Am I Still a Conservative?

I did it. I ventured out into a nest of happy voting Democrats in the heart of Baghdad Jim McDermott’s Washington 7th Congressional District and voted for Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL).

Not because I think he’ll make a good president. No, I think that Obama has all the wrong fashionable liberal opinions on everything, from his youth as a community organizer in the cruel and unjust template of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, to his oh-so-fashionable views on global warming.

No. To me it’s a matter of political hygiene. I think that the voters should switch parties about once every eight years (and definitely after twelve years).

There are two reasons to do this. First of all, any party gets corrupt, and we need to sweep the rascals out on a regular basis, on principle.

But the main reason is this. You just don’t do any serious thinking when you are in office. All you do is try to stay in office, and we can see where that got the Republicans.

There are great and worthy reforms that Republicans and conservatives need to offer to the American people, but right now the Republicans need to go into winter quarters at some modern version of Valley Forge and think about how to talk to the American people about their vision of the future.

In four years, or maybe eight years, the American people will be ready to listen to Republicans again, and then we can hope to start on a new age of conservative reform, and truly begin to roll back the cruel and unjust politics of the welfare state.

Vote for Barack Obama? Or Fred Smith?

If you vote for Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) maybe he’ll spread the wealth around. He’ll take money from the rich earning more than $250,000 a year and give it to 95 percent of the American people. Obama is a student of Saul Alinsky, who wrote Rules for Radicals. Alinsky’s idea was that you organize poor people to demand justice and their share of the economic pie. You can read all about Obama and community organizing from Stanley Kurtz.

Or you could vote for Fred Smith. Fred Smith is the guy who wrote a paper in business school on the idea of an overnight package business. Today FedEx Corporation owns 300 planes and employs 290,000 people. But back in the day his business school prof didn’t think the idea would work.

Fred Smith is frustrated. He’s built his company on blue collar and community college types, according to an interview with Stephen Moore at the Wall Street Journal. The high flyers won’t go to work at ordinary industrial companies. They want to earn the big bucks in the finance industry. Or they did.

He says that most of FedEx’s first line managers come not from the top flight universities, but out of community colleges and the military. "The top talent has wanted to go to Wall Street."

But if you want to spread the wealth, according to Fred, you want to forget about Obamanomics.

"The politicians deplore the fact that we have a disparity of income," he says, but "the only way to make a blue-collar person earn more is to invest in capital, training and infrastructure. So the more you tax capital, the more you hurt workers." He estimates that about 70% of the return from FedEx capital expenditures is captured by workers in the form of higher wages as their productivity rises.

You mean that the way to help ordinary Americans is not by government spread-the-wealth but by corporate invest-in-capital-training-and-infrastructure? My, that’s radical!

Notice that Fred doesn’t mention education. The way to make a blue-collar person earn more is to invest in capital, training and infrastructure, he says.

Fred Smith deplores the high leverage in the financial industry.

"Rather than in our business where you have to have a dollar of equity for, 10 cents or 15 cents of debt," he explains, "it’s exactly the opposite in the financial sector where you have one dollar of equity for 10, 25, 50 times risk."

The thing about having 1 to 10 debt to equity rather than 10 to 1 like the finance industry is that, when things go south, you get to survive. In today’s economy that has to mean something.

Fred argues that the way to encourage corporations to reduce debt load and increase equity is to tax equity less, starting with lowering the corporate income tax rate from 38 percent down to 25 percent.

Now that would be something.

The Rest of the Credit Story

Here in the US we are naturally concerned about the damage that the mortgage meltdown has done to the domestic US economy.

Just on cue, as the federal government announced a 0.3 percent decline in real GDP last quarter, the stock market this week seems to a have turned a corner, starting with a 900 point climb in the Dow in the aftermath of the short squeeze on Volkswagen stock.

Don’t look now, but when the US catches cold the rest of the world gets wiped out. The Asia Times columnist Spengler has the story.

The financial crash exposes the fragility of large swaths of the world. The political consequences will be terrible... Worst affected are the most populous Muslim countries, and Russia’s "near abroad".

