The Liberal Ideal Versus the Reality

Really, things could not be better for conservatives. Everything about the Obama administration is in ruins. And in a month there will be a midterm election.

Of course if we had a non-partisan media there would be a hurricane of Obama and Reid blaming, just like in the good old days of Blame Bush in 2006. With that kind of wind behind us we might count Democrats in the House in double digits and the Senate in single digits in January.

But our media is composed mainly of Democratic operatives with bylines, so the Obama blaming is kinda muted, just like the Carter blaming back in 1978-79 was all about the notion that you couldn't really blame the president because things were so complicated that nobody could be expected to master them.

Jonah Goldberg has a piece about Obama failure. In the best of all possible worlds

Liberalism, as an ideology, insists that government can do good and great things for the people and the world if the people running the government are smart liberals.

But the people running the government aren't all smart liberals. There are, for example, government unions. There is, for example the fact that the annual dismissal rate for federal government workers is 0.25%, i.e., not one in four, or one in forty, but one in four hundred. So, on Obama's watch, of course

we’ve seen horrifying incompetence, malfeasance, or skullduggery at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the IRS, DOJ, GAO, and HHS. 

Liberals may not like that sort of thing, but, as Jonah says, you have to dance with the girl what brung you. And that means liberals have to dance with the activists, the bureaucrats, and the Daily Show viewers what voted for them.

The problem is quite simple. It is just not enough to talk about hope and change and design a cool system to, e.g., create affordable health care. The question is, what happens when you hit your first brick wall and things start to go wrong?  What do you do then? When health insurance rates go up at double-digit rates after you promised they'd go down. When the Obamacare website is a disaster. When a mere 8 million sign up for Obamacare? When the health care system from CDC downwards botches the first Ebola case in the US?

We know what happens. Nothing. Or the government leaders blame some scapegoat.

When something goes wrong you want to have people empowered to do something about it, to figure out what went wrong, to fix the problems, and to list the lessons learned. But that is not how government works.

You get a high-octane look at this as Jürgen Habermas, in a transitional book Legitimation Crisis, 1973, tries to blame "late capitalism" for the problems of the world. He writes about "administrative planning" and "the state's responsibility as a global planning authority" and "limits of administrative capacity". He cannot exclude the idea that the administrative system might allow a "compromise path between competing claims" and allow a "sufficient amount of organizational rationality."

But that's the point. An administrative system is like a mechanical system, only designed for one job. What's needed is an organism with infinite adaptability.

Every piece of legislation amounts to a compromise between the competing claims of the special interests. But then what? Then you have an administrative system cast in concrete to execute on the Compromise of 2010 for the next forever.  Social Security was the Compromise of 1935. Medicare was the Compromise of 1965. The problem is that each of these Compromises have become holy shrines and any attempt to modify them is anathematized as the desecration of the holy place, a sacrilege.

The joke is that nobody expects government to perform. We tolerate an education system that doesn't educate, and welfare system that sinks people into generational dependence and we act as though nothing can be done. But if Apple doesn't bring out new and better iPhones every year with quantum leaps in functionality it's considered a scandal.

The fact is that government just cannot do anything that needs flexibility, adaptability and a quick response to problems. It takes enormous energy just to get it to do the simplest things badly.

The joke is that we have a system that is designed for flexibility, adaptability, and instant response to problems. It is called capitalism.

But the problem is that capitalism doesn't provide a starring role for a ruling class. And for that our liberal masters will never forgive it.

The TImes are Out of Joint

Hey, Mr Ebola Zero went to the hospital a week ago with a fever, told them he was from Liberia, and they sent him home.

A man entered the White House and overpowered two female agents before being stopped by an off-duty agent. Now the female head of the Secret Service has resigned, and the Secret Service is in turmoil.

Obamacare is so successful that hospitals are hiring off-network physicians in their ERs so people get to pay out-of-pocket for their ER-visit. Hospital is in-network but doctor isn't. And new enrollees for Medicaid are finding a dickens of a problem getting to see a doctor.

Oh and Islamic warriors are running wild in the Middle East.

