GOP Establishment vs. Tea Party

Charles Krauthammer's appearance on Comedy Central's Daily Show seems to have sparked a big row.  It's between what might be called the Republican establishment's accommodationist stance towards the welfare state and the constitutional argument against it, typified by the Tea Party movement.



Charles Krauthammer defends the establishment argument here, and Andrew C. McCarthy makes the constitutional argument here.  Former leftist Ron Radosh votes for accommodation here.



I think the disagreements are based on the different assumptions of the different parties.



I don't think that anyone is suggesting that Republicans go into the elections of 2014 and 2016 and propose to end entitlements as we know it.  That is what the Republican establishment, as practical politicians, are telling us.



Anyway, the Tea Party folks aren't proposing to end entitlements; they expect to get theirs.



What thoughtful conservatives argue is that the authoritarian welfare state is doomed.  It is doomed because it has made promises that can't possibly be redeemed.  In their secret hearts conservatives would like to believe that they can persuade Americans to wean themselves off the entitlement drug.  But the truth about addiction is that people don't wean themselves off until they "hit bottom."  They have to see the wreck of their life in living color before they will swear off the demon rum.



I don't think anyone can expect that entitlements will end any other way.  They will end when the checks stop coming and the checks will stop coming when the government's credit is totally tapped out.



The question is what comes next.  How can we rebuild America on better principles?  The Tea Party, aided and abetted by folks like Mark Levin and his bestselling books such as The Liberty Amendments are reminding us that America is supposed to be about limited government.  A limited government can't make the kind of reckless promises that have got us into this mess.



Let's take Social Security.  We conservatives look at the current system and we call it unjust.  It is unjust because it expects the working population to pay seniors for the promises of the politicians irregardless.  The act of paying your payroll taxes is completely divorced from the process of getting your checks.



To illuminate this, let's look at a private system of savings for retirement.  You save your money, according to your means; you invest it in broad market index funds and bonds.  Every year you look at your nest egg and figure out whether you can afford to retire.  Let us illuminate what it means when you reach that point.  You are basically saying that the capital you have saved can now create enough jobs to support you in your retirement.



Let's say you have saved $250,000.  That money is out in the economy providing capital to companies that use the money to create jobs.  In return you get, say, 5% return, which is $12,500 per year.  Or you can get an annuity which will pay you about 10% on your money.  If that $250,000 is not enough, then you work a few years more.  If the market tanks, then you have to wait to retire until it's recovered.



This is a self-organizing and self-correcting system.  (Oh, and by the way, the news has been reporting for a while that baby boomers are putting off retirement, because they lost so much in the Crash of 2008).



The role for the welfare state in this is,  possibly, to take care of the people who have failed to save money, or have become disabled -- all through no fault of their own.  Although I think that it is better for charitable relatives and neighbors to do the taking care.  The role of the state, it seems to me, is to borrow money after a great disaster to keep house and home together while people work to recover from the crisis.



The problem with government running a safety net is that government is an armed minority that stays in power by giving out loot to its supporters.  It has ever been so, ever since the Iliad, and it is certainly still so in the day of the advanced administrative welfare state.  So instead of creating a cooperative, social network of people caring for each other, government always gives you a predatory elite and its ravenous supporters that understand nothing except power and pillage.



The fundamental weakness of the welfare state system comes fully into focus when things go wrong, as right now, when the government has to cut back a little on its disbursements in so-called "austerity."



What happens?  The supporters of the government, the pensioners and the government employees, pour into the streets and "demand" their rights.



It ought to be obvious, to anyone with a brain, that the administrative welfare state is not a self-correcting system.  Instead, it is a system that is always careering towards chaos and conflict.



I like to say that the problem with government is that the only thing it knows how to do is conduct a war.  So everything it does has to be turned into a war: on poverty, on drugs, on bigotry, on racism.



The problem with wars is that there necessarily has to be a winner and a loser.  That is not cooperative; that is not social.  It is martial.  And that is why conservatives argue that the social safety net should not be a government safety net.



