Who Is The President Working For?

Foreign policy analyst Richard Fernandez asks a significant question today.  Who does the president think he is working for?  The answer Fernandez gives is:

[Y]ou work for guys like the mid-Western plumber. The folks who drive Fords, shop at Safeway’s and who may even own a gun or two. The people who elected you.

And that's just the problem.  President Obama does not see himself working to create a decent life for Joe the Plumber, Ford drivers, Safeway shoppers and gun owners.  He has a far higher calling: fundamental transformation.

More than George W. Bush, more even than Bill Clinton, Obama is a creature of the ruling class, the people with Big Ideas for America: Single-payer health care, green energy, financial regulation, outreach to traditionally marginalized communities, and all the other ideas that feature a starring role for the administrative ruling class.

The president has pushed towards single-payer health care because that's what the elite thinks we need.  Ordinary people can't really understand how to structure the health care industry, and certainly can't deal with a big personal health care crisis; it's up to the educated ruling class to do the job.

The president is a green energy advocate because that's what people like him know is needed.  Carbon pollution will waste the planet and we have to do something to stop it.

The president backs administrative regulation of the financial markets, as per Dodd-Frank, because that's what Everyone agrees is needed to stop the con artists and banksters from creating another financial crisis.

The president backs the racist Reverends because he believes that only community organizers and politics can help marginalized communities get justice.  Otherwise inequality and injustice will get worse.

The plumber, the Ford owner, the Safeway shopper: they don't have a direct opinion on these esoteric questions.  They just know that the economy is bad and they are struggling.  They don't know what has gone wrong.

But what should the president do for the folks he is working for, if he should not take the advice of the ruling class?

The conservative answer starts with an act of faith.  Almost certainly, we believe, any political policy that requires detailed administrative supervision of the economic sector is a bad idea and will not work.  So that takes care of single payer, green energy, and financial regulation right away.

You know where that argument comes from.  It is the argument of F.A. Hayek that government simply cannot develop the knowledge to administer the economy, but millions of producers and consumers can and do.

So confine the government to making general rules to make the price system work.

We also believe that any politics that starts with the exploitation narrative -- that "our group" is being discriminated against and the government needs to act -- will do more harm than good, except in cases of egregious discrimination such as that in the Jim Crow South and today in the quotas and diversity culture.

You know where that comes from.  It's a simple application of the workings of the price system.  Imagine a discriminatory world in which black workers are paid less than white workers.  What a profit opportunity for the entrepreneur willing to take a risk on black workers!  After a while, the world will begin to notice that the black workers working for our daring entrepreneur create more profit than higher-paid white workers.  They hire black workers themselves.  Pretty soon the demand for black workers goes up and employers have to bid up their wages.  And so on.  The only thing needful is to prevent the government or posses of angry racists from interfering with the entrepreneurial lust for profit.

So conservatives believe that the government should only act in cases of grievous discrimination.

The only good thing about the Obama presidency is that it will teach the American people to believe that something went wrong in the Obama years.  They won't know exactly what it was, but they will have a feeling that the president wasn't really working for them and their needs.

They will feel, in 2016, that it is time for a change. And they will get it.

Let's give the Fool has the last word:

Why, 'some are born great, some achieve greatness,
and some have greatness thrown upon them.'...
and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

The Fool was speaking to Malvolio, not President Obama, of course.

Liberals and "Violence"

Quick:  Do you think the alleged killing of an Australian jogger by three African American teenagers in Oklahoma is "senseless violence?"  Or "gun violence?"  Or "racist violence?"

Actually, you probably don't know because the liberal media has been a bit slow to report and comment on the black-on-white Oklahoma killings.

We all know what is going on here.  On the assumption that the only justifiable use of force is the understandable rage of the oppressed, liberals regard all acts of force by others as "violence" and a form of disease.

I want to make my peaceful protest against that whole notion.

The resort to force is seldom "senseless violence" but more usually a rational and human act.

Let's start with the three teenagers accused of murdering the Australian college student.  It's perfectly normal for three young men banded together into a proto-gang to look for someone to kill.  That's what young men did back in the hunter-gatherer days.  It even goes back before that.  Three against one is the preferred odds for chimpanzees patrolling the borders of their territory.  The whole point of fathers and the socialization of males is to sublimate this instinctive urge to kill into more socially approved channels.  Fathers are usually absent in the African American community.  So you'd expect a lot of unsocialized males to be out on the streets "looking for trouble."

