ObamaCare's Culture of Compulsion

It's tempting to ask the Catholic Church: where were you?  Now, finally, at the eleventh hour, the leaders of the US Catholic Church have come out and opposed ObamaCare on the grounds that it forces Catholic employers to pay for contraception and abortifacient services in violation of long-standing Church moral policy about contraception and abortion.

After all, the Catholic Church, at least since the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, has held to the principle of subsidiarity.  From Wikipedia:

The principle is based upon the autonomy and dignity of the human individual, and holds that all other forms of society, from the family to the state and the international order, should be in the service of the human person. Subsidiarity assumes that these human persons are by their nature social beings, and emphasizes the importance of small and intermediate-sized communities or institutions, like the family, the church, labor unions and other voluntary associations, as mediating structures which empower individual action and link the individual to society as a whole. "Positive subsidiarity", which is the ethical imperative for communal, institutional or governmental action to create the social conditions necessary to the full development of the individual, such as the right to work, decent housing, health care, etc., is another important aspect of the subsidiarity principle.

The idea is that, because humans are social beings, that government should only do things that people cannot do for themselves and cannot do for each other in mediating structures.  Why is this?  Because government is force.  Whenever you have government involved in anything it involves force.  When force enters the equation it means that the normal interactions of humans as social beings has broken down and needs to be compelled, to be forced to provide something that people cannot or will not do themselves.

The fact is that our liberal friends obviously understand that.  Otherwise they would not be trying to change the subject on ObamaCare.   When they say that the issue on Catholic employers is a question of women's reproductive rights, they are saying that reproductive rights are only possible if employers are forced to provide a service that costs $9 per month.  That is a joke.  We are talking here about three lattes a month or a couple of beers.  We are talking about ten percent of the cost of a fully supported iPhone with voice plan and data plan.  Our liberal friends understand very well that they are trespassing on First Amendment rights.  That is why they are changing the subject.

We know what is going on here.  Since time immemorial, politicians have bought the votes of the credulous by offering them free services to be paid for with other peoples' money.  In a way, the smaller this free service, the better.  After all, who can object to the cost of a mere $9 a month.  How cheap can you get?

But the fact is that government is force.  Politics is the threat of force.   And every subsection in a thousand page bill is another little instance where the life of humans as social beings is replaced by government force.  In each case we are talking about something that is removed from flexible social cooperation and replaced by rigid police force.

I suppose that many provisions in any thousand-page bill are not there because of some pressing need, but are really there as a demonstration of power by some organized special interest.  Attention must be paid!  Thus, if you are a feminist, you want to make sure that the nation's comprehensive and mandatory universal health program includes your big issues--contraception and abortion--otherwise you are demonstrating to the world that you don't really count as a power in the land; you are irrelevant.  When the special interests are sitting around the table, it matters that your issue gets added to the grand bargain that reflects your relative weight in the councils of power.

But every new addition to the power of government adds to the phalanx of force, and it diminishes the "autonomy and dignity of the individual."  It also diminishes the autonomy and dignity of all subsidiary institutions of social cooperation below the level of government that imposes its new rule of force.

In the Bush years our liberal friends sometimes became hysterical over the intolerable compulsions that Bush's policy laid upon them.  They do not seem to be so sensitive to the dangers of government force now that they are doing the forcing.

It is wonderful that the Catholic Church has woken up from a sound sleep and manned the ramparts of freedom.  Here's another wonderful thought.  How about we now discuss the forced confinement of children in government custodial facilities from age 7 to age 18?  What does that do to the "autonomy and dignity of the individual" child and its individual parent?

Misunderstanding Charles Murray

What is it about liberals, anyway?  Why did they gang-tackle Charles Murray on The Bell Curve? And why does liberal Joan Walsh of Salon miss the point of Murray's latest book, Coming Apart? 


I suppose it's because she sees everything through a lens of social justice, in that everyone's position in society is a consequence of white racism, or a consequence of how much support they get from government.

The point of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 is that the white working class are suffering many of the same pathologies as the minority underclass: a decline in marriage, an increase in single parenthood, a detachment from community organizations, and a retreat among single men from work.

The reason Murray made his book exclusively about whites was that he wanted to detach from his argument any question of racism.  Folks like Joan Walsh live by the accusation of racism.  If brown people are doing badly, it must be due to racism. The argument that Charles Murray wants to make is that if the white working class is experiencing increases in social pathology then something other than racism must be at work.  Maybe it is government programs!

Joan Walsh lives by the notion that a Democratic majority of "the young, women, lower-income blacks, Latinos and Asians" is waiting to take over--if not this year then next.  The suffering white working class could throw a wrench in the works if it votes Republican in 2012, and that would be a pity.  And in due course, social justice activists will have to pay attention to their grievances.