Once the government is in charge then the safety net turns into jobs for the boys, and subsidies for the cronies, and outlandish promises that can never be redeemed.  Of course it does.  That's because government is an armed minority: an army.  The political leaders are the captains and they love to fight.  The individual soldiers are recruited with the lure of loot, and they expect to get it, or else they will offer their soldiering talents to another captain.



In real life, of course, the captains use the soldiers as cannon fodder.  The soldiers often don't get their loot; they die of disease or get killed in a battle.  And sooner or later they don't get paid.  That is the lot of the political supporter too.  They get all carried away with the promise of the free stuff.  But in the end their glorious leaders betray them, and leave them to rot by the side of the road, used up and broken, just like broken-down soldiers of real armies.



That, of course, is what is happening right now to the supporters of Obama, like the woman who liked the idea of Obamacare but didn't realize that she would be the one to pay for it.



Socialism, progressivism, statism, call it what you will, has always lived on utterly empty promises.  Obama's promises for Obamacare are more egregious that most, but not too much.  The problem for Obama and for his liberal cohorts is that perhaps the Obamacare promises should have been a little less specific, and should have been a little less short-term.



After all, when millions of women are getting cancellation notices from their insurance companies, they know that they cannot keep their health plan, as the president promised.



But it is only when administrative liberalism has hit bottom that the practical Republican politician and the Tea Party radical will be able to unite and offer the American people a new social safety net based on limited government and consensual cooperation.

Why Obamacare Equals Injustice

The Weekly Standard guys have piece on the Five Deceptions and Disasters of Obamacare.  I think we can use it to illustrate why, necessarily, all big government programs are unjust.

Here are the five Obamacare deceptions:

• Deception #1: Universal coverage
• Deception #2: No new taxes on the middle class
• Deception #3: Annual premium savings of $2,500
• Deception #4: No increase in the deficit
• Deception #5: You can keep your plan if you like it

Given that the program was designed to enroll the uninsured through a) subsidies for the near poor and b) fines on the rest of the uninsured, you can see that the deceptions were deceptions pure and simple.  Also, given that the program required all plans to include mandatory prevention and contraception plus provisions to subsidize the old and the sick, the idea that the plan could cost less was a fantasy.

So what is really going on?  Partly it's the liberal fantasy that "there has to be a system."  And there is the liberal assumption that ordinary people just don't have the mental equipment to navigate the health care system on their own, so they have to be "nudged" to do the right thing.  Then there's the political imperative: politicians are people that offer free stuff to their supporters.  That's how you get to 51 percent.

All that is a setup to my three mantras.  No there doesn't have to be a system.  The history of the modern era is that the economy is self organizing.  What we call the price "system" is not a system at all.  If anything, taking off from Heidegger, it is a discourse.  "Discourse is the Articulation of intelligibility," he writes in Being and Time.  What does he mean by that?  Well, with Heidegger, who knows! But let us assert that price is a kind of language with which we communicate our needs and desires.  Let us riff off Heidegger's actual words and say that Price is the intersubjective Articulation of human needs.  In a system, a government system, the intersubjectivity and the articulation are suppressed by the system architects and operators.  Because system is domination.

No, health care doesn't have to be a prize in the political auction of free stuff.  In fact that makes health care into an economic and social good into a political hostage.  You can't have health care unless you have kowtowed to the political machine.  You want health care?  Better learn to go along to get along.  Politics is division, civil war by other means.

No, health care doesn't have to be a government program.  Government is force, and government can only do simple things.  It can't, for instance, pull off a fairly simple website to show health plan alternatives.  So government gravitates to one-size-fits-all, as in Medicare and Social Security and childhood education.  And that one-size-fits-all gravitates towards the convenience of the producer interest, or the bureaucratic interest, or the activist interest.  And it sows conflict, because it forces people to fight each other in a futile effort to get the one-size-fits-all to match their own needs, and to hell with anyone else.

When you mix system and politics and government together, as we are doing with Obamacare, the result is injustice.  Of course it is, if system is domination, politics is division, and government is force.  The whole point of social animals is to reduce rigidity, smooth over divisions, and reduce the need for force.  

I suspect that it's just beginning to dawn on liberals and Democrats that Obamacare is an epic disaster and an injustice that will echo down the decades.