What about Egypt?  Here we have reports of "violence" in the streets of Cairo.  Well, yes.  There's a civil war going on, and people resort to "violence" when they are fighting a civil war.  From the western point of view Egypt is a complete mess, unable to grow enough food to feed its millions and with an economy that cannot produce goods and services to pay for food imports.  What else would you expect in such a situation except bloody war and killing?

What about the whole Middle East?  The western policy has been to apply pressure on the region to reduce violence and advance a "peace process." But is that sensible?  Is not the current utter failure not just a personal failure of Barack Obama but the failure of the entire West to understand the situation of the Middle East culture?

The facts are that human death by violence is on the decrease.   That's what Steven Pinker writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature.  Hunter-gathers had 500 deaths per 100,000 per year.  Agriculturalists about 50 deaths per 100,000 per year.  We industrials have about 5 deaths per 100,000 per year.

Why is that?  It is because every male in a small hunter-gatherer band is involved in the defense of the borders.  But in the larger agricultural political unit there's an army to do that.

But in the industrial age, the defense of our food-producing land from the marauding foreigners is no longer the big issue.  Wealth is no longer denominated in acres but between the ears of productive entrepreneurs and workers.  It really doesn't make any sense for today's Greeks to go marauding to Troy.  A modern Hector would not worry about his wife Andromache being sold into slavery if the Trojans lost the war.  No, the best thing after a big war is to do what the Americans did after World War II: put the Germans and Japanese back to work to rebuild their industrial economies, and place a bet that they wouldn't be interested in war.

But this does not apply to the Middle East, which is pre-industrial.  In fact, with its oil, the region is still agricultural: its wealth is sitting there, not on the ground but under the ground.  Its wealth is not denominated in numbers of productive citizens, because its citizens are not productive enough to compete in the world market of goods and services.  So it makes sense that Middle East potentates think like Homeric warriors and medieval kings and princes.

Unfortunately the liberal notion of "violence" prevents us from seeing all this.  We are scandalized by the wars; they prompt us into promoting "peace processes" to end the violence where there is no interest in peace, and where wars are the natural and practical strategy of any self-respecting ruler.

Domestically the problem is the same.  For minority gangs in the big cities, gang wars and killing are the most logical and sensible things in the world.  If we want the "violence" to stop then we have to change the economic incentives and end the fatherless welfare culture.

We could do that.  But it's pretty clear that liberals prefer the current status quo and the political power that comes with it.  Whatever the outcome in "senseless violence."

But conservatives are different.  And we can start by ridiculing the senseless liberal "violence" discourse.

What "Emerging Democratic Majority?"

Ever since 2004 the Democrats have been assuring us that we are on the cusp of The Emerging Democratic Majority.  Yeah, there's a book by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira.

Obviously, a chap like me cannot believe such a thing because if I did, what would be the point of being a conservative?

The basic idea is that minorities, women, and educated young people are all trending Democratic, so look out ageing white men.

But there's just one thing, as TV detective Columbo used to say.

If the whole world is trending Democratic why does the president have to flog the black community into the Democratic column with racist incidents like the beer summit and the Trayvon Martin case?

If women are trending Democratic why do Democrats have to terrify women into believing that Republicans want to take their contraception away?

And if students are trending Democratic why is it necessary to make a big deal about student loans?

Shouldn't it just be obvious that the liberal way is the right way?

If you look at what Democrats do instead of what they say, you'd think that Democrats are scared to death of getting into a permanent minority, so they figure they have to flog every potential advantage from race identity to voter registration.

Which means that they are not in the catbird seat as they pretend.

In fact, of course, President Obama won reelection by only four points.  In fact, the US House of Representatives has a Republican majority.  In fact, state legislatures and governors have been trending Republican for years.

The reason that young 'uns and blacks and women have been trending Democratic is because only Democrats have their ear.  If you're a black then racial solidarity requires to you identify as Democrat.  If you are a single woman, practical considerations require you to rely on the government safety net rather than the spousal safety net.  If you are an educated youth then you've been listening to unionized teachers since kindergarten.  How you you think that unionized teachers with government pensions and tenure are going to vote?

Under the Obama administration these good folks are going to find out that Democratic governance does not improve their lives.  They are going to find out that politicians and their cronies are always and everywhere corrupt unless you tirelessly expose their shenanigans.  They are going to find out that politicians don't have a clue about the economy or education or health care or anything else.

