The New EERA

My point is that, whatever we are fighting about on the front lines of politics, the real issues can be found by stepping back a bit.

In my weekly oped, I announce the new era of the welfare state smashup.  The welfare state smashup will occur because, the promises that have been made cannot be delivered.  What is more, they should not be delivered.

It's a new EERA, and I think that the defining issues will be Entitlements, Economy, Race, and Abortion.

On Entitlements, we must realize that, not only are entitlements eating up the budget, they are eating up our society.  The great issue of any society, from a family to a nation state, is freeloading.  The benefits of society are enormous, there is no such thing as an "independent" human.  We would all perish without society.  But equally, for each of us there is an eternal temptation to ride on the labor of others.  One of the central tasks of religion, according to Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct, is to control freeloading, by naming and shaming and, if that doesn't work, with divine justice.  But the welfare state creates a springtime for freeloaders, encouraging people to define themselves as victims that cannot be expected to contribute.  It dissolves the notion that we should all try to contribute as much as we can, rather that try to get away with as little as we can. or as beneficiaries who deserve to get back what they put in.  Then there is the systems aspect of entitlements, the idea that you can set up an administrative system that defines for all time what people should contribute and what they should receive.  Such a mechanical system is bound to fail.

On Economy, we must stop the government trying to game the economy.  No doubt there is a place for the government's system of force, but if we have learned one thing over the last two centuries of the industrial age it is that the government's attempts to second guess the market has almost always failed.  On the credit system, governments have again and again debauched the currency and stolen the savings of ordinary people.  On the market system, governments have again and again favored special interests and economic chimeras over the natural discovery process of the market.  And while the government is tending its cronies, the wind farmers and the government employee unions, the ordinary fraudsters and bunco artists thrive.  Why on earth did Bernie Madoff not get shut down by the regulators?

On Race, we must stop the monstrous betrayal of the civil rights revolution.  I can understand that the Democrats may have thought, after the civil rights acts, that they deserved to hand out some goodies to their supporters, but the hypocrisy of quotas and "diversity" 50 years later is an outrage, and the way that Democrats have ghettoized blacks into voting 90-10 for Democrats can only have been achieved by naked appeals to race.  What the civil rights revolution was supposed to curb in the racist South.

On Abortion, liberals need to rethink.  My prediction is that abortion is going to become the great moral issue of the age.  Think back to slavery.  Back in the 18th century, Europeans were doing a fine business in the slave plantation business.  It brought sugar to the breakfast tables of Europe, and built great mansions in the country.  But then the Quakers decided that it was wrong.  A century later, slavery was dead.  Today, we can agree that abortion is, after a fashion, tremendously liberating for women.  They do not have to be a slave to their reproductive role.  That's the good side.  But there is a cost to the convenience of abortion.  It cheapens the central business of life, which is reproduction.  There is a reason why women and children have been made sacred and set apart.  It is because we forget the central importance of reproduction at our peril.  When we see the child per woman rate down at 1.3 in Western Europe, when 2.1 is replacement rate, we know that something is wrong.  That something is the marginalization of sex, marriage, childbearing and childraising.  We talk about careers for women as more important than children for women.

We humans are social animals, but we are also easily distracted from any tasks and run off at tangents.  Instead of concentrating on the job at hand we run off into the weeds.  It is the job of the great social institutions to turn us back to our tasks.  On Entitlements it is to realize that the great social engagements of health care, education, and welfare cannot be shoved aside as mechanical administrative programs.  On the Economy it is to realize that the economy is something to which we must all contribute before we can get our reward.  On Race it is to refocus on what unites us rather than what divides us.  On Abortion it is to realize that our central creative task is to produce children not great products, great cities, or great works of art.

We can either re-channel ourselves to our central human task, or we can drain away into the sand, like every other civilization in history.  Our choice.

The Politics of the Smashup

I mourned for a day, but now I see the future.  The era of conservative reform is over and the era of the smashup is about to begin.

For fifty years conservatives have been offering a way to veer gently off the folly of the administrative welfare state by limiting the expansion of government.  But with the confirmation of Obamacare, President Obama has welded shut the door of the iron cage.  We are now trapped in the cage until we can smash it up and escape.

The four walls of the iron cage are government pensions, government health care, government education and government welfare.  The cage is designed, whether its designers understand or not, to replace the natural human instincts of social engagement with the mechanical steel of the administrative bureaucracy and the rulebook.

