Maggie's Farm

Jay Cost at RCP with America is not Ungovernable. A quote:

The solution the country ultimately settled on had five important features: checks and balances so that the branches would police one another; a large republic so that majority sentiment was fleeting and not intensely felt; a Senate where the states would be equal; enumerated congressional powers to limit the scope of governmental authority; and the Bill of Rights to offer extra protection against the government.

The end result was a government that is powerful, but not infinitely so. Additionally, it is schizophrenic. It can do great things when it is of a single mind - but quite often it is not of one mind. So, to govern, our leaders need to build a broad consensus. When there is no such consensus, the most likely outcome is that the government will do nothing.

The President's two major initiatives - cap-and-trade and health care - have failed because there was not a broad consensus to enact them. Our system is heavily biased against such proposals. That's a good thing.

Yes, it is a good thing. And, in general, government doing nothing is a good thing.

I love this quote from Reagan (if you didn't hear, this weekend would have been his 99th birthday). Borrowed from Moonbattery:

Right now ... I'm looking down on a busy city at rush hour. The streets below are twin ribbons of sparkling red and white.

I wonder about the people in those cars, who they are, what they do, what they are thinking about as they head for the warmth of home and family. Come to think of it, I've met them - oh, maybe not those particular individuals, but still I feel I know them. Some of our social planners refer to them as "the masses" which only proves they don't know them. I've been privileged to meet people all over this land in the special kind of way you meet them when you are campaigning. They are not "the masses," or as the elitists would have it - "the common man." They are very uncommon. Individuals each with his or her own hopes and dreams, plans and problems, and the kind of quiet courage that makes this whole country run better than just about any other place on earth.

January 27, 1978

The story of Germany's SDU is relevant to everyone these days, even though it sounds strange to hear people still talking about "workers" as they still do in Europe - as if it were some permanent condition of serfhood. One quote from the piece at Boston Review:

...social democracy may have settled the issues of industrial society, but it did so just in time for industrial society to give way to a globalized economy, one with its own complicated and pernicious effects on labor and social equality: immigration, fluctuating employment levels, and offshore outsourcing, to name a few.

Like the American Dems, political organizations like the SDU are fighting the last war.

The O admin seems determined to quietly undo Clinton's welfare reforms. We have learned over the years that the Dems and the Lefties want all the people on the government plantation that they can collect. That's what "health care" is was all about, but the people saw through it.

It's what most Dem programs are about: everybody a slave to the Massas in Washington, and relying on their "generosity"  (see Medicare).

Heather MacDonald now reports in Championing Dependency that New York is experiencing attacks on Clinton's welfare reform. Good essay. One quote:

This double-sided attack on New York’s welfare reform lacks all empirical basis. Since 1995, the city’s welfare rolls have dropped nearly 70 percent, from 1.1 million to 350,000. Rather than increasing, as opponents of welfare reform warned, the child poverty rate in New York City dropped 34 percent during the same period, compared with a 5 percent drop nationwide. In 2008, New York City had the lowest child poverty rate—26.5 percent—and the lowest total poverty rate—18.2 percent—of the country’s eight largest cities.

Work, even at minimum wage, remains the best route out of poverty. When tax credits and medical and housing benefits are included, an average single mother of two with an $8.25-an-hour job in New York City receives a $63,000 annual income. On welfare alone, that same mother would pull in $43,000 a year—a whopping amount for non-work, to be sure, but still less than work provides.

At City Journal. One quote:

There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats. It is as if he has read, and taken to heart, the work of Sinclair Lewis, but never even skimmed the work of Kafka.

At most times and places in history, state authorities have had pretty wide discretion to help or hurt folks.  People knew to submit to authorities, and to accept occasional arbitrary applications of authority power.  Thankfully, such applications were limited by the fact that authorities were distracted trying to keep their power via keeping the peace, meeting revenue targets, etc.,

Today folks proudly bask in a glow of higher status by believing that they have more control over their government.  They believe democracy puts them in charge, and that a “rule of law” drastically discourages arbitrary applications of authority power.  They are deluded.

Whole piece at Overcoming Bias.

One quote:

Zinn’s wretched tract, A People’s History of the United States, is worthless as history, and it is a national tragedy that so many Americans have fallen under its spell. It is a political cartoon which even the socialist magazine Dissent described as an intellectual fraud, which it is. All Zinn’s writing was directed to one end: to indict his own country as an evil state and soften his countrymen up for the kill. Like his partner in crime, Noam Chomsky, Zinn was a wicked man and his life’s work was a pernicious influence on the young and ignorant, with destructive consequences for people everywhere.

The whole thing here.

We linked this piece at Reason earlier this week, but it's worth highlighting. Class War - How public servants became our masters. One quote:

The United States had 2.3 state and local government employees per 100 citizens in 1946 and has 6.5 state and local government employees per 100 citizens now. In 1947, Hodges writes, 78 percent of the national income went to the private sector, 16 percent to the federal sector, and 6 percent to the state and local government sector. Now 54 percent of the economy is private, 28 percent goes to the feds, and 18 percent goes to state and local governments. The trend lines are ominous.

