The Progressive Era End-game

Probably there was no way for America but the Federal Reserve and the income tax.  "Everyone" was for it back in 1913.  It's what a modern country had to have.  Good central banking and a solid base of taxation to fund the social insurance programs invented in Germany by Bismarck.

But now we are approaching the end-game, according to Jay Zawatsky, natural gas guy and econ. professor.  It's either back to capitalism or the neo-fascism of Venezuela.

Given the power of the media and the inability of the current generation of Americans to withstand even minimal pain, the more likely new order will be one of increasing financial repression. 

He means that the Fed will keep printing money and maintain its zero-interest rate policy.  The ensuing inflation will hit "those who spend significant amounts of their income on food and energy."  Minorities and women hardest hit.

Zawatsky divides the nation into two opposing coalitions thus.  The Democrat coalition includes:

1. The 1 percent financial elite.
2. The 50 percent on the government dole.

The Republican side includes:

1. The top 24 percent (after the 1 percent) business owners and non-union employers.
2. The second 25 percent, the middle class with aspirations to the 24 percent.

Zawatsky sees the top 1 percent, the financial elite as the villains that "control the political elite through billions in direct and indirect campaign contributions," but I think he is naive.  He is buying into the left's "robber baron" narrative.

The financial elite and the crony capitalists are people paying tribute to the political elite.  It's important to understand this.  The modern ruling class is the class of educated progressives.  They rule through their ideas and through the free stuff with which they buy the votes of the bottom 50 percent.  They offer the 1 percent riches and influence in return for their contributions and their ideological support.  Ask yourself the question.  Can the 1 percent make and unmake careers in the political elite?  Not really.  Can the political elite make and unmake reputations and careers in the top 1 percent?  You betcha.

But the top 1 percent lives high on the hog, because they are very useful to the ruling political elite.

Here's another argument.  Over the past 100 years and more, the government has from time to time used the anti-trust laws to read the riot act to the rising big corporation of the time.  In the 1900s it was Standard Oil.  In the 1930s it was electric utilities and a nice union bill to tame the auto companies.  In the 1970s it was the anti-trust case against IBM.  In the 1990s it was anti-trust against Microsoft.  Now the target is Google.

What is the common thread through these actions?  These were powerful businesses growing to enormous size that were not much interested in government.  They made their money just by being first and best.  

But, as these corporations all learned, to paraphrase Trotsky:  "You may not be interested in government, but government is interested in you."  Government is force; politics is power.  When politicians see a potential rival they act to cut the rival off at the knees.

But back to the future of America.

The key to the future is what happens after the crash, what happens the day after the entitlement programs fail and the "increasing financial repression" fails.

On that day conservatives better be ready with an answer that will appeal to the broad majority of the frightened and desperate American people.  Or it's Argentina/Venezuela time.

Economics and Christianity

Everyone is eager to get Jesus on their side.  Even secular liberals.  They like to assert the opposition of Jesus to the money-changers in the Temple and the message of His Sermon on the Mount to show that Jesus was a socialist.

On the other hand there is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which the German Max Weber noticed the development of the idea of "work as a calling" and its connection with the Protestant Reformation among the bourgeoisie in the early modern period.

On this reading of Christianity, God wanted Christians to love Jesus and work hard.  By the time that John Wesley came along, taking Christianity to Industrial Revolution mechanics and the saintly Dinah Morris of Adam Bede, the idea had boiled down to "work all you can, save all you can, give all you can."

In politics religion started out in the US as the water that politicians swam in, but by 1900 the parties had divided out so that, in the North, the Republicans were Protestant and the Democrats were Catholic.  Today, of course, the Republicans are the religious party and the Democrats are the secular party.

So it isn't surprising that Christians of all kinds are coalescing in the Republican Party and bringing their  concerns with them.  Liberals have not been slow to label this movement as the Religious Right, which they mean as a pejorative.

The thing about political parties is that they are coalitions.  The Republican Party is a coalition of six different kinds of conservatism, according to Ken Blackwell.  They include:

1. Social conservatives
2. Christian conservatives
3. Second Amendment conservatives
4. Economic conservatives
5. Philosophical conservatives
6. National security conservatives

The thing about being in a coalition is that you start to listen to the other folks in the coalition.  Economic, philosophical conservatives like me start to listen to Christian conservatives.  Hey, these guys are getting the business from liberals just like me.  That's why economic conservatives have been going pro-life over the years.