Put it this way.  Democrats dined out for decades on Herbert Hoover, the president that presided over the four years of economic disaster from 1929 to 1933.  I suspect that Republicans will be dining out on Obama and Obamacare for the rest of my life.

Are Conservatives Like Me Anarchists?

I'm a little perplexed.  Over the past two weeks I've been called an anarchist twice.  The first time was when I was explaining my civil society ideas to a 60-ish liberal, a man that started out adult life as an SDS activist at Boston University.



The second time was when a liberal took out after my piece "There Has To Be a System."



Who, Me?  An anarchist?  I have to admit it took me aback.



But then I realized that it all made sense.  To a liberal, a world without their big-government programs would indeed be a world without structure, a world of chaos.



But let's get one thing out of the way.  Wikipedia defines "Anarchism" as "a political philosophy that advocates stateless societies based on non-hierarchical free associations."  That's not what I or any conservative I know about or any libertarian I know about is proposing.  Anarchy comes from the Greek and means "without a ruler."



What libertarian conservatives do want is a state that is as small as possible, with a ruler whose powers are strictly limited to the need to defend people against looters and pillagers foreign and domestic.  We do want most social or "societal" functions dispatched by free associations, which might or might not be "non-hierarchical."  But we admit the need for a state.  It's just that we don't admit the need for a state of liberals, for liberals, and by liberals.  We think that such a state can be described in a single word: unjust.



So when liberals call me an anarchist they are projecting.  They are saying: but you want to tear down everything that we have spent the last century building.  And all that will be left is societal rubble.



This all issues naturally from the liberal analysis of the condition of humanity.  Starting at least with Marx, the left has asserted that capitalism is at least as hierarchical and exploitative as feudalism.  Under capitalism the workers are exploited.  The only solution is to meet force with force: a revolution to smash the power of the bosses, or "countervailing power" to match corporate power with union and government power.



If you think the lefty way then you think of society as purely a balance of power, just like the balance of power between nations.  Unilateral disarmament by the workers (and now the traditionally marginalized) would mean their utter destruction by the bosses.



(Yeah.  Funny how liberals call for unilateral disarmament between nations but not within nations.)



The conservative and libertarian worldview says that the fundamental relationship in the modern era is the economic relationship of the invisible hand.  The way to get ahead is not to go out looting and pillaging like some medieval king or some fascist or socialist dictator.  The way to prosperity is to divine the needs of the consumers and give it to them.



Liberals say no, that couldn't be true.  Unless we step in with our wage and hour laws, our social safety net, and our vigilant regulation of business then workers will get exploited without limit and we'll get a society of gross inequality with the rich and the poor and nothing in between.



Conservatives say the science is settled on this.  Starting right when Marx made his predictions about the "immiseration" of the workers the lot of workers has improved.  And the lot of workers has improved fastest where the economy and the society were the most capitalist.  In the 1950s John Kenneth Galbraith talked about "countervailing power" between Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Government.  Today, of course the Big Businesses of the 1950s are a corporate memory and the private sector unions reduced to penury.  Instead we have the market-focused behemoths like Walmart, Microsoft, and Apple and Google.  But Big Government is bigger.



What did Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, say about corporate power?

There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.

You can see why corporations like to get in bed with government when things start going south. Government can stop the consumer from "spending his money somewhere else" and can force him to keep spending his money at the old place.



Conservatives as anarchists?  No, liberals.  You are just interpreting the world anarchy, a "world without rulers," to mean "a world without liberal rulers."



Can't say I blame you.

Liberals Driving People Away From City

One of the hardy perennials of our national political garden is the liberal piece about racist whites bailing out of the city.  Here's the latest, Jessica Grose's "Rich People Love Diversity, Until They Have Kids," from Slate.



Things are getting worse, of course.

According to an analysis of census data by Kendra Bischoff of Cornell University and Sean Reardon at Stanford University, the proportion of families living in affluent areas doubled from 1970 to 2009—it went from 7 to 15 percent. At the same time, the percentage of families living in poor areas also more than doubled—it went from 8-18 percent.