In other words, the bureaucratic state is screwing up left and right. Hey voters!  You gotta problem with that, or are you gonna keep voting Democrat to keep those checks coming?

But what will you do when the checks stop coming?

In my view, the big problem is women voters.  Women vote for big government because they vote for the things they need to raise their children, things like education and health care.

Trouble is, government is lousy at doing education and delivering health care. See Ebola Zero above.

I don't know when the women voters are going to get the plot. Usually, it's too late, because women are too trusting. In other words, when a man says Trust Me, whether a lover, a husband, a politician, whatever, they tend to believe him until it's too late.  I don't say that in a sexist way, oh no.  I suspect that women have to be programmed that way, because Darwin.

Anyway, I'd say that the American people are in the middle of getting a wake-up call, big time.

The wake-up call basically says that everything you hear from liberals is focus-group tested rubbish.

Truth is that the authoritarian bureaucratic state is a mess and it always has been. That's because it pays people to sit around and play bureaucratic games with each other. To get people to do real work and respond to other peoples' needs you have to get them out of bureaucracies and make them responsible for results.

None of this is rocket science, but people rather like just sitting around and getting a paycheck. They prefer it to actually working for a living.

Gentrification: It's the Capitalists' Fault!

Here I thought that gentrification was a liberal thing: liberals with a little less money that corporate strivers buying low and selling high in marginal urban neighborhoods.

But class warrior Gavin Mueller paints a different scene. Forget about Richard Florida and his "creatives". The gentrifiers are "bureaucrats and IT workers with a few more years of beards and bong hits in them". And gentrification is a big-money game.

Gentrification has always been a top-down affair, not a spontaneous hipster influx, orchestrated by the real estate developers and investors who pull the strings of city policy, with individual home-buyers deployed in mopping up operations.

So the whole thing reduces to the usual left-wing narrative of class warfare with the "broken windows" policing of Rudy Guiliani doing a right hook on the poor and the Jane Jacobs worship of the urban environment doing a left hook while the corporate interests advance up the middle and mop up with the profits.

Well, yes.  You combine the profit motive with access to government influence and you can turn the city upside down, and the poor will get the shaft. Factor in government programs encouraging minorities to buy houses they can't afford and you compound the problem.

So what do we do? Apart from left-wing organizing and right-wing laissez-faire?

Maybe the short-term option is to do nothing and let liberal gentrifiers and lefty community organizers and the crony capitalist real-estate developers stew together a little.  They are, after all, Democrats, every one.

Meanwhile let's try to think things out a little.

First, the poor are always going to be living in the worst part of town, and that means they will always be vulnerable to redevelopment, because that's how capitalism works. You buy low, you add value, and you sell high. So the poor are always going to find themselves chased around town. Because reality.

Second, cities are always changing, and if you don't like change driven by real-estate developers than you are choosing change driven by politicians and activists. Which means incompetence and no change until the bottom drops out. See Detroit.

You can have public housing; you can have subsidies; you can have programs. But the poor will still be living in the  worst part of town. And if you don't redevelop the worst part of town it will get even worse

Of course, everything that liberals do, from lefty community organizers to creative-class urban pioneers to crony capitalists, make the poor's situation more difficult. That's because welfare, subsidies, public transportation make the poor vulnerable and dependent on government.  People that have jobs are people that can move around and adapt.  People that live on welfare and housing subsidies and rely on public transportation are stuck.

So the real solution is to reform the welfare system so that poor people mostly have jobs. Then they have the economic power to make choices rather than slither, by default, into the worst part of town, because dependency.

But that sort of thing doesn't interest lefty class warriors. The solution must be political. It must be a crackdown on business interests and capitalism. It must be bigger government.

It's all such a bloody shame.

Wascally Republican Racists

One of the fundamental beliefs of today's liberals is that they are for civil rights and Republicans are racists. The proof is that Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and that the South voted for Goldwater in 1964.

(In fact Goldwater was a libertarian who had desegregated the Arizona National Guard and voted against the Civil Rights Act because he felt it was too intrusive.)

And then there was Richard Nixon's supposed "Southern strategy" to pick up white Southern racist votes in 1972.