And the opposite is true.  Christian conservatives are signing on to basic Reaganite economics.   They are deciding that big government is not just hostile to them as Christians and as families but as workers and savers.

Here's an example of what I mean: the video series Economics for Everybody produced by R. C Sproul Jr. and Thomas Purifoy.  There's a two hour version on YouTube.

What do Sproul and Purifoy have to say?  That God calls us to stewardship, work as a calling.  That government is all about force, punishing evildoers.  Then they dive into basic economics: prices, private property, division of labor.  And how only a government with a capitalist economy allows people to produce for their families and to worship under freedom.  Then it's on to the redistributive state and its two poles, the welfare state and the corporate state.

Nothing remarkable here.  Christianity began two thousand years ago in the Axial Age when religions were all responding to the emergence of the "responsible self," the idea that the individual could make a difference in the world.  Responsible selves were differentiating themselves out of the undifferentiated "we" and asking what their individual role is in this world, this universe.

On this view, of course, the welfare state is a regression, turning the clock back to the age before the emergence of the responsible self.  On this view you identify yourself by race, class, gender or sexual preference, not as an "I", a responsible, purposive ego.

My view is that the history of the last 2,000 years is the history of successive groups emerging as responsible selves.  First it was the "rich bitches" like the Indian prince Gautama Siddhartha.  Then it was the city folks in Roman Palestine, then city folks all over the Roman Empire.  Then it was the early modern bourgeoisie, then the industrial mechanics.  Now, of course, in Pentecostalism, we are seeing Christianity breaking out in the favelas of Latin America and the shanty towns of southern Africa.  Then there are the house churches in China.  

But when will the spirit bring the 47 percent out of their welfare state hellhole in these United States, and shake off the chains of victimhood for the apparel of the responsible self?  Then they can join the conservative family as the seventh member, minority conservatives.

When that happens people will speak of the new minority conservatives "as waking from the sleep of ages, to the astonishing idea that they can be responsible beings, called to a life of purpose by a God that will never forsake them."

For that, we can only hope and pray.

The Flap over SI and Christians in the NFL

The guys putting out enthusiast magazines, from sports to what the Brits call "lad" magazines, understand that they are second-class citizens.  They do not count in the best circles as much as folks that write for The New York Times.

So there is always a temptation to correct that with a bit of high-toned liberalism, to show that the magazine's editors really could make it at The New York Times.  But hey, someone has to write for the rubes!  Such an effort is the Mark Oppenheimer piece on Christianity in the NFL, "The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth" in Sports Illustrated.

It's a perfect liberal hit piece on the NFL and Christianity.  Did you know that Christian football players were hypocrites?  That they don't turn the other cheek when the refs make a bad call?  That some people in the NFL are opposed to gay marriage, although not as much as they used to?  And did you know that student "athletes on average score lower than the general student population on tests of moral reasoning, and athletes in 'male, revenue-producing contact sports' are the most deficient of that group"?

Oh no!

It's no surprise that, when a liberal Jew writes an article about Christianity and athletics, he serves up all the usual liberal bromides on religion.  Heck, that's probably in his job description.  And it is delightful for conservatives to get all hot under the collar about it, like genre writer Andrew Klavan.  And fun to have radio host Hugh Hewitt eviscerate Mark Oppenheimer in real time.

Look.  Of course athletes would score lower on moral reasoning.  Modern sports is war for young men by other means.  And a jolly good thing too.  Sports celebrities aren't likely to have exquisitely refined views on all the favorite liberal issues like gay marriage.    But hey, how about an article on Christianity in sports as it relates to Max Weber's notions in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  I would think that a religion that exalts "work as a calling" would go really well with a highly focused activity like top-level professional sports, as bacon goes with eggs.

But who needs that?  Not when you are burnishing your liberal credentials at a sports magazine.  The whole idea is to show that, even though you have to push out the deadly enthusiast stuff week after week, you really long for higher things, just like the chaps and chapettes at The New York Times.

Sorry, I have to close here.  I feel the need to write a long thumb-sucker article about politics and liberal hypocrisy.  How come that liberals, who believe in equality and liberation, are the most snobbish people in America and want to treat everyone as though they were serfs on the liberal manor?

GOP Wobbly on Sequester

Look out below! The House GOP is going wobbly on the "sequester."  That's the modest $1 trillion spending cut agreed to by the president and Congress back in the debt-ceiling deal of August 2011.

