harmonicminer

At Townhall, Jonah Goldberg points out that big business supported Obama 2 to 1 against McCain, because it hoped to cash in at taxpayer expense:

It’s worth remembering that Obama was the preferred candidate of Wall Street, and the industry gave to Democrats by a 2-1 margin at the beginning of last year. The top business donor to Democrats in 2008 was Goldman Sachs, and nearly 75 cents out of every dollar of Goldman’s political donations from 2006 to 2008 went to Democrats. Few can gainsay the investment, given how well Goldman Sachs has done under the Obama administration.

It’s not just Wall Street. Obama led in fundraising from most big business sectors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Aside from the desire to back the winner, and the cultural liberalness of East and West Coast plutocrats, why did Obama get so much support from precisely the constituency he demonizes?

Because it was good business. A host of big corporations bet that the much-vaunted Obama era would materialize. For instance, nearly 30 major corporations and environmental groups invested in Obama’s promise to force the American economy into a new cap-and-trade system via the United States Climate Action Partnership (CAP).

Whatever the benefits of such a scheme for the economy and environment as a whole, these corporations, led by General Electric, were looking simply to cash in on government policies. GE, which makes many wind, solar and nuclear doodads that would be profitable under “cap-and-trade,” was poised to make billions if Obama succeeded in seizing control of the “carbon economy.” GE is still protecting its bet, but after the failure in Copenhagen, the “climategate” scandals and perhaps most significantly, that implosion of Obama’s new progressive era, several heavyweights — Caterpillar, BP and ConocoPhillips — have pulled out of CAP, with rumors that more will follow. There are similar rumblings of discontent within the ranks of PhRMA, the trade association for the pharmaceutical industry, which had cut an $80 billion deal with the White House last year for its support of ObamaCare, only to see the whole thing unravel.

The lesson here is fairly simple: Big business is not “right wing,” it’s vampiric. It will pursue any opportunity to make a big profit at little risk. Getting in bed with politicians is increasingly the safest investment for these “crony capitalists.” But only if the politicians can actually deliver. The political failures of the Obama White House have translated into business failures for firms more eager to make money off taxpayers instead of consumers.

That’s good news. The bad news will be if the Republicans once again opt to be the cheap dates of big business. For years, the GOP defended big business in the spirit of free enterprise while businesses never showed much interest in the principle themselves. Now that their bet on the Democrats has crapped out, it’d be nice if they stopped trying to game the system and focused instead on satisfying the consumer.

Go back and read the title of this post. Then read this, to which I’ve linked before.  Ignore the reviews, pro and con, and just take it on its own terms… and see if you can refute the history.  I think you can’t.

There hasn’t been a “free market” in the USA for sometime.  The government’s power to tax and regulate, and to give tax breaks and regulatory exceptions, is the reason there is so much lobbying in the Beltway.  It could not have been otherwise, once corporate taxes got high, and the regulation of business became one of the chief functions of government.  The merry-go-round career path of government “service” to lobbyist, and often back to government “service,” is the biggest indicator of this.  The essential role of a lobbyist in the modern world is to figure out who should get the money that the lobbyist’s principals have to donate.

When big business couldn’t count on government to help it get captive markets, and to restrain competitors, it had to compete for consumers on the basis of price and quality.  That’s why Rockefeller kept cutting the price of kerosene in the 19th century, not exactly an act of violence against the consumers of the day.

It’s unfortunate that so many people still believe that we live in a “free market” economy and that “the market” is the cause for so much economic woe today.  But we have had a “mixed economy” that often crossed the line into “crony capitalism” or just plain “state capitalism” (especially in time of war), for over a century.  The government is by far the most responsible for our current economic mess.  The lobbyists of big business (the johns) wouldn’t have any place to spend their money if politicians weren’t pimping themselves out.  Those lobbyists are often the ones who write campaign finance law and regulations.

It’s simple.  If big business didn’t think it was going to get something out of it, why would it donate so much money to politicians?  And more particularly, why did it give so much to Obama?

Let’s hope that if the Republicans do get some power back, they don’t blow it this time.

Mark Steyn: Unsustainable’s the new normal

At the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Obama singled out for praise Navy Corpsman Christian Bouchard. Or, as the president called him, “Corpseman Bouchard.” Twice.

Hey, not a big deal. Throughout his life, the commander in chief has had little contact with the military, and less interest. And, when you give as many speeches as this guy does, there’s no time to rehearse or read through: You just gotta fire up the prompter and wing it. But it’s revealing that nobody around him in the so-called smartest administration of all time thought to spell it out phonetically for him when the speech got typed up and loaded into the machine. Which suggests that either his minders don’t know that he doesn’t know that kinda stuff, or they don’t know it, either. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, they don’t know what they don’t know.

Which is embarrassingly true. Hence, the awful flop speeches, from the Copenhagen Olympics to the Berlin Wall anniversary video to the Martha Coakley rally. The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they’re the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they’re having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of “The West Wing” they can only conceive of the public – and, indeed, the world – as crowd-scene extras in “The Barack Obama Show.” They expect you to cheer and wave flags when the floor manager tells you to, but the notion that, in return, he should be able to persuade you of the merits of his policies seems entirely to have eluded them.

But, since Obama’s mispronunciation is a pithier summation of the State of the Union than any of the dreary 90-minute sludge he paid his speechwriters for, let us consider it: Is America a Corpseman walking?