Recently there have been three items in the liberal media, all featuring photos of Gov. George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door, that assume this meme.

But Ed Driscoll has taken one look and decided to invoke Ian Fleming and Goldfinger.

And there's a telling boner on MSNBC's part in this hate-fest. Its chiron tags Wallace as an (R). In fact Gov. George Wallace (D-Alabama) was a lifelong Democrat.

But once the Civil Rights Act passed and blacks began to vote in Alabama, Wallace got religion and bid for the votes of African Americans and appointed blacks to his cabinet. A true politician.

Liberals need to paint Republicans as racists, because their policies have betrayed the spirit of civil rights. They have turned equal rights into a racial spoils system and injected race relations with the poison of cultural Marxism and identity politics. According to fashionable liberal psychology, the way your deal with that is "projection," projecting your own faults on your political opponents.

In reality, Republicans are embarrassed by race. We'd love to have blacks voting Republican but we know it ain't gonna happen as long as Democrats manage to whip them with the fear that Republicans want to return blacks to the days of Jim Crow. Anyway, the result of affirmative action is that overwhelming numbers of blacks work for the government. They ain't gonna be voting for the party of limited government any time soon.

Republicans have never bid for the votes of Democrats. What happens is that individual Democrats find themselves echoing one-time Democrat Ronald Reagan: I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me. And they find themselves voting Republican.

But there is a germ of truth in the liberal accusations on Wascally Wepublican Wacism. It is that the victims of liberal race politics are predominantly lower-middle class and working class whites. It is their jobs in government and elsewhere that have been targeted by affirmative action. And the same applies to university admissions.

I don't know how racist the lower class whites are, but if I were one, I'd be pretty angry with the Democratic Party that once loved me as a working stiff and now sneers at me as a racist redneck.

Moore vs. Krugman Cage Fight

Libertarian economist Mark Skousen is boosting a grand debate at the next FreedomFest in Las Vegas July 8-11, 2015. It's between NYT columnist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman and WSJ columnist and supply-sider Stephen Moore. They are going to debate a bunch of topics, one by one.

Red States vs. Blue States (especially California)… Flat Tax vs. Progressive Tax… Austerity vs Stimulus… Inequality vs. Growth… Market Healthcare vs. ObamaCare… Easy Money vs. Deficit Spending…Market Capitalism (USA) vs. State Capitalism (China)… and many more topics.

Of course, as a libertarian conservative I come down pretty hard on the Red State, Flat Tax, Austerity side of this argument. But I get what the other side is saying, and how faithfully the Paul Krugmans of the world represent them.

If you are a liberal you live and work, most likely, in a big organization like a school or a government bureaucracy. You experience the world as an underling. Your security and your livelihood depends on the "fairness" of your superiors or, failing that, your ability to curry favor with your bosses. Or maybe you are living on a government pension, Social Security or SSI or welfare. In other words these people are still living within the feudal system. They know that they depend upon a strong and generous patron that "takes care of them."

The idea of the market economy is terrifying to these people. They think: but what if my boss didn't like me? What if I got laid off? What if the employer came by and insisted upon "give-backs?" How would I pay my mortgage?

So these people buy the liberal Keynesian message. It is monstrous to talk about "austerity" and cutting government spending. How could people survive if their benefits were cut? It is monstrous to talk about a flat tax. The rich should pay more, because people like me on a fixed income can't afford any "cuts.".

The whole panoply of liberal macroeconomics is a response to the feudal culture of liberal voters. They want everything sewn up and guaranteed, from pensions to healthcare to benefits to job tenure.

But reality is that nothing is guaranteed. All government guarantees are made at the expense of what Amity Shlaes calls "The Forgotten Man," the folks that aren't represented by some special interest. So when the feudal horde of liberals demand to continue their pensions and benefits and rights undiminished through hard times like the Great Recession they are making it worse for people that don't have powerful interests on their side.

Because the best way to recover from a recession is if everyone is working hard to adjust to the new economic conditions. If the government beneficiaries had to share in the hardship, maybe they'd increase their work effort and contribute to the recovery.