Karl Marx may have been the most unpleasant man of his generation, and he may have been dead wrong about the "immiseration" of the working class, but he had one thing right.  When the economy changes, as it did in 1760 with the textile revolution and again in the 1820s with the railroad revolution, then necessarily society changes too.  The old elite inevitably succumbs as the culture and the politics change and new men come forward.

So here we have the death of the old world of "good jobs at good wages" that we witness in the failure of General Motors and the devastation they say you can see from the Acela is it runs through Camden and Philadelphia.  And anyway, the workers hated those jobs.  We see the new world of smaller, agile companies that will demolish the big business model, and we see the prospect of on-line education that will utterly transform the big education model.  We know that big welfare is a total failure.  And here's my nickel that says that big health care is on the cusp of a revolution.

If the Economy of the Bigs is on its way out, then society itself is going to change.  So then what will happen to the biggest big of all, our modern big government?  Who knows?  But one thing is for sure: It will change.

It will change because it will run out of money.  Inflation, debt default, financial repression, confiscation, riots in the streets: Greece and Argentina writ large.  It's all a real shame, because women and minorities will be hardest hit.

Forget the Tactics and Messaging

Reading the postmortems on the 2012 election I see a lot of people worrying about tactics and messaging.  We didn't appeal in the right way with the right candidate with the right messages.

All true, but don't forget that the Prussians won the Franco-Prussian war despite some severe tactical mistakes.  They won because they had the better strategy; they had their larger formations in the right place.

That's why I believe we should take a deep breath and step back. The larger question is the question of the administrative welfare state.  Is it a social and political system that is: just, practical, sustainable.

The obvious answer is that the welfare state is profoundly unjust, for it merely instantiates the age old rule of the stronger over the weaker.  Welfare state politics is nothing more than the mobilizing of regime supporters with the promise of loot.

The welfare state is impractical because it does not have the bandwidth to manage society and its millions of transactions.  The administrative method can work for an army, although only just, because an army has a limited goal and it frankly admits that it uses its soldiers as cannon fodder.  In an economy and a society, we have the idea that the ends do not justify the means.  It is the means that matter and that means we cannot use the administrative method which treats everyone in its structure as a means.

Finally, the welfare state is profoundly unsustainable because, like all political systems, it cannot respond to change.  Politics is a human way of resisting change, of trying to set things up for all eternity.  That is a mirage.  A wise political system limits the power of government because it knows that it cannot anticipate every need and every accident.  We have a system for that; it is called capitalism.

In these days the world looks very dark for conservative ideas.  President Obama has cunningly characterized the utter bankruptcy of liberal ideas as President Bush's fault.  He can do that because when a Democratic president says something the mainstream media do not insert those snappish little paragraphs that begin "But critics say..."

But now the president must "do something" about the budget and about the economy.  My guess is that, whatever he does, nobody will be happy.

As Winston Churchill is reputed to have said, America always does the right thing. In the end.

End of an Illusion

The basic idea behind modern conservatism has been that we can persuade the American people to move away from their client relationship to the administrative welfare state, and build a different society, one based on freedom and free association, in particular the free associations of civil society.

The historic reelection of President Obama means that the conservative dream has become an illusion.  With the confirmation of Obamacare we now have in the United States a four-sided iron cage of administrative confinement.  For old age we have government pensions, for health care we have government health care, to educate the children we have government education, and for the relief of the poor we have government welfare.  And we will have all of that that until it breaks.

It will break, that we know.  The one great lesson of history is that people don't give up their free stuff without a fight, so governments like ours are forced to give out more and more out of a dwindling "stash."

The great blessing of the free market is that it offers humans a way of adjusting their behavior to the needs of their fellows.  If you have a job, or if your company makes a profit, it means that you are rendering valuable services to your fellow humans.

But government is different.  It is a system of force.  It is, always and everywhere, an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to provide for its supporters.  In the past these supporters have usually been a warrior elite, but in our day the government's supporters are the entitlement program beneficiaries and the government employees.

In The Great Wave David Hackett Fischer has described how an age of rising prices ends.  It ends in social collapse, in inflation, in disease, war, and famine.  Fischer isn't a very good economist, and still less a political philosopher.  But he can shovel out the facts.  In each era of rising prices governments start to live beyond their means, and they resort to borrowing and inflation.  They do that because to disappoint their supporters and reduce their stipends would deny the government's very reason for being.  And anyway, people denied their benefits usually resort to the streets.