That's because politics is good for only one thing: riling people up for a war.  You can learn that the easy way by reading a few books, or you can learn it the hard way in the aftermath of the inevitable political failures.

Bottom line: look for a reversal on that glorious Democratic majority in the next few years.

Conserrvatives Don't Get It says Liberal

Conservatives are already responding to Mike Konzcal's "Conservatives don't get that some problems are public, and it's hurting them" in the Washington Post.

Liberals, on the other hand, believe that, e.g., "unemployment is a public problem... because the individual firm, the individual himself, is powerless to cope with the complexities in times of stress."  That's how Bill Buckley put it, according to Konzcal.

OK, so now we have to define the difference between "public" and "private."  Konzcal uses John Dewey:

Dewey argued that the public is involved wherever an action between two people has consequences “that extend beyond the two directly concerned.”

Then off he goes critiquing conservatives for saying that government shouldn't provide a safety net,  that shaming the poor is better than a government response,  and that talk of inequality belongs in "quiet rooms."

Ah yes.  Inequality, President Obama's big line.  And, "for liberals, inequality is a public problem."

Huge inequality can make us more vulnerable to economic instability, and a weak middle class makes stronger recoveries and innovations less likely to happen. Huge inequalities can “distort our democracy,” making it harder for government to answer the needs of the people. These supplement other arguments like inequality can cause severe deprivation, stigmatizing, unacceptable forms of domination and block equality of opportunity.

But conservatives don't want the government to do anything about inequality.

Conservatives spend a lot of time discussing how inequality isn’t as big as we think, or how the poor have a much better life because certain durable goods are cheaper, or how austerity and liquidation are better for the overall economy than stimulus. But what they really think is that these don’t belong in the realm of the public, and that’s the realm of policy.

You'd expect that a liberal like Konzcal would make a dog's breakfast of what conservatives really believe, so let's pick over the mess he's created.

First of all, conservatives don't think in terms of the polarity of "public" and "private."  We believe that almost all human acts, especially economic acts, are social, in the sense of being not private, merely the business of one or two people, but public, in the sense that every economic act has repercussions throughout the economy.  That's what a free economy means as prices are transmitted throughout the society of producers and consumers.

The polarity that conservatives emphasize is the polarity between government and non-government, between force and voluntary cooperation.  What lies behind the benign notion of a "public problem" is the idea that voluntary cooperation has failed and force is the only solution.  In other words, liberals use the idea of "public" as a euphemism for "government" and "force."

In the conservative universe everything is a "public problem," that is, a problem that people might want to discuss in the public square.  But as soon as we are talking about government action then we are not really talking about a "public problem" any more.  We are talking about what kind of force to apply, what Lenin called "who whom."

Conservatives believe that force is usually the wrong medicine to apply to a social wound.  Take inequality.  Conservatives believe that there is benign inequality and malignant inequality.  The benign kind is the wealth acquired by Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs.  They made spectacular fortunes by making computers and iPhones that transformed peoples' lives and transformed the economy.  Good for them.  Then there is the malignant kind.  It's the difference in the wages between unionized and non-unionized workers.  The difference in wages between tenured professors and adjunct faculty.  The difference in compensation between pensioned, tenured government employees and casual laborers.

Notice the unseen force behind the malignant kind of inequality?  It's government.  It's government that allows some employees to form a labor monopoly.  It's government that supports academic tenure.  It's corrupt politicians that do corrupt deals with government union leaders in return for political support.

So it's all very well to talk about "public problems" but what if government action makes them worse?  That's the missing link in Mike Konzcal's world view.  He assumes that large-minded people can sit down at a table and construct another government program to fight inequality, and good things will flow.  But what if the opposite is true?  What if today's inequality is the result of 50 years of liberal responses to "public problems" that made things worse?  That's what conservatives are talking about when we mutter on about "unanticipated consequences" of government actions.

For instance, conservatives think that the big problem with the health care system is that 60 years of government intervention since World War II has created a monster.  We think that the monstrosity begins with the fact that most people don't pay for their health care: the insurance company does.  And so people don't pay attention to the hospital bill the way they pay attention to the grocery bill.  And we think that Obamacare will just make things worse and complicate an already complicated system of subsidies and third party payments with even more cross-subsidization.

We notice that, whatever the nature of a "public problem" may be, the liberal solution always seems to be to hand out more free stuff to their political supporters.  And we wonder.

