President Obama's Last Words

For a racist sexist homophobe like me President Obama is the Worst President Ever, for a simple reason. He actually believes in the reactionary politics of the left. He believes that, after the two centuries of the Great Enrichment, when poor people have been covered with wealth unimaginable in history to anyone except the most be-jeweled emperor, the overwhelming reality is the oppression and marginalization of -- well whatever the current lefty victims of the week happen to be. And he believes that politics is the solution to this problem.

So he starts his farewell speech with this:

So I first came to Chicago when I was in my early twenties, and I was still trying to figure out who I was; still searching for a purpose to my life. And it was a neighborhood not far from here where I began working with church groups in the shadows of closed steel mills.

It was on these streets where I witnessed the power of faith, and the quiet dignity of working people in the face of struggle and loss...

Now this is where I learned that change only happens when ordinary people get involved, and they get engaged, and they come together to demand it.

In actual fact, the young Obama achieved nothing in the two years he community-organized in South Chicago. Because the steel plants weren't coming back, however much "ordinary people get involved... and demand it."

So then the president gives us short history of America to justify his lefty faith, that the founders' dream was not "self-executing." It required people to step up and organize.

It’s what pushed women to reach for the ballot. It’s what powered workers to organize. It’s why GIs gave their lives at Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima; Iraq and Afghanistan — and why men and women from Selma to Stonewall were prepared to give theirs as well. 

 Actually, I am not sure that is true, even in the right-wing version of sturdy pioneers creating civilization out of the wilderness.

I think that what has powered the last 200 years is that political power doesn't work. Top-down political power doesn't work because it protects the status-quo, and bottom-up political power only gets organized after the factories have closed and the old status-quo cannot be continued and it is too late to fix things.

In my view the freedoms and liberties and prosperity of the last 200 years arise out of the fact that free and responsible workers make more prosperity for themselves and the world than subordinate peasants and workers. The wealth of the world depends not on wise and impartial experts constructing a National Plan but by innovators engaged in "creative destruction." In other words, prosperity is as much a process of destruction as of creation. I think that our prosperity comes from individual businessmen stumbling into this truth without any help from thinkers and politicians.

It is naturally the conceit of any political elite or ruling class that the rulers -- or their bribed apologists among the community organizers -- are the indispenaible ones. I doubt it, Mr President.

If I had told you eight years ago that America would reverse a great recession, reboot our auto industry, and unleash the longest stretch of job creation in our history — if I had told you that we would open up a new chapter with the Cuban people, shut down Iran’s nuclear weapons program without firing a shot, take out the mastermind of 9-11 — if I had told you that we would win marriage equality and secure the right to health insurance for another 20 million of our fellow citizens — if I had told you all that, you might have said our sights were set a little too high.

It always amazes me how good political speechwriters are at putting lipstick on a pig. But even though everything is great, there is still "The laid off factory worker, the waitress or health care worker who’s just barely getting by and struggling to pay the bills." So we need a new social compact

to guarantee all our kids the education they need. To give workers the power... to unionize for better wages. To update the social safety net to reflect the way we live now. And make more reforms to the tax code so corporations and the individuals who reap the most from this new economy don’t avoid their obligations to the country that’s made their very success possible.

 Hmm. The Obama record on education is bupkis. The contribution of unions is bupkis. The president's record on updating the social safety net is bupkis. Then there is race.

After my election there was talk of a post-racial America. And such a vision, however well intended, was never realistic. Race remains a potent... and often divisive force in our society. Now I’ve lived long enough to know that race relations are better than they were 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, no matter what some folks say. You can see it not just in statistics. You see it in the attitudes of young Americans across the political spectrum. But we’re not where we need to be. And all of us have more work to do. If every economic issue is framed as a struggle between a hardworking white middle class and an undeserving minority, then workers of all shades are going to be left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves.