You see, what's happening is that these affluent areas "deliberately exclude affordable housing."  That's how they stay uniformly affluent.



Meanwhile over at Forbes Joel Kotkin is reporting on the baby boomers moving away from the suburbs.  They are not moving back to the city.

Perhaps no urban legend has played as long and loudly as the notion that “empty nesters” are abandoning their dull lives in the suburbs for the excitement of inner city living. This meme has been most recently celebrated in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

On the contrary, they are moving further out, everyone except the most affluent, the ones that can afford the high cost of inner-city living.



The indictment that liberals hurl at the white flighters is that the middle class is abandoning the poor to the inner city.  And that they are racists.  Meanwhile liberals are moving into the city because they like to live in a diverse community and they care about the poor.



Of course there is a germ of truth in the liberal indictment.  Most non-liberal whites think that living next to underclass minority communities is utter folly.  You just don't want your kids anywhere near the dysfunctional and violent youth of the underclass.  And now we have a report of a white couple getting beaten up by a gang of black kids in Brooklyn.  So we were right.



But liberals are only telling part of the story.  Middle class and affluent folks are not leaving the city just to get away from the toxic and dangerous culture of the underclass.  They are also leaving to get away from the toxic political culture of liberals.



You see, liberal political control in a city is a long-term marker for decline.  It means everything from the inconvenience of up-to-the-minute micro-bossiness about recycling and plastic bags and all the latest liberal nostrums in the schools.  And for some reason liberals see nothing wrong with overgenerous public pensions bankrupting state and local governments.



Even if they are not conservative, most people just want to be left alone to live their lives in their own way among their own kind.  And especially they want to raise their kids in a safe and friendly environment.  And safety in this context means safe from liberal social engineers.



Here's another idea from the social scientists.  Guess who drives the urge to go and live in the suburbs?  It's women.  Women may like to live in the cool city when they are single twentysomethings.  Why not?  Young people tend to congregate where young people tend to congregate.



But after women get married and start a family they want a nest.  Ever notice that you never see birds nesting?  There's a reason for that.  If you want to get your fledglings off the nest you need to hide them away from the predators.  Human females are no different.  Once they get into the family way they experience no need to strut their stuff on the sidewalks of the city.  Instead, they want safety and security for the children they bring into the world.



That's what really powered the move to the suburbs after World War II.  Affluence and automobiles meant that women could bury themselves in leafy suburbs and, for the first time since their ancestors came off the farm, leave the edgy city to the fashionables.



Maybe, as the trendspotters would like, women would like to return to the city when their nests empty out. But by that time women are anchored in their dream homes and their relationships in the suburbs.  And they really don't need to return under the tutelage of liberals that take politics with every meal.



The exodus from the city to the suburb has nothing to do with racism or with evil oil companies killing the old streetcar lines.  It has everything to do with women nesting, and liberals driving normal people out of the cities with their poisonous politics.

EBTers Sack Walmart

Obamacare isn't the only government program having computer problems. Recently the EBT program went down.

EBT's the electronic replacement for Food Stamps. It's a debit card that gets refilled every month so that welfare recipients can use them to buy food.

When EBT went down most merchants stopped accepting EBT payments. But two Walmart stores in Louisiana decided to honor EBT purchases anyway.

So what do you think the good EBT folks did when Walmart kindly let them continue shopping on the honor system? Did they thank Walmart for letting them shop even though nobody could verify whether they had a balance on their EBT cards?

No they didn't. What they did was to buy up the stores and loot them, buying not just food but clothing and electronics.

It's a dramatic illustration, as if we needed one, of the difference between government and business, a difference that I dramatize in my American Manifesto.

Government is force. A government is an armed minority occupying some territory and funding itself by requisitioning or taxing the local inhabitants. Who need it? The argument is that you need an agency of force to prevent the robbers and pirates from running rampant. Yet governments maintain themselves by paying their supporters from funds extorted from ordinary people. This may be in wages and pensions paid to modern government employees, or in a license to loot, like crony capitalists, liberal grant recipients, Social Security Disability Insurance, and EBTers.

So wherever you find it, government is an armed minority doling out loot to its supporters, even though it says that its whole reason for being is to defend against the looters.

