Critiquing Obama from the Enlightened Left

Every time we hear of a new incident of Obama administration lawlessness, we have to wonder.  Do liberals really not see this as a problem?

We know what is going on.  The news media and the cultural czars reckon that Obama and the liberal activists and the Democratic Party have their heart in the right place and so the corner-cutting on Obamacare, the bogus wait-list scam at the VA, the ludicrous exchange of several Taliban leaders for a US deserter, all these are just friction.  The Obamis know the media feels this way, so they figure that they can get away with anything.

But they might look behind them, because it's one thing to roll over the law when you are winning.  It's another thing to violate the law to cover up your mistakes.

I get where the liberals are coming from.  They are on a mission to create a peaceful and just society, and they know that what with the racists, sexists, and homophobes out there, that there is very little time left in the Obama administration to fight inequality and save the planet.

So liberals lose sight of the fact that the USA is a society, not a church, and its job is not to right all wrongs but a rather more modest goal: to keep people out of the streets.

The purpose of laws and constitutions and rules of law is not to hamstring good liberal governance, but to keep the opposition from flooding into the streets.

Let's make this even clearer.  Suppose that all liberals are good guys and all conservatives are evil racists.  Liberals should still govern according to law and not cut corners because when the government cuts corners the opposition starts to get really angry.  It starts to wonder if the governing party will cancel the next election.  It starts organizing for civil war.

So here is my question: What's the point of cutting corners on the fight against inequality and saving the planet if the nation dissolves into civil war and we all start blowing each other up?

There are, of course, two lefty governing narratives.  One is the Fabian Society/Progressive era narrative that educated, progressive people are "nature's noblemen" and therefore ought to rule.  Noemie Emery beautifully captures the fatuity of the movement with this:

They had a dream. For almost a hundred years now, the famed academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex has dreamed of a government run by their kind of people (i.e., nature’s noblemen), whose intelligence, wit, and refined sensibilities would bring us a heaven on earth. Their keen intellects would cut through the clutter as mere mortals’ couldn’t. They would lift up the wretched, oppressed by cruel forces. Above all, they would counter the greed of the merchants, the limited views of the business community, and the ignorance of the conformist and dim middle class.

The only problem is that government, any government, is force, and politics is division, dividing the electorate in half, so every new government program replaces voluntary cooperation with force.  The reason that the academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex is in trouble is that, stripped of its kindly librarian image, it is force.  Meanwhile the whole point of social animals is to reduce the expense and the incidence of force to a minimum.

The other narrative is the revolutionary tradition associated with Marx.  The Marxists made the argument that even if the middle-class governments of the 19th century obeyed the law it was still unacceptable, because exploitation, and therefore revolution was the only remedy.  But Marxism ran into problems.

By the end of the 19th century it was clear that, even if the bourgeoisie were beasts and that 19th century government was nothing but the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, the workers were not getting "immiserated" but were actually prospering in a modest way.  If that were true then maybe revolution wasn't the answer.

By 1920 it was clear that the workers of the world identified first with their homelands and only second with their class.   By 1940 it was clear that the bourgeoisie wasn't the only power center dealing out exploitation.  You had Bolsheviks not just bullying but killing people by the millions.  By 1950, you could add fascists and Nazis to that list.  By 1970 you could add the Maoists.

So the thinking Marxist had to rethink.  What had gone wrong with the Enlightenment and the revolutionary projects?  That's what "critical theory" and the Frankfurt School was all about.  The marquee effort of the early Frankfurt School was The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.  Writing in California during World War II as refugees from Germany, they wondered if the problem wasn't in the very nature of the 18th century Enlightenment, for "What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men."  They also observed how the conversation in the public square of the 18th century coffeehouse had become institutionalized in the propaganda blasts of mass media.

Some of the Frankfurt Schoolers were just lefty charlatans.  I am thinking of the New Left's darling Herbert Marcuse and his specious doctrine of "Repressive Tolerance."

But then we come to my guy Jürgen Habermas.  A student of Adorno, he is acutely conscious of how the average German just went along with the Hitlerian crimes, just going along to get along.  And he appreciates how even the welfare state has is authoritarian aspects.  What is left then of "enlightenment and emancipation" in such a world?

