The Bible on Nairobi

If you want to understand what is going on with the Nairobi shootings, at the Westgate Mall and at the Gujba College of Agriculture dorm, then the first stop is Ayaan Hirsi Ali's coming-of-age memoir, Infidel.  Because she was there.



Born a Somali in Mogadishu during the Marxist rule of dictator Siad Barre, Ayaan's childhood took place on the cusp between the old tribe and clan world of her grandmother and the exploding Islamism in the cities, including Nairobi, where Ayaan spent her teenage years.



The complete meltdown of the Barre regime in the early 1990s meant that hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled to the border with Kenya, and many of them like Ayaan managed to get into Kenya.  If you want to know how quickly the everyday world descends into disease and hunger when people have to flee their homes for their lives, then read the book.



The refugees ended up in Nairobi, and the young 'uns went to school.  They might be Christian schools left over from the Brits.  Or they might be madrassas run by the Muslim Brotherhood.



The point that comes out of Ayeen's childhood and her book Infidel is not that the cynical Arabs are poisoning young minds with their mullahs and their money.  It is that the young minds, pitched out of the tribal world into a modern-ish metropolis, are eagerly looking for something to make sense of their lives.



Religion, whether transcendental or secular, is the way that humans make sense of their lives.



Marxism is a religion just like the rest.  It promises heaven on earth, if only we can liquidate the evil bourgeoisie and the capitalists.



Ayaan herself went through numerous religious stages, and being a girl, this involved constantly figuring out what to wear.  She designed for herself a shapeless garment that she calls a hidjab.



And Nairobi was full of proselytizing preachers.

The charismatic Christians were no less aggressive than the fundamentalist Muslims in those days.  The whole country [Kenya] was falling apart and perhaps people were grabbing for certainties... Shabby street-front churches began to sprout where once there were grocery stalls.

But at the same time, good Muslim girls like Ayaan were going to movies and reading English novels, everything from Jane Austen to trashy romance novels.



Of course there is violence and war in the streets in places like Nairobi.  That's what happened during the industrial revolution in the west.  And guess when Marxism reared its ugly head?  In the mid 19th century when "thousands [of Germans] were driven from their homes by unemployment and unrest."  It was obviously a big thing in Germany because the Germans are the most numerous ethnic group in the US.  They didn't up-sticks because they felt like a vacation.



In all the worry about Islam we easily forget that there is another religion that is spreading throughout the world like wildfire.  Christianity.  And its most virulent form is the Pentecostalism that began in 1906 in a street-front church in Asuza, California.



We don't hear too much about the Christian side of this partly because liberals aren't interested.  And partly because it is a girl thing.



Think about it.  Men are fighters and women are lovers.  Islam urges a global holy war against the infidels, and Christianity says that God loves you, and that God sacrificed his Son for you.  So who do you think would be attracted to Islam, and who would be attracted to Christianity?



We know about Ayaan Hirsi Ali because she ended up in Holland, ended up going to college, ended up the proximate cause of the murder of film-maker Theo van Gogh, and she ended up writing a book about it.  She also ended up marrying historian Niall Ferguson.



But there are hundred of millions of people emerging out of the tribal nomad world and the feudal agricultural world into the modern world, and their lives are not a fairy tale.  Ayaan's own sister, Haweya, just gave up and died.



The question is: what shall be done?  You can argue that the colonial era was a crime.  But then the Marxist dictators are an abomination.  And the mullahs are flying millions of innocents into a box canyon.



You can say that Bush was a fool to imagine that he could plant democracy in Iraq.  But then the Obama turn to the Islamists looks like pure liberal folly.



Maybe we should get back to basics.  Maybe we should get back to individualism, responsibility, limited government, civil society, and goodwill.  That's what we say we believe in, after all.

The Coming Death of the Liberal God

There's no point in all this defunding-Obamacare politics, writes Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal, because universal health care is not just a program, but a a great political idea, perhaps the foundational idea of liberalism.

