Road to the Middle Class - by Christopher Chantrill

For now, they are just blowing smoke. Just like the Democrats who are saying that it's a done deal and ObamaCare will pass and the people like it, they really like it.

I've written that ObamaCare is a shame and it will hurt the American people. So I think that the best thing is for ObamaCare to lose and never get into the statute books.

But the partisan in me thanks the Democratss every day for provoking what may the the Clausewitzian "decisive battle" on the welfare state.

Although we have seen major advances in the power of the welfare state in the 1930s and the 1960s when Democrats had big majorities in Congress, the fact is that it has also advanced year by year with micro-advances that have been difficult to oppose. One more government program for education, or for child health care or for green jobs doesn't seem like much, and it is hard to say: No.

It's like seducing a woman. If you gently, kindly work on her, a baby step at a time, you will eventually succeed. Because almost all women believe in love, and cannot resist the idea that someone loves them. The only happiness in life, wrote Georges Sand the French woman writer, is to love and be loved.

But the Obama Democrats have rejected the arts of seduction for the peremptory command to lie back and think of England. And that sort of treatment women resent.

So there's a good chance that the ObamaCare campaign could result in a great reverse for the welfare state, as the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk marked the turn of the tide for Nazi expansion.

It could prove a high-water mark for the administrative Bismarkian state.

We conservatives believe that social programs should be truly social. They should not be bureaucratic programs backed up by government force. They should be part of a great organic whole of give and take, sharing and caring, giving and receiving, of humans as social animals. The US was well on the way to implementing such a system in the late 19th century. But then came the Progressives (grandfathers of our liberals) and their faith in the administrative state. They smashed the growing array of sociable associations in which people obtained safety, security, and fellow feeling, and replaced them with uncaring government programs.

So a monumental failure by ObamaCare, either by withdrawal of the current package or by repeal in a year or two, would open the public square to alternatives.

And then we could all start over, and get to work on a system of social arrangements that was truly social, truly just, and truly worthy of the United States of America.

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/17/10 11:51 am ET

Beyond School Choice

AS THE NATION'S education system continues to rot, President Obama has come up with a revision of No Child Left Behind that rewards success, lets states define their own standards, and fires teachers at failing schools (maybe).Conservatives continue to advance school choice, principally in promoting charter schools, public schools freed from some bureaucratic standards. Paul E. Peterson, in The...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/16/10 11:33 am ET

Howell Raines, Media Dinosaur

WE CONSERVATIVES have our little blind spots. One of them is that MSM journalists get it.In other words, when they go on and on about objective journalism and the horrors of Fox News they understand that, as the postmodernists say, they are reciting a narrative, a narrative that justifies their power.To run the kind of stories they run, to consistently bias towards the liberal point of view, as...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/15/10 11:30 am ET

The Rotation of Power

THE ESSENCE of governing is to let the other guys have a turn.My Greek friend George Maroutsos used to teach me the essence of democracy as it applied to Greece after the fall of the Greek colonels back in the 1970s. The point was to elect the left, then defeat them in duly constituted elections. The key is that, when defeated, the ruling party leaves office. And then the other party takes...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/12/10 11:06 am ET

Why ObamaCare is a Dem Donkey Trap

CONSERVATIVES and other opponents of ObamaCare have been flapping on about "consent of the governed" as the Democrats twist this way and that to get out of their box canyon.Michael Barone has just summed up the Dems' problem pretty well. So let's go with it. He writes of three cases to consider when trying to pass legislation:You can pass popular legislation on party-line votes, and you usually...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/11/10 11:28 am ET

Conservatives as Reactionaries

LIBERALS JUST can't get enough of the idea that conservatives are reactionaries, trying to turn the clock back.So you would expect that the Wall Street Journal's tame liberal, Thomas Frank, would be eager to take a whack at the subject whenever he gets a convenient hook.Mostly though he is outraged that Glenn Beck hates college professor President Woodrow Wilson. OK, so Wilson vetoed prohibition...