In the 1960s Habermas tried to locate "critical theory" within a triad of "interest" in Knowledge and Human Interests.  According to Thomas McCarthy in The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas the technical interest is about developing knowledge in the natural sciences in the "behavioral system of instrumental, feedback-monitored action".  He takes up C.S. Peirce's pragmatism about developing knowledge that is reliable "in arriving at beliefs that future events will confirm rather than render problematic".  Good knowledge helps humans be successful in their interactions with nature.

The practical interest is about developing knowledge as a social project:

the dimension in which concepts, methods, theories, and so forth are discussed and agreed upon, in which the framework of shared meanings, norms, values, and so on is grounded, is the dimension of symbolic interaction that is neither identical with nor reducible to instrumental action.

We climate deniers can see how the practical interest applies to "settled" climate science.  It's not just science, it's a community of scientists.

Then there is "critical theory" and its emancipatory interest.  On Habermas' reading, the Enlightenment itself was supposed to be emancipatory. Thus: "Emancipation by enlightenment required the will to be rational." Thus Kant's sapere aude! to have the courage to use your own reason. Habermas traces the theme of emancipation through Fichte, Hegel, Marx.  Yet these thinkers could not stop the positivist movement that reduced the scope of reason so that "reason became scientific reason."  But the point of critical theory is to look at the existing structure of power, of received notions about reality and forms of life, and to reflect upon them.  It is the struggle to be free of the chains of the past.

Of course "critical theory" was tremendous fun for lefties when the criticism was all about the bourgeoisie and capitalism and whacking away at the patriarchy and institutional racism.  But our liberal friends are noticeably reticent when it comes to a reflective attitude towards their own tradition and its narratives.

For instance, one might ask: how much is left of enlightenment and emancipation in a society that taxes its citizens out of 35-40 percent of their daily labor?  There seems to me to be an "emancipatory interest" in reflecting upon the dominatory aspects of an authoritarian state that minutely taxes and regulates every citizen up the ying-yang.  We might profitably read Habermas, who says that we must balance the "systems" aspects of capitalism and bureaucracy with the intersubjectivity and discourse of equals in the "lifeworld."

Just how much intersubjectivity and discourse is going on in Obama's America when liberal bullies are out everywhere demanding that people "check their privilege" when they are not falling on their fainting couches when some ageing billionaire says nasty things to his 30-ish mistress?

I was reading a piece today in which the writer suggested that either President Obama doesn't know what he is doing or, more problematic, he does know.  My guess is that at a tactical level, President Obama does know what he is doing, and he doesn't care that he is tearing up the Constitution and the rule of law.  But at at a much higher level he has no clue about the nightmare he is setting up for his party and the nation.

Either way, what's really needed in America is a genuine "critical theory" that looks at the embedded social and cultural structures not just of "advanced capitalism" and mass media but at the whole "academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex."

Because if you ask me the present ruling class of the academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex really has no clue what it is doing to America.  Today we have Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (H/T ibabuzz.com) saying that the new EPA standards to reduce coal plant emissions "will strengthen public health, create new jobs, spur innovation and lower electricity rates."

Can she really believe that?  If she doesn't, then she is just a canting politician.  If she does believe it, then it's "Houston, we have a problem."

Liberals Don't Know Better

Here's a nice little piece from the Wall Street Journal.  Guess what: the Obamis at the Census Bureau don't like the way racial classifications are going with the Hispanic community.  You see, according to Amitai Etzioni,

[M]ore that two million Hispanics changed their racial classification to "white" in the 2010 census from "some other race" in 2000.  Overall, according to official data, 53% of Hispanics classified themselves as white in 2010.

Oh no!  We can't have that!  Millions of Hispanics calling themselves white?  What will happen to the Democrats' race politics?  What will happen to all those vital majority-minority congressional districts? What will happen to the racial spoils system. So now the liberal racists at the Census Bureau are working overtime -- and no doubt getting substantial bonuses -- figuring out how to corral Hispanics back into nice convenient categories to help liberals play race politics.



It's cool, isn't it!  The New York Times calls George Zimmerman a "white Hispanic" when it fits the narrative.  But when a more specific classification is needed to bolster up liberal political hegemony, fuggetaboudit.