What the GOP's Defund-ObamaCare Caucus is failing to see is that ObamaCare is no longer just ObamaCare. It is about something that is beyond the reach of a congressional vote.



As its Oct. 1 implementation date arrives, ObamaCare is the biggest bet that American liberalism has made in 80 years on its foundational beliefs. This thing called "ObamaCare" carries on its back all the justifications, hopes and dreams of the entitlement state. The chance is at hand to let its political underpinnings collapse, perhaps permanently.



If ObamaCare fails, or seriously falters, the entitlement state will suffer a historic loss of credibility with the American people. It will finally be vulnerable to challenge and fundamental change. But no mere congressional vote can achieve that. Only the American people can kill ObamaCare.



No matter what Sen. Ted Cruz and his allies do, ObamaCare won't die.

So, writes Henninger, all this Ted Cruz stuff is missing the point.  You don't kill a great foundational belief by defunding it.

But there is one thing that can kill an established political idea. It will die if the public that embraced it abandons it.

No, Henninger writes, instead of tilting at windmills Republicans and conservatives should be coming up with "the policy ideas" that will replace Obamacare.



Dear me.  These journalista types really do lose it sometimes.  The point is that all politics is conducted at the level of the symbolic defund Obamacare movement.  Did President Obama give speeches telling us all about the policy ideas of Obamacare?  Not at all.  He made great symbolic promises, as in: if you like your doctor and your health plan, you can keep it.



What Ted Cruz and lamentably few others is doing is committing sacrilege on a liberal idol.  That's how you start a new religion.  You show that you can profane the old gods and live to tell the tale.



Let's go to Nicholas Wade in his Faith Instinct.  There is only one way for a god to die, he writes.  "Gods die when people no longer worship them."



But expecting today's liberals to stop worshipping their secular gods and believing in their foundational liberal faith because it doesn't work is a mug's game.



In fact, Nicholas Wade is not quite right about the death of gods.  Gods only die when the last believer dies.



Today's liberals will go to their deathbeds thinking "if only" about Obamacare.  If only those racist, sexist, homophobe, anti-choice fascists and their evil hate speech had been stopped in time with proper freshman orientation programs.  And so on.  Because if Obamacare had been done right then we would have universal health care and we would live forever.



But the new generation will not believe in universal health care.  They will remember the disaster of Obamacare.  And so the ranks of the true believers will slowly dwindle away.



The question for Republicans and conservatives is how to do the politics.  The first thing to do is to show that universal health care is not a sacred vision but an ordinary government program advocated by the usual canting politicians and run by the usual corrupt administrators and special interests.



Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, they told Dorothy and friends.  Of course.  Because you wouldn't want her to find out that there is no health care god.  There are only politicians and activists offering free stuff in return for your vote.



But the politics of Obamacare is not just about exposing the god that failed so that the proselytizing liberals fail to find new converts.  It is also about rallying the conservative base, and showing the uncommitted moderates that all the cool kids think that Obamacare is so over, so "whatever."



We conservatives need new leaders that will raise a new standard high for freedom and for dignity, the right of ordinary Americans to be who we are and not the serfs of the authoritarian welfare state.  You don't do that by advancing new policy ideas.  You do it the Les Mis way by jumping on the barricade and singing "Who Will Join in our Crusade?" and getting people all riled up.



That is what Ted Cruz is doing and that is why the Republican base is getting all riled up.  The next question is perhaps the bigger one.  Can Cruz build the organization to fight and win a decisive presidential election that will cow liberals into retreat and empty the pews in their Church of Secular Liberalism?



That's what we have elections for.

Marx vs. Mises

There I was, lying in bed at three in the morning, in between sleep periods, and I had a thought.