Well, we’re getting there. National Review’s Jim Geraghty sums up Obama’s America thus: “Unsustainable is the new normal.” Indeed. The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as “unsustainable.” So let’s make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in “Spaceballs” (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”

Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001-08, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP averaged 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

But, if they’re “unsustainable,” what happens when they can no longer be sustained? A failure of bond auctions? A downgraded government debt rating? Reduced GDP growth? Total societal collapse? Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike?

Testifying to the House Budget Committee, Director Elmendorf attempted to pull back from the wilder shores of “unsustainable”: “I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road,” he said. “If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action.”

Dream on, you kinky fantasist. The one thing that can be guaranteed is that a political class led by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, a handful of reach-across-the-aisle Republican accomodationists and an economically illiterate narcissist in the Oval Office is never going to rein in unsustainable spending in any meaningful sense. That leaves Director Elmendorf’s alternative scenario. What was it again? Oh, yeah:

“Some collapse down the road.”

Speaking of roads, I see that, according to USA Today, when the economic downturn began the U.S. Department of Transportation had just one employee making over $170,000. A year and a half later, it has 1,690.

Happy days are here again!

Did you get your pay raise this year? What’s that, you don’t work for the government? Yes, you do, one way or another. Good luck relying on Obama, Pelosi, Frank and the other Emirs of Kleptocristan “taking action” to “resolve” that. In the past month, the cost of insuring Greece’s sovereign debt against default has doubled. Spain and Portugal are headed the same way. When you binge-spend at the Greek level in a democratic state, there aren’t many easy roads back. The government has introduced an austerity package to rein in spending. In response, Greek tax collectors have walked off the job.

Read that again slowly: To protest government cuts, striking tax collectors are refusing to collect taxes. In a sane world, this would be an hilarious TV comedy sketch. But most of the Western world is no longer sane. It’s tough enough to persuade the town drunk to sober up, but when everyone’s face down in the moonshine, maybe it’s best just to head for the hills. But where to flee? America is choosing to embrace Greece’s future when even the Greeks have figured out you can’t make it add up. Consider the opening paragraph of Martin Crutsinger, “AP Economics Writer”:

“WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs.”

What language is that written in? How can a $3.83 trillion budget “freeze spending”? And where’s the president getting all this money to “pour” into his “fight” against high unemployment? Would it perchance be from the same small businesses that might be hiring new workers if the president didn’t need so much money to “pour” away? Heigh-ho. Maybe we can all be striking tax collectors. It seems a comfortable life. If unsustainable is the new normal, it should also be the new national anthem. Take it away, Natalie Cole:

“Unsustainable

That’s what you are

Unsustainable

Though near or far

Like a ton of debt you’ve dropped on us

How the thought of you has flopped on us

Never before Has someone spent more … .”

It’s not the “debt” or the “deficit,” it’s the spending. And the only way to reduce that is with fewer government agencies, fewer government programs, fewer government employees, lower government salaries.

Instead, all four are rocketing up: We are incentivizing unsustainability, and, when it comes to “some collapse down the road,” you’ll be surprised how short that road is.

As usual, when Steyn is done, there isn’t much left to say.

There is one guaranteed way to stimulate employment. That’s to cut taxes for employers, and make it known that the cuts will be in place for a very long time.  That stability will be the enticement that employers need to feel confident about expanding their operations.  This is historically verifiable for anyone who looks.  But in a strange dream that somehow strategies that have never worked before will now start to work,  Congress looks to create jobs, but will it be enough?

Democrats in Congress are furiously crafting legislation to spur job creation, but experts warn that the benefits could be too small to make much difference.

Senate Democrats plan to meet Tuesday to discuss a package that could provide billions in help for strapped state and local governments, as well as infrastructure projects. They’re also considering tax breaks to small businesses for hiring workers and to help make homes more energy-efficient.

The House of Representatives passed its own $154 billion jobs plan last month.

………………

Some analysts warned that such limited stimulus measures would hardly make a dent in a $14.2 trillion economy, however.

“It’s more of a painkiller than a cure,” said Robert Bixby , the executive director of the Concord Coalition , which monitors fiscal issues.

“While $150 billion might give the economy some stability, it’s not large enough to make much of a difference,” added Muhammad Islam , an associate professor of economics at St. Louis University .

…………….

“The roadblock is just general business confidence,” Bethune said. “Whether this kind of legislation will do the job is hardly clear.”

During his campaign, when a reporter pointed out to Obama that across-the-board tax cuts had created economic booms in the past, he said, regarding even-handed tax cuts for all economic classes, “It’s a matter of fundamental fairness,” by which he meant that tax cuts that benefit all economic classes, including the “rich,” are somehow unfair.  The Left, of course, is only for “targeted tax cuts,” meaning tax rebates to people who pay little or no tax..  and who do not engage in the kind of economic activity that creates jobs.

Crystal ball time (not that it’s especially difficult to predict that what has happened before will happen again):  the Democrat congress will not lower taxes generally, in a way that affects all businesses and likely employers.  They will fund a bunch of non-productive public works projects that will create flurries of employment, but nothing sustained, nothing that leads to a true recovery.  They will lionize themselves for small gains, and portray themselves as the great rescuers of the economy. 

Hopefully, the electorate will know better.  Of course, they didn’t in 2008.

