Politics Means Intimidating the Journalists

While visiting my sister back in January, I suggested to her that, even allowing that the mainstream media guys are all Democrats, the utter lapdog attitude towards Obama seemed extreme.



Sure, the media wants Obama to look good, but the net result seemed to be too good to be true.  I told my sister that journalists are not that accommodating to people in power, even their favorite Democrats.  Journalists live for the big coup, and surely there are liberal journalists willing to stick their heads out for a scoop.



There must be something else going on, I suggested.  There must be intimidation, I said, and my sister agreed.



So now we know how it works in Obamaland, from the Bob Woodward flap here reported by Bryan Preston.  When veteran journalist Bob Woodward called to tell the White House that he was going to call the president a liar over the sequester, because the sequester was not Congress's idea, but the president's, he got yelled at for half an hour and an angry email with a veiled threat: "I think you will regret staking out that claim."



Now Bob Woodward is the hero of Watergate, and at 69, a grand old man of journalism.  He can afford to have the White House mad at him; he can afford to go public and publish threatening memos from White House bulldogs.  But how many others would dare?



The truth is that journalists are wusses.  That's because 97 percent of journalism is "source" journalism. That is French for sucking up to powerful people.  Here's an example of how it works, reported by Justin Katz, from the great state of Rhode Island.

A conservative news and commentary site for which I work, OceanStateCurrent.com, recently offered a young journalist a regular freelance opportunity at a very competitive rate of pay. The one catch was that his name must appear on the articles, and that was a step too far. It appears that union leaders and other insiders who are entrenched in boards, initiatives, and agencies at every level across government had only just begun responding to the journalist’s calls, having suspected his political leanings. For the journalist to be identified by his own name would be fatal. His calls would go unanswered again.

Journalists are like sharks: they only bite when there is blood in the water.  I learned this thirty years ago when the Seattle Seahawks first coach, Jack Patera, got fired.  All of a sudden, it turned out that the broadcast journalists, that had covered and interviewed him for years, thought he was useless.



Oh really.  Now you tell us.



Political journalists, not less than sports journalists, depend on getting their phone calls to powerful people answered.  To put your access at risk means risking your career, in a world where there are thousands eager to take your place.



No doubt there will come a moment in the Obama administration when there will be blood in the water, and we will suddenly learn how all those noble journalists hated being spun and intimidated.



But who remembers or cares about the sixth guy to stick the knife into Caesar?

Back to the Future on the Economy

Back in the 1930s the New Deal Democrats got really, really angry that business was sitting on its hands, that "capital was on strike."  So they passed a retained earning tax, to tax earnings that weren't distributed as dividends and weren't reinvested in the business.



Deja vu all over again as Connecticut Democrats push a hoarders' tax, according to Instapundit.

This would place a levy on liquid assets — companies with a lot of money in the bank — and dedicate the proceeds to job creation programs.

Really, the statists never learn.  Although, maybe they don't want to.  They don't seem to get that the more they bully business around the more that businessmen just want to curl up in a ball and hide.



Back in 1936, the year of their stunning win, the Democrats passed the Undistributed Profits Tax.

 The idea was to force businesses to distribute profits in dividend and wages, instead of saving or reinvesting them. In the end, Congress watered down the bill, setting the tax rates at 7 to 27% and largely exempting small enterprises.

Then in 1938 the act was watered down some more; it was repealed in 1939.



But maybe the Democrats then and now don't really care.  What they care about is getting reelected at the next election.  So the point is to generate the right atmospherics, to rile up the faithful against "corporate greed" and "price gouging."  It really doesn't matter what happens to the economy or jobs or wages.  That is a second order effect.  The only thing that matters is whether ragging on business helps you get reelected in November.



Election or reelection, the facts are still pretty clear.  When the politicians start bullying businessmen and creating uncertainty, then businessmen are going to draw in their horns.  Not because they want to "go on strike" but because any new capital investment is a big risk.  And if the politicians are threatening anti-business legislation it just makes any and all bets on the future a little more risky.



And get this.  Any and all business decisions are bets about the future.  The more uncertain the future, the more likely that any decision will turn out to be a mistake.

Obama: Genius of Being There?

