Are Trump and the Republicans Finished?

Everyone is in a fine froth about the failure of Ryancare (or Trumpcare) last week, and everybody is busy blaming someone.

It was Speaker Ryan, who should have known that you don't do major health care reform in a month.

It was the House Freedom Caucus that would compromise on anything.

It was President Trump, who didn't appreciate how difficult and complex health care is.

It was Steve Bannon, who threatened the House Freedom caucus guys.

Then there is the meme that Trump, or Ryan, or the Republicans, have spent all their political capital and are finished.

Well, which is true?

I don't know. But my smart retort is that government is a total disaster all the time. Almost everything it does is stupid and wasteful and cruel and unjust. It is almost impossible to get anything worthy and sensible done.

That is why governments employ flacks whose sole job is to tell us what a wonderful powerful guy the president is, on down to the worthy bureaucrat churning out life-saving regulations and "our" nurses and schoolteachers who are saving lives and caring for our children.

So the Republicans in Congress tried to do something really difficult and President Trump was trying to push whatever it was over the finish line.

And they failed.

And leaders are supposed to never fail.

I suppose this is all about the Pharoah being a god, and a god being necessarily omnipotent, and therefore any political failure bringing into question the divinity of the Pharoah.

Or, as the Chinese say, losing the Mandate of Heaven.

But it's pity, because normal human activity on this world constantly encounters problems and setbacks. The measure of a man or a woman is how they handle adversity. It's a bit hard to expect presidents and speakers to be perfect.

And the fear of failure seems to haunt all the folk in the political sphere. They have to appear omnipotent, or nothing at all.

Perhaps it arises out of the impossibility of a political career. As I read once, it is an amazing achievement for a Briton to get a seat in the House of Commons. But backbenchers are nobodies. It is even more astonishing to become a junior minister, practically impossible to become a front-rank cabinet minister, etc.

So every politician is haunted by the fear that the astonishing run of luck is about to run out.

On the other hand, I understand the necessity for oppositions to say See, I Told You So at every opportunity.

But here's a scary item from The Telegraph's eternal pessimist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. He says that US corporate credit is contracting at a record rate, almost as bad as 2008, so...

This morning energy stocks are down.

Everyone is Between a Rock and a Hard Place

We conservatives are naturally angry that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has announced that he will vote against the Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch. And he will probably filibuster Gorsuch too.

But what else is Schumer to do? The liberal base is all riled up and it demands "Resistance!" The great and powerful United State Senators cannot just wink at each other and let a Republican Supreme Court nomination through on a nod. The base wants blood, and by God, they are determined to get it.

But I understand the fury of the base. The liberal cognitive elite has used the Supreme Court to enact its policy preferences -- abortion for upscale women, gay marriage for upscale gays -- in the teeth of reluctance from the broad American mainstream. Suppose the Supreme Court became dominated by conservative "originalist" justices? What would happen to abortion and gay marriage and the rights of undocumented immigrants and criminal defendants then?

Liberals are tied to the mast, and must defend the activist Supreme Court to the knife. Otherwise all the Court's progressive jurisprudence comes into play.

The irony is that I'll bet my nickel that if abortion and criminal rights and gay marriage had been left to legislatures we would have arrived at some sort of messy, human accommodation on these issues. But because liberals on the court rammed all this down our throats we are mad as hell and we are not going to take it anymore.

The joke on liberals is that they are using the courts to enforce their moral agenda, just what they inveighed against when they insisted we get the government out of the bedroom.

The short-term result of liberals fighting over Supreme Court nominees will be the end of the filibuster to resist any presidential nomination, so nominations will be purely partisan. There could be eight years of this, liberals, before you get the whip hand again.

But the Republicans are also between a rock and a hard place on Obamacare. The Republican base hates Obamacare and wants it destroyed. But Obamacare has become yet another entitlement, and you touch entitlements at your peril.

Plus Donald Trump was elected courtesy of the white working class voters, and the white working class voters want their entitlements, thank you very much. They earned it.

And they used to talk about the Democratic Party as a coalition of conflicting interests that somehow got it together to win elections.

So the liberals are hoist by their own petard on the Supreme Court, and conservatives are trapped by the success of Donald Trump.

How will it all end up?

Oh, that's simple. It will end up in war. Either a global war against the Muslims or a civil war here at home. And in the chaos of war and its aftermath all the petty squabbles of today will go up in the smoke of a million funeral pyres.

But why? How come we can't just get along?

That's a good question, Senator.