You'll remember that the president wants to replace the spending cuts with a "balanced package" of spending cuts and tax increases.  Now that the cuts are looming ahead like linebackers, GOPers representing districts with defense workers want to punt.

The problem for Boehner is that while his members generally support his position, they are unhappy about having to explain these cuts back home. Privately, GOP members say, they never thought that Congress would actually implement these specific cuts.

“We all voted for this, but we thought at the time that both parties wouldn’t want to see this happen, so it’d make us work together,” says a House Republican close to the leadership. “Both parties still don’t want to do this, but it looks like we may be forced to, if the president keeps insisting on new taxes.”

It just shows the basic problem with modern government.  It's easy to talk about small, limited government, but nobody got pitched out of Congress for bringing home the bacon.

Here is Michael Barone praising  House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for his "outside" game, appealing to voters with poster boys and girls.

He spoke not of educational block grants, but of having federal education "follow children" to schools their parents choose.

In a move reminiscent of presidents' State of the Union messages since 1982, he brought along Joseph Kelley, who sent his son, Rashawn, and his three daughters to private schools with money from a District of Columbia voucher program the Obama administration has tried to shut down.

He criticized the Obamacare tax on medical devices by bringing a Baltimore nurse who worked to develop replacement discs for patients with back pain and then needed one herself. She was wearing her cervical collar.

He brought 12-year-old Katie, from Richmond, who has been treated for cancer almost all her life, to illustrate Republican support for funding basic medical research.

See what he is doing?  He is making the case for spending: on block grants, on medical research, you name it.  More goodies, more practical help for people.  And you know what he is trying to do.  He is trying to appeal to women.

Sorry.  But to me, Cantor is playing on the Democrats' turf.  Maybe that's all we Republicans and conservatives can hope to do.  Maybe that's the only way we will ever be able to appeal to women: dangling goodies in their faces for them and their loved ones.

But here is my problem.  If conservatism means anything it is that the health of the nation and society depends on people cooperating and helping each other outside the context of big government handing out goodies.  It means children with a married mother and married father.  It means people clubbing together to make education work.  It means a whole civil society of people working together to help each other.  It emphatically does not mean politicians bribing people for their votes, reducing human society to a scramble for entitlement loot.

Maybe there is nothing that conservative politicians can do, absent a moral revolution that declares the bidding for government loot to be as evil as bidding for human flesh at a slave auction.  After all, plenty of people made lots of money out of slaves for thousands of years without bothering themselves too much about the morality of it.

Nothing will really change until women mount a moral revolution that declares government goodies as stuff that hurts mothers and makes babies grow up into monsters.

So let the spending roll on!

The Root Cause: Fatherlessness

We educated types are pretty strong on the -essness words.  Joblessness, helplessness, and, of course, fatherlessness.

It's all part of the purposelessness of the average beneficiary of the administrative welfare state.  To have a good solid administrative state you need a good supply of the jobless, the helpless and the purposeless.  So you can help them with good solid government program.  And more to follow.

Falstaff knew all about it.  In fact he could ramble on forever on the subject:

A good [government program] hath a two-fold
operation in it. It ascends me into the brain;
dries me there all the foolish and dull and curdy
vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive,
quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and
delectable shapes, which, delivered o'er to the
voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes
excellent wit. The second property of your
excellent [program] is, the warming of the blood;
which, before cold and settled, left the liver
white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity
and cowardice;

And so on.  The problem is that, while a good government program, like a good sherris sack, is wonderful for Sir John, it isn't so good for the average person, especially when taken to excess.

Because the root cause of all that helplessness and joblessness and gun violence and welfare is fatherlessness.  That was highlighted in a couple articles in The American Spectator.

Item: Gun violence.  It does not occur too much out in the leafy suburbs, but has been notable in the inner city where families have broken up consequent upon the demoralization of men following the migration to the city.  It starts in American history with the Irish in the mid 19th century and The Gangs of New York and the 50,000 "nymphs of the pave."  Of course by the end of the century the Irish had progressed from "shanty Irish" to "lace curtain Irish" and the Catholic Church had made the nymphs into nuns and the gang members into fathers.  But that was before the administrative welfare state.