Some conservatives like to think of President Obama as an empty suit.  Who knows?  Who knows anything about a public figure, given that public figures live by publicity, and we peons really know  nothing about them?



But the facts are that President Obama and his team won two presidential elections.  So the team won ugly, you say; but the president and his team still won.  I suspect that the bottom line reason for the president's success is that the American people aren't ready to move on from the entitlement state, and they won't be until they lie buried in its ruins.  Why should they?  As long as you can get free stuff, why worry?



So the president's policy is simply "Tax, Cut, and Pray" according to  James Pethokoukis, as in: cut defense, tax the rich, and pray the slowdown in health costs continues.



Every military commander has a idea in his mind about how his army is going to win, and the only way that Obama wins through is if the continuous explosion in health cost abates.  So naturally he believes that ObamaCare will "bend the cost curve."  The president and his liberal advisors have to believe that, otherwise they would have to "do something" about it.  And really, the only thing they care about is the next election, and you certainly don't win the second midterm by telling your base that the gravy train is ending.



It helps, in the fog of war, to cut to the chase, and I have been doing so with Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics.  The point he makes, again and again, is that the price system is the only thing we know that can coordinate an economy of strangers.



And the reason it works is that the price system and the system of profit and loss force people to fix their mistakes.  Here is Sowell in Chapter 7: Big Business and Government.

People make mistakes in all fields of human endeavor but, when major mistakes are made in a competitive economy, those who were mistaken can be forced from the marketplace by the losses that follow.  In politics, however, those who were mistaken can often continue to survive by doing things that were never contemplated when their positions and their powers were created.

We have been seeing this from President Obama recently.  He proposes a universal pre-K program even though the governnment's Head Start program has been shown to have no measurable long-term effect on the pre-K children it serves.  Why not?  It may not help children but it certainly gives mothers a break and it will provide lots of jobs to deserving Democrats.



Now, it is fair to say that we need the government to do things that the private sector would not do on its own.  But really, are we saying that people would not save for retirement without Social Security?  That they would not make provision for end-of-life health care with Medicare?  That they would not raise children into competent adults without government education?



And are we to say that a government program that fails to respond to and correct its mistakes is better than a private sector provision that does, that must, correct its mistakes?



It's pretty obvious why we have all these government programs.  It's because we humans are all secret freeloaders.  We cannot resist the idea of someone else paying for our free stuff.



Politics is the art of gathering a band of brothers to get out there and get some free stuff, and President Obama seems to understand that at a deep instinctive level.



Because promising your supporters free stuff seems to work right up until the moment that the free stuff runs out.



Call the president a genius.

Max Weber's Economic Framework

Max Weber, he of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, developed a three point framework in which to evaluate state economic policy.

Actually, in General Economic History he divided it up into traditional economic policy and rational economic policy.

Under the old tradition, states had two objectives.  First, they wanted money from the land they controlled.  Weber calls this the "fiscal interest."  Second, they wanted to continue the "customary standard of living."  Weber called this the "welfare interest."(p.344)

I think that we tend to underestimate the importance of this traditional economics.  Really, the whole policy of the modern administrative welfare state is to attempt to satisfy the universal instinct to continue in the current ways and preserve the current standard of living.

It is the modern, rational approach to life, instantiated in the progressive businessman, that brands this old idea as a chimera.  In the modern economy--really in life itself--you gotta keep moving.  Otherwise you suffocate and die.

But most people hanker after a cloud-cuckoo land in which their yearning for an uneventful, secure life is realized.  Hence the medieval guild, the modern labor union, the wails from people on "fixed incomes" when anything goes wrong.

The modern era features the rational state and a rational approach to economic policy, i.e., policy based on a theory.

The first modern theory was mercantilism, according to Weber.  Here the state realizes that its revenue depends upon the ability of the economy to yield revenue.  The idea is to treat the state as a business, buying low and selling high.  Here is Weber in General Economic History:

Hence mercantilism signifies the development of the state as a political power, which is to be done directly by increasing the taxpaying power of the population.(p.347)

That's why the mercantilists thought that a country became powerful with a trade surplus.  It meant that specie would flow to the exporting state, money that could be taxed.  Flowing from that was the idea that the trade of the country should be conducted by the merchants of the country, and carried in ships owned by the merchants of the country rather than others.  We can see that this attitude survives today in the notion of crony capitalism and the shuttling of bankers between banks and government.