The trend line leads to 100%. Then what?

VDH at NRO (this is his entire post):

When Obama gives the usual review of all the programs, stimulus efforts, and new entitlements he's overseeing, almost no one seems to conclude that he is simply detailing how he is going to redistribute nearly $2 trillion a year in annual borrowing. When we cut through all the soaring Great Society rhetoric, we are left with a "Gorge the Beast" strategy in which money is borrowed and given to favored constituencies before being paid back by less popular groups through higher taxes.

Given the aggregate $7-10 trillion in additional debt envisioned over the next four years, Obama may well become the greatest redistributor in U.S. history, at last addressing his 2001 lamentation about the absence of meaningful "redistributive change" in America. The only question at this point is whether Obama's gargantuan deficits are aimed primarily at lavishing constituencies with cash, or rather at making it necessary to raise taxes in a way that serves to reduce income inequality.

In addition to growing government, I think VDH gets right to the core of the underlying Dem agenda. When you think about it that way, they are being fairly successful.

I agree with The Englishman:

...the hijacking of the environmental movement by climate change campaigners is the worse thing that ever happened to it. All decent people want to see a clean environment, cuddly bunnies bouncing in verdant pastures breathing pure air and drinking safe water. How we safeguard, clean up, maintain and utilise the environment has been overshadowed by strident political statements, the sooner they are dismissed the better it is for real environmentalists.

Yes, the movement was indeed co-opted by politics - by Lefties who never took a serious basic science course, and world-government types. Maybe now we can get back to good old conservation.

Superb, from Dr. Zero at Hot Air:

The middle class is the great enemy of collectivist politics, under any of its names: progressivism, communism, fascism, or “liberalism.” As far back as Karl Marx, the apostles of collectivism have understood that they must subjugate the middle class before they can claim total victory.

The upper class isn’t a big problem – they don’t have the votes to block a collectivist agenda in a democracy, and they generally find ways to maintain, or increase, their power and wealth under a total State. The power of the State can be extremely valuable to them, for manipulating markets and thwarting upstart competitors. Many of them are willing to trade a little wealth for power, or find moral nourishment in supporting a collective agenda.

The members of the lower class are generally seen as the clients of a collectivist movement, the recipients of the social benefits it promises. Their desperation and anger become fuel for the movement, providing both righteousness and voting power. The collectivist only needs to conceal any hope of finding prosperity beyond the generosity of the State, and keep the lower class convinced that government is the only moral actor in the economy. Review the speeches of Barack Obama, and search for anything that suggests the poor should look anywhere beyond the government and its social programs for salvation.

It’s clear that the middle class is the great enemy of collectivism...

From Roger Kimball's excellent Obama Gets It Right on the core political issues:

What are those issues? One concerns the proper role of government in American life.  The Constitution was primarily an effort to define, to set limits, to the power of the state. The Founders understood both the need for  federalism and the dangers of statism. In their effort to “form a more perfect Union” and “secure the Blessings of Liberty  to ourselves and our Posterity,” they were everywhere at pains to circumscribe the reach of state power. Having tasted tyranny first hand, and having pondered the melancholy lessons of history, they understood the awful metabolism of servitude. President Obama was quite right when, way back in 2001,  he described the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties.”  What he did not understand then — and what he clearly still cannot get his mind around — is that fact that this “negative,” “merely formal” quality of the Constitution is one of its great strengths, not a weakness. In 2001, Senator Obama complained that the Constitution only told you what the state and federal government “can’t do to you,” not what it must do for you. As I noted at the time,

For a couple thousand years, people were desperately eager to frame constraints that would apply to their governments, that would limit, for example, the government’s ability to expropriate their property, to force them to educate their children in a certain way, or subscribe to certain government-mandated beliefs.

That sort of traditional political freedom is not enough for left-wingers. Ever since Marx decried bourgeois freedom as merely “formal,” the left has set out not to preserve freedom but to remake society according to a utopian scheme.

This is exactly what Obama wants to do. The “tragedy” of the civil-rights movement, he said, is that in focusing on “negative” freedom, it tended to “lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.”

Bringing about “redistributive change” is what the Obama administration is all about.

A quote from Yuval Levin's Capitalism at NRO:

Part of the problem I have with some versions of the libertarian case is that they take capitalism (if not classical liberalism more generally) to be an argument against the need for restraints on our appetites and passions, rather than an argument for the possibility of such restraints — to be an argument for libertinism rather than liberty. I’m with Edmund Burke, who said that “men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.”

What are "intellectuals" anyway?

When I was young and vain I thought I was one. I read lots of books, got myself overly-eddicated, used to read the New York Times daily, and robotically held most of the socially-acceptable, arrogant, bien pensant views. Now I know I am a regular person who just tries to live in reality as best I can, fully aware that many non-tweedy, non-Ivy grads understand life far better than I do. Uncommon sense and sensibilities can replace common sense.  From Tom Sowell's new book, with interview video, at SDA:

Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society - intellectuals certainly can renounce war, “and that does not stop your neighbor from building up the biggest army in the world and coming in and killing you.”