Here's a cool idea!  Let's add an "honorary white" racial category on the Census form for people that want to be in with the patriarchy and the neo-colonialist set.  And for people that just think it would be cool to be white.



The interesting thing is that the government doesn't need racial classifications unless it's planning to do race-based government.  In fact the only reason the government needs any data is for purposes of command and control.  Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott. No kidding!



This command and control thing applies to everything.  If the government weren't mucking around with the economy, stimulating and money printing and subsidizing and taxing over 30 percent of the yearly income of the people, it wouldn't need any data.  Oh sure, it would need to be the lender of last resort during a financial panic.  But you don't need much data for that, because the people that desperately need to borrow money to maintain liquidity will identify themselves to the appropriate authorities.



But when the government gets into some activity it needs data.  Principally, of course, it needs data so it can figure out what to do when things go wrong, in accordance with the inevitable unanticipated consequences of government action.



In this spring of 2014, as the VA implodes and the president flubs his speech at West Point, liberals are getting ready to do the Fantine thing and sing:

I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving

and so on.  Back before Barack Obama liberals certainly had a dream; it was about them and their intelligence and compassion and wisdom.  But it's turning into a nightmare and so liberals are getting ready to think of themselves as helpless victims, just like poor Fantine did back in the horrible days before the welfare state.



Only liberals did this to themselves.  They have tried to make politics do things it can't do.  They have used their power to put government to work on things that government can't do.  Because government is force, and force is only good for breaking things and force has to be a last resort.



That's just the liberal stupidity side of things.  Then there are things that go beyond stupidity.  There is the liberal record on exhuming racism out of its well-deserved grave and making race and class and gender the center of liberal neo-tribal politics.



We cannot know what awaits us at the end of neo-tribal liberal identity politics, although it is encouraging that ordinary Hispanics don't seem to want to be marginalized off in a corner of the liberal plantation and 53% of them call themselves whites.



But we got where we are today because of liberals. As Noemie Emery writes:

They had a dream. For almost a hundred years now, the famed academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex has dreamed of a government run by their kind of people (i.e., nature’s noblemen), whose intelligence, wit, and refined sensibilities would bring us a heaven on earth.

Because liberals knew better. Only now the dream is every day turning into a nightmare.  Hey Fantine!  Let's sing it together:

I dreamed a dream in time gone by...

 Now the dream is over, pal.  Get used to it.

Moral Dilemmas in "The Secret Life of Violet Grant"

What do you get if you mix romance with history and politics and throw in a little spy thriller?  You get The Secret Life of Violet Grant by my New York Times bestselling daughter Beatriz Williams.  Now available in bookstores everywhere.

What can I say about it except go and order yours?  And what more can I say without ruining your whole experience with plot spoilers?

Let's start with this.  Manhattan girl-about-town Vivian Schuyler -- the same Schuylers that my man Alexander Hamilton married into centuries ago -- gets a suitcase in the mail in 1964.  It seems to have belonged to her great-aunt Violet that disappeared mysteriously right before World War I.  What gives?  

Well, Vivian is a spunky kid, even if she is rich, and even if she only got her job as fact-checker at Metropolitan magazine because she's the best friend of the owner's daughter.  In fact Vivian might remind you of the spunky heroines of those now-forgotten 1930s screwball comedies. So she ignores the warnings from Mums and Dadums about the danger of family scandal and bores right in to the suitcase mystery to figure out just what happened back in 1914.  That sets up a glorious romp through Manhattan with lots of drinking and smoking on the one hand and the gradual unraveling of the life of the mystery of the great-aunt Violet who left New York in 1912 as a young science graduate to join the masters of the universe trying to figure out the nature of the atom in Britain and Germany.

In between the dizzying plot twists we get a lot of moral dilemmas.  What do you do if you find that you and your best friend are in love with the same man?  What do you do when your lover wants you to have an abortion?  What do you do if an educated girl comes to you wanting an abortion?  What do you do if you think that a young woman in the office is being improperly treated?

Sorry, liberals.  These questions are considered not as black and white political issues of rights and "Justice!" but as moral dilemmas that challenge good people in their daily lives, that don't have easy answers, and that ought to be worked out without the clunking fist of government.