In the US we have had a credit squeeze. But you can still get a mortgage to buy a house. In the rest of the world the credit faucet has been completely turned off, and many emerging countries are facing economic Armageddon as their currencies tank. Spengler uses the cost of five-year default protection as a gauge of just how bad things are going to get. For countries like Argentina and Venzuela, it’s not available.

The solution is pretty obvious. The US is going to have to use its credit to bail out not just the banks but a number of nations, especially including the countries that escaped recently from the old Soviet Empire. Already the Fed and the IMF are working to spread money out around the globe.

[Treasury Secretary] Paulson said he welcomes the Fed’s decision to create swap lines with four central banks as well as the IMF’s decision to establish a short-term liquidity facility to provide various countries with loans. The Fed Wednesday announced swap lines totaling up to $120 billion with Brazil, Mexico, South Korea and Singapore.

Let’s propose that the bank bailout is working, that the major credit markets in the US and Europe are returning to normal as LIBOR rates decline from the mid 4s to the mid 2s.

That is fine and dandy. But the rest of the world is still completely frozen. The next step is to help them.

Because it doesn’t do the US any good if the rest of the world suffocates on a total credit seize-up.

And it also looks like the gleeful reports of the end of the US hegemony were greatly exaggerated.

Poisoning the Chalice

For the past thirty years conservatives have been trying to reform the vast empire of government subsidy and patronage we call the welfare state. Conservatives have worked to ease the distortions built into the economy from a peverse tax system. They have worked to enable the forces of “creative destruction” through deregulation. They have tried to unwind the cruel and unjust system of welfare benefits. They have tried to introduce choice into the monolithic system of compulsory education. And they have tried to move away from the first dollar free-at-the-point-of-delivery model of health care.

Not surprisingly, our liberal friends have resisted the forces of change. A century ago they began their program of legislation to provide free education, free health care, generous assistance because they believed that it was the right thing to do. They enacted their program confident in the knowledge that every educated, progressive-minded person agreed with them.

But now, a century later, their rigid programs of education, health care, and welfare assistance are long past their sell date. Initiated with boundless hope they have slowly wound down, year by year, and how exist mainly as patronage programs by which our liberal friends maintain themselves in their sinecures and their clients in their pensions.

In the last decade, especially, our liberal friends have struck out with remarkable venom against those who would seek to reform their welfare state colossus, and in doing so they have poisoned the chalice of US democracy. By blocking all reform, especially in the subsidies for home mortgages, they have brought on a perfect financial storm, and true to the chapter and verse of their tactics manual, have ruthlessly blamed it all on the incumbent Republicans.

That means that Americans will likely elect Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) next week to be president. And he has promised more of the same: more pensions for Democrats, more subsidies for liberal-favored constuencies and initiatives, and more government direction of the national life.

Conservatives believe that we are already long overdue for root-and-branch reform of the welfare state. We believe that Americans should be in charge of the efforts to enhance and improve their communities. We believe that government programs are the least effective way of adapting to the future. We think that the bureaucracy-and-subsidy model has be tried and has failed.

But our Democratic friends are determined to give it one more college try, and if they win they will have a mandate to do so. Unfortunately they will be handed a chalice that they have tarnished and poisoned. In their intransigence they refused, while in opposition, to allow it to be refreshed and renewed. We saw this intransigence before, in 1990, when Democrats led by Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell refused to allow a capital gains tax reduction to ease the pain of recession.

The American people are fed up with the poisoned chalice that politicians in Washington have been soiling for the last decade. They want sensible, practical reform. Next week, most probably, they will call for a change in the national executive branch. That is the one great power they possess.

But they will expect that change to lead to reform. If it doesn’t—and we believe here at Road to the Middle Class that they are unlikely to get it from President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid—they will be back in two years or four years with a firmer demand for change.

That is what democracy is all about.

Spread-the-Wealth

Conservatives have been pushing the Obama-is-a-socialist meme pretty heavily in the last few days.It’s probably the only thing that can pull the election out of the bag for John McCain. A recent Gallup Poll shows that, if you ask the right question, Americans oppose fixing the economy with spread-the-wealth programs by 84% to 13%. As Gallup report it:

When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today’s consumer, Americans overwhelmingly — by 84% to 13% — prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans.