It's baloney to say that "conservatives don't get that some problems are public."  We understand that all problems are public, in the sense that we are social animals and all our actions are social and public.  We just don't think that most problems require a government solution.  We believe, on the contrary, following Adam Smith and a host of adepts, that the solution of public problems begins with personally working to understand and helping solve the other guy's problem, as in the Invisible Hand.

Liberalism, we believe, is based on the idea of the Clunking Fist, to force the other guy to bend to your will.  Because you are right and he is wrong.

The 40 Year Republican Surge

With all the talk about The Emerging Democratic Majority it is easy to flinch before the jabs from the mainstream media that the Republican Party is Doomed, Doomed.

Or maybe not.  After all, what is a four point presidential win in 2012 telling us?  That President Obama ain't that popular, pal.

Now RealClear's invaluable Sean Trende has written a three parter on the Republicans: Are Elections Decided by Chance?, Are Republicans Really Out of Step?, and What If Party Makovers Don't Work? He argues that the reports on the death of the Republican Party have been grossly exaggerated.

In part one he shows that it almost looks as if elections are won by chance or the state of the economy. In part two he argues that Republicans and Democrats are not perceived by the voters as getting more extreme over time.  In fact the voters saw Romney as closer to their own political ideology than Barack Obama.  In part three he shows that party makeovers don't seem to make a lick of difference.

The takeaway chart for me was this one about party strength since 1945.

If you ask me the chart shows that the Republicans have been slowly growing in party strength at the state and national levels over the last 40 years since the nadir of the late 1970s.

You take a look at the chart and tell me: the chart, with all its noise and backing and filling shows a steady increase in GOP party strength.  Typically, of course, GOP strength improves towards the end of a Democratic presidency and declines towards the end of a Republican presidency.  But then there are the exceptions.

For all the noise the Democrats are making about taking back the House in 2014 it would be a bloody miracle if they did.  Maybe, after all, there will be a big bounce in the economy; maybe Obamacare will implement much better than expected.  Maybe the Republicans will get demolished by accusations of racism.

But I doubt it.  Much more likely is that we will see the rise of "privacy moms" uneasy about their cell-phone conversations ending up at the NSA and their health records getting hacked at the IRS.  Much more likely is the continuing disenchantment of the young 'uns realizing that they are the patsies of the Obamis, with unaffordable student debt and unaffordable health insurance and a lousy job market.  Much more likely is a gradual demoralization of the African American voters that have turned out so loyally for a president of their own race.

But all this is mere speculation.  For the reality we have to wait for November 2014 and November 2016 when the voters will speak.

Then it will be time to start the makeover lament all over again.  For the losing party of 2014 and 2016.

Liberals in "Worse than a Crime" Territory

All along, in the Obama era, I've had the feeling that the short-cuts and illegalities of the Obamis was, in the words of Talleyrand, worse than a crime, a blunder.

In other words, there's a reason that you obey the law and don't use the bureaucracy to harass your enemies.  It is to prevent the opposition from getting really riled up and unified.

Remember the 2000s.  The liberal activists used any questionable Bush administration act to whip their partisans into a frenzy, starting with the vote recounts in 2000 and continuing to the Bush Lied, People Died accusations about the entry into the Iraq War, and continuing with the eternal flap over Scooter Libby outing a CIA employee.  My liberal friends would give me a good flogging about these mild illegalities, which really weren't illegal at all.

Now we have President Obama asserting the right not to enforce laws like the Defense of Marriage Act or declining to enforce immigration laws.  The Obamacare rollout would be impossible without the president choosing which unworkable provision to delay or ignore next.

Today the Wall Street Journal edit page joins the chorus with a comment on the willful disregard of the law at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  The NRC is stacked with Obama and Reid cronies that don't want to go ahead with the Yucca Flats nuclear storage site.  Only problem is it's against the law, and the US Appeals Court has so ruled.

If the head of the NRC worked on Wall Street, "he'd be indicted" for this kind of shenanigans, writes the Journal.  At least if he were a Republican.

And then there's my favorite, little Lois Lerner, who seems to have been using her private email to conduct government business, like some others we know.

The point about all this petty illegality is that it makes it much easier for the Republicans to run in 2014 and 2016.  You may not want to give up your entitlements but you sure don't like government officials getting off with breaking the law and giving themselves exemptions and insider deals.