Perhaps that's why this fall, after six years of the Obama administration and its full-on Keynesianism, average people are tuning out the message of the media and the administration that things are getting better.

The record of the Obama administration is that things have gone pretty well if you are well-connected, a liberal billionaire or a unionized government worker or a liberal activist or a government pensioner. But things are not so good for the rest of America and the rest of America is beginning to register its frustration.

It's right that Paul Krugman should represent the liberal feudal horde and their interest in their government benefits. But there is another story, and it's right for Stephen Moore to debate it with liberal icon Paul Krugman.

A Grand Strategy for the War Against Islamism

As the Obama administration stumbles towards existential ruin, I hope that the Republican candidates for president in 2016 have their foreign policy and defense teams hard at work on a grand strategy for the post-Obama years.

Really, the utter confusion and failure of the Obama years is a blessing, because the Democrats' foreign policy has been exposed as nothing more than anti-Bush animus and base-pleasing catchphrases. In 2016 Americans will be ready for grownups to take office and restore America to power and respect in the world.

Very well, but what should this new team do about the Islamist challenge? What should we do to vanquish yet another challenge to the culture and society of responsible individualism and its differentiation of human social relations into three parts: political, economic, and moral/cultural?

This is not just an intellectual game. The half millennium of western hegemony has been an astonishing act that has plunged the world into an unprecedented adventure of prosperity. Yes, it's been imperial and it's turned the world upside down. But it's ended the domination of Malthus.

Obviously we must first try and understand what the Islamist challenge means to us. Never mind what it means to the Islamists. What about us?

What is more sensible than to experience Islamism as yet another reactionary backlash to our radical western project of responsible individualism?

Let us understand the great conflicts of the last century as the failed fascist/socialist rebellion against responsible individualism. Really, according to the ideas of Rene Girard, they are "monstrous doubles" of unrestrained violence.

The socialist reaction was an attempt to hide from the awful challenge of responsible individualism by returning to a kind of neo-feudalism, where a wise aristocracy of the best and brightest would rule over a society of semi-servile worker victims and protect them from the dangerous bourgeoisie. Only it didn't work; it send 100 million humans to unmarked graves.

Then there was the fascist reaction. It attempted to hide from the awful challenge of responsible individualism by returning to a frank tribalism of blood and race. A charismatic tribal leader would rule over a grateful people and purify the tribe from harmful race pollution. Only it didn't work; it sent 40 million humans to their premature death.

In each case an elite stepped forward to protect a frightened populace and help it avoid the perilous step of leaving the tribe or the feudal manor for a life of individual responsibility. Instead of stepping into the modern economy where each man and woman offers his or herself in service to the rest of humanity, surrendering to the market and accepting its economic verdict, the elite would keep the people safe in the old ways.

Only it didn't work, because humans in the 20th and 21st centuries have already eaten from the tree of economic knowledge and have been expelled from the Garden of Collective Eden. There is no going back.

The result of it all? The monstrous bourgeoisie flooded the world with a tidal wave of life, liberty and prosperity.

Now comes Islamism and the best way for us to understand it is as yet another lurch back to tribalism and servile collectivism.

We can understand why our liberal and lefty friends have seemed to condone this reactionary and nostalgic movement. The lurch back to tribalism is what leftism and liberalism are all about. They condone the frightened backward glance of the new arrivals in the city and enroll them in their welfare-slave plantation. Their cultural Marxism makes of every backward group a class of victims to be confirmed in their culture of victimhood.

But what do we do?

Let us recall the grand strategy of the Cold War and see if it yields any lessons for us. It seems to me that the Cold War proceeded in three stages.

First, thanks to George Kennan, was containment. The idea was to avoid the high-risk strategy of confrontation but still make it difficult for the Soviet Empire to expand.

Second, thanks to Nixon and Kissinger, was division. Richard Nixon went to China and divided the two Communist empires: Soviet Union and Peoples Republic of China.