The forces of social justice have always looked out for the rights and singular insights of minority populations. We’re about to have a new one to think about.

And that's even though "low income white people have benefited from the long legal and extralegal history of racial subjugation and white supremacy".

Actually Walsh is wrong about that Democratic majority.  If it forms, it would be the young, single women, all blacks, lower-income Latinos and lower-income Asians.  And I'm not so sure about the young, since they have been disproportionately affected by Obamanomics and might be having second thoughts about hope and change.

But Walsh does make a telling point about white seniors.  The most Republican counties are the ones that get most federal payments, "crop subsidies, housing assistance, and Medicaid payments".  In other words, Republicans are all on welfare.   Tea Party supporters, for instance, have no intention of giving up their Medicare, yet that is just what Paul Ryan and the Republican Party want to do; they want to end Medicare as we know it.

Will white seniors continue to support the Republican Party if it takes away their Medicare and replaces it with a fixed subsidy?  Maybe that would be the issue that creates a Democratic majority.

But that would turn Joan Walsh's social justice notions on their head, because a Republican reform of Medicare would make wealthy seniors--like me--pay more.  So she is hoping for a realignment based upon Republicans making Medicare more progressive?

No wonder she doesn't get the point of Coming Apart.

People Who Live to Intimidate

Looking at India from the outside you appreciate the venality and the brutality of politics.

There's the Indian Railways that seems to rate an editorial in the newspaper every couple of days about its failure to improve safety, its failure to invest, its failure to turn a profit. Committee after committee reports and nothing is done. I wonder why the railways only seem to carry passengers. Perhaps the railway bureaucrats aren't interested in freight.

As we drive into the big cities, there seem to be endless important buildings announcing themselves as the Institute for Agricultural Basket Weaving, or some such, and you wonder: can India really afford to be flushing money down the toilet on useless bureaucracy just like in the US? The trouble is that developing countries seem to think that they have to mirror the west to count as serious nations.

Just how serious can serious be? There are wind farms in every state we have visited. I'm sure they are just as useless as the wind farms in the US. But I am sure that their crony wind-farm capitalists have benefited many an Indian politician.

Today, February 28, is a one-day general strike by Indian unions protesting rising prices and violations of the labor laws.

Yesterday there was a piece in the paper about Prime Minister Singh accusing anti-nuclear protesters in Tamil Nadu of getting support from foreign NGOs in the US and Sweden. The protest leaders react with outrage. Oh come on, fellahs. If you don't take money and advice from the anti-nuclear chaps in the west you would be fools. Meanwhile Tamil Nadu has daily electrical blackouts while two newly-constructed nuclear units sit idle. The protest leaders say they are determined to fight for the grievances of the fisher folk near the nuclear plant.

I'm trying to think about what these radical suits want. Right now in the US they are "auctioning" off the house of Wells Fargo Bank CEO. And Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is on the TV every day whacking evil Republicans. Meanwhile the left is protesting "workfare" in the UK as "slavery" and intimidating the corporations that signed up to hire welfare recipients into quitting the program.

What is it about these people? I suppose it's all about the intimidation. If they can intimidate someone, they will. Muslims excluded, of course, because Muslims don't believe in letting western radical suits, or anyone else, into intimidating them.

Intimidation. Government is force, and politics is the threat of force. So anyone in politics is someone that likes to intimidate.

Bad Science Fails Like Bad Business

Our friends in the mainstream media were eager to regale us with stories of the failure of Enron and other overleveraged corporations in the 2001-02 recession.  It just showed, they said, the need for robust government regulation.

Actually, it showed nothing of the sort.  It showed, if anything, that crony capitalist outfits like Enron that seek the favor of the great and the good are a menace.  Enron was also making a big play in carbon offset trading.

Our liberal friends are a lot quieter about corporate corruption when we are talking about bailouts for auto companies.

The point is that, when things go south, and in this vale of tears they often do, then you will find out who are the fakes and who are the real thing.

The current moral meltdown is the FakeGate affair in which global-warming enthusiast Dr. Peter Gleick seems to have obtained internal documents from The Heartland Foundation and maybe faked an additional document to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing statement.  (That's what the government employees talked about in The Mikado when they had been ordered to produce an execution).

That's what a lot of folks do when they realize that their hopes and dreams are going up in smoke. That is why J.P. Morgan told the House of Representatives a century ago that the big thing in loaning out money was the character of the person seeking a loan.

Morgan knew, as a veteran of life as well as numerous railroad bankruptcies, that when things get rough, a lot of good people get tempted to cheat.

Let us turn this around.  When you see a lot of cheating going on then you know that things are going wrong.