The biggest issue, that comes up again and again, is who can you trust?  When someone says they love you, do they really love you or are they trying to use you?  And what are you prepared to sacrifice for love? I think I can say, without betraying the story, that in Violet Grant these questions remains open right down to the last page.



Violet Grant is my daughter's third novel with Putnam and, if you ask me, she is getting better with every book.  Beatriz Williams is willing to take risks, and the more she writes, the bigger the risks.



The central question is, if you are writing a novel that mixes romance, history, politics, and a bit of spy thriller, how far can you go?  How much is enough?  What will the punters like?  The only thing to do is to put pen to paper and find out.  And that's what Beatriz Williams has done.  And what she has done is deliver a glorious romp that, if you pay attention, is really about the Big Things: love, courage, honor, decency, and sacrifice.  And their opposites.



What else is there?

The Ruling Class's Sickness Unto Death

All ruling classes are the same.  They all suffer under the delusion that their particular power and wisdom is needed to bring order to a chaotic world.  They experience themselves as parents trying to control unruly children.



So in Europe the ruling class decided after World War II that it needed to create a new, wise, continental over-class that would prevent another outbreak of dangerous nationalism.  It slowly built up a vast oligarchy of the great and the good to rule over the crazed plebs.  After all, if the German people could vote for a Hitler once, they could do it again.  So a wise elite would write the laws and work behind the scenes to neuter the passions of the masses.



(It did not stop to think that Nazism and Fascism might be practical responses to the failures of the old regimes and their proud elites.)



Well, we now see what has happened in Europe.  Even apart from the clumsy and corrupt European Commission in Europe which rules without the consent of the governed, we have the abominable Euro, the currency without a country that is tearing Europe apart.  It is, of course, appropriate that it is a failed currency that is doing the job of destruction because it has been the policy of inflated and devalued currencies that has been the universal resort of the 20th century educated ruling class when caught in a jam.  The ruling class built a huge administrative government to deliver countless benefits to the people to keep them off the streets, but it needed a constant resort to the thievery of inflation to clean up its economic messes.



In the United States the problems are similar, but different.  Here the ruling class has been executing on a similar plan of administrative supremacy, but has to have constant resort to the tribal instincts of race, gender, and class in order to cudgel the ordinary voter into maintaining the status quo and the ruling class in power.   The elite that stands for progress and enlightenment can only stay in power by resorting to the crudest appeals to race and difference.



It is well to turn back the clock and remember what the educated class originally intended.  It thought of itself as advanced and rational.  It thought that its well-considered policies would lead the people upwards out of tribe and faction into the sunny uplands of education and universalism.



You can see this delusion in every page of Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty.  To Piketty and to tens of thousands like him in the ruling class, the administrative state is a "social state" delivering social justice in programs of free or subsidized services so that people have their "rights."  So it does. But he forgets that the "rights" were imagined by people like him.  The programs were designed and implemented by people like him, and the money, power, and love of beautiful women are all supposed to go to people like him.



That is why "people like him" don't like capitalism.  It cannot, surely cannot be just that under capitalism the money, power and beautiful women get snapped up by jumped-up barrow boys that just struck it lucky, and not given by a grateful populace to "people like him."



In fact, of course, the policy of administrative supremacy is a blast from the past.  It retreats to the politics of the village big man and the bureaucracy of the absolute monarch.  It is not a vehicle for enlightenment, it is a means of domination.  Thus, the more that the educated ruling class extends its programs of centralized administration the more it builds a structure of domination in which all people except the favored few are reduced to peonage.



The program of administrative centralism does not elevate the common man, and teach him the ways of the modern world.  It forces him back into the villages and cramped superstitions of the pre-industrial world.  Soon enough we will find out that the administrative state is bankrupt and failed, and the rule of the educated elite will be as discredited as the rule of the Caesars, the landed barons or the absolute monarchs.  People will rise up and topple the castles of power and something else will take its place.



What went wrong?  The educated elite believed too much in political power.  It could have remained satisfied with merely presiding over the evolutions of capitalism, but it didn't.  It wanted to rule over capitalism.