Third, thanks to Ronald Reagan, was economic warfare. Reagan built up the US armed forces, challenged the Soviet Union with the Strategic Defense Initiative, and talked Saudi Arabia into increasing oil production and thus radically cutting the global price of oil and bankrupting the Soviet Union. Plus he kick-started the US capitalist economy into a 25 year boom, just when liberals said it couldn't be done.

Result: an amiable dunce dispatched Communism to the dust heap of history without firing a shot.

So here is my three-part grand strategy for dispatching Islamism to the dustbin of history.

First, harassment. We unleash our intelligence community and our special forces upon the Islamic State and all the hydra-headed Islamic groups that keep popping up.

Second, division. We secretly play the Shia against the Sunni and various tin-pot dictators against tin-pot imans -- while denying it to the world with a straight face, and we foment rebellion and revolution throughout the Islamic world against any regime that doesn't kiss the ring of western empire. Here's how they did it a century ago.

Third, frack, baby, frack. We push the technology of the current shale energy revolution to the full extent, fracking on federal lands, fracking offshore, aggressively exporting the new oil-extraction technology to our friends like the Poles. Result: energy prices go down and denies money to the oil-dependent Middle East. We reform out economy to unleash entrepreneurs, encourage work, reform and privatize entitlements, cut domestic spending, streamline regulation, restore the rule of law. We declare war on crony capitalists, foreign and domestic, and de-cartelize health care and education. It's odd how every item in this program of economic warfare means reversing Obama and liberal policy.

Then all we have to do is sit back, watch liberals declare that they knew Islamism was a busted flush all along, and we play parlor games like imagining what the next Obama will look like when a generation comes to maturity that knew not the follies of the America's First Worst President Ever.

Registering the Artillery for "Mann v. Steyn"

Have you noticed? the website that broke the Hockey Stick is stirring to life with a bunch of posts about the goings-on among the climate scientist set during the critical months when Michael E. Mann and the chaps at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit were pushing out the Hockey Stick for the United Nation's IPCC.

Here's a list of the latest posts at climateaudit.org:

Kevin O'Neill's "Fraud" Allegations by Steve McIntyre: about the Wegman Report on the Hockey Stick being a political hatchet job.

Black Tuesday of Climate Science by Jean S and Inventory of Hide-the-Decline by Steve McIntyre about the day they "hid the decline" of Keith Briffa's Siberian tree-mometers by terminating their temperature time series in the middle of a spaghetti graph blob right before they took a big decline.

Another Porky from Mann, Williams and Fontaine by Steve McIntyre about inconsistencies in Michael E. Mann's pleadings in "Mann v. Steyn" (and other respondents).

The Original Hide-the Decline by Steve McIntyre about the first appearance of hiding the decline in Siberian tree-mometers after the mid 20th century.

Rule N Revisited by Jean S about Michael E. Mann's questionable use of Principal Components Analysis in his Hockey Stick papers.

Who Wrote EPA's "Myths vs Facts" by Steve McIntyre about a document that contained statements and assertions that were untrue and undocumented in the "formal" documents they were supporting.

What could be going on here, the world wonders? It couldn't possibly be likely witnesses in "Mann v. Steyn" rehearsing their facts and getting their thoughts and their documents together, could it? It couldn't be the world's foremost climate artillerists registering their 155mm howitzers on the firing range, could it?

A white back an exuberant Mark Steyn was observing on his website in "The Lonesomest Mann in Town" that in the battle of the Amici Curiae, folks filing their own independent briefs in the trial of the century, "Mann v. Steyn," that he and his co-respondents had lined up a Murderer's Row of establishment liberal batters, from the ACLU to the mainstream media. Michael E. Mann's Amici batting order? Zilch. Not one settled scientist has sent in an amicus brief in support of Mann.

There's a telling remark on Wattsupwiththat.com about Michael E. Mann, who just gave a talk at the Cabot Institute in Bristol, England. A WUWT reader writes that

what I took away from this lecture more than anything else is that Mann genuinely believes he is right and that his work will save the world.

I have this mild feeling that we are about to witness a monumental train-wreck.  Oh it won't be featured on all the networks, and it won't appear as a feature in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. But you will know something has gone down because of a strange silence on the global-warming/climate-change front.