Now of course the problem is young fatherless blacks and Hispanics.  Without fathers they act out in the streets in the archetypal "men's house" gang.  But for President Obama, fatherlessness isn't the problem. Peter Ferrara:

More government spending for mental health, more federal spending for the local government responsibility for cops on the beat, and confirmation of a director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Ah yes, the need for another federal bureaucrat is really a root of the problem of gun violence.

Item: There is, as it happens, an organization that was founded over a century ago to deal with the broken family in the urban inner city.  It is called the Boy Scouts--in the US, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA).  It socializes boys (originally lower-income boys) under the control of non-gang older males.  Which is the way that societies usually socialize their boys.

But liberals, of course, want to muck around with the Boy Scouts, and end their ban on homosexual scout leaders.  Actually the Boy Scouts go further than banning gay scout leaders.  They have a rule that a scout leader cannot be alone with a Boy Scout.

You can see the blaring irony of this.  Here we have a stodgy old civil society institution that actually does something to mitigate the plague of fatherlessness by creating opportunities for fatherless boys to spend time in their teenage years around real fathers.  What do liberals want to do?  Liberals want to meddle with it, to advance their liberation agenda.  Not that a liberal parent would want to see their son within a country mile of the Boy Scouts.  But not to worry, writes Mark Tooley:

Defenders of the BSA’s current policy cite Canadian scouting having lost over half its membership in five years after liberalizing its membership standards in 1998, including accepting open homosexuality.

It's amazing.  Liberals seem to know by instinct how to weaken civil society and traditional culture to soften up society for more big government.

The basic difference between conservatives and liberals is the difference between liberty and liberation. Liberty is the right to conduct a flawed, but moral and purposeful life in this world with the hope of salvation in the next; it is the freedom to make mistakes. Liberation is the hope for salvation in this world; it is the removal of the concept of mistake altogether.

This is a hard time for conservatives, as liberals press the pedal to the metal on their entire agenda.  It is small comfort to recall apothegms like: "experience keeps a dear school" or  that democracy is the idea that the people should get what they want: good and hard.

But then, conservatism does not offer salvation in this world.  So who's complaining?

Government, Guns, and Max Weber

Max Weber, the German sociologist famous for his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is not known as a gun nut.  But he had some interesting things to say about the relationship between armed citizens and big government.

In his posthumous General Economic History he does a tour d'horizon of the feudal era.  We tend to think of that era as a pretty fixed order, with landed aristocrats at the top and serfs at the bottom.  But of course things were much more complicated than that.  Some peasants owned land, others rented land, still others owed labor to their landlords.  But there is one theme that runs pretty clear.  People that owned their own weapons were accorded much more respect in the feudal era than people without the means to arm themselves.

I wonder why.

Weber also has interesting things to say about the rise of the cities.  Generally, when cities start up, the inhabitants still look to their blood kindred out in the countryside for identity.  They don't really form an urban community.  And often the local princes make darn sure that they don't.

But when the city inhabitants start to think of themselves as individuals that swear allegiance to the city--instead their blood kindred--then things start to change.  They especially change when the city develops its own citizen militia, armed with weapons provided by the citizens themselves.

Because, of course, the landed princes don't give no respect to people that don't have the power to make their presence felt in the calculus of power.  But when a city becomes an armed power, then the princes pay attention.

Now of course, when the Founders put in the Second Amendment to the Constitution they were 200 years closer to the old tradition of the citizen militia than we are. (Think of Rembrandt and his painting of "The Night Watch," a local Amsterdam company of musketeers).  So the Founders possessed in their cultural heritage the idea that involved citizens would naturally band together in armed companies to meet the exigencies of city life.

And there is no doubt that government at all levels respects people with the means to inject themselves into the power equation.  Government is force, after all.  So if you want to play in the game of force, you had better have credible reputation in the force department.

Something to think about as our modern ruling class attempts, once again, to disarm the populace.

Why Liberals Fight Inequality

Why do liberals keep banging on about inequality?  Look: per capita income has gone from $3 per day to $100 per day in the last two centuries.  After going nowhere since forever.  So why worry that some have too much when everyone is doing better?

It all comes down to my mantra: Government is Force.

Reduced to its essentials, government is an armed minority defending some territory from enemies, foreign and domestic.  And it doesn't matter if the government is a government of male chimps defending their territory for its food or American anti-communists defending the world against godless communism.  The point is you defend against foreign pirates and predators and against the domestic kind too, whether burglars or criminal gangs.