Marx's fundamental argument is that wage labor is alienating.  What starts out as social, working for use, ends up as commodification, labor for exchange.  Under capitalism the worker mindlessly churns out labor for the market instead of for the use of himself, his family, and his neighbors.  Labor becomes a commodity, bought and sold on the market, instead of a personal thing.

In reality, of course, people have been laboring in exchange for thousands of years.  Labor in exchange didn't just start with the industrial revolution.  We know that trade took place even in the ancient world.  After all, how did those Homeric warriors get their goodly bronze armor and spears?  From a copper mine in the back yard?  I expect that the truth is that the guys mining the copper were not even wage slaves but actual slaves, war plunder, working for food if they were lucky.

And we know that, e.g., the Ericksons in treeless Iceland a thousand years ago were raising sheep on their grasslands and weaving wool on hand looms in their sod-insulated houses.  The finished textiles were transported by long-ship to the wool markets of NW Europe.

So the dramatic revolution in labor proposed by Marx is at best a gross exaggeration.  What is true is that the industrial revolution provoked a massive systematization and mobilization of labor unthinkable in former times.  And system is domination.

But then comes Ludwig von Mises in 1920 and his argument that socialism was impossible because it couldn't compute prices.  And without prices you can't figure the cost of anything.

Notice the bigger point Mises is making.  If you don't know the cost of things then you are at risk of wasting valuable resources.  And the most valuable resource is human labor.  What is worse?  Commodifying labor with market-set wage rates, or wasting human lives doing pointless and wasteful things?

We know the answer to that because we have the example of the Soviet Empire.  The result of 70 years of socialism was enormous and tragic waste.  There was a prodigal waste of natural resources, as the Soviets mindlessly mined and laid waste to the land of the Soviet Union.  And there was tragic and brutal waste of humans, from the relatively mild waste of ordinary workers that "pretended to work for a government that pretended to pay" them to the utterly cruel waste of prisoners worked to death in the labor camps and the Kolyma goldfields.  In those days the London Economist used to write about "subtracting value" in the economies of the Soviet empire.

It's all very well to assert that in the best of all possible worlds workers would be happily working for their own needs in Arcadia.  But no human has ever lived in such a world.  Every human group has always had to fight for its food and shelter, and thus every human has been subjected to the need to fight for the welfare of the community.

The reality of human labor was, in the hunter-gatherer days, that all work product was the property of the whole community, so the individual laborer did not own the product of his labor.  The reality in the agricultural age was that the product of the individual labor was probably owned by his liege lord.

It is only under capitalism, in a system of labor in exchange, that the individual laborer has a chance to own most of his production.  And if the laborer looks around him he can find, with a bit of effort, that if he upgrades his skills a little he can produce a more valuable product and earn more wages.

There is no doubt that the price system is a hard master.  It's a system and all systems are dominatory.  The price system is constantly peering over the worker's shoulder asking if his is really making the best use of his talents.  And worst of all, when a worker's skills become superseded by some new invention or automation, the worker must either work harder, find a new skill, or accept the cruel verdict of the market that tells him that his skill is not that valuable any more.

The question always is: compared to what?  You don't like the price system?  Then come up with a better idea.  Marx and his adepts thought they had found that better idea 150 years ago.  It turned out they were proposing a cure that was worse than the disease.

And that returns us to the old Hippocratic oath, which begins with the injunction to do no harm.

Ted Cruz's Real Game

I know we are all supposed to be a little shocked at Ted Cruz and his reckless actions over the continuing resolution.  And defunding Obamacare.  What happens if the American people blame the Republicans, again, for shutting down the government?



Let's relax, shall we?  My guess is that nobody will remember much about the Fall of 2013, except that Ted Cruz stuck a stake in the ground and fought against Obamacare.



Today, the energetic Michelle Malkin puts the Obamacare issue front and center, with "Obama Lied, My Health Plan Died."  Yep, our Michelle is self-employed, so her health plan recently sent her a letter telling her that her health plan won't be available next year under full Obamacare.  So Obama's central promise that, if you like your health plan you get to keep it, is a lie.