Healthcare Showdown: Obamacare vs. Trumpcare

Remember when the Democrats were shoving the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act through Congress back in 2010?

It seemed like they were all singing from the same hymnal. Everyone knew to repeat the same talking points: If you like your plan... If you like your doctor... etc.

But with the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare it's like the gang that couldn't shoot straight. All the different conservative groups are fighting with one another. There is no single set of talking points.

Today there's going to be a vote on Speaker Ryan's American Health Care Act. Everyone is making predictions about pass or fail, but I'd say that the science says that every vote is a horse-trade, with many Republican votes available to the highest bidder until the last moment.

So we are in the same position as Obamacare, when Harry Reid was buying the votes of Democrats to get his bill passed in the Senate. Only it's the opposite.

I guess that while the Congress is so divided on an issue, it means that things aren't bad enough to warrant a reform.

Because in my view the problem with the government doing anything is that you can't get the votes to fix it until the boat has gone over the waterfall. That is why it is a bad idea for government to do anything other than fight wars.

But why is it that Democrats always seem to speak with one voice, whereas Republicans and conservatives always seem to be at sixes and sevens?

I'd say the reason is power. The left is interested in power, specifically the cultural power to name and shame and the political power to order people around or else. (Economic power comes as a free gift when you have cultural and political power. Corporate CEOs all know which side their bread is buttered.)

But the whole program of the right, excepting chaps like Hitler and Peron, is to limit power. We believe in the remarkable idea that a nation or a people does best when the cultural Torquemadas are kept in check and the political bosses don't have clunking fists to stitch up the whole town under their rule.

So when Republicans get into power we don't have a new cunning plan to buy votes like the Democrats do. We just want to find a way to release the shackles of big government, and every Republican as a different idea about where to start.

Then there is President Trump, the hero of the white working class, and they just want to go back to the good old days of the 1960s and good jobs at good wages, with pensions and health care for dessert.

I expect that all the flap about health care will subside when the west finally gets around to Doing Something about Islam.

But it will still be interesting to see if Speaker Ryan and President Trump manage to stitch together a majority in the House today for the American Health Care Act.

Maybe the Jihadis Will Help Us Kill Two Birds With One Stone

Yesterday I read a profoundly troubling piece about Islam, an interview of a Pole that converted to Islam. I was alerted to the article by a reader of this blog. Today we have a jihadi attack on the Westminster Palace, the home of parliaments.

This is personal to me because, 50 years ago, I used to walk across Westminster Bridge and past the Houses of Parliament, exactly where the car crashed into the pedestrians, on my way to work at Sir William Halcrow and Partners.

However, I used to walk on the other side of the bridge. So that's all right.

On one particular day in 1965 I filed past the catafalque of Sir Winston Churchill in Westminster Hall where the British national hero lay in state.

The liberal Polish convert to Islam was adamant about Islam. It cannot adapt to the modern world without killing Allah. That's because Islam is completely black and white. Either something is halal, permissible, or it is haram, forbidden.

There is also one hadis saying: there are things that are haram and things that are halal and in between there is the zone of uncertainty – do not go there. 

 So that means no critical thinking is allowed for Muslims: no gray areas for them.

But the whole point of the West is the investigation of the gray area, wrestling with the problem of what lies between the permissible and the forbidden.

So, on this Muslim's witness, Islam must be at war with the West, even as it is tempted and corrupted by the cornucopia of the West's riches and gadgets.

So we get to my understanding of history.

The great revolution in the last two hundred years, with the industrial revolution, is that wealth no longer consists of food-growing land. So the great instinct of humans, to defend their patch of land from invaders in necessary border wars, is defunct. Now wealth does not consist in land, nor yet in natural resources; it consists of intangible capital, the ideas and the techniques in men's minds. And everything is negotiable; everything has its price, so you can always pay to get access to resources like food and fuel.

Naturally there has been a huge reaction against this new truth, because we are all primed to believe in Gerald O'Hara's faith in "land, it's the only thing that lasts." So said the proprietor of a cotton slave plantation, an agriculture that rapidly exhausts both land and slave.

Really, socialism is an attempt to return to a lost agricultural Eden. I saw a book at HalfPriceBooks last weekend titled something like American Socialisms. It is a history of the socialist experiments in the US in the first half of the 19th century, New Harmony, Brook Farm, Oneida, etc., the attempts to instantiate the ideas of Fourier and Owens. These were comical attempts to redo agriculture at a moment when agriculture was about to be transformed by the industrial revolution.