And the problem with political power and government is that it is good only for one thing: war.  It might be a foreign war on a dastardly enemy.  If not a foreign war then any government will instinctively start searching for enemies at home, and it will find them.



That is what all the furies over racism and the supposed Republican war on women and the constant turmoil on campus over diversity is about.  Government must have its enemy.



Our liberal friends don't see any enemies abroad.  They think that foreign policy very soon declines into neo-colonialism and imperialism, and they are probably right.



But the problem is that without foreign enemies, our liberal enemies find them at home.  So we get wars on poverty, on pollution, on bigotry, on racism, on corporate greed, on religion, on family.  And the bigger the government, the bigger the war.



We are the American people.  We don't want to be dragged into an endless war against each other.  Do we?



But the ruling class can't help itself.  It must have its war to fight, otherwise it loses its mandate to rule.



And so it will go, until the American people rise up and rebel against their rulers and change their ruling class, as the ordinary people of Europe are threatening to do.



Nothing new here.  Every ruling class creates injustice and domination, because every ruling class is blinded by its pride.



Thus we may say that every ruling class is blind to its faults until it is probably too late.

Beyond Tea Parties and UKIPs

It's jolly good fun to see that UKIP and its pubbable leader Nigel Farage tearing up the pavement in Britain over the weekend. Farage is a poster boy for the old working class man who said: "I like a drink and I like a smoke." But UKIP is rather like the Tea Party.  It's mad as hell, but don't touch its Medicare (or its NHS).



Look, I get it.  People work their entire lives paying those unjust payroll taxes; they see drifters and grifters playing the system for all the freebies they can get and they are damned if they are going to give their share up to some iffy reform of Social Security that tosses them to the mercies of the Wall Street casino.



(Only isn't it interesting that the S&P has practically doubled and the NASDAQ has practically tripled on Obama's watch while the ordinary working stiff can barely find a job. Yea the 1%, Barack!)



But Social Security and Medicare and the NHS are the problem, people.  Not the banksters or the frackers or the special interests or even the welfare moms and the idle single males.



The problem is as old as Eve.  The Serpent tempted me, and I did eat.  The politicians dangled free stuff before me, and I did vote.



Back in the dawn of the modern age, when the feudal system was breaking up in England in the 13th century, almost everyone kicked their kids out of the house at puberty.  They went into an apprenticeship or they went into "service".  They had to find a way to contribute, to earn a living wage; they were, to coin a phrase, "on their own."



We now know that a similar, but harsher, system obtained in China where the feudal system broke down in about 500 AD.  The Chinese owned their own land and distributed their land among their sons, so if you had more than one son the next generation ended up with less land per head.  If you didn't work hard and acquire more land your sons ended up without enough land to marry on.  Then they became hired laborers and never married and your seed died out.



It's the system I call responsible individualism.  Lefties call it Social Darwinism.  But in truth all human society, as all nature, is a form of Darwinism. Only the adaptable survive.  It might be social adaptation; it might be genetic adaptation.  But the rule of life is: adapt or die.



So the responsible individual has to grasp the nettle.  He has to say, first thing every morning: how can I contribute?  He cannot say, first thing: I got my rights!  The point about social cooperation is social cooperation, not social distribution.



Now, in his Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century Thomas Piketty proudly rehearses the intergenerational solidarity of the welfare state, which he calls the "social state" or the European Social Model.  In his social state the young generation pay for the benefits of the old generation, and this is wonderful.



No it isn't, because this social solidarity is based on force, on the votes of the elderly to force the young 'uns to pay brutal taxes.  It says: I got my rights; I got mine coming.  You call it social solidarity?  If you ask me, it isn't social, and it isn't solid.



Here is my idea of intergenerational solidarity.  The middle-aged work.  And they work until they have saved enough of a pile to provide a retirement income. (OK some people just cannot do that and we help them.)  This means, on a societal level, that you cannot retire until you have created enough jobs for young people to support you in your old age.  If there's a war or there's a recession, and the stock market is in the tank, then you have to put off your retirement for a few years.  That is what I call intergenerational solidarity; that's what I call generational justice.  People work to contribute; they don't march for their "rights."