Of course it was a lie.  Anyone could have seen that coming.  But America's women are trusting souls.  They believe it when someone tells them that they can keep their health plan.



In a grand strategic sense, I assert that women are coming of age with the Obama era.  Up to now, in the era that women have had the vote, they have never got royally screwed.  They got the vote, the little darlings, they got to abort their babies if the father didn't step up to the mark.  They got to divorce men that didn't turn out too good.  They got to come out into the working world and compete for jobs with men, and even got the legal system to put a finger on the scales of justice in their favor.  They got Medicare to take care of their mothers.  They got dozens of welfare programs to take care of them if their "partner" didn't step up to the mark.



But health care is where women live.  Health care is what women talk about when they are together.  Health care is what women worry about.



What women want, of course, is unlimited high-quality health care for them and their children and their mothers at an affordable cost, so naturally, that is what Candidate and President Obama promised them.  What Obamacare is suddenly giving them is mediocre health care at an astronomical cost.



And the average LoFo woman voter is just now beginning to find that out.



In the next two years we are going to see an electoral earthquake, and at the center of it will be angry, scorned women compared to which Hell hath no fury.



Ted Cruz is running for president on the assumption that the rightmost 60 percent of the 2016 voters will be looking for a tough, no nonsense street fighter.  As the two political armies march towards the climactic Battle of 2016 Ted Cruz is turning up at all the meaningless skirmishes, the minor contests at which a few people get clobbered and the march resumes the next day.  Ted is turning up at the skirmishes, bravely leading the troops, demonstrating to all and sundry that he is the man to lead the great army that will be brought to strategic concentration in 2016.



Now imagine what it would mean if all those waffling soccer moms and security moms and America's-First-Black-President moms of the last 20 years became, in 2016, raging healthcare moms.



But what about divisiveness?  Is Ted Cruz too divisive to win those LoFo moderates?



To those of you worried about Ted Cruz being too divisive and not enough of a team player, we old geezers that were around in the 1970s have something to tell you.



Back in the 1970s Ronald Reagan was considered by all sensible people as a complete flake.  He was a right-winger; he was a B-movie actor; he was divisive; he was a puppet of his kitchen cabinet; he was ignorant.  And even libertarian-conservatives like me half bought the liberal line.



It all turned out to be rubbish, pure liberal moonshine.  A couple of telling points.  When they looked at Reagan's papers after his death they found that he had read all the classics, including Mises and Hayek.  They could tell that because the books were full of Reagan's annotations.  They also found that many of the weekly radio addresses he made between 1976 and 1978 were drafted in his own handwriting: so Reagan actually wrote them.  Imagine that!  Those Reagan radio addresses ran the gamut of presidential issues; you could say that Reagan was prepping for the presidency when he gave them, making sure that he had taken the trouble to at least develop a familiarity with the issues that would come across his presidential desk.  The tone of the addresses was brusque and slightly angry, a startling difference from the aw-shucks avuncular President Reagan that we learned to know and love after 1980.



One worrying thing about Reagan was that he didn't do well under questioning.  He didn't do well at presidential debates.  You felt that he really didn't have his answers down pat, and you worried that some liberal questioner would trip him up.  That helped advance the liberal line that Reagan wasn't really up to the job.



Ted Cruz is different.  In the first place he has been the brilliant student all his life, punching his ticket at all the prestigious way-stations on the elite liberal career track.  In the second place he is pitch-perfect on the split-screen TV interview.  Here he is on Sean Hannity.  Flawless.



I have a feeling that the combative Cruz is exactly what we in the GOP base are going to want in 2016.  We are like Dorothy's Aunt Em.  For twenty years we have wanted to tell liberals what we thought about them as they trashed every honorable conservative as a kook and an extremist.  Ted Cruz may be just the man to do it for us.  Only he'll do it so smooth that liberals won't know what is happening to them.