Reagan proved that cutting taxes during a recession is the surest road to recovery.  Obama and the Democrats are raising them, regardless of what they say, simply by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2010.

Some people are slow learners.

Watch this, from Lord Christopher Monckton, chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute.

I haven’t heard much about this from other sources…. I’m trying to get more information about it.  But if this fellow isn’t exaggerating, this is looking really ugly.

More info here and here and some especially scary nonsense from Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister.

Mark Muller is giving away an AK-47 (presumably the civilian legal semi-auto only version, which does NOT qualify as an “assault weapon”) with every new truck he sells.  Well, he’s giving them a voucher so that if they can qualify for the legal purchase of the weapon, they can use the voucher to buy it from a licensed gun store.

Watch this thing, and then notice how utterly, completely, risibly clueless this interviewer is. Observe what she must think:

1) If you need to defend yourself, your gun shouldn’t be TOO good. You might actually survive the encounter, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?

2) God doesn’t want us to defend ourselves or our loved ones. I hope she doesn’t have children.  Or loved ones.  All of whom deserve better from her.  Or, she was just asking a stupid question for which she didn’t believe the premise herself.  Either way, clueless.

3) She’s obviously ignorant about the definition of “assault weapon.” Civilian legal versions of the AK-47 aren’t assault weapons, because they are semi-automatic ONLY, one round per trigger pull, exactly like semi-auto hunting rifles.  But wait, she went to journalism school, I’m sure.  And we know that they always do their background research, right?  (Sidebar:  if someone wants to kill me from a distance, I HOPE they’re using an AK-47 and not a typical American semi-auto rifle, which is usually a LOT more accurate.  With the AK, they’ll probably miss the first shot, and I’ll hear it and have time to seek cover.  Hey…  this is starting to remind me of faculty meetings, in which I spend lots of time taking cover.)

4)  She apparently thinks that Jesus doesn’t want parents to protect their children, each other, or themselves.  Or she doesn’t think that, and is just asking another disingenuous question of the country bumpkin rube auto dealer. 

Keep in mind that these geniuses are the ones reporting to us on nationalized healthcare, foreign policy, the economy, and political intrigue  everywhere.  You decide if you think they’ve done any more background research on that than on this story.

Of course, green is the color of mold, really bad teeth, and gangrene.

In a takedown of the Obama adminstration’s apparent attempt to use its legal howitzer, anti-trust chief Christine Varley, to prevent the airline industry from doing mergers that would save it, keep it out of bankruptcy, preserve jobs, and allow it to continue to provide service for consumers, Holman Jenkins asks the question, Does Obama Want to Own the Airlines? While describing the Justice Department’s move to block mergers that would save troubled corporations, in the guise of protecting the public from evil monopolies, he makes this trenchant comment:

Even now, she has turned her attention from airlines to the mobile-phone business on the theory that any industry that hasn’t collapsed into government receivership must be doing something wrong.

It’s all worth reading.

And for background in the sorry history of anti-trust law, you might want to read this.  Just remember a simple principle: whenever the government gets involved, prices go up, supply goes down, and the only winners are the bureaucrats and successful lobbyists who wangle exceptions for their companies…  all the while pretending that they’re protecting the free market and competition.

For now, let’s just say this.  If you’re too successful and capture a larger share of the market than your competitors, look out; the feds are coming for you.  If you’re struggling, and need to merge with some of your competitors in order to stay in business, create economies of scale that allow more efficient operation, and provide a service or product that the public will buy at a price you can sell it, look out.  The feds are coming for you, too.

Basically, it’s simple.  The feds would rather own you than see you succeed.

Clear?

They have the only monopoly that matters, and they intend to keep it.

This disastrous drag on the US economy has passed the House, narrowly.

The last chance to block it is in the Senate.  Don’t just assume that your senator can’t be moved.  Write them, evey day, to express your disapproval of a bill that even its proponents admit will make no significant difference to the climate, but which will weigh down an already struggling US economy.   This is purely a “feel good” bill for the eco-pagan elites, yet it is a bill which will hurt the poor more than anyone, because they are always the first hurt by a struggling economy.  The notion that only “the polluters” will pay more is risible.  Prices will be higher, and costs and fees will simply be passed on to the consumers, doing the most harm to those on the tightest budgets.  More subtle effects, but even more damaging to the poor, will be the jobs that will continue to move offshore, as the US becomes less competitive against other large economies that will never make such restrictions on their own producers.

Imagine a public pool that isn’t quite as perfectly clean as you’d like it to be.  Now imagine about 100 people in it, splashing around, many barely staying above water, but all required to be in the water, because there is simply nowhere else to be.  And now imagine throwing a 25 pound cleaning filter around the neck of one swimmer who is already struggling, a swimmer whose history is one of rescuing other swimmers, giving other swimmers short breathers while they hang on for a minute, even though you know that only an insignificant difference will be made by the 25 pound filter.

Now imagine being proud of your commitment to clean water, because you hung the filter around the neck of one swimmer.  Now imagine having friends in the press who are willing to repeat your line that “it won’t really hurt the swimmer who is carrying the extra weight” as if it’s true.  And imagine pretending that you’ve done a great service for the world, and being allowed to get away with it.

That’s about where we are today.

Call your senators.  Then write to them, or send email at least.  Then call them again.  You owe it to yourself, and anyone you care about.