And so we get the great 20th century wars. First the two German wars, about what exactly? Germany, the most advanced country in Europe needing living room? For what? The prosperous Germans could buy anything the world had to offer.

Then we got the battle against Communism, a cold war of position and propaganda, that was won by the United States with a few border wars around the periphery of the Communist Bloc.

Now we are shaping up for a war against Islam. And now the jihadis just attacked the mother of parliaments.

We should thank the jihadis. They are, to coin a phrase, sending out a cry for help: Stop us before we kill again!

If they knew what they were doing, they wouldn't be doing minor acts of terror; they would be quietly biding their time until the moment came for the great uprising, what Hardt and Negri call

“Kairòs,” the “moment when a decision of action is made,” for the “extraordinary accumulations of grievances and reform proposals must at some point be transformed by a strong event, a radical insurrectionary demand.”

Well yes, but you wouldn't want to signal it, and teach the West to prepare a defense and a strategy against violent Islamism.

In the history of the last century or so, the century of the Left, the constant demand has been to accommodate the outsiders with neo-feudal politics that betrayed the promise of the market and its culture of trust for the rest of us.

And the good old middle class has acceded to many of the left's demands, even though it has replaced the lean republics of the 19th century with bloated administrative states in the 20th century that have given out the national treasure to organized special interests.

But now, I suspect, we are reaching the moment of truth. Can the west accede to the demands of Islam? Can it accommodate Muslim immigrants without demolishing the idea and the practice of the west? Can we allow the left to champion another outsider group, and force us all to sit around for another fifty years while its members learn the way of the city and the culture of trust?

My feeling is that just as German follies gave us two world wars and Communism a half-century of cold war, we cannot avoid a momentous clash with the Islamic world.

The problem is, as the liberal Polish Muslim admits, there is no common ground between the west and Islam. And since Islam has nothing except oil and gas its strategy is naturally to migrate from the barren lands of Arabia to the rich lands of the west, and then metastasize throughout the host.

But I think that the necessary development of antibodies to Islam in the west will force us to finally deal with the Left, and its vile policy of indulging outsiders in their feudal, pre-bourgeois culture.

Because the only really valid job for government is to protect the people from foreign and domestic enemies.

And there is nothing like threats from knifers and bombers to remind us all of that.

Are We Peasants or Drug Addicts?

Yesterday, reacting to the quandary of Republicans as they try to "repeal and replace" the Obamacare entitlement I argued for a strategy that tries to keep a market going in the cracks between the monster brutalist skyscrapers of the welfare state.

That is because I believe in the 100 year old settled science of Ludwig von Mises, that socialism -- and by extension, the administrative state -- could not work because it could not compute prices.

Put another way, socialistic and administrative programs must fail because they have no mechanism, no feedback loop, to adjust to changing conditions.

Mises himself (I think) argued that the Soviet Union survived as long as it did because, while no genuine prices existed in the Soviet Union, there were reference prices in the outside world. So the Soviet bureaucrats and planners could do their sums using western prices.

So the trick is to preserve the market somewhere in the concrete desert of big government administrative programs, so that when the crash comes we have a beam of light in the darkness to tell us what to do.

Dennis Prager argues instead that the entitlement state is a disease, and that entitlements are an addiction worse than sex drugs and rock-and-roll.

All addictions -- whether to drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex or cigarettes -- are very hard to escape.

There is one addiction, however, that may be more difficult than any other to escape, in part because it is not even regarded as an addiction. It is entitlements addiction, the addiction to getting something for nothing.

Of course, Prager has a point. But I think that he misses the larger point. I believe that the pre-bourgeois mindset properly enjoins the workers and peasants to find a strong patron, adhere to him through thick and thin, and expect to receive scraps from the lord's table.

If you were a peasant in northern Europe your biggest fear was invasion by the nomads from the east. They would kill the men, take the food, and enslave the women. Compared to that the indignities of sucking up to a feudal lord and putting up with his droits de seigneur were minor inconveniences.

The great challenge of our modern era is to help people move from their age-old existence as People of the Subordinate Self that bow to a powerful patron, and become instead People of the Responsible Self that bow to the orders of the market and its prices.

The whole point of the left for the last 200 years is that it says: Oh No! to this program.

Instead the left says: You poor workers and peasants should not have to change from subordination to your liege lord and submit instead to the market. Instead, the left says, We will protect you from the rigors of the market and we will step into the place vacated by the feudal lords when they threw you off the land a couple centuries ago only to dump you into the cities to the slavery of the factory and the time clock.