So long as we continue in our politics to emphasize rights, and so long as we Eves allow the political serpents to tempt us, so long will our nation lurch from crisis to crisis.



The current "free stuff" political model is a primitive throwback to the age of agriculture and the hunter gatherers before the industrial revolution where land was wealth, and rape and pillage was the way to get a leg up in a zero-sum world.  But today people are wealth: human ingenuity and cooperation.  In Britain they began to really see this at the end of the 17th century in the Glorious Revolution where Whigs and Tories divided over the source of national wealth.  Tories thought in terms of land and its limits; Whigs thought that the new manufacturing and trade was a source of perhaps unlimited wealth.  Guess who was right?



We are still having that argument today.  Do we divide out a fixed pie in political programs and benefits?  Or do we work together as free and independent individuals to create new and bigger pies of perhaps unlimited size?



The good thing about the Obama administration is that you probably couldn't imagine a better way to demonstrate the utter bankruptcy of the fixed pie paradigm.



But don't think that rights and benefits politics will just go Poof! in 2016.  The story of the dog in the manger wasn't written as a joke.  The world is full of manger dogs, blindly barring the way to prosperity, because.  People will not give up their free stuff until ruin is staring them in the face.



But at least in 2016 the American people will be thinking: It's Time for a Change.

The Trouble with Keynes Is Us

Why has Keynesianism survived down to the present day?  Most TV commentators understand the economy in orthodox Keynesian terms.  The survival of Keynesianism is not that hard to understand, according to Sheldon Richman.

I’d have said it’s because Keynesianism gives intellectual cover for what politicians would want to do anyway: borrow, spend, and create money.

Another explanation Richman offers is from Lawrence H. White of George Mason University. Keynes gave people hope in the black despair of the Great Depression.  For economists, it gave them hope that they could solve the unemployment problem without going to totalitarianism.



My view is that the power of Keynes is to give not just politicians and economists but ordinary people the hope that they can continue doing what they are doing without making the wrenching changes that they desperately fear they must make.  Hey, no problem, the politicians can say!  Just sit back and let us do a bit of stimulus here, and a bit of quantitative easing there, and presto, it's recovery summer!  Because everyone wants to keep doing what they are doing until there is no longer any possible hope to continue in the old way.



The orthodox Austrian explanation of the business cycle centers on the idea that a recession is an inevitable consequence of the previous easy credit boom, because investments that looked solid in the boom are suddenly revealed as malinvestments.  Thus the people and resources marshalled into the lines of business now revealed as malinvestments must be liquidated, sooner or later. But nobody wants to hear that!  They don't want to confront what they know they must eventually do.  They want to continue in the old ways, and they sensibly elect politicians that will let them do it.



Of course it is the ordinary people that suffer losses to their wealth in the subsequent inflation and they lose their jobs in the malinvested industries anyway.  Then they will blame the politicians and the whole cycle can begin again.



We can excuse the politicians: theirs is the art of the possible, and if there is no majority for a party that offers orthodox capitalism with sound money and no freebies then a politician is a fool to offer it.



But the economists have no such excuse.  They know the problems with Keynesianism, or they ought to if they are as smart as they claim.  But we know why they are on the Keynesian train.  It is the same reason that the climate scientists are all aboard the global warming train.  It is money, power and the love of beautiful women.  That is one side of the coin.  But there is another reverse side of the coin.  If you don't get with the program you will get the brush off.  There won't be any professorships or adviser jobs for you.  So you'll abandon your economics Ph.D. and get into another line of business, and nobody wants to do that.



So what about the Obama economy?  How long can this miserable "recovery" continue?  Nobody knows.  But you can imagine that by November 2016 the American people will think it is "Time for a Change."  But the ghost of Keynes will still be with us.

Anti-Piketty: VA is part of the "social model"

Our liberal friends like to talk vaguely about "working families," although their core voters are often neither workers nor families. But euro-lefties like Thomas Piketty, he of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, are more direct about their agenda.  They call it the European Social Model.  They mean that the state provides basic services like free education, free health care, pay-as-you-go pensions, and income supplement.  And this is a good thing, even if it costs 40, 50 percent of GDP in taxes.