Flotation devices are going to be in very short supply, and very expensive.

America walks the road of collectivism

Dear reader, let us first and foremost establish a known fact as our guiding principle: the Principle of American Extremes.

Simply put, in the American culture and government, any law passed and program enacted will be taken to the absolute extreme. Note, I do not say logical extremes but absolute extreme, beyond any measure of logic or hint of common sense or wisdom.

So begins an article in Pravda observing the collectivist tendencies of the American Left, and actually instructing the USA on the dangers of collectivism.

What’s next? A USA newspaper running an editorial accusing the Chinese of “wild west capitalism” a la 19th-century America?  Maybe warning the Chinese about “robber barons” (who pretty much never existed as commonly described)?

The world has become very strange.

The Democrats want to take over US healthcare, and intend to nationalize essentially all of it, all the while protesting they don’t plan to do that, even though that is the logical result of the policies they now pursue.  They want to institute a huge carbon tax (again claiming it will only affect “polluters”) which will affect the prices paid by everyone for everything, and cost the poor the most, because they live on smaller margins.  (The Left is for the “little guy” alright.  That’s why they want him to STAY little.)  The Democrats want union organizers to be able to pressure individuals to sign up for the union (card check legislation pending), and want to put an end to the secret ballot formerly required for unionization.  Would you turn down two huge guys name Guido and Alfonzo standing at your front door, with a few of their friends in the pickup truck on the curb, “just asking for your signature”?  Just about every new policy contemplated by Obama and Democrats is one of decreasing freedom for Americans, and more power for the government.

It is not a given that the USA will be the focal point of freedom in the world forever.  If we continue to abdicate that role by inches, and then by feet, that honor may fall to liberalizing societies to which we now feel superior, but which may be instructing our descendants on the finer points of freedom….  or even the major ones.

To win battles, you have to achieve adequate combat power in relation to your enemy:

… Combat power is created by combining the elements of maneuver, firepower, protection, and leadership. Overwhelming combat power is the ability to focus sufficient force to ensure success and deny the enemy any chance of escape or effective retaliation. … Overwhelming combat power is achieved when all combat elements are violently brought to bear quickly, giving the enemy no opportunity to respond with coordinated or effective opposition. …

Commanders seek to apply overwhelming combat power to achieve victory at minimal cost. … They attempt to defeat the enemy’s combat power by interfering with his ability to maneuver, apply firepower, or provide protection.

Four primary elements – maneuver, firepower, protection, and leadership – combine to create combat power – the ability to fight. Their effective application and sustainment, in concert with one another, will decide the outcome of campaigns, major operations, battles, and engagements. Leaders integrate maneuver, firepower, and protection capabilities in a variety of combinations appropriate to the situation. …

The idea of combat power may seem a bit abstract, so a few examples may help.

If you have a combat force of 100 soldiers, how should you distribute weapons?   How should you distribute ammunition?   How should you distribute the soldiers in the battle space?  The answer can be stated generally this way:  you want the best, most powerful weapons to be gathered at the point where they will be most effective, with the most available ammunition, supported by as many soldiers as necessary to use the weapons, protect the weapons, and protect the soldiers who are USING the main weapons until those weapons have been effectively employed and the enemy is destroyed or neutralized.

Here is what you don’t do.  You don’t automatically distribute the ammunition evenly to each soldier.  You don’t just spread the soldiers out and hope that one of them runs into the enemy.  You don’t hold a lottery to decide who gets the biggest guns, or the ones with the highest rate of fire.  You don’t give all the soldiers identical training, and you don’t place soldiers in particular roles without primary regard for their achievement and acquired skills.

Combat power is the idea of focusing energy and resources where they will do the most good in defeating the enemy.  Somebody has to be in command, to make the decisions that will lead to that timely concentration of power.  It won’t happen by accident.  Ideally, an officer moves up through the ranks by demonstrated success against the enemy, although in this imperfect world, other criteria will sometimes be applied.

There is a strong relation between the concepts of combat power and capitalism.  Capitalism gets its name from the fact that it involves building up sufficient resources to accomplish economic tasks that are beyond the “average resources” of individuals.  An important point:  although “capital” is analogous to “combat power,” the enemy for capitalists is poverty.   This fact is not obvious, on the surface, to anti-capitalists, including socialists, who also claim that their enemy is poverty.  But consider: there is an upper limit (and it’s pretty low) to how rich a person can be in a poor society.

The richest man in a third world country may still have to spend a lot of time in considerably less luxurious circumstances that most American inner cities, where no one spends much time bouncing over dirt roads, rarely has to smell open sewage, can safely drink water from pretty much any tap, and so on.  You know all those rich people you read about in third world countries?  They are often rich only because they have managed to sell a product into a developed middle-class economy (think Saudis selling oil to the USA), or because they just plain stole it by means of military force, or maybe both.  Would you rather be the richest guy in Zimbabwe, or comfortably middle-class in Topeka?  The richest guy in Zimbabwe has to watch his back….  In any case, the best way to STAY rich (and alive) is to be rich in a middle-class economy.  Globalization has masked the fact that the rich in third-world countries are often dependent on the middle-class of developed nations, again proof that capitalists need markets with disposable income, while statists/socialists need a lower class to justify themselves.