Really, can you blame the workers and the peasants, and now the immigrants from rural Latin America and the tribal Middle East? It is a wrenching change, the biggest ever, to change from the tried-and-true culture of a tribal or feudal retainer to the responsibility culture of the individual in the city that must adjust to the dictates of the market and believe, against all instinct, that things will turn out all right for the man who dares to swim in the riptides of the market.

But still. Do you think that the average Venezuelan blames the leftist government for his miseries? Or do you think that the average person blames the saboteurs and wreckers, the bakers that are withholding bread from the market?

They talk about the necessity of education, but where are the schools teaching that the market is the royal road to prosperity and that the only wreckers and saboteurs are the politicians and activists blaming the private sector for their own mistakes and follies?

How to Weaken the Welfare State

The difficulties Republicans are experiencing as they attempt to "repeal and replace" Obamacare remind us that the most difficult thing in the world is to cut a government program.

That is why the history of government domestic spending over the last century was described by Margaret Thatcher as a "ratchet effect." The best that conservatives have achieved is to stop government programs expanding, and when they are replaced by a liberal government, the progressives give another tug on the ratchet to increase the amount of free stuff.

Is there nothing we can do? Will liberals take their pipe wrenches to society and keep ratcheting away until the pipe breaks, as in Venezuela?

The fact is that our era is an age of neo-feudalism. Most people, most of the time, are content to be subordinate peasants, tugging their forelocks, and expecting in return to be protected by the lord of the manor from harm. In return for their loyalty to the Big House they expect to be taken care of. In the old days the lady of the manor went around the village handing out flannel. These days the lord of the manor hands out Social Security and Medicare to his grateful tenants.

For years, conservatives thought they would get to reform and reduce and "privatize" the welfare state, some day. But the nomination of Donald Trump ended that.

The old Republican Party was the party of the middle class and its culture of personal responsibility, to obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, and for 30 years it failed to close the deal with the white working class that the Democrats cast out into outer darkness in 1971 when they decided that working class Archie Bunker was a racist, sexist bigot.

The reason the Republicans couldn't close the deal with the white working class is the that white working class decades ago sold themselves into welfare-state slavery with its labor unions, its pensions, its health care. It was great! But it couldn't last. And so the welfare state model imploded on the white working class. No longer could they walk out of high school into a well-paying life-time factory job. No longer was the welfare state a light burden on the workers, paid for by the middle class, for now the cost of the social benefits docks workers 25-35 percent of their wages. Once a slave, always a slave.

But Republicans hate all that stuff. We want to save for our own pensions. We want to direct our own health care. And as for education, we are slowly leaving the government education system for home-schooling. We want to privatize the welfare state, not enlarge it with the ratchet.

Too bad. Now Donald Trump has demolished the old Republican Party, and brought the white working class in by endorsing the working-class agenda. Restore the good old days of good jobs at good wages and no cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

So what are we libertarian conservatives to do?

I'd say that the key is to keep the market alive in pensions and health care. The principle is a simple one. It goes back to Ludwig von Mises back in 1918 and his dictum that socialism couldn't work because it couldn't compute prices.

But really his point is a much bigger one. He is saying that any attempt to subvert the market, by socialism or by the administrative state or buy special interest handouts, is bound to end in red ruin, because the market and its prices are nothing less than a daily reality check, and government programs are always and everywhere an attempt to ignore the reality principle.

That is why I keep reiterating my definition of government as: an armed minority, occupying territory, taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters. You can see that every act of government, and every promise of a politician can easily be fit onto this Procrustean bed. Everyone wants free stuff, a relief from the rigors of life, and everyone fights like mad to avoid the reverse experience, the horror of losing any of that free stuff and having to go out and get a job.

That is why government is always and necessarily a ratchet. There is always some new free stuff that can be conjured up and offered to the voters. And it is always electoral poison to withdraw any benefit from the ungrateful beneficiaries.

That is why Obamacare could be bullied through Congress, and why "repeal and replace" is going to be horribly painful.

But surely we can create some place, some niche of politics where we can create a space to say: OK, I'll pay my share of FICA taxes, but I want my pension from my savings and my investment. And OK, I'll pay my share of Medicare taxes, but I want to exchange my benefit for a market-based health care experience, where prices are public and ubiquitous, just like they are at Target's in-store medical clinics.

Yeah, imagine. Target has health clinics at its stores and a price list right outside! Last I checked, most everything was $99.