Not until after the health care moms of 2016 change US politics forever.

Why the Obamacare Fight Matters

Look, Obamacare will get funded.  Either this week or next week.  And if there's a "government shutdown" the Republicans will get the blame.



But that's not the point.



The point is that, unlike all the other lovely entitlement programs from Social Security to Medicare, Obamacare is violating Kristol's Law.  That's Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol's dad.



Kristol's Law says that if you want to help the poor, you need to deal in the middle class.  When Social Security was passed, the average middle-class senior didn't have a pension plan.  When Medicare passed the average middle-class senior didn't have health insurance.



But today, the average middle-class family already has health insurance.  So if we are now going to extend health insurance to the 30 million (who are mostly young people and people without assets) that don't have it and throw in a subsidy as well, it stands to reason that the average middle-class family is going to find itself spending more on health care.  A lot more.



Kristol's Law merely makes explicit the unsaid calculus of the authoritarian welfare state.  It tries to offer free stuff to a lot of people that seems to be paid for by a few.  That's why President Obama is always going around talking about getting the rich to pay a little more.  In fact, of course, you can never really tell who will be the net payers for a government program.



The meaning of Kristol's Law becomes even more explicit when you remember that all government, from the robber band to the guerrillas in the hills to formal democratic government, always operates by offering the promise of loot and plunder to its supporters.  It is always a calculus of force: Join us and you will get yours.



The conservative argument against the calculus of loot is threefold.

1. Government is force.  Humans are social animals; we cooperate and do things for other people not because we are forced to but because that's what social animals do.  Force is a destroyer; cooperation is a multiplier.  The more force, the less prosperity for anyone; the more cooperation, the more prosperity for all.  Because why bother to go out to work in the morning when you can force someone to send you a check?
   


2. Administration by experts doesn't work.  This has been settled science for over half a century.  Ludwig von Mises in the 1920s argued that socialism couldn't work because it could not compute prices.  Mises's student F.A. Hayek in the 1940s argued that the "man in Whitehall" just couldn't know enough, compared to a million consumers and producers, to direct the economy.  We've seen the expert model fail recently over global warming.  Based on the simplistic idea that carbon dioxide was the marker for global warming, teams of experts and activists insisted that we reduce our consumption of carbon-based energy.  But the computer models they built on that theory clearly aren't any good at predicting the future; climate is a lot more complex than they thought.  Back to the drawing board.  But the market does that automatically without political intervention.
   


3. Entitlements and subsidies lead to disaster.  Our liberals friends insist that health-care and education and food stamps are a "right."  The trouble is that, in fact, health-care and education and housing and transportation are the things we work for; the whole economy is based on people striving to get the goods and services they need.  We make things and serve other people so that we can earn wages and buy the things we need to live and prosper.  If you give a single mother with two children $35,000 a year in benefits then she doesn't need to get married and doesn't need to get a job to support herself and her children.  This leads to social and cultural and economic breakdown, as the settled science shows.

The conservative approach is to remove the liberal culture of compulsion and replace it with the cooperation of "civil society."  Health care?  Well, today's longevity is a factor of about seven things, from asepsis to vaccination to sanitation to education to income to food to actual "health care."  Education?  Uber-liberal homeschooler David H. Albert in And the skylark sings to me shows that there are abundant resources to help parents educate their children without government getting in the way. Jobs? Well it would be much easier for employers to hire people if they weren't harassed by endless taxes and regulations, starting with the minimum wage and the payroll taxes.

Would the conservative alternative work?  Of course it would, for humans are social animals.  But there is a problem.  Millions of people have adjusted their work effort and their lives to take advantage of the government's free stuff.  It will take a total meltdown for them to release their grip on their entitlements and their "rights."

But with Obamacare, we can make a start.

What Happened to the German SPD?