But liberals beg to differ.  They don't think we need to spend all that money on defense.  In fact, following chaps like Noam Chomsky, they believe that the problem in the world is US imperialism not godless communism or Islamofascism.  Nor do they believe that a vigorous pursuit of domestic criminals is appropriate since their violence and criminality is really due to "root causes" like poverty and discrimination.

Good.  So now we can dispense with government completely?  Because if government is force and the traditional functions of government are no longer front and center, then we don't need the armed forces to defend our borders.  Nor do we need the police forces to defend against criminals.

How wrong can you be!  Our liberal friends had already seen the problem a century ago when William James wrote his celebrated essay of "The Moral Equivalent of War."  Without the unifying and character-building of real war, he wrote, we would need to inculcate its virtues with the moral equivalent.  As in a war on want, a war on poverty, a war on cancer.

And now we have the war on inequality.  The president's Osawatomie speech was the official Obamian declaration of war.  And Alan B. Krueger, then Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, backed him up with a speech(pdf) on January 12, 2012.  The just war declaration depends on the following:

• Since "the 1970s income has grown more for families at the top of the income distribution".
• The "median household suffered saw a decline in real income in the 2000s."
• The "top 1% of families saw a 278 percent increase in their real after-tax income from 1979 to 2007, while the middle 60% had an increase of less than 40 percent."

Then Krueger gets to the causes, according to a poll of economists, in declining order of importance:

1. Skill-based technical change, and a "slowdown in the growth of the supply of relatively highly educated workers in the US".
2. "Other and unknown factors."
3. Globalization.  Some have benefited, "but other workers have been left behind by globalization".
4. Union membership has declined, and union membership raises the wages of the lower middle class "so they can make it into the middle class".
5. "Tax changes in the early 2000s benefited the very wealthy by much more than other taxpayers", and only three countries "have tax systems that reduce inequality by less than the U.S."

So what is to be done?  I'm glad you asked that.

• The "Affordable Care Act is already helping middle class families."
• It "is critical to take the steps necessary to ensure that the current economic recovery continues", e.g. through the extension of the payroll tax cut.
• "Regulate excess risk-taking and corrupt practices in financial markets."
• Adhere to the Buffet Rule, where those "making more than $1 million should not pay a lower share of their income in taxes than middle class families."

Oh yeah.  Big deal.

Krueger closes by asserting that "more fairness to the economy would be good for all parts of American society."  Oh by the way, "this isn't about class warfare."  But you knew that.

Notice what doesn't get a mention in this speech?  Right first time.  Government entitlements.  The collapse of the lower-income family.  The retreat of lower-income men from work and marriage.  The penal marginal tax rates on the poor.  The credentialization of work.  The meddling of government in the credit system.

And that's leaving out other things.  Maybe the inequality growth in the 1980s was a delayed reaction to the corporatism of the 1950s and 1960s that fast-froze economic relations.  Maybe it had nothing to do with government, but just reflected the computer and information revolution.  Maybe there were just astonishing profit opportunities (remembering that profit is always unexpected gain) out there and chaps like Gates, Jobs, Dell, Hamm and Co. saw an opportunity and took it.  Notice that, except fort Bill Gates, son of a prominent lawyer, the others were relative nobodies: Jobs the adopted son of a mechanic and carpenter; Michael Dell the son of a stockbroker; Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental Resources, started out pumping gas, and often missed school to help pick cotton.

But that's not the point.  The point is that government is force.  When you have decided that you don't need force to defend our borders, then you naturally turn to other things.  Like inequality.  And you never think that, wow, maybe our previous efforts at force haven't worked out too well.  You don't ever think of that.  Your mind just turns to increased taxes and increased entitlements.  And more regulation of the financial markets, which have been only recently wrecked by reckless government actions and subsidies.

Jonah Goldberg writes today that people are pretty commonsensical about local government.  But when we think about the federal government we get all religious:

we've come to see the federal government as some sort of mystical entity empowered to right all of the wrongs in society. If there's a problem, there "should" be a federal response, the costs or feasibility of that response be damned.

Notice the problem here.  We are mixing up church and state.  Mystical entities are supposed to be kept in churches.  Because government is force.  When you combine church and state and start legislating morality to "right all of the wrongs in society" then you get into trouble.

Government is about force.  Religion is about meaning.  When you mix the two you tend to get wars and crusades and the little people get crunched in the middle.

Assuming that you care about the little people.