But the independent class of entrepreneurs didn't like mercantilism, because it shut them out.  And then came Adam Smith arguing that free trade, rather than government managed trade, was the way to riches.  This new thing, pushed in Britain by the Puritans, was "capitalism oriented in relation to market opportunities which were developed from within by business interests themselves on the basis of saleable services."(p.350)

The power of Weber's analysis allows us to see that all three approaches to the national economy are still fighting for influence.  The average person wants only to maintain their standard of living.  The government and the ruling class wants to increase their power.  And the businessmen (crony capitalists excepted) just want the freedom to create and sell products.

Under Ronald Reagan, the state became more powerful because it stepped back and allowed a hundred flowers to bloom.  Under Barack Obama the state becomes less powerful because it insists on controlling everything.  As it says in the Tao:

The ordinary person who uses force,
will find that they accomplish nothing.

Oh well.  Every generation must learn its lesson the hard way. 

The Tao of Obama

In the week that the stock market ignored the prospect of the sequester but fell out of bed at the hint that the Fed might stop printing money, let us meditate on the Dao of Obama.



Dao, or Tao, means The Way, the unthought, unplanned Way of the person that is beyond being nice, beyond doing the right thing, beyond doing the just thing.  It is just The Way.



So let us run the Dao Chapter 38 in review.

The highest good is not to seek to do good,

but to allow yourself to become it.

It is easy to think of President George W. Bush as a man that always sought to do good.  Maybe he never become goodness, but he certainly tried.  But Obama?

The Master does not force virtue on others,

thus she is able to accomplish her task.

The ordinary person who uses force,

will find that they accomplish nothing.

Boy, doesn't that tell it like it is about Obama and the administrative welfare state.

The kind person acts from the heart,

and accomplishes a multitude of things.

The righteous person acts out of pity,

yet leaves many things undone.

The one thing we know about President Obama is that he always acts out of strategy.  After all, that's what "fundamental transformation" is all about, making, molding, forcing America into a different social, economic and political pattern.  Because of the superior righteousness of the progressive program.



The upshot to all this is the great peroration in Dao 38.

Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.

When goodness is lost, there is kindness.

When kindness is lost, there is justice.

When justice is lost, there is ritual.

Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.

In the Tao of Obama, what is there other than the Tao of community activism, the instinctive practice of Alinskyism, the manipulation of the rage of the mob?



And notice what is implied with the idea that, when justice is lost, there is ritual.  It means that people are reduced to enacting the old forms without any faith that they will achieve anything.



In fact we are talking about people mumbling the old forms as the great tidal wave of force, of power lying in the street and taken up by young men with guns, gathers strength and sweeps over them, engulfing and destroying everything and everyone with its blind and heedless power.



In these times, when the old Tao of the American Way is lost, we hope for goodness.  But goodness, in the Chicago Way of the Obamis is lost, and so we hope for kindness.  But kindness does not apply to a ruling class that believes in hitting back twice as hard.  And so we hope for justice.



Justice? What hope of that when the supporters of the president get to cop all kinds of special carveouts and privileges?  When the insider rich get new privileges in the same bill that raised taxes on the rich overall?  So we hope for ritual.



Ritual?  Why in the Obama years we don't even do the budget resolutions and "regular order" appropriations.  In fact, we don't really even do the replacement ritual for regular order appropriations any more, the "continuing resolutions."  Because now we lurch from debt crisis to fiscal cliff to sequester.

Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.

What do you think, America?  



Are we into the beginning of confusion, or right in the middle of it?

GOP Civil War: Does it matter?

Conservatives seem to be having a grand old  time arguing about what to do.  Should we be sidelining Tea Party extremists with Karl Rove?  Or teaching Rush a lesson with S.E. Cupp?



Should we return to the William F. Buckley Jr. policy of supporting the most conservative politician that can get elected? Or should we be doing full-bore conservatism, as Rush always recommends?



Who, in other words, will own the future?