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| perm | comment(1) | 03/10/10 11:41 am ET

By-the-numbers Conservatism

THERE ARE ALL kinds of conservatives and all kinds of conservatism.Some people say there are three kinds of conservatives: economic, social, and national-security.Then there's Ken Blackwell's six-legged stool: social conservatives, Christian conservatives, Second Amendment conservatives, economic conservatives, philosophical conservatives, national security conservatives.How many conservatives...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/09/10 11:27 am ET

Lack of Trust in Dem Congress | 03/08/10 11:23 am ET
Avoiding Conflict Avoidance | 03/05/10 11:36 am ET
Obama's Four Porkies | 03/04/10 11:33 am ET
The Consent of the Governed | 03/03/10 11:02 am ET
Canada's Housing Non-Meltdown | 03/02/10 11:28 am ET
Pelosi's Forced March Politics | 03/01/10 11:08 am ET
The New Stupid Party | 02/26/10 9:17 am ET
Science's Big Problem | 02/25/10 11:55 am ET
This is not Obama's Rubicon | 02/24/10 10:37 am ET
The Box-Canyon Presidency | 02/23/10 11:16 am ET
The Problem with Tax Cuts(2) | 02/22/10 11:22 am ET
The Trouble with Specifics(1) | 02/19/10 11:04 am ET
Which Party Will Split FIrst? | 02/18/10 11:35 am ET

| March blogs | February blogs |

OPED

ObamaCare: Defeat or Repeal?

THE BIG QUESTION for Americans is whether they are better off defeating the monstrosity of ObamaCare now or whether it is best to let the Democrats pass it and then work to repeal it, whether it takes a day or a decade.

The short answer is: Defeat it. The passage of ObamaCare lets a genie of government power out of the bottle that will be very difficult to put back in. It will turn health care into an ineffectual government program much like education in which Americans are endlessly fighting for advantage. Nobody with an ounce ...

| more | comment | 03/12/10

Science's Big Problem

Last week Dr. ...

| more | comment | 03/02/10

The Back-pocket Manifesto

Liberals Say US Is Ungovernable. Again

Liberal Condescension Isn't the Problem

RMC CHAPTER-A-DAY

RMC Contents

Chapter 1: After the Welfare State

Chapter 2: Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn

Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism

Chapter 4: The Nineteenth Century From the Top Down

THE GREAT EVENT of the second millennium was the rise of the world-historical middle class.... more

Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century From the Bottom Up

RMC BOOKS

RMC Book of the Day

Peterson, Jesse Lee, From Rage to Responsibility

RMC Books on Education

Andrew Coulson, Market Education
How universal literacy was achieved before government education

Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic
How we got our education system

James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
How the feminists wrecked education for boys and for girls

James Tooley, Reclaiming Education
How only a market in education will provide opportunity for the poor

E.G. West, Education and the State
How education was doing fine before the government muscled in

RMC Books on Law

Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
How ordinary people in the United States wrote the law during the 19th century

F. A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol 1
How to build a society based upon law

Henry Maine, Ancient Law
How the movement of progressive peoples is from status to contract

John Zane, The Story of Law
How law developed from early times down to the present

RMC Books on Mutual Aid

James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We're In
How the welfare state makes crime, education, families, and health care worse.

David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
How ordinary people built a sturdy social safety net in the 19th century

David Green, Before Beveridge: Welfare Before the Welfare State
How ordinary people built themselves a sturdy safety net before the welfare state

Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy
How the US used to thrive under membership associations and could do again

David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry
How modern freemasonry got started in Scotland

RMC Books on Religion

David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
How Christianity is booming in China

Finke & Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
How the United States grew into a religious nation

Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
How progressives must act fast if they want to save the welfare state

David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish
How Pentecostalism is spreading across the world

Amazon.com Widgets

READINGS

Dems reworking ObamaCare to get better score

the numbers aren't coming out right.

ramp up charter schools

Peter E. Peterson says that we need 50 percent charter schools to compete in the global economy

Obama's illusions of cost-control

Robert J. Samuelson tells it like it is on health care.

Do They Really Believe in Obamacare?

according to Michael G. Franc, a recent poll of lawmakers shows that Dems think ObamaCare helps them electorally, and GOP lawmakers think it helps them. Someone is wrong...

The False Premise of National Education Standards

Cato education czar Andrew Coulson on government education

> more

CCWUD PROJECT

cruel . corrupt . wasteful
unjust . deluded

Take the Test!

THE PROJECT

Work to restore the Road to the Middle Class. Here’s how. Ground it in faith. Grade it with education. Protect it with mutual aid. Defend it with the law. more>>

THE ARGUMENT

The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the king�s peace, the law of contract, and private property.