Barefoot and Pregnant Dem Voters

Our liberal friends have dined out for decades on the proposition that conservatives are patriarchs that want to keep women barefoot and pregnant.  It's the usual mean-spirited insult, of course, that expresses the idea that conservatives don't bellieve women are the equal of men and don't want women out in the work force doing the things that men do.

But when I read President Obama on the fiscal cliff, reducing the entitlements crisis to the notion that:

it is very difficult for me to say to a senior citizen or a student or a mom with a disabled kid, ‘You are going to have to do with less but we're not going to ask millionaires and billionaires to do more.’

You see, what the president is cunningly omitting here is the context.  He is leaving out the $50-100 trillion unfunded mandate on entitlements, the difference between the government's promises on Social Security and Medicare and the funds available to deliver them.  There is not one word in his remarks, nor in any other Democrat's statements, to prepare the Democratic voters for their upcoming years of responsibility, years when the money just won't be there for Social Security and Medicare as we know it.

In other words, Democrats don't want their voters to get out in the world and get an education in public finance--which they could easily get at usspending-101.com for free.  No they just want them barefoot and pregnant, dependent on their government benefits until the next election.

Of course, politics is all about hypocrisy, projection and any pop-psych notion you can imagine.  But it is still galling.

There's a lesson here: conservatives need to understand that the overwhelming Democratic base is never going to "get" the idea of an entitlement crisis.

Thus when someone like Kevin Williamson urges conservatives to understand that, e.g., most Democrats are much more risk-averse than Republicans, he has a point.  Yes it's true that savings accounts and bonds and Social Security are attractive to the low-risk folks.  That's because they believe what authority figures have told them.

The problem is that government programs and benefits are a lot more risky that the average Democratic voter understands.  Bonds?  Superfragilistic as long as you have a government that will maintain the currency at par with gold.  Social Security?  Low risk, as long as the government doesn't default on its debt, and governments often do.

Let's just take a look at my situation, aged 66.  Social Security?  Yes, but what will happen down the road?  Bonds?  But what happens when the money supply expands to match the quadrupling of the monetary base since 2008?

My point is that relying on bonds and Social Security in 2013 is a risky bet.  It would be much lower risk, over the medium term, to rely on dividend stocks backstopped by a spot of gold.  Why?  Because in my view, it is harder for the government to loot people of their gold and their stocks than loot their bank accounts and their bonds denominated in dollars.

But when will people get that?  Only when the checks stop coming.

Back to Ben Franklin: Experience keeps a dear school, but they will learn in no other.  Risk-averse people won't warm to the Republican agenda until they have experienced for themselves the huge risks hidden in the supposed risk-free agenda of the Democrats.

Jonathan Rauch, Hypocrite

Comes now liberal writer Jonathan Rauch to argue that the one way of doing things is wrong. (H/T Dynamist).

Whenever anyone tells you, 'I've got it right. I've got the one true answer and everyone else is wrong and I'm going to enforce it,' that person is not only a menace to freedom but, more important, a menace to human thriving and human knowledge.

Golly.  Of course, Rauch doesn't mean it with respect to government programs.  He just means that in the university there should be a full and free discussion of ideas and that nobody should be allowed to get away with being "offended" by free speech.

Also, Rauch meanders on to say what a wonderful thing the conversation about gay marriage was, and how it "persuaded" the American people.  As if.  As if the "conversation" about gay issues, like the conversation about race, has not been at every moment about liberal bullying, liberals stigmatizing anyone that disagrees with them as bigots and racists and homophobes.

I wonder how many people in Washington State voted, like me, for gay marriage on the principle of Ben Franklin, that experience keeps a dear school, but they will learn in no other.

If you truly believe  that "the one true answer" is a problem then you have to believe that almost any government program is a disaster.  Because almost any government program says: Look chaps, we've been thrashing around with this problem, everyone going his own way.  Now we need to stop all that and force everyone to do it the same way, our way.

In Government's End, Rauch argued that government was stymied by special interest rent seekers which prevented government from being the flexible problem solver it could be.  But that completely misses the point.  It was 50 years ago that Buchanan and Tullock dissected government in The Calculus of Consent, and showed how the game of forcing others to pay for your pet projects works. Special interests are to government what eggs are to bacon.  As far as the system will allow, special interests will try to game the system to acquire rent.