So I think that the "laws are for the little people" attitude in the Obama administration and the go-along-to-get-along attitude in the media amounts to a strategic error.

A government needs to demonstrate that it follows the rules and respects its opponents.  Not because it is right, but because it avoids riling up the opposition.

The liberal media needs to keep liberals in line just as much as the hated conservatives.

Same thing with Obama's recent executive decision to exempt Congress and its staff from Obamacare.  When people are suffering next year from the chaos of Obamacare they will not like the idea that their representatives and their staffers got themselves exempted from the chaos.  Even a low information voter gets that.

But you never know.  Maybe the American people will just sit there and take it and elect Hillary Clinton president in 2016 because she's a woman.

We Ain't Ready Yet for the "Liberty Amendments"

Today's the release day for Mark Levin's new book The Liberty Amendments.  And yeah, he's got a few, as in:

1. An Amendment to Establish Term Limits for Members of Congress
2. An Amendment to Restore the Senate
3. An Amendment to Establish Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices and Super-Majority Legislative Override
4. Two Amendments to Limit Federal Spending and Taxing
5. An Amendment to Limit the Federal Bureaucracy
6. An Amendment to Promote Free Enterprise
7. An Amendment to Protect Private Property
8. An Amendment to Grant the States the Authority to Directly Amend the Constitution
9. An Amendment to Grant the States the Authority to Check Congress
10. An Amendment to Protect the Vote

He proposes a constitutional convention for this important work.  Jeffrey Lord has all the details.

But I think that Mark is putting the cart before the horse.  I don't see anything like a political movement that could sustain such an ambitious program.  Not yet.

Levin considers this a Third American Revolution (the second was the Progressive movement of the 1880s that gave us the income tax and the directly elected Senate and the administrative state).

But I don't think we are anywhere close to that point.  That's because I think that revolution takes three stages.

1. The first stage is the general ideological battlefield preparation.  With deep thinkers that are proposing a new order.  I don't think that we are anywhere close to achieving that.  We've had Mises and Hayek, and we've had Novak with the three sector idea and Berger and Neuhaus with the championing of civil society.  But we don't have a intellectual tour de force that puts it all together.
2. The second stage is the young 'uns and the conquest of the cultural space.  Revolutions need young people.  As in the Napoleonic baby boom of the 1840s with Marx, and the 1960s baby boom tearing up the streets.  We don't seem to have anything like that today.  The Occupy movement was an AstroTurf joke.  Young people got all in a tizzy with Obama who, really, was a reactionary, going back to the failed and the corrupt.  Now they are in a daze what with their student loans and their joblessness and all.  There is no sign of a change in the culture among the young 'uns.  Then there are women.  In my view we can't have a cultural revolution without women, because they are guardians of the culture.
3. The third stage is boots on the ground, the conquest of the political space.  That is what Mark Levin's new book is about, and you can see why I think he is way premature.

Let's get back to the woman question.  Women just aren't natural revolutionaries, ranting on about injustice and exploitation; they take the world as they find it and try to make it work for them.  Women don't get riled up by airy-fairy political principles, but by the needs of their loved ones.  You would think that women would be all riled up by the health care mess that hurts their ageing mothers, by the education mess that hurts their children, and by the collapse of marriage that hurts women.  Maybe they are, but we ain't seen any sign of a rebellion on the distaff side, except perhaps that the telling  point that the Tea Party is largely run by women.  My feeling is that the Third American Revolution will need the enthusiastic participation of women if it is to be a success.

You can see my interest in all this.  I'm writing a book that is trying to do Stage One, the ideological battlespace preparation.  I am trying to define just what we mean by the political sector, with government as force, politics as division.  I am trying to describe the reality of the modern economic sector, the fact that it has got over its shameful birth in plantation slavery and industrial discipline, and I am thinking about how to keep business out of the embrace of the political sector.  And I am discussing the importance of the moral/cultural sector, and how all these sectors need a civil society if human society is to flourish as a social thing rather that a hegemonic, dominatory thing.

I think we still have a lot of work to do in hammering out the basic principles of what we believe, and in making it compelling or at least challenging to the liberal ruling class.

Then and only then can we lay it all out before the suffering young 'uns and let them get cracking.

And then we will be ready for Stage Three, the actual implementation in a glorious series of constitutional amendments or their equivalent.  Because we need to rein in the unjust administrative state and its dominatory and hegemonic systems and restore the lifeworld of civil society.