It took capital to build the first railroads, the first airlines, the first automobile factories, and the first computer businesses, not to mention electronics factories, farm equipment factories, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, clothing factories, retail outlets for all of these, and more. In each case, poverty was the enemy of the capitalists who funded these things, who took risks to make them happen.  If your society is poor, its members don’t have the resources to buy whatever you’re selling.  It really is that simple.  (A secondary enemy of capitalists is people whose power is threatened by them, mostly statists/socialists/royalists/entrenched privilege…  but even then, the major enemy is still poverty, which limits the ability to market what you make or do.)

John D. Rockefeller ruthlessly suppressed his competition by the simple expedient of finding every possible way to deliver his product at a lower price than his competitors.  But he depended on a technological infrastructure that created a need for the product he wanted to sell.  That is, if people hadn’t needed kerosene and oil, Rockefeller couldn’t have sold it to them.  They needed oil because they lived in a society that was rich enough to afford devices that required oil.

The enemy of capitalists is poverty, not other capitalists.

Let’s make this a little clearer this way:  the enemy of professional baseball team owners is not other baseball teams; it is an apathetic public that no longer cares to watch baseball.  Of course, there is competition, with “winners” and “losers,” but even the losers win if the public keeps coming to watch them lose.

No capitalist is required to stay a “loser,” because in a free system they are allowed to adjust their activities until they are winners.  That is the original meaning of “win-win.”  If I can’t make a particular widget that you want to buy at the price I can sell it, then I’ll find something you DO want enough to pay me for it, and we’ll both “win.”

The enemy of capitalists is poverty, not other capitalists, because it is only poverty that makes it unlikely for captalists to be able to sell anything at all.

Committed egalitarians would have us believe that the real enemy is the “gap between rich and poor.”  This is ludicrous on historical grounds.  Would these people prefer us to live in a society where everyone is equally poor?  The very, very exciting thing about a free, capitalist society is that no one has to STAY poor.  And there is no capitalist who WANTS the poor to stay poor, for the simple reason that it’s impossible to sell much to poor people, unless the government has required lending institutions to make loans to them that can’t be repaid.   And we all know how that ends.

Just as you don’t win battles or wars by equal distribution of troops, weapons and bullets, you don’t win the struggle against poverty by equal distribution of income or goods.  Instead, you let natural forces and markets encourage the concentration of those resources in the hands of the most productive among us, to the betterment of us all, as they produce goods and services we would never have had otherwise, and offer us choices we would never have had without them.  Successful capitalists are those whose products and services make the lives of the rest of us much better than they would have been without them.  It makes no more sense to resent fabulously successful capitalists than it makes to resent the success of Alexander the Great, or General Eisenhower.  Would you rather have fought on the side of Darius?  Or Hitler?  Would you rather be equally poor with everyone else, everywhere else?

Capitalism WAS the original war on poverty, and it is a war that was being won, pretty much on all fronts, right up until the government decided to hogtie its best commanders, divert resources used in weapons production to planting daisies in the park, send half the army on furlough, sound the retreat and sue for peace.  Peace with poverty, that is.  It is one of the great achievements of the Left that the only war that can go on forever, without a significant change in strategy or tactics, and with no strategy for withdrawal, is the publicly funded “war on poverty.”  Call it The Forever War.  It is the war that socialists/statists can never allow to be won.

Conjecture:  if there had never been anti-monolopy laws, but if the rule of law was scrupulously enforced, if corporations were not penalized for success, if government did not try to pick winners and losers, if government did not allow itself to be bought BY capitalists (no one said capitalists were angels), if government did not see the success of capitalists as a source of unearned income for itself (the only reason capitalists CAN try to buy government), if bad personal behavior wasn’t rewarded by government largess, if people were not conditioned to see “the safety net” as a hammock, if government did not promise things it can’t deliver forever, and in particular, if the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson hadn’t happened (and their allied Left political constituencies), we would be richer now than most folks can possibly believe.  We would not now be just getting around to returning to the moon in 15 years or so, we would have permanent colonies there.  The standard of living of virtually all Americans would be higher, much higher.  We would have even more medical and pharmaceutical innovation, and it would cost us less.  Fuel would be cheaper, energy in general would be cheaper, and we would have more leisure time.  And paradoxically, the air and water would probably be cleaner.  We would be profiting, all of us, from economic expansion that would dwarf what actually happened.

The reason is simple: the diversion of resources away from focused, productive use, by the programs of anti-capitalist government, has made us all poorer, because those resources did not produce greater “capital power,” and diverted many, many people away from being productive themselves.  To put it simply, we ate our seed corn, instead of planting it.

We are now hip deep in another presidency that has the ambition to make as permanent a mark on America as those of FDR and LBJ.  I have no doubt that it will be possible to reduce the average gap between “rich” and “poor,” but it will not be done by making the poor any richer, and the price will make it even harder for the poor to change their circumstances.

It’s very, very simple.  Capitalists need a middle class into which to sell their goods.  Socialists need a lower class in order to justify their existence and political power.  Socialists, if they ever succeeded in eliminating poverty, would immediately lose power.  Who would need them anymore?  Capitalists can win forever, as we all just keep getting richer, and richer.  Statists/socialists see the resources generated by a period of successful capitalism, and they lust after them.