Well, Mr President, I'd say that a ton of white Americans voted for you on the promise that America's First Black President would extinguish the lie that America is the racist, sexist country of the left's reactionary faith. So to say we were disappointed in you is to say nothing. What we saw, over the last eight years, was a president and a secular faith that just cannot let go of the sacred totem that America remains irredeemably racist and sexist. Because that is the sacred fount of their power.

And so we reject you and your party and your secular liberal church.

But there is more.

We cannot just change the laws, but hearts and minds, says the president, and get out of our bubbles.

Yeah. Well. How's that working out for you, Mr. President. I ain't seen much changing of heart and mind in the Democratic Party or the liberal ruling class. What I see is a determination to press its cultural power to the utmost and not change hearts and minds so much as put them on the rack to confess their deplorabeness, on pain of losing their jobs.

And then onto climate change, beating the pants of ISIS, and thanking the people that worked for him,

And to all of you out there — every organizer who moved to an unfamiliar town, every kind family who welcomed them in, every volunteer who knocked on doors, every young person who cast a ballot for the first time, every American who lived and breathed the hard work of change — you are the best supporters and organizers anybody could ever hope for, and I will forever be grateful. Because you did change the world.

He looks to the young generation "to carry this hard work of democracy forward."

As though there was no question that more democracy, more community organizing, is the obvious solution to our problems.

I would ask our ruling class to step back for a moment. A good activity during such a pause would be to read Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. It says that the top 25 percent, which includes most educated liberals, is doing fine. The middle 50 percent is not doing too good, and the bottom 25 percent is in real trouble: the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

The point that Charles Murray makes in Coming Apart and throughout his life's work is that the whole political agenda of people like President Obama, people that fancy themselves as political activists and community organizers, has clearly made things worse for the least of us. Whatever they may think of "the hard work of democracy" they haven't paused to think about whether what they are doing is doing any good.

I would say to President Obama and the people that supported him that they all have a very narrow vision of human flourishing and how to work for something higher and fuller. It cannot just be carrying "this hard work of democracy forward," if nothing else because politics is just one sector of modern society, in the great contest of political power, economic power, and moral/cultural power.

The whole project of the left is to crowd out all human social interaction and replace it with politics.

That is something that our liberal friends just do not grasp, because their answer to every problem is more politics.

And politics, according to Mao Zedong, is war without bloodshed. Is that the best we can do?

All Your Pejoratives Are Belong to Us

Here's a spot of good news. Margaret Sullivan, over at the Jeff Bezos blog, writes that it is time for liberals to can the "fake news" meme.

Fake news has a real meaning — deliberately constructed lies, in the form of news articles, meant to mislead the public...

But though the term hasn’t been around long, its meaning already is lost. Faster than you could say “Pizzagate,” the label has been co-opted to mean any number of completely different things: Liberal claptrap. Or opinion from left-of-center. Or simply anything in the realm of news that the observer doesn’t like to hear.

Oh no! How could this happen? How could a carefully constructed liberal pejorative have gotten canceled out in a matter of weeks?

“The speed with which the term became polarized and in fact a rhetorical weapon illustrates how efficient the conservative media machine has become,” said George Washington University professor Nikki Usher.

I'll say. Or there is the Carlos Slim blog:

As Jeremy Peters wrote in the New York Times: “Conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself . . . have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their agenda.” 

Golly; I never knew that our guys were that good.

What these sweetie-pie liberals toiling away at their MSM blogs fail to mention is that there is nobody, nobody, doing more to push back against the liberal "fake news" pejorative than Breitbart.com. (Breitbart gets a sideways mention in Sullivan's piece, but not a starring role.)

Because nobody, nobody has done more to Cut the Cringe than Breitbart. That was my point in "Cut the Cringe" back in June 2016. Conservatives must not, any more, cringe before the vile accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia. We must laugh at the accusation of racism, and fling it right back into the faces of the liberals.