And, of course, the Obama program leans heavily on finding ways to spray money at its supporters through tax credits and the like. (Of course, elite liberals get a look in with a renewed tax credit for buying a hybrid car.)

It’s not so much the spread-the-wealth that annoys me. After all, Republicans spread the wealth to Republicans with tax rate cuts. It is merely an incidental factor that lower marginal tax rates benefits not just Republicans but all Americans.

It’s the subsidies that I don’t like, and the distortions they introduce into the economy. First dollar health coverage. Subsidies for alternative energy. Subsidies for low-income homebuyers. “Free” education.

Everyone wants to help poor people, but how? Subsidies? Welfare? Free this and free that? It all seemed so simple a century ago when social democracy really got started. Everyone agreed on the problem: the poor lacked material resources. Give them the resources, and justice would reign.

It didn’t turn out that way. The poor did not just lack material resources. They lacked “spiritual resources,” as Robert William Fogel put it in The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism.

The way that the poor build up their spiritual resources is with religion and with love and with hard work and intact families. The welfare state has been a stunning success in breaking up families and turning low-income young men into feral beasts.

That is why we here at The Road to the Middle Class have just two words for the welfare state: Cruel and Unjust.

Because there is another way.

From Smarts to Song

You can often tell someone by trying to understand their enemies. You ask what the folks attacking your favorite politician have in the game. And then you start to understand what’s going on.

There must be something really important about Gov. Sarah Palin (D-AK). Else she wouldn’t have so many enemies. But even an occasional enemy can see the good in her, like feminist Elaine Lafferty in The Daily Beast. Palin’s smart, writes Lafferty, but not in a crude street-smarts way.

I mean, instead, a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight. Palin asks questions, and probes linkages and logic that bring to mind a quirky law professor I once had. Palin is more than a "quick study"; I’d heard rumors around the campaign of her photographic memory and, frankly, I watched it in action. She sees. She processes. She questions, and only then, she acts. What is often called her "confidence" is actually a rarity in national politics: I saw a woman who knows exactly who she is.

That, of course, is exactly the sort of leader that anyone would want at the top of their political party or movement.

But this is just the intellectual and political side of things. What about the cultural question? What about casting around for a good campaign song for for Palin 2012. It would have to be based on a good old patriotic song so that everyone knows the tune. I have an idea:

O beautiful designer specs,

And amber waves of hair,

Reformer of the female sex

Who’s smart and tough and fair!

America! America!

Let’s end the liberal bile.

And crown thy good with brotherhood

And Sarah Palin’s smile!

It looks like America The Beautiful is out of copyright, so folks could sing it at rallies without having to pay for performance rights.

And it would drive our liberal friends crazy.

One Tough Politician

You can’t tell a dog when it’s out hunting. You can only tell how good it is when it’s being hunted.

That’s why we don’t have a clue what Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) would be like as president.

A couple of months ago we had the same problem with Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK). Yes she could give a boffo speech, but what would she be like when the going got tough? Would the tough get going? Would she have a future as a national Republican politician, or would she turn out to be a flash in the pan?

Now we are beginning to get her measure. After an unprecedented firestorm of invective and criticism, including ruthless gotcha interviews from Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, she has not lost her nerve.

When criticized about her $150,000 wardrobe she didn’t miss a beat but came right back and played the sexism card on the liberals that criticized her.

And now we have the unsourced article from CNN. “Palin’s ’Going Rogue,’ McCain Aide Says.” If your liberal friend has caught onto the article, he’s probably sneered knowingly about it.

On the contrary, the news couldn’t be better. Palin has determined that the McCain campaign is mishandling her, so she is ignoring them and taking her own counsel. That may not be too good for anonymous McCain aides, but it portends well for the future.

It means that Palin is not out for a Sunday drive. She is an ambitious politician thinking of the long term, running for president in 2012, for starters.

So now we are beginning to take her measure. She is gutsy. She can take a punch. She won’t lie down meekly and allow people to drive her into the political wilderness.

What we have here, it seems, is a politician of remarkable courage and talent. She seems to have Bill Clinton’s talent to turn lemon into lemonade, and never, never, never, let anyone think that you are whipped.

Republicans aren’t used to this kind of leader. Even Ronald Reagan often reckoned that discretion was the better part of valor.

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.