Capitalists need middle classes, and capitalist activity tends to promote the growth of them.  Socialists/statists need lower classes, and socialist/statist activity tends to promote the growth of them.  The fact that socialists/statists seem always to manage to take over, just as capitalism starts to succeed, is all the proof anyone should require of original sin.

It is as if socialists/statists went to the front line of battle, just as their own general’s brilliant strategy is about to win a great victory, and insisted on unloading the weapons of some of their own soldiers, just to make it fair.

Reflections On an Age Now Fading… Read it all.

On matter of race, one detects beneath the therapeutic calls for inclusiveness, an unfortunate renewal of identity politics with a new harder edge-we saw that in the campaign with the slips about reparations and oppression studies, the clingers speech, Rev. Wright, and the ‘typical white person’ put down. Then with Eric Holder’s blast about Americans as “cowards” and now with the Supreme Court nominee’s somewhat derogatory remarks about the proverbial white male judge. We are not hearing praise of the melting pot ideal of intermarriage, assimilation, or integration-even if such elites in their private lives do not predicate their daily regimens in terms of racialism. I spent 21 years in a university in which quite affluent elites sought any multicultural patina possible for an edge in professional advancement and general leverage–the hyphenated name, the addition of the accent mark on the name, the non-American accentuation, occasional ethnic dress, the relabeling of one as a designated minority who otherwise had not previously emphasized race, etc.—that would suggest they were not part of the popular capitalist culture-supposedly centered on the white male-around them. Yet I left sensing the industry of race was doomed, due to the power of popular culture, the unworkable labyrinth of racial identification due to intermarriage, the laughable contradictions (the jet-black immigrant from India got no favored treatment, the light-skinned Costa Rican name Jorge piggy-backed onto the Mexican-American experience), the son of the Mexican father who used his name Gomez was authentic, the son of the Mexican mother who carried his non-Mexican father’s name Wilson was not. And on and on with this ridiculous neo-Confederate practice of adjudicating percentages of race to the sixteenth, and drops of targeted minority blood—a racist enterprise to the core. The only constant? The white male was fair game. It mattered little that more women were graduating than men, that under the racial spoils system we were beginning to see white males in less percentages than those found in the general population at the university; instead, it was sort of OK to trash, as in the manner of Sotomayor’s comment, the proverbial white male, as if we are collectively ashamed of everyone from the Wright Brothers to Lincoln to John Wayne to JFK.

When so close an observer of history and modern life as Victor Davis Hanson is this pessimistic, I feel the need to go see an escapist movie or something.

Read his entire article. Then go get a massage or a pedicure and try not to think about it.

In the 2008 elections, a bit over 13 million people voted in California.  Obama won about 8 million votes, while McCain won about 5 million.

On May 19, 2009, California held a special election to decide if taxes were to be raised to the tune of about $15 billion dollars (to try to close an enormous financial deficit for the state government), or if the state politicians would have to do the hard work of cutting spending.  About 4 million people voted, with 2 to 1 margins _against_ the tax increases.

Therein lies a tale.  Given that Obama was well known to have favored enormous government spending programs, and tax increases that would be needed to support them, how is it that so many people voted for him, but against the same policies for the state?  It’s actually pretty simple.  A very large number of people who voted for Obama didn’t know much about his policies or stances on important issues, nor about his history as a politician and activist.  The media put forward an attractive image, acting as his unpaid campaign staff, and the public bought it, but professional polling has demonstrated that Obama voters were disproportionately ignorant of fundamental facts about Democrats, Republicans, Obama, McCain, Palin and Biden.

So why didn’t it work this time, too?  Why was the turnout in California less than a third of the presidential election’s turnout?  Why did those who did turn out vote 2 to 1 not to raise taxes in California?

Simply, the only people who voted this time were people who were reasonably aware of the issues, enough to have an opinion about them.  Given that public employees in California, whose jobs and pay are imperiled by cuts in the state budget, probably voted 4 to 1 FOR the tax increases, and given that there was probably a higher percentage turnout OF those employees than the general electorate, the result is even more decisive.  If you aren’t a public employee (including teachers, bureaucrats and staffers, etc.), the odds are overwhelming that you voted NO on the tax increases, if you voted at all.

There are a number of reasonable observations:

1)  People who are aware of what’s actually happening in government, who care enough to vote their opinion about it, and who don’t have a personal agenda (i.e., they work for the government), are overwhelmingly likely to vote more conservatively in fiscal matters.

2)  It is likely that the large majority who voted NO on tax increases also voted for McCain.  Of course, there will be a few examples to the contrary….  but not many.

3)  California’s fiscal future is being shaped, at least to some degree, by McCain voters, not Obama voters.

4)  It is likely, given the size of this sample, and the generally leftward tilt of California as a state, that if a national election were held today to raise taxes in order to “balance the budget,” but no other issue was on the ballot, the result would be similar.  With no _face_ on the ballot, many of those new, Obama-smitten voters would be hard pressed to make an appearance at the polls.  And the generally better informed conservative electorate would be more likely to vote.

5)  The media, and Democrats, will do their very best to keep anyone from noticing the implications of the California rejection of higher taxes.

6)  The job of the Republicans is to continue to tie the Democrat party, justly, to high taxes and high spending, in the public mind.  This will require some courage and resolve, and a refusal to succumb to the minor guilt that remains over excesses of spending by Republicans during the Bush years.  At this point, they are like someone who merely stole a car being afraid to point out the people who are robbing Fort Knox.  Obama and the Democrats are preparing to spend us into deficits FOUR TIMES the size of anything Bush every dreamed about, and that will have to be paid for, sooner or later, with higher taxes.