Who knows?  The fact about US politics is that the marginal voter is a lot more liberal that an average Republican candidate, and a lot more conservative than the average Democratic candidate.  So getting elected is always a crap-shoot; you need to get your people to the polls, but you need to avoid turning off the moderates and the partisans in the other party.



Everyone wants the government to spend money on them, but they think that someone else should pay more in taxes.



In the next four years, I suspect that the big political story will be the gradual collapse of the Obama permanent campaign, the ability of the Obama people to define political reality.



In the last decade we have experienced an extraordinary political campaign by the entire liberal universe.  It started with the campaign to demonize President Bush as the "selected, not elected" president, and it extended into the opportunistic campaign against the Iraq War.  Then it morphed into the 2006 mid-term campaign when the Democrats ran a slate of center-right candidates to take back the House of Representatives.  Then, of course, it was the campaign to elect Barack Obama as a post-partisan moderate.  Then there was the push for ObamaCare.  In the last two years it has been a campaign against Republican obstructionism.



During the whole decade the Democrats and the media have managed to achieve an astonishing message discipline as they seamlessly switched from one phase to the next.  How did they do it?  I think they did it because of the utter determination in liberal-land to restore the liberal project.



The problem is that the resumption of the liberal project is going to end in the most almighty mess: debt default, entitlement cuts, inflation, hardship.  The "manufactured consent" (thanks Noam Chomsky) of the last decade is going to collapse.



When that happens it won't matter how the conservatives and the beltway Republicans have been arguing and posturing in the months after the 2012 election.  Politics will become a whole new ballgame, and it will all depend on the mood of the American people.  Will they want to blame insurance  companies for ObamaCare, or the federal government?  Will they blame Obama and Helicopter Ben Bernanke for the inflation or greedy oil companies?  Will they blame the Democrats for the bad economy or obstructionist Republicans?



In the new environment it will all depend on the qualities of the individual candidates running for election and the excellence of their campaigns.  Because there are always people that want to loot the corporations on one side, and people that want to get the government out of the way on the other.  The question at election time is which approach wins the support of the folks, the so-called "low information voters" in the middle.



So I say, let's have it all out between the conservative and Republican factions right now.  Then, when 2014 and 2016 come along, let's fight the elections and win them.



And stop worrying about whether the other guys will ruin the party.

How Much Freedom Do We Want?

We humans are social animals.  So far so good.  But in our modern era we preen ourselves on our emergence from the Dark Ages into the Light, from superstition into Enlightenment.  Today we are free, whereas people used to live under oppression: feudalism, patriarchy and all that.

But the curious fact about our modern era is the discipline.  Never mind the discipline of the old slave plantations.  What about the discipline of the factory?  Or the discipline of the schools, the government child-custodial facilities?  Or the modern office, with its ranks of dutiful drones sitting in front of their computers?   Construction: everything according to the charts and scratching of the project management plan.  Or the one-size-fits-all entitlement programs.

Do we moderns really want to be free, as the right proposes?  Or liberated, as the left proposes?  Or do we just want to be told what to do in return for our free stuff?

Here I am in this blog, busily damning to hell the injustice, the cruelty of the modern administrative welfare state: government is force, I say; politics is division; system is domination.

Here we have our liberal friends damning to hell the injustice, the cruelty of the modern corporation and the dastardly Koch brothers.

Could both be right?  If so, it could be that our modern society is the most oppressive, exploitative that there ever was.

Think about it.  In the bad old days of the feudal system at least the average peasant could run his day-to-day life without the constant interference from his lord.  Of course, if he didn't show up to do his share of the work on the lord's demesne, or pay his annual share of the crop, he'd be in a whole heap of trouble.  But otherwise, it seems to me, the lord left him alone.

Today the government is intensely interested in the details of our lives.  It makes us "legible."  It taxes us beyond the dreams of the old patriarchs; it wants to tell us what to eat, what to think.  It tells us how to save for retirement; it organizes our health care.  And of course it takes our children away from us to confine them in those government child-custodial facilities.  No exceptions.

Do we moderns really want freedom?  Or do we just want our modicum of free stuff and the luxury of complaining about our rulers as they order us about?

Maybe we just want to go with the flow until our rulers throw us over the cliff.  But then, by golly, we will show them!