Program beneficiaries are like NRA members who say you can get their guns out of their cold dead hands.  It is not just that they are selfish: we are all selfish.  The beneficiaries of the welfare state have organized their lives around their benefits.  They are, as they self-describe, people on "fixed incomes."  They don't propose, and maybe cannot, "do something" about their situation if it heads south, except to demonstrate and riot.

In our case projected government health care costs alone are going to eat the federal budget.  They cannot be paid and they will not be paid.  The same probably goes for the national debt.  We have three states already, California, Illinois, and probably New York, that are going broke.  With the reelection of President Obama they are probably going to get bailouts, meaning that they will not be forced to reduce spending.  Then we have the hyper-regulation of the Obama state that will probably keep business hunkered down on its capital strike.

Is there hope?  Of course there is.  We conservatives can continue to work on what comes after.  After the present welfare state of the educated liberals and their clients runs out of money and blood.

Our chance may not come for a generation.  Of maybe it will come in four years.  Who knows?

Paradoxically, the solution to our problems has probably received its most penetrating analysis from the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School.  It is they that realized that all instrumental reason, whether used in government or business, leads to domination, and a triumph of system over people.  The solution, Juergen Habermas realized, was a balance between our modern rational systems and the human-all-to-human lifeworld.  Or as we conservatives say, civil society, where free people in free association join with their fellow citizens face to face to meet their social needs and solve their social problems.

Today's the Day

Today's the day on which we Americans decide if Barack Obama's huge gamble pays off.

Back in 2006, if you remember, Democrats decided that they had learned from the Bush 2004 victory and they ran a lot of moderates for Congress.  It was a great success and the Dems picked up 30 seats in the House.

Then they ran the healer Barack Obama in 2008 and America voted for its first black president in the hope that he would end the centuries of race war.  The Democrats also picked up 25 seats in the House.

But President Obama did not govern as the healer.  He governed as a man in a hurry.  Galvanized by the almost filibuster-proof Senate, he decided to go for broke and pass every item on the liberal wish list while there was still time.  He passed a stimulus bill, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank.

The American people were outraged and in 2010 sent 63 more Republicans to the House of Representatives, including a Tim Scott, a black insurance agent to represent Charleston, SC, and Allen West to represent a district in SE Florida.

The question today is whether we return the president to office, in which case his signature Obamacare will probably endure, or whether we counterattack, and roll back his ambitious effort to "transform" America.

If the president gets reelected then he will go down in history as one of the most daring and successful politicians ever.  If he fails then he will be dismissed as just another reckless fool that tried to take a bridge too far.

Of course, beyond the issue of the president and his daring gamble for the laurels of history, there is this.

Politics is civil war by other means.  The idea is to take advantage of your opportunities, but not so that your opponents decide that their only option is civil war.  The way you do this is, as Noam Chomsky puts it, by manufacturing consent.

When you want to pass a great health care bill you figure that you have two options.  You could go for broke with a bare partisan majority and create a head of rebellion in the opposition.  Or you could broker a compromise and pass a "bipartisan consensus."  Then you can argue that your bill was a "bipartisan" bill and that only a rump of extremists voted against it.

President Obama went the bare partisan majority route and rammed his programs through in the teeth of opposition from the American people.  I suspect that his decision will echo down the decades to come in rancor and conflict.

The result, of course, is likely to be sovereign debt default and the collapse of the welfare state, and maybe worse.

Women and minorities will be hardest hit, as usual.

But then, that's what usually happens when transformative leaders start transforming.

At Election Time, Government is Force

I confess I was a little shocked last week scanning the links at RealClearPolitics.com.  The liberals were all extolling the wonders of government.  Yeah, they said.  You sure need big government when Nature comes calling.

Of course, everyone is in favor of big government where their pet project is concerned.  Conservatives think that, on the view that the job of government is to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic, that the armed forces and the police are a good thing.

Liberals disagree.  They are paranoid about Pentagon generals, and watch local police forces intensely for any sign that they are committing police brutality on the poor and the marginalized.  But they are all in favor of the enforcement of environmental laws.  Because that will save the planet.

So there's real agreement in America.  Everyone is paranoid about the use of government force for things they don't like.

The question is: to what extent are we willing to reduce the use of government force on our pet projects in order to accommodate the fears of our friends in the other party?