7)  Expect the media to have very little to say about California’s rejection of higher taxes, with national Democrats saying even less.  (On the other hand, if the high tax initiatives had passed, you can imagine the result being trumpeted far and wide as representing “the public will,” can’t you?)

The simplest way to explain all this:  the people who have jobs in the private sector (and who know something about what’s going on in state government) voted overwhelmingly against higher taxes.  Public employees voted for them, mostly.  People who fit in neither category couldn’t be troubled to turn off Oprah and get to the polls….  which is likely why they were watching Oprah in the first place.

The previous post in this series is here.

First, in order to be able to talk about this, let’s agree that no purely socialist society has ever existed.  Nevertheless, it’s reasonable to observe that some government policies and programs are more socialist than others.  So it’s the morality of socialist policies and programs in general that is in question, without regard to whether they exist in a purely socialist system.  In any case, experience suggests that it’s a smokescreen to argue that particular politicians or governments “aren’t socialist” in some absolutist sense.  What’s very clear is that some policies are socialist.  Governments and politicians who primarily pursue those policies can reasonably be called “socialist” in normal speech.

So what ARE socialist policies?  Basically, socialist policies attempt to disconnect outcomes for individuals from the efforts made BY those individuals, and to do so with money and other resources taken from other individuals in the form of taxes, fees, restrictions, regulations, and sometimes outright confiscation.   This isn’t a theoretical economic definition, but is rather an observation of what animates socialist policies (the disconnection of outcomes from individual efforts) and the means by which socialist policies are carried out (taxes, fees, restrictions, regulations, and confiscation).  Call it an operational definition that allows the correct identification of “socialists in the wild” without first capturing them, checking their DNA and doing a complete morphological exam of their complete economic policy.  If it walks like socialist, talks like a socialist, and generally acts like a socialist….

You can look up socialism in several online references and get various definitions, some requiring “state ownership of the means of production” and “central planning of economic activity” and other things.  The problem:  the definition of “state ownership” is vague.  If I theoretically own something, but the state can tell me IF I can use it, how to use it, when to use it, who I have to pay to use it, how much I have to pay them to use it, who I have to hire to use it, where I can sell it, IF I can sell it, perhaps price limitations on what I can sell it for, what kinds of conditions I am required to provide for those I hire, etc., and after all that the state confiscates a large percentage of whatever money I can make using it, even with all those restrictions, regulations and requirements, at what point does my putative “ownership” cease to mean “ownership” in the normally accepted sense?   Particularly if the next “owner” to whom I sell it has the same relationship with the state that I did when I owned it? And now, what if all the people who (theoretically) don’t own my property are still allowed to vote for regulations and policies and taxes that impose all the restrictions I just listed, for their own benefit as they see it?  Who, exactly, owns my property?  Well, quite a few of us, apparently.

This is why those textbook definitions are of little benefit in really identifying “socialism on the ground.”  When someone tells you that European nations “aren’t really socialist,” it means they are looking at the textbooks, instead of the realities on the ground.  It’s like saying that the Soviet Union wasn’t really a dictatorship because they had elections.

So, while textbook definitions of “socialism” often obscure more than they reveal, it’s easy to see that socialist policies attempt to disconnect outcomes for individuals from the efforts made BY those individuals, and to do so with money and other resources taken in the form of taxes, fees, restrictions, regulations, and sometimes outright confiscation.

Statism and socialism have much in common.  It’s pretty safe to say that socialism requires statism to function; if there isn’t much statism going on, there won’t be much socialism, either.  On the other hand, some forms of statism (the purely kleptocractic dictatorship, for example) aren’t particularly socialist, because they have no intent to secure ANY particular outcome for individuals other than those in power.  So:  all socialists are statists, but not all statists are socialists, although in the modern world most are.

In what follows, therefore, everytime I use the word “socialist” it would be good to remember that it means “socialist and statist.”  I just don’t want to say it that way everytime.

Most people who reject socialism are really rejecting statism, its unavoidable symbiote.  I am one of those.  If there was some way of having an entire culture participate in “voluntary socialism,” where everyone worked as hard as if they were working only for themselves, and behaving as responsibly with public resources as if they were personally owned, I might be willing to consider it (though I would have several reservations…  and since we don’t live in Heaven yet, and the Fall happened, this is a ludicrous conjecture anyway).  For me, the deal breaker is the degree of statism that must accompany socialism.

In the next post in this series, I’ll discuss the continuum of socialism/statism, i.e., starting with those “socialist” policies that most of us agree about, and moving to those that are more controversial.   Then, we can get to the spiritual implications of all this, the moral questions, the really interesting stuff.  Stay tuned.  I know this has been a bit dull, but it’s about to get much more interesting.

The next post in this series is here.

Darth Greenspan Read it all at the link.

The former chairman of the US Federal Reserve shares a lot in common with one of the most famous villain characters in the history of Hollywood, Darth Vader, who was first a member of the Jedi coalition when his name was Anakin Skywalker.

In a brilliant challenge to social theorist Charles Murray, Greg Forster points to the incompleteness of Murray’s argument that socialism is spiritually negative on moral grounds.