The only political question, then, is how much do we limit government?  Within those limits, we should understand, it is a special interest feeding frenzy.

When you don't limit the government you get what we have right now, a government barreling to inflation and default.  Why?  Because there is no established limit to how much the government can take, and how much the government can give.

And that's because our ruling class, the educated elite, gets its power from cultivating the resentments and the envies of the average American into well manured, husbanded, and till'd government programs with lots of jobs and power for the ruling class.

So the ruling class, like Jonathan Rauch, can talk a good line about the horrors of the one way, but when it comes to the crunch, they are all in favor of more government, the one forced way for everything.

Getting Supporters to the Polls

Reporters and pollsters tend to talk about percentages when they talk about elections.  But real politicians talk about numbers.  They know that the name of the game is getting people enthusiastic enough to get out to the polls and vote.

Obviously there are two sides to this equation.  You want your supporters to be enthusiastic and you want their enthusiasm to rub off on the swing voters.  You also want the opposition to be demoralized so they won't bother to vote.

A look at the recent presidential elections in the US shows this enthusiasm at work.  Let's get the vote numbers from uspresidentelection.us.  First the Democratic vote.

	Presidential popular vote in millions
Election Year	1980	1984	1988	1992	1996	2000	2004	2008	2012
Dem Vote	35.5	37.6	41.8	44.9	45.6	51.0	59.0	69.5	65.6

Now let's look at the Republican presidential vote over the same period.

	Presidential popular vote in millions
Election Year	1980	1984	1988	1992	1996	2000	2004	2008	2012
Rep Vote	43.9	54.5	48.9	39.1	37.8	50.5	62.0	59.9	60.9

The politicians are right. It is the total vote count that is really interesting.  If you look at the Democratic vote, it has steadily increased every year since 1980, except for one.  The big years were the 2000s when the Dems went from 51 million in 2000 to 69.5 million in Obama's great year, 2008.  But then Obama lost 4 million votes in his reelection.

The Republican vote is different.  It has seesawed up and down.  It peaked at 54.5 million in Ronald Reagan's Morning in America year of 1984.  Then it dived down into the 30s, with the terrible elections in the 1990s when Ross Perot split the conservative vote.  But under George W. Bush and his "architect" Karl Rove the GOP vote almost doubled to 62 million in 2004.  Since then it has flatlined at about 60 million.

How did the Democrats manage their extraordinary climb from 35 million in 1980 to 70 million in 2008?  I'd say it has been mostly hard work, identifying supporters and building the infrastructure to get them out to vote, and also making it easier to vote, with Motor Voter and absentee voting.

What's the story with Republicans?  Is the flatline a temporary pause, or are Republicans just running out of white people?

Back before the election I estimated that the Dems would lose 5 million votes and the Republicans would gain 5 million.  Well I was half right.  The Dems lost most of the 5 million I prophesied.  But the campaign of Mitt Romney failed to pick up the 5 million it needed.

Maybe the only hope for Republicans is that Barack Obama is busily minting new Republicans as he fails to ignite the economy, year after year, with his redistributive economics.

Obama's Anecdotes

Classicist and farmer Victor David Hanson calls Obama's style "The Anecdotal Presidency" for the way that the president reduces our great national challenges to anecdotal fluff.  From deficits to immigration the president's response is a plausible but insufficient story: let the rich pay a little more; give the illegal-immigrant children of illegal immigrants a break.

The Obama presidency is one of anecdotes in lieu of solutions. It might be a comforting thought that jailing a reactionary filmmaker, or raising taxes on the suspect few, or providing amnesty to the college undergraduate, or taking away Ted Nugent’s guns will solve our mounting problems, but such anecdotes mean little in the real world of difficult choices that would offend friends as well as opponents.

We expect our politicians--or at least the politicians of the other party--to act responsibly to solve national problems, but I always come back to this.  Democracy is not the rule of the people, for the people cannot rule.  The only thing the people can do is to choose who will rule over them.  In our age these are elected politicians, experts in persuasion.  Their skill is not governing, it is running for election.

A chap like Barack Obama runs for election as someone who can get you free stuff, and it stands to reason to his supporters that if the rich paid a little more there would be enough for all.

A chap like Mitt Romney, or any Republican, runs as someone that will fix the profligate government, and it stands to reason to his supporters that if we just cut a little from all the waste, fraud, and abuse that there would be plenty of money for the government to discharge its proper responsibilities.