The Germans call her "Mutti."  It's a diminutive of "Mutter" or mother.  So it means that Germans call their Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel "Mommy."  You can say this about Margaret Thatcher; nobody ever called her Mummy except her children.



But in the triumph of Mutti there is this to consider:  What happened to the SPD?  After all, Merkel's CDU/CSU union only got 41.5 percent of the vote.  So nearly 60 percent of the voters voted against her.



The answer is that the SPD did something in the 2000s that a left-wing party must never do.  It actually tried to reform the welfare state.  Under Gerhard Schröder the party deregulated the labor market a little, making it more flexible, and it lowered unemployment benefits.  This caused a split in the party and the growth of a new left-wing coalition, Die Linke, meaning literally "the Lefties."



So, in Sunday's election, the SPD got 25.7%, Die Linke got 8.6% and Die Grüne (Greens) got 8.4% of the vote.  In our US system, that would be as if the "progressives" in the Occupy movement and the enviros split off into separate parties from the mainstream Democratic Party.



Could it happen here?  Well it did happen in Canada, where the dominant Liberal Party got panicky in the 1990s and enacted sweeping cuts in federal spending do "do something" about the Canadian national debt.  Net result?  The Liberals lost their mojo.  In the latest election in 2011 the Liberal Party slipped to #3 in party strength behind the explicitly social democratic NDP.



There's a big lesson here, one that is difficult for your average conservative like me to understand.  The average center-left voters come to politics expecting to get their share of the loot.  For sure, they don't think of themselves as looters and plunderers.  They just demand their "rights" and they don't see beyond that reality to the bigger horizon of national solvency.



If their party takes away their "rights" to welfare and unemployment then they will take their vote elsewhere, to a party that really will "fight for the people against the powerful."



I like to explain all this as the divide between the modern People of the Responsible Self and the People of the Group Self.



The People of the Responsible Self first emerged in the Axial Age 2000-3000 years ago when the idea of an individual responsible to God was invented in the Axial Age religions.  That is the meaning of "individualism."  It does not mean pure egoism; it means individual responsibility for thought and action, as opposed to loyalty to the group self of the tribe and clan.



If you want to understand the People of the Group Self, a good place to look is Infidel by Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  In Ayaan's youth, her grandmother taught her the names of her parents going back generations.  For a Somali, that was your identity: the memory of the names of all your ancestors.  In that society it is unthinkable to go against the authority of the clan and the tribe.



In the modern era the cause of the Group Self is taken up by left-wing parties and their identity politics.  The parties of the left represent people still clinging to the old way of human community. Identity politics advances the group as the defining identity in race, class, gender.  Thus our US Democratic Party appeals to people by their group identity, as blacks, Hispanics, women, gays.  It stands to reason that the one thing you must not do, if you lead a left-wing identity party, is to weaken the sense of group identity and group "rights."



Maybe that explains President Obama.  He must know, either consciously or instinctively, that once he concedes the need for retrenchment or "austerity" the Democratic Party is toast.  That's why he's intransigent on all the domestic issues.  Because if the Democrats won't fight for the people and their "rights" against the powerful, its voters will find another party for their vote or just stay home.



Meanwhile "Mutti" Merkel has won a famous victory over her divided lefty opposition, and we wish Germany's first Bundeskanzlerin well.

What the Obamis Get Wrong

We've seen in recent days that the Obama economic policy seems to privilege the rich and screw the poor.  That's because cheap money goes first of all to those closest to money: people with assets.  And secondly, I would argue, that government spending goes to existing interests, people with power.

When I say that government spending goes to existing interests I am saying nothing about the purity or the corruption of the government.  I am just saying that it is in the nature of government spending that it goes to existing interests.  Period.

By existing interests I don't just mean rich bitches and crony capitalists.  For instance, the biggest government programs are entitlement programs for the middle class: Social Security and Medicare.  The poor get screwed with a blizzard of miserable welfare programs and the failing Medicaid.  Then there is education, which subsidizes the education of middle-class children right through grad-school.  And the poor get screwed with abysmal schools in the inner city.