There is a reason why "fake news" has failed as a liberal pejorative. Well, two reasons. And the reasons come clear in Sullivan's pro-forma remark, quoting Glenn Kessler, also of the Bezos blog:

People seem to confuse reporting mistakes by established news organizations with obviously fraudulent news produced by Macedonian teenagers.

Oh no! But, of course, our liberal friends are completely missing the point, as in this quote from Sullivan:

BuzzFeed, meanwhile, is digging deeper into the rise of deliberate deception in the form of news stories, with the appointment of debunking expert Craig Silverman, formerly of Poynter.org, as its media editor.

Yes. The point is that deliberate deception occurs in all news stories, whether from established news organizations or from Macedonian teenager or, dare one say, from Russian hackers. One can only point to the Carlos Slim blog's handling of the alleged racist hate crime by four black Chicago youths. Carlos Slim's kids opined as how the crime was a hate crime against the disabled! Who knew?

So the liberal line fails on the basic point that all news is question-begging, all news is pushing a political line.

The other point is that, with Breitbart and Trump, we have left behind the old days when conservatives and Republicans cringed before the vile accusations of racism and wanting to hurt the poor. Done. Over.

More and more, I am coming to agree with Vox Day and his catchphrase We Don't Care. Whether it is liberal pearl-clutching, liberal vile accusations, liberals melting down after losing an election, liberals whispering "I can't believe he/she said that," or liberal journalists descanting on the latest liberal line-of-the-day in unison, the only response is to stand up to them and say We Don't Care.

Or, alternatively, All Your Pejoratives Are Belong to Us.

After Obamacare: My Two Cents

Things are warming up for the political battle over Obamacare repeal and replace. Last week the Democrats ran a presser that was clearly designed to say to Republicans: Be afraid, be very afraid.

Because everybody knows that the streets will erupt with rage if one hair on the Obamacare subsidies is touched. That is what Chuck Schumer was selling last week in the Dems' Make America Sick Again show.

And, right on cue, we read that Republicans are getting nervous about an Obamacare replacement.

And that makes me nervous. So, to buck myself up, I got to thinking about what I want to see with the Obamacare replacement. Two things:

• The reform should benefit Trump voters and the People of the Responsible Self in general.
• The reform should be acceptable to the white working class.

The whole game of Obamacare and the liberal idol of "universal healthcare" is to make health-care consumers in general pay for the subsidies and benefits handed out to Democratic Party supporters without having to recognize the costs in the federal budget. Their plan means that health care in general has to be subordinated to an administrative regulatory system and consequent distortions and injustices, instead of being a market and price driven organism that delivers what people are willing to pay for.

So I would say that the subsidies and handouts and free stuff need to be frankly put into the federal budget. Because the sly and dishonest Obamacare approach is liable to kill the health care system.

Yes, but won't that increase federal spending and increase the deficit? Yes it will, but I think of the additional outlays as crowding out other liberal stuff, like climate spending.

We need to get as close to a market-driven system as the American people will let us. Because that is how you get a health care system that responds to peoples' needs and ability to pay.

Of course, the white working class doesn't think that way; it thinks as workers and peasants, People of the Subordinate Self. So a lot of free stuff, including coverage for pre-existing conditions, will have to be included in the Obamacare reform. But these benefits, which are not "insurance" but government benefits, should be hived off from the health insurance system and made a separate high risk pool funded by government outlays.

Obviously, there are going to be losers in any change to the current system, and they would be the iconic Hillary voters, single 50-ish women with developing life-style related health problems that benefited from the compression of age-related insurance premiums and Obamacare exchange subsidies. But hey, these folks were not protected by Obamacre because their bronze plans have huge deductibles, which they hate. And they are never going to vote Republican anyway. Let us throw them a bone, and move on.

One thing that encourages me. The old game of intimidate the Republicans into concessions won't work too well, because Trump doesn't play that game. That is going to be fun to watch. It will be as Rush Limbaugh says. The liberals will keep calling plays out of their 30-year-old playbook, and be completely dumbfounded when the plays don't work.

But it ain't over till it's over.

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.