Which is right?

Well, neither.  The result of a chap like Barack Obama is that the government gets into real fiscal difficulty and confiscates the wealth of the people through inflation and debt default to try and pay its bills.  The result of a chap like Mitt Romney is that the government's affairs become so comfortable that people think we can safely increase government spending and subsidies.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

Merry Christmas, Suckers

The official liberal myth is that liberals, through selfless concern for the poor, have lifted the unfortunate out of misery, the brutality of the time clock and the speedup, the 12-hour day, the unsafe workplace.

Another way to tell the story is that the new ruling class of liberals gets its power by tempting the poor with free stuff.  Liberals don't care about the poor; they care about political power and comfortable sinecures that liberal politics delivers to them.

The latter story fits with the description of democracy in Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.  Democracy cannot be the rule of the people, Schumpeter writes, because the people cannot rule.  All they can do it vote to elect the people who will rule them, and it follows that the people competing for the right to rule will become experts, professionals, in the art of getting elected.  Thus it is that democracy is really the rule of the politicians, professionals whose lifework is getting elected to public office.

Conservatives like me profess to be puzzled that Democrats seem to be uninterested in "fixing" the entitlements.  After all, it is Democratic voters that have the most to lose if the government runs out of money.

But the Democratic disinterest in entitlement reform makes complete sense if you think of the Democrats as elected politicians.  All they are interested in doing is saying the right things to get elected.  What comes next is beside the point.  Now humans are beings that like the idea of getting "free stuff."  They are also beings that hate the idea of giving up "free stuff."   So you tell me what would happen to Democrats that told their supporters to cinch in their belts.

Now comes an article in The New York Times that worries about the poor and college.  It turns out that many poor students rack up a pile of student debt and then don't graduate.  Golly, who could have seen that coming!

And it all filters down to the dreaded problem of rising "inequality."

Thirty years ago, there was a 31 percentage point difference between the share of prosperous and poor Americans who earned bachelor’s degrees, according to Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski of the University of Michigan. Now the gap is 45 points.

While both groups improved their odds of finishing college, the affluent improved much more, widening their sizable lead.

 Golly.  Why could that be?

Likely reasons include soaring incomes at the top and changes in family structure, which have left fewer low-income students with the support of two-parent homes. Neighborhoods have grown more segregated by class, leaving lower-income students increasingly concentrated in lower-quality schools. And even after accounting for financial aid, the costs of attending a public university have risen 60 percent in the past two decades.

The charming innocence of these liberals.  Thank goodness they haven't read Coming Apart by Charles Murray.  Or they might cotton on to the idea that their administrative welfare state has done wonders for the income and prospects of well-born liberals.  But it has hammered the very people it is supposed to help.  As in:

Item: The poor, through the workings of the welfare system, experience extremely high and variable marginal tax rates.  That's because as you generate more wage income you lose your welfare benefits not gradually, but chunk by chunk.

Item: We now learn that the people that have been hurt the most in the real estate crash are African Americans.  And no wonder.  It was the "redlining" of minority neighborhoods that the Community Reinvestment Act and the subprime real-estate loans were supposed to fix.  The result was that many people got loans that didn't have a hope in hell of servicing them.

Item: The wonderful and compassionate entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment insurance have the perverse effect of sterilizing the savings of the poor and the near poor.  The money that normal people would save against a rainy day, or starting a business, or putting a big down-payment on a home, or sending a kid to college, is sequestered by liberal program administrators to be given back later.  Meanwhile, liberal politicians have the use of the money in bribing the voters with "free stuff."

It was well said by the neo-Marxist Jürgen Habermas that the administrative welfare state is a system of internal colonization.

One day an American politician will figure out how to explain all this to the suffering American people.  My guess is that we already know this politician; he is already beginning to be a household word.

Will he make his move in 2016?  Or 2020?  Who knows?

But never forget the Instapundit Rule: "Something that can't go on forever, won't. Debt that can't be repaid, won't be. Promises that can't be kept, won't be."

Obama the Great Divider

Just in time for Christmas, Hugh Hewitt has a piece on Obama the Great Divider.  Obama has successfully eliminated Speaker Boehner as a negotiating partner for his second term, he writes.

Having managed to lose 4 million votes between 2008 and 2012, the most partisan and relentlessly negative president of modern times doubled down on all of his least generous instincts and went "full Lee Atwater," embracing completely the advice that if your opponent is on the ground with a broken arm, step on it.