But business is different. Business is not about force and loot, because business does not start with the problem of how to maintain the apparatus of force, but how to find or make something, some product or service, that people are willing to pay for.

So right away business starts not with Ego's needs, but with Alter's needs, to use the lingo of modern Marxists. It means that business must spend every waking hour thinking about what other people want not what I want.

Suppose you have discovered a product that other people want. Then you have a new problem. How do you get the customers to come back and buy again? The answer is simple. You must build a relationship with your customers; you must treat your customers well, and get them tolike you and feel that they are treated well. There is a word for this sort of thing. It is called Trust. There is even a book about it, by Francis Fukuyama.

So when the EBT system goes down, Walmart thinks of its EBTers as valued and trusted customers. Unfortunately, Walmart is wrong.

EBTers and the other supporters of the welfare state are not trusted "others." They are like the soldiers of a warrior chieftain. They are like the warriors in the Iliad. They only know looting and pillage. They range the world looking for things to steal and loot, just like Sherman's "bummers" or the Russian soldiers that, reportedly, raped every single German woman east of the Elbe on their way from Moscow to Berlin in World War II.

The modern global underclass is just like the licentious soldiery of old. They are not connected into the market economy by a web of service and reciprocal obligation, by long-term relationships of trust. On the contrary, they are looters and pillagers, and they owe loyalty only to the political chieftain of the moment, the one that offers them the best opportunity for ripping off free stuff.

The sooner we stop it the better.

Be of Good Cheer

OK.  So the House Republicans lost the shutdown war.  So what, as they say in corporate-speak, are the "lessons learned?"



Lesson One: Obama had to have a win, and he got it.  But we shall see whether it turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory or not.  Because Obama won on the issue to keep his Obamacare lead balloon fully inflated even as its website was collapsing and Americans all over the country were waking up to a doubling of their health insurance premiums.  Golly.  Another victory or two like that and the president will destroy the Democratic Party.



Lesson Two: Republicans needed to show their base that they had some fight in them.  Yes, it was a pathetic Keystone Kops routine, but at least they fought.



Lesson Three: Republicans needed to know which leaders were prepared to get up on the parapet and yell defiance at the Ruling Class.  That was what Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-TX) "meaningless" non-filibuster was all about.



Lesson Four: These Obama crises are really good for usgovernmentspending.com.  Yesterday the site got just under 20,000 visitors.  Back in early September is was more like 4,000 visitors per day.  Yay Obama!



Remember back in the innocent days of 2000 when Al Gore ran for president and his website was full of stuff about "fighting for the people against the powerful?"  Back then I thought this sort of faux populism rather funny, but I'm not laughing now.  Right now I am feeling a deep hunger for a leader who will fight for the People of the Responsible Self against the ruling class of liberals, experts, special interests and crony capitalists and their supporters, the EBT folks that looted Walmart.



Why is this?  It is because the liberals are finding themselves behind the 8-ball and they are cheating in order to stay in the game.  Back in November 2008 after liberals won the election with the First Black President they never thought they'd be sitting where they are today, defending an unpopular law with parliamentary tricks and executive illegalities.  Liberals think that, with their pro-science world view and their Keynesianism and their education and their policy-analyst expertise that they know how to operate the levers of political and economic power to fix society and fix the economy.  They never thought that in 2013 they would be running the printing press flat out (making money for the 1%).  They never thought that the economy would be struggling to make 2% GDP growth.  They never thought they would have to observe a code of omerta on the embarrassing fact of high unemployment.



Because liberals own the mainstream media and the culture and the universities and all, they have a safety net and can attempt death-defying political high-wire acts that Republicans and conservatives just cannot attempt.  But eventually gravity wins out.  Eventually even the most partisan of liberals and the most oblivious of low-information voters begin to feel in their gut that something is wrong.  That "eventually" is probably occurring right about now.



Think about it.  For ten years liberal leaders have been teaching their followers that conservatives, from President Bush on down, are stupid.  And when they are not stupid they are racists, sexists, homophobes.  What was needed was for an intelligent government that knew what it was doing and that relied on science not on religion for its inspiration.  Well who is stupid now?  Who is stumbling and bumbling now?  Who is failing to bring Americans together now?  Who has produced the worst government program failure ever?