Conservatives say that's why we need limited government and the separation of powers.

And I say that's why we need to go beyond that to the Greater Separation of Powers, to keep a separation between the great power sectors of society, the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

We already agree that there should be a separation between church and state, between the political and moral/cultural sectors, except that we violate it every day with government schools instructing the young and government support for the arts.  Of course, the truth is that you cannot separate politics from morality and culture, because morality and culture inform the decisions we make in politics.  But we can at least try to get the politicians and the moralists from getting in bed together.

The next great challenge is to separate economy and state: the political and the economic sectors.  This is particularly a pressing issue for the modern age, because government and business have grown from cottage industries into great and powerful systems that threaten to dominate and run over everything in their path.

It was Marx who first made the power of business into a scandal.  He used the tools of the classical economists, their confused ideas of exchange value and use value, to contrast the difference between "social labor" and "abstract labor," of work performed face-to-face and work bought and sold on the labor market.

But it took a new generation of Marxists, the Frankfurt School, to realize that it wasn't just business that threatened the social nature of humans, it was instrumental reason and its systems.  We are talking here about both business systems and government systems and their universal tendency to domination.

Then Juergen Habermas developed the ideas of Husserl and Heidegger into his system-and-lifeworld model.  System is the mechanical world of businesses and governments, of rules and subordination.  In Husserl's conception "The ‘lifeworld’ is a grand theatre of objects variously arranged in space and time relative to perceiving subjects, is already-always there, and is the “ground” for all shared human experience."

The problem for humans is that, unless we restrain the big and powerful systems they will dominate and sterilize the lifeworld.  That's because the systems want to reduce everything to their system.  So we have government, the system of force, and economy, the system of money.  We also have organized religion, the system of faith.  And each of them threatens us with its power.

Conservatives have a parallel view to Habermas and his systems vs. lifeworld view.  We believe in the limitation of powers, that is the restraining of the systems.  And we believe in the protection of "civil society" which is pretty close to the German concept of lifeworld or Lebenswelt.

But here we are, with an momentous election, determining whether we go full tilt towards an uber-systems government with bigger and more powerful systems.  Or whether we start in a different direction, de-privileging the systems and trying to find a new balance between our powerful systems of government and business and our essential humanness?

The thing about systems, of  course, is that they work really well right up until the moment they break.

Obama: Breakthrough or Bridge Too Far?

Let us suppose that Mitt Romney wins by 3-5 percent next Tuesday and gets a Republican Senate.  For President Obama and his left-liberal supporters, will it all have been worth it?

As John Podhoretz opines, you have to hand it to the president.  When he had the power he rammed through as much of his left-wing agenda as he could cram through Congress.  And as we know, it is easy to create new spending, and almost impossible to roll it back.

In his first 16 months as president, from his inauguration through the signing into law of ObamaCare, Obama arguably altered the trajectory of the United States in a manner that neither Mitt Romney (should he become president) or the president who succeeds Obama after his second term concludes in 2017 will find easy to redirect — if he or she even wishes to.

It starts with the big numbers, the $700 billion of TARP.  After that, the $800 billion of stimulus and supposed $1 trillion of Obamacare is just more of the same.

That TARP program utterly changed the terms of the Washington debate about the economic crisis and the nature of the government’s role, especially since its colossal size barely slowed its rapid adoption into law. The voices raised against it were basically dismissed as being on the fringe. The system needed an expression of confidence and an explosion of liquidity.

 So the question is whether the Obama interlude is a replay of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society when liberals seized an opportunity to enlarge government power and reach by handing out "free stuff" in a way that could not be reversed.

My guess is both Yes and No.  Yes, Obama has put government deeper into health care, and that will not change.  Paradoxically, his Obamacare was designed in part to try to put a lid on Medicare, the government's biggest problem, by instituting back-door rationing.  So Obama would hasten the time when the whole government machine shudders to a halt.  If the Romneys roll back Obamacare and reform Medicare they might actually make the entitlement program last another ten extra years.

But the basic problem is that people will not give up on their entitlements until the whole system crashes, as I wrote about yesterday.  When it comes to their Medicare, people are like the members of the NRA.  Like the NRA member's proverbial gun, you can get my Medicare from my cold dead hand.

People will only give up on their entitlements when the government goes broke, wrecks the currency, and defaults on the debt.  And maybe not even then.

That is America's real problem.