The benefit will be twofold. First, cranks like me will have the satisfaction of ordering our own lives without the company store owning our souls. Then, the fact of market prices for pensions and healthcare will possibly keep enough of a reality check on the government and its administrative state, and keep the whole thing from going Greek, or Soviet Union, or Venezuela.

But maybe not. If the ratchet effect is a law of nature then maybe nothing can be done, that the ratchet of compulsion will slowly extend its force over more and more aspects of life until it throttles the air we breathe.

Every civilization ends in red ruin, with the barbarians killing the men and enslaving the women, and I fear that our own beloved civilization will prove no exception.

But at least we can dream that we are not just victims of history, where the arc of civilization tends in the end towards oblivion.

And surely there is something higher and better than the clunking fist of the welfare administrative state.

Political Power is Just Not That Useful Any More

Today there are a couple of items on Instapundit about social justice warriors doing their social justice warring. One such loser is proposing that St. Patty's Day is a celebration of whiteness. The other wants us to believe that milk is racist.

It's a challenge, isn't it, to find a new issue to protest. These chaps and chapettes are really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Of course, the joke is on the SJWs. St. Patrick's Day was a way for the Irish-Americans, then a marginalized immigrant group, to march down Fifth Avenue in New York City right past the mansions of the Morgans and the Vanderbilts and show them that the Irish were not to be taken lightly. Now, we are told, St. Pat is a racist dog-whistle for the overclass.

In my view, the millennial SJWs are being led down a rabbit hole.

What these easily-led youngsters do not understand is that political power is not the be-all and end-all any more.

You can see the error getting started with Marx in The Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels proposed in that remarkable document that the capitalist bourgeoisie was to the proletarian factory worker as the feudal nobility was to the peasant.

Good point, Chuck and Fritz. It was a pretty sensible prediction to make back then in 1848. Only it turned out that you were wrong, for a number of reasons.

The first reason, that needs to be repeated over and over, is that the bourgeoisie, then and now, is just not that interested in power, whereas the feudal nobility most certainly was. The difference is, of course, that the business of the bourgeoisie is business, the understanding, the manipulation and exploitation of the market and the consumer. The business of the feudal nobility was politics. They started out as the lords of their lands, almost independent of the kings and princes that ruled over them. And every Harry Hotspur fancied himself the equal of the monarch that ruled over him. In due course, with the rise of the absolute monarch and the taxation of merchants, the feudal nobility got taken down a peg or two. But they still believed in politics.

The point to grasp is that the nature of society has profoundly changed due to the industrial revolution and the rise of the market economy and global trading. Used to be that the foundation of wealth was land and its food-generating potential. The great feudal barons were land-owners. If you owned good rich acres and defended them against rival landowners you were rich and you were powerful.

But now the rich and the powerful are differentiated. There is now a political sector that specializes in power and politics, and there is an economic sector that specializes in invention and production and distribution and trading and consuming.

When Matthew Josephson (a rich kid) wrote The Robber Barons about the 19th century industrial magnates he completely missed the point. These men might have robbed, but they were also lowering the cost of steel by 65 percent, and the cost of illuminating oil by 90 percent. They were innovators, producing new products at low prices. And when they retired they created charitable foundations to give money away. And the beat goes on. When I bought my first personal computer in the early 1980s, courtesy of Bill Gates and his MS-DOS operating system, the price was about $1,600 and it seemed like a complete bargain compared with the $30,000 you would need to buy a minicomputer. But now I can buy a Chromebook for less than $200. Who cares if the Microsofts and Googles and Apples are robber barons? I still get a computer for $200 and very likely less.

So now we have Elon Musk, the king of crony capitalists. But he is in the middle of a reckless process of reducing the cost of launching a satellite from $360 million to $30 million, and the goal is $10 million per launch once his reusable rocket boosters are really up and running. No doubt he is an outrageous manipulator of the political system. But his dream is to get to Mars.

When the whole world is for sale it doesn't matter too much what race or gender the worker is. What matters is the price. For sure, if you are black or Hispanic you face speed bumps because people are hesitant to hire you. But then today people are probably hesitant to hire a white guy in tech, compared to an East Asian.

The fact is that the left today is the most remarkable reactionary movement in history. It is saying that power, political power, is the only thing in an age when the evidence is that political power is the problem and is on its way out.

I wonder if we will look back at the 20th century as the last hurrah of the age-old truth that political and military power, the ability to defend your borders and keep the pirates and plunderers at bay, was the important, indeed the only thing.