Of course the liberal partisans are never going to admit that their guy is a bust.  But they will start to lose faith in the project.  They will start to cast around looking for better leaders.  They will start drifting away from the reassuring NPR news.  The lo-fos will start picking up on anti-Obama cracks from the TV comics.



And then there is 2016.  African Americans will be staring in the face the truth that we conservatives already knew.  Put not thy faith in princes, even First Black Princes.  African American voters will be wondering what their enthusiastic support for President Obama has delivered for them.  They will not be excited about an old white woman like Hillary Clinton, even if she will be America's first woman president!  Yeah.  They will stay home.



But in 2016 the conservative base and the independent conservatives that sat out 2008 and 2012 will be loaded for bear.  All they will need is a presidential candidate that can ignite their smoldering rage.  If they want a nice guy they can have Marco Rubio.  If they want a tough guy they can have Ted Cruz.  Both men come from big states, so that's all right.



Yeah.  It's tough to take a loss, especially against a guy like Barack Obama.  But Obamacare will still be there messing up peoples' healthcare next week, and next year.



And Obamacare is an issue that goes straight to the hearts of women: their healthcare.  Here's a fearless prediction.  Look to the gender gap snapping shut in 2014 and 2016.

What is Wrong With Republicans?

Here we are, less than a day before debt default -- or more exactly -- pay-as-you-go, and the House Republicans collapsed in a heap on the floor.



Is this a disaster, or what?



Who knows?  But J.T.Young writes that it's a lot easier for the presidential party to impose party discipline.  And right now President Obama desperately needs party discipline to show some backbone to his troops after the chaos of the Syria debacle and the Obamacare rollout.

Democrat divisions have been becoming more pronounced. Prior to the debt limit and shutdown, which strengthened Obama’s control over his Congressional allies, recent concerns have arisen over Obamacare and its implementation, continuing revelations over NSA surveillance, the recent Summers-Yellen debate over heading the Fed, and over his stance on Syria.



If Congressional Democrats should really break with Obama in appreciable numbers, his presidency would start to disintegrate as well and Democrat fissures become even more numerous and apparent.

Yeah.  That's the real problem.  Unless President Obama spends a lot of energy maintaining discipline in the ranks his people will start looking forward to the time without Obama.  When that happens, and it is a question of when and not if, the Obama ship will go on the rocks -- while everyone complains about Obamacare 24-7.  Why even a chap from Daily Kos is all wigged out about his steep increases in health insurance premiums.  And now that "Tirge Caps" is getting hammered he has this to say about the president's signature achievement: "This appears, in my experience, to not be a reform for the people."



Listen.  All I'm worried about is that I'm in Boston and scheduled to take the train to Connecticut on D-Day, October 17.  What happens if the president pulls some new shutdown shenanigan Thursday?



But let us ease up from this misery and delight in the Hot People of the Responsible Self.  I am thinking of the hot mom that posed with her three young children on Facebook.  To the haters and nay-sayers that objected to her photo she had this to say.

I won’t go into details that I struggled with my genetics, had an eating disorder, work full time owning two businesses, have no nanny, am not naturally skinny and do not work as a personal trainer,” she wrote, in part. “What I WILL say is this. What you interpret is not MY fault. It’s yours. The first step in owning your life, your body and your destiny is to OWN the thoughts that come out of your own head.

Couldn't have said it better myself.  We humans are social animals, so everything we do is socially conditoned.  But back in the Axial Age the idea got about that each individual ought to be individually responsible for their one life to God.



If you are a conservative and Republican things are pretty discouraging right now.  But with people like Maria Kang in America you have to feel that we are destined to get out of the current Obama Slough of Despond pretty soon.



We'll do this not because of fate, but because of the individual determination of each Person of the Responsible Self.



And because President Obama is driving the Democratic Party off the cliff.



It may look like the president is beating up Republicans up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, but I suspect that he is subjecting his party to unnecessary and damaging battles that are a waste of political capital.



Only time will tell.