Everyone makes a mistake.  Everyone misreads the weather forecast.  Anyone can hit an iceberg.  But not everyone shoulders aside the women and children in order to get a seat in a lifeboat.

But we are getting close to Goldfinger's Rule in the climate racket.  Climategate, you may say, was Happenstance.  Fakegate, you may claim, is Coincidence.  But one more warmist-gate means Enemy Action, Mr. Bond.

On the Road to Ooty

To get from Coimbatore in South India up to Ooty, the old hill-station for the Madras Presidency, you climb up a fierce switchback road into the Nilgiri Hills, famous for its tea plantations. The grade is steep, the switchbacks are endless, with some hairpin bends so tight that buses must go into the right lane, in the path of opposing traffic, in order to make the bend. Sometimes there's a truck coming in the opposite direction and it doesn't stop in time to give the bus the full use of both lanes. So everyone toots their horn; someone gets out and directs traffic, and eventually the truck backs up, the bus makes the turn, and the great hustle and bustle of the Indian roads resumes.

And what a bustle it is. There are buses everywhere carrying people from anywhere to everywhere. There are the ubiquitious Indian trucks, three axle jobs, and usually dreadfully underpowered by US standards. But hey, what's the problem, the traffic on the National Highways seldom goes faster than 80 kph. Then there are cars darting in and out: they generally want to pass the slow trucks and buses, but there isn't always room to pass if tuk-tuks and motor-cycles are coming in the opposite direction. No problem, you just toot your horn and expect the motor-cycles to jam over to give you room. In the cities, of course, the motor-cycles form a flood tide of traffic, forever flowing around and in-between the bigger four-wheeled vehicles.

India is on the move; everyone is driving or riding somewhere, and if not they are building something. Construction is ubiquitous and construction materials litter the side of the road.  Advertising appears everywhere; if large diameter pipe is left very long, it soon sports advertising.

Highway construction is ripping swathes through the countryside. Houses are condemned and torn down: sometimes a building only partly intrudes on the right-of-way and is only partly demolished. Culverts and bridges are built right across the existing road and the traffic flows off to the side and around the new concrete structures under construction. When it's all built, each National Highway is a four-lane divided highway, with plenty of at-grade crossings. But it is no longer an upgraded country lane meandering up and down and around, but a real engineered highway with steady grades, embankments and cuttings: that unmistakable mechanical Newtonian look and feel. At the toll plazas one of the many signboards lists the dignitaries exempt from payment.

When we get up to Ooty, after negotiating the hair-pin bends and the trucks and the buses and the cars and the motor-cycles and the vehicles stopped by the side of the road unloading something, we find that the old hill-station is a major tourist destination for Indians. Just the place for a weekend getaway from Bangalore or Mumbai. And when tourist season fades during the monsoon it's time for honeymoons--for yes, Indians like getting married in the rain, as Monsoon Wedding testified a while back.

Our guide tells us that Indians like to have their photos taken with western tourists, and when we go into the Ooty Botanical Gardens we understand what he means. Young Indian men just love to get Marjorie and me into a group photo with them and their pals. Sometimes one of them takes the picture; sometimes the guide does it.

Marjorie spies two twenty-ish girls wearing exactly the same black and white pattern. Are they sisters? No, just friends, and it's time for photos all round again.

This is a glorious time in India. A rising tide is floating all boats, and India is full of its possibilities.

America's Verdict on Obama

When Jonah Goldberg wrote Liberal Fascism back in 2008, liberals blew it off; they weren't interested in engaging its arguments. It wasn't surprising. Liberal Fascism said what conservatives have been saying about liberals for ages. It said that there was a fascistic streak in liberals that goes back to William James and the "moral equivalent of war."

Liberals want to mobilize the nation for great tasks, but not for war. They want to mobilize us into a civilian army to fight the good fight for education, for helping the poor, for health care.  Specifically, they want us to follow their lead and pay for their plans for the welfare state. And anyone that doesn't follow is a rotten egg, expressed more elegantly these days as a racist, sexist, or homophobe.

There is a point to the "moral equivalent of war." From time to time, we the American people need to mobilize to respond to some great national emergency that is not war related: Think Hurricane Katrina. But health care, education, welfare, superannuation, the great liberal programs that are bankrupting the nation, are not national emergencies. They are the normal challenges of life that people come together and solve, generation by generation, in social cooperation. These tasks do not require extraordinary mobilization--as if for war--and they do not get solved well under conditions of compulsion. They are the normal complex interactions of the great panorama of the challenges of life, so they are unlikely to respond well to the one-size-fits-all strategy of war, moral or otherwise.