Faced with Charles Murray’s argument that the welfare state makes everything too easy, a socialist could ask: Should everything therefore be made more difficult? How can Murray say the welfare state is bad for making life easier while praising other state functions that make life easier, like the police? Only a moral perspective can oppose socialism while affirming legitimate state functions.At the American Enterprise Institute’s annual black-tie shindig on March 11, Charles Murray gave an outstanding lecture on the spiritual (as distinct from economic) dangers of the European-style social welfare state. But Murray’s analysis, though otherwise excellent, is missing a crucial element: an appreciation that these spiritual dangers ultimately arise from disregarding the moral law. And just as a small curve in a funhouse mirror changes the whole image, the single missing piece in Murray’s logic bends his whole argument ever so slightly, but crucially, out of shape.

The topic of Murray’s talk was well chosen. Whatever one thinks of its virtues, socialism on a scale that would have been unthinkable just two years ago is already the law of the land. We see government asserting de facto rights of ownership over our largest financial firms. We have seen a sizeable portion of the economy being brought under direct government control, financed by trillion-dollar borrowing. We have made steps to undermine the Fed’s independence that could bring about inflation that would make the 1970s look tame. Some are beginning to raise tentative but credible questions about the security of America’s sovereign debt. And the top two items on the legislative agenda this year will be near-irreversible first steps toward socialized medicine and a giant new energy tax disguised as environmental regulation.

—

Murray argues that, even aside from its demographic and economic flaws, the European welfare state undermines the aspects of civilization that make for “a life well-lived.” By a life well-lived, he means a life characterized by a lasting and justified satisfaction that one’s life was worth living. He identifies himself with the Aristotelian preference for seeing human beings fully “flourish,” and argues that this, as opposed to mere hedonism, is what Madison had in mind when he wrote that “the object of government” is “the happiness of the people.”

Only a limited number of human activities can serve as sources for this kind of deep satisfaction. Murray identifies three characteristics that all such activities must have: they must be important, they must be difficult, and they must involve individual responsibility for consequences. Activities that are trivial, effortless, or disconnected from consequences can be fun, but cannot make for a life well-lived.

Murray asserts that there are only four areas of life where such activities take place: family, community, vocation, and faith. The assertion is plausible, if only because Murray is careful to define these concepts broadly—a “community” need not be a neighborhood but can be geographically expansive, and “vocation” can include avocations or, more nebulously, “causes.”

The crux of Murray’s case is that the European-style welfare state undermines all four of these areas of life—and on a deeper level than even most conservatives now appreciate. The welfare state doesn’t just eat away at the material preconditions of these activities, but also detracts from their ability to provide a life well-lived.

—-In the lecture’s most powerful passage, Murray discusses how this deeper dynamic has been at work destroying the family in America’s poor urban communities—where something approaching a European-style welfare state already exists. Welfare makes it much harder for the family to be a source of deep satisfaction for men in these communities:

A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: “He is a man who pulls his own weight.” “He is a good provider.”

If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing some theoretical outcome. I am describing American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn’t.

Welfare removes the difficulty from providing for the family, and therefore the importance of the husband and father.

And notice how, once family is undermined, two other areas of deep satisfaction—vocation and community—are undermined as well. The menial job loses its significance, and the now-superfluous father is no longer an important part of his community.

Murray is not saying that the welfare state removes absolutely all deep satisfaction from these areas of life. But the empirical evidence before our eyes, both in Europe and in our own poor urban neighborhoods, ought to convince us that the negative impact of the welfare state is extremely damaging.

—-…. faced with Murray’s argument that the welfare state makes everything too easy, a socialist might well retort: Should everything therefore be made more difficult, so you can have the deep satisfaction of overcoming difficulty? If the welfare state is bad, why are police good? Why not abolish the police so that walking home safely requires more effort (such as arming yourself) and can thereby become a source of deep satisfaction?

We can’t ultimately answer this question without distinguishing between morally legitimate and illegitimate ways of making things easier. Policing the streets makes our civilization more conducive to deep satisfaction because it is right. Coercive redistribution of wealth makes our civilization less conducive to deep satisfaction because it is wrong. Able-bodied people who live on welfare for extended periods are cheating—just as much as an athlete who bribes the judges. That’s why the welfare state has the corrosive effects it does.

—-Those who are now building the socialist utopia around us are convinced that their way is morally superior, and increasing numbers of Americans (especially in the rising generation) are beginning to think that they’re right—especially as they come to see unbridled capitalism as morally hollow and corrosive. The moral case for economic freedom—the rightness of capitalism in the context of an ethical culture—is indispensable if the disaster Murray rightly warns us against is to be averted.

It’s more or less received wisdom on the Christian Left that its socialist leanings are morally superior to those of the selfish, capitalist Right.  After all, didn’t Jesus come to minister to the poor and downtrodden?  Wasn’t His ministry about challenging everyone else to care for the poor?  Isn’t selfishness evil?  Aren’t we supposed to “give till it hurts”?  What about “widows and orphans” in the New Testament?  Aren’t Christians morally required to vote for politicians and policies that will provide more resources for the poor?  Wasn’t a form of communism the pattern of the early church?

These are serious questions, of course, and I plan to treat them seriously in upcoming posts.  If you’ve been lurking around this blog for awhile, you probably know what my general position is, but you may be surprised at some of the reasons.

The next post in this series is here.