-thee-well in their Ivy League secular seminaries and finishing schools, so that they know the currently approved orthodoxy and know to avoid heresy and also have learned the "social graces and upper class cultural rites as a preparation for entry into society," these tender souls cannot understand why the folks in the Middle East have not embraced Peace and Justice.

Well, there are those nasty Israelis, of course. But for them the arc of history would be bending towards...

But what do you expect after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire? And after European dead white males, educated in all the usual state seminaries and finishing schools, had mucked around in the Middle East for a century with their foolish attempts to create a European style region. As Alan Massie writes,

None of these creations was a nation-state. There was the idea of the Arab nation, and it’s an idea that has never found practical expression. In most of the new states people felt loyalty to their tribe and their religion, not to the state.

Let's take a look at the Middle East. It has numerous tribes and enclaves, and mostly people identify themselves by blood and kindred. It has two competing versions of Islam. It has a holy site, in Mecca. And it has great powers interfering all the time, just because they could.

Gee, that sounds familiar. How about the German lands in 1600, or so. You had the dozens of principalities and even bishoprics. You had the memory of a lost empire in the Holy Roman Empire that was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. You were the front line between Protestantism and Catholicism. You had the holy center of Christendom down the street at the Vatican. And you had great powers, like France and Sweden, meddling in German affairs, because they could.

Let's say that the German problem started with Martin Luther and his 95 Theses in 1517, kicking off the schism in Christianity. About a century later you had the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648. The end of the war saw the Treaty of Westphalia and the advancement of the idea of the Nation State.

That was cool for the non-German powers, because they were already nation states. But what about Germany? Too bad. It took another 200 years of war and revolution before the Germans got themselves a nation state, courtesy of the genius of Otto von Bismarck. Then, of course, the heirs of Bismarck mucked things up and got Germany into two world wars of Germany-vs.-the-rest.

So the result of all that religion and war and revolution is that the Germans are checking out of the world, with their women refusing to have babies and their German lands being overrun with migrants from the Middle East.

Here we have 500 years or so of complete elite cock-up in Europe, and you chaps are all wigged out about the fact that the Middle East hasn't yet settled down in a mere 100 years after the end of the Ottoman Empire?

What planet are you living on? Or more to the point, which secular seminary did you get your orthodox faith from? And which finishing school gave you your social graces?

I say let's give the Middle East another couple hundred years of war and mayhem before we decide to send in Graham Chapman and "The Colonel" to stop the silliness.

On the other hand, perhaps we should encourage Arab on Arab mayhem. Imagine if the Arab Middle East ever unified into a single entity, bursting with energy, whether religious or linguistic or national.

I don't think that would be much fun for the rest of us.

So maybe the result of Barack Obama's foolishness in the Middle East is the best possible outcome. He has managed to dissolve the whole place into wars and revolutions and terror and massacre. No chance for a unified Arab world on his watch. Yay Barack!

Geroge Soros Doesn't Get It

George Soros is a remarkable man, a Hungarian Jew that escaped the gas chambers of Hitler's Germany and then lived to become a wealthy speculator and a follower of Karl Popper and his idea of an Open Society.

And so he has spent tons of money over the years promoting what he believes to be the idea of the Open Society.

Now he has written a kind of manifesto, telling us what he thinks, and why, and what has gone wrong and what needs to be done. Here is the center of his political system.

I distinguished between two kinds of political regimes: those in which people elected their leaders, who were then supposed to look after the interests of the electorate, and others where the rulers sought to manipulate their subjects to serve the rulers’ interests. Under Popper’s influence, I called the first kind of society open, the second, closed.

OK, he writes, that is too simplistic. But when the EU was founded he supported it.

Which means that George Soros supports the idea of an unaccountable elite whose rulers could seek "to manipulate their subject to serve the rulers' interests." Which is what the EU elite has done.

Just a thought, George. I would say that an open society is one in which -- never mind how it is elected -- the government is limited and the intellectual elite labors night and day to create a national culture that marginalizes the eternal yearning in everyone to live at the expense of others, through government free stuff.

And now Germany has become the hegemon of Europe, and is doing a bad job at it, according to Soros. Meanwhile the whole of Europe is coming under the influence of Vladimir Putin, "whose concept of government is irreconcilable with that of open society." Writes Soros:

I hope that Europe’s leaders and citizens alike will realize that this endangers their way of life and the values on which the EU was founded.

And of course, Donald Trump is a real problem. Under him, "the US will be preoccupied with internal struggles in the near future, and targeted minorities will suffer."

So now we know why Soros is anti-nationalist and pro Black Lives Matter, as I wrote in the American Thinker. He's all worrited about "targeted minorities." You mean like the white working class, George, marginalized since the 1970s by liberals like Norman Lear in his All in the Family?

The fact is that George Soros is a man of his time and class, and bows to the false gods of the global elite, just like an Obama or a Kerry. His idea, like the rest of his buddies, is that a wise, evolved elite will rule the world as a kind of transnational cabal.

But the truth is that government, all government, is a shambles. Above all, politics and government are a problem because they attract people that are interested in power and the use of force.

But the notion of social animals, and humans as social animals, is how to limit force and its destruction. How do you slow down the chaps and the chapettes that are interested in power? How do you arrange institutions so that people are encouraged to serve their fellows with products and services rather than guns and bullets?

The overarching fact of the last century or so is that rich kids all over have fallen for the notion that the peace of the world depends on people like them getting political power to fight against the bourgeoisie and lead the marginalized into safe channels by bending the arc of history towards justice. And they have made the biggest mess of things ever every time they have been given that power.

George Soros is, no doubt, a clever man, and a successful speculator. But when it comes to government and politics he is a fool, blinded by the ruling-class shibboleths of the age.

He just doesn't get it.