It's simple.  The vast majority of voters are middle class, and so the middle class will get most of the loot.  That's how government works.

Scratch a liberal though, and you'll find someone that genuinely believes that all those programs really help.

Liberals really believe that one-size-fits-all government programs help people.

Conservatives believe that one-size-fits-all government programs will always end up benefiting the administrators of the program and the special interests that gather around them.  Conservatives believe that first and foremost, government spending will be used to get politicians elected.  Modern politicians, in our view, are no better than the leaders of robber bands; they offer the prospect of loot to their supporters, and aim to deliver when they get elected.  As St. Augustine put it, a robber band is made into a kingdom "by the addition of impunity."

The genius of modern liberalism is to dress this naked larceny in the raiment of caring and compassion.

So we learn that the median young, the minority, the single woman has lost real income in the first four years of Obama while the rich like me have benefited.  How could this happen with a president that wants to grow the economy from the middle out?  Whatever that means.

Obamanomics doesn't work because the administrative welfare state model doesn't work.  The administrative welfare state model doesn't work because it is indistinguishable from the robber band model of loot and plunder.  It is a model of net subtraction.

Take Obamacare.  It was a grand attempt to extend health insurance to the uninsured. Never mind that the 30 million or so uninsured might just be people for whom insurance didn't make any sense, people without assets to protect from medical bills.  That is to say, if you are a person without assets it makes sense to go bankrupt rather than pay your medical bills.  But in order to get Obamacare passed the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress had to hand out goodies to all the special interests.  It looks like they promised a lot and probably double-crossed a number of their special-interest supporters, from Big Pharma to labor unions.  But the point is that in order to give benefits to the deserving poor they had to give away a whole bunch of goodies to special interests.  Net subtraction.

Take Medicaid.  Right after World War II the feds offered free money for hospital construction.  The only caveat was that the hospitals had to let anyone in for treatment.  After a while the hospitals decided that they really needed to get reimbursement for all the government-mandated free care.  Voila: Medicaid.  But of course the government soon found that Medicaid was getting too expensive so they started trying to duck the commitments it had made by reducing the amounts paid for Medicaid-funded procedures.  Hey, what would you expect a robber band with added impunity to do?  So doctors and hospitals started cutting back on serving new Medicaid patients.  And so on.

When you have the whole economy riddled with this sort of scamming and subsidizing, it's not surprising that the economy starts to get kinda rocky.  Like right now.

That's because all government spending, all of it, is a dead weight on the economy and society.  Oh there may be exceptions.  DARPA.  The internet.  Interstate highways.  Public health.  But it is a delusion to project these occasional successes onto government as a whole.  Government spending is waste.  Period.

But people will kill to keep their government contracts, their government benefits, and their government subsidies.  That's why we need government control much more than we need gun control.  Stop the killing!  Actually, politicians are so afraid of people with benefits that it seldom gets to killing; the last thing politicians ever try is cutting entitlement programs.

The solution to the Obama economic malaise is simple.  Cut.  Start cutting now, and keep on cutting.  And return to sound money.  And clean the tax code out and replace it with simple, low-rate taxes.  And reform the credit system so that it's almost impossible for homeowners to get underwater, and banks to get insolvent.

Here's why liberalism doesn't work.  The poor, the unskilled, and the undisciplined are starting out with a problem.  Nobody wants to hire them.  They will get hired eventually, but only when all the skilled and the disciplined already have jobs.  If you have a minimum wage then the unskilled and the undisciplined may never get hired.  If you give money to the unskilled and the undisciplined then you take away some of the incentive for them to get skills and develop discipline.

In other words if you espouse liberal politics and liberal government programs you will keep the poor poor, the unskilled unskilled, and the undisciplined undisciplined.

Meanwhile the rich get richer.