Atwater, of course, intended his counsel for the period before elections, but the permanent campaign requires permanent pummeling.

President Obama is the guy that sent the bust of Winston Churchill back to the British Embassy.  Perhaps the most famous apothegm attributed to Churchill is this:

In War: Resolution; In Defeat: Defiance; In Victory: Magnanimity; In Peace: Good Will.

Now why would the pugnacious Churchill propose such a dictum?  Because he was a good guy?  Because he had a weakness for a good turn of phrase?

I suggest that he proposed it because it is good practical advice for anyone in high politics.  When you are fighting you need courage and perseverance.  When you are victorious in war you want to co-opt the losers and discourage them from forming a new head of rebellion.

President Obama seems to think that he doesn't need the goodwill of the loyal opposition, and maybe he is right--for now.  And he has the advantage of a cultural elite that is completely in the tank for him.

But what happens down the road when things turn bad for him and his party?  When the politicians he has humiliated get their chance to stab him in the back?

The central idea in the politics of the left seems to be the act of protest.  It supposes that the left is a powerless group of the marginalized desperately reaching for a moment of publicity in which to announce their grievances to an uncaring world.  In other words, it is 1825 and the workers are working twelve hours a day underground in ill-ventilated mines.

In fact, of course, the left, in its liberal instantiation, is the ruling class of today, not a ragged band of the powerless.  It would, if it were sensible, try to co-opt its adversaries in order to reduce the effectiveness of the opposition.

My guess is that liberals are still reeling from the experience of the Reagan administration.  Here was something inconceivable: an amiable dunce that won the Cold War and ended the stagflation of the 1970s.  If it was real, it would mean that the administrative welfare state of the liberals was a mistake and a chimera, and the whole project was based on a delusion.  So liberals have closed their minds to the idea that Reagan was right, and have returned to their government expansion project like a dog to its vomit.

So now we have President Obama, determined to complete the liberal agenda against all odds and against all opposition.

Here is the problem for liberals in this policy.  It means that conservatives don't have a dog in the fight.  It means that there is nothing in the entire sweep of government policy that reflects conservative ideas and sentiments.  Given our druthers, conservatives would not continue Social Security: we would replace it with a genuine private-sector based savings program with maybe some sweeteners for the low-paid.  We would not continue Medicare and Medicaid, but move to a consumer-based rather than third-party-based healthcare insurance scheme.  We would not continue the government monopoly education system, and we would reform the welfare system at a minimum to reduce the high marginal tax rates on the poor.

Why then would conservatives consent to pay taxes for all these liberal programs?

When you are utterly shut out of the government spending racket and you don't have any dog in the fight then you start to rail at the injustice of it all.  You start to look for alternatives.  You start to gather a head of rebellion.

Churchill's dicta are the practical politician's way of preventing rage from breaking out in the opposition.  President Obama's way is the ideologue's clumsy way of riling up the opposition.

Most likely the near term result will be that the president will leave office in 2017 with the Democratic Party in ruins.

And don't forget the Instapundit Rule: "Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be. Promises that can’t be kept, won’t be."

Plan B Failure a Disaster? Or What?

The MSM consensus on the failure of Speaker Boehner's "Plan B" last night seems to be that Boehner was humiliated and the Republicans are in disarray.

So now the president and the Democrats can go to the country and crow that Republicans want to increase taxes on the middle class.

Who knows?

The basic correlation of forces is still what it was after the election in November.  The American people have chosen not to go for reform of the welfare state.  Not yet.

The logical result of that is to increase taxes, but not not too much, and keep all the rent-seeking spending going for now.

I was watching a Peter Robinson UncommonKnowledge interview of John O'Sullivan and Jonah Goldberg last night.  Someone said that you only get to curb the spending and the rent-seeking after a military defeat or a civil war.

It's obvious really.  The spending and rent-seeking in the modern administrative welfare state represents the real power balance in the western world.  If you want to change it you have to have the power to move the current power-holders and their supporters off dead center.  Realistically, you can only do that when the current power-holders are off their balance.

Maybe a financial meltdown would have the same effect as a war.

At any rate, if the economy isn't doing too well by the end of the Obama administration then you can expect the American people to be in a nasty mood.

And nobody will remember the details of Boehner's Plan B.