Just like the US Veterans Administration.  It runs a cafeteria of free services for US veterans.  Want health care?  Go to the VA hospital.  It's run just like every government department: for the benefit of the managers and the bureaucrats.

So the VA is hiding its waiting lists.  So President Obama is shocked, shocked that waiting lists are going on.  So everyone is piling on.

Who are we kidding?  The VA operates a government-furnished, government-run "free at the point of delivery" health care system.  Which means that there will be waiting lists.  There's no mystery about this.  It doesn't take dysfunctional bureaucrats or incompetent managers to muck up waiting lists. It's a basic fact of life, courtesy of Economics 101.  Supply and Demand, baby.  If you price some thing at zero, the demand for that thing will be infinite.

Every scarce thing in this world must be rationed.  You can ration it by price, or you can ration it by waiting lists.

And that applies to the VA and everything else in the European Social Model.

Now I know that for our graduates of the French grandes écoles like M. Piketty, there is nothing more progressive or more just or more social that the "social state" and its "social model".  But you may have a tiny little question mark in the back of your mind about it.  I certainly do.

Because there is an interesting thing about the European Social Model and all its brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts.  It's indistinguishable from the Looting and Plunder Model.

So you're the Frankish king sitting in you capital city of Trier, just west of the Rhine, way back in the good old days of the Frankish empire.  It's spring and it's time for the campaigning season.  What do you do?  You say to your noble supporters and your peasants: Hey, pal, want some loot and plunder and free stuff?  Follow the Frankish banner and come and get it.  So when the snows clear and the forest paths harden up you lead your merry band of pranksters into Saxony and teach the Teutons a lesson.  In the fall you return to Trier with your bags full of grain and silver and loot.

You tell me what is different with the modern politician and his supporters.  What does he say once the election campaigning season comes around?  He offers his supporters free stuff. Health care for the uninsured!  New subsidies for community college students!  No cuts to Medicare!  Higher minimum wage! And at the end of the campaign after the office is won, then it's time to divide the spoils.

Now there is a very advanced and sophisticated way to look at this.  It is the pragmatic method that William James taught us over a century ago.  He said: never mind about realism or transcendentalism or any of that stuff.  Think of things pragmatically.  If the way you deal with A is the same as the way you deal with B, then A and B are, for all practical purposes, the same.

So if the European Social Model is indistinguishable from the Looting and Plunder Model, maybe it's because they, for all practical purposes, the same.

Of course, there's a middle way in this, the medieval feudal system.  In those days the supporters were mostly serfs.  They weren't recruited for loot, but served in the feudal host as part of a system of loyalty and obligation.  They served the lord, and the lord protected them from other lords and the Vikings.  And the lord kinda sorta looked after them, throwing them a few bones every now and again.

But today we are trying to blunder a way out of the Loot and Plunder model to a new system. It's not a looting system, or a servile system, or a free-stuff-social-model system.  It's the system of individual responsibility.  It's completely upside down from the old system.

In the old system you were recruited and you joined up for the loot, the free stuff.  And you fought or worked in the fields in order to get your loot, your right as a loyal servitor.

But in the new system you start not with your loot but with your contribution.  You have to figure out: how can I make myself useful, how can I add value in this crazy, complex world?  How can I make a difference?  How can I find a niche to fill?  Then, you hope, the money will follow.  It's a great system because it doesn't need a great lord divvying up the spoils in some complicated administrative system with its waiting lines and waiting lists.  It just requires people eager to serve and people willing to pay them for their service.

The problem at the VA will not be solved with more money and better administrators.  It will be solved only when we abandon the free-stuff model.  Let's offer the veterans a choice.  You can stay with the free-stuff model, or we can give you an equivalent chunk of change so you can buy health insurance on the open market.

Oh dear.  I see there's a problem with that.  President Obama and his Democratic army just overran the open market for health insurance with their centralized bureaucratized costly unaffordable uncaring unprotected Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

So the president and his party are making things worse instead of better, for veterans and for everyone else.  They are turning the clock back to the days of serfdom and looting and plunder.

And so it goes.

And so it will continue to go until the advanced progressive ruling class finally gives in and abandons its primitive free-stuff model and joins the modern era and its radical idea of individual responsibility.

When that day dawns we may truly say that the state has become social.