You could say, a century and a half ago in the middle of the chaotic transition from agricultural society to industrial society, that the emergency required decisive action. But not today. That is why liberals use the language of justice more often than war to justify their extraordinary powers. They say that people are poor because other people are rich, because of greedy bankers and corporate greed--or exploitation or inadequate education or anything that comes to mind.

The big problem, and it gets bigger all the time, is that every time our liberal friends capture an area of social cooperation and place it under the yoke of compulsion they wither the natural instincts and virtues of the American people for unforced, willing and voluntary social cooperation.

In the 19th century, foreign critics noted the extraordinary talent for cooperation in the American people. Whenever Americans saw a need, remarked Tocqueville, they formed an association to tackle it. But the modern, liberal approach is that whenever liberals see a need, they agitate for a government program to solve it. The difference between the old method and the new method is the difference between black and white. But it is a mistake to critique the liberal approach to society with the normal shibboleths of "justice," "corruption," and "abuse of power." The problem is bigger than that. The result of the liberal project, its culture of compulsion and regimentation, of enlisting the whole nation, as if it were an army, in its moral projects, is a vast human tragedy that is tearing our society out by the roots and that withers the tendrils of social nutrition and individual moral growth.

Now of course, we have Charles Murray's latest, Coming Apart, which puts numbers and percentages on the indictment served up by Jonah Goldberg. When we talk about "coming apart" we mean precisely the loss of social capital, the goodwill and willing cooperation, that is the unintended consequence of each new liberal program and each new ratchet of the culture of compulsion.

This year, 2012, Americans are getting a momentous opportunity to vote "yea" or "nay" on the liberal project. Right now, of course, everyone is talking about the weakness of the Republican candidates on the one hand, or the utter cynicism of the Obama FY13 budget on the other. People want the president to be defeated for the right reasons, and they despair of the prospects for a decisive rejection of the president and all his works.

Politics is seldom as clear-cut as that. Just as Al Capone was not convicted of racketeering but income tax evasion, the great liberal project of social regimentation will not be defeated purely on its merits but most likely upon subsidiary issues. Maybe it will be defeated just because people don't like liberals and especially don't like Obama.

But those of us that believe in American exceptionalism have faith that the American people will deliver their verdict on Obama, and it will not be Four More Years.

New Federal Budget up on usgovernmentspending.com

So now, a week late, the president has submitted his FY13 budget. And of course usgovernmentspending.com/current_budget has all the data.

But what does it mean?

There's the higher deficit, $1.3 trillion for the election year of 2012 instead of the sub-trillion deficit budgeted for FY12 just a year ago. But we expected that, from the sub-par growth in this sub-par recovery.

There's the gigantic contribution of the Fed's QE2, a convenient $1.6 trillion of public debt that was bought by the Federal Reserve System in FY11. Goodness knows what the impact of that will be in a year or so when credit demand picks up and the $1.6 trillion gets converted into $5 trillion or so in money and credit.

If you are looking for a report card on Obama spending, you can see it in the Estimated vs. Actual for FY11, the spending year that ended last September 30.  You can see the estimates for FY11 for the major functions starting in the FY07 budget.  You can see the sudden jump of about $80 billion a year in Health Care, the $40 billion a year in Education, and the $100 billion a year in Welfare.  Oh, and the $70 billion a year in Other Spending.  Pretty soon we'll be talking about real spending increases!

The big story, of course, is that the president has punted on restraining spending. He's done nothing about the entitlements, especially Medicare, which is already hemorrhaging $280 billion a year over its payroll tax revenues--unless you consider the smoke and mirrors and bureaucratic trick ponies in ObamaCare as serious attempts to address the Medicare problem.

It's frustrating for everyone, liberal and conservative, that the nation is drifting on down the river towards the waterfall, and nothing is being done to fix the government's finances. But that is politics. Politics is not really a system to compromise or settle anything. Politics is power, and the national political power today is contested. That's what we mean by the culture war, by "50-50 nation," by the liberal complaint about the loss of civility and all the other terms used to describe the stalemate in national politics. We will keep drifting downriver until we really go over the waterfall. In the emergency, the question of how much in taxes and how much in spending will be resolved in a great trial of political strength.

Until then Republicans will refuse to agree to new taxes and Democrats will refuse to agree to "cuts." But one thing is certain. When the crisis comes, it won't just be "minorities and women hardest hit." It will be ordinary people across the spectrum who will be hurt, from the working stiff wanting a decent wage, to the college graduate looking for corporations that will hire them to the retiree trying to get a decent interest rate out of his lifetime of savings, to the government beneficiary suddenly finding out that all the old scams don't work any more.

It's such a shame.  Because if we cut back the power and the spending of government all Americans would get a better deal.