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Obama. A Gift from the Gods
IN a thumb-sucker about the managerial shortcomings of the Obama White House, John Fund surfaces the worries of Democrats, that "chaotic implementation" of Obamacare could "could become the biggest political liability Democrats will face in next year’s midterm elections."
Don't set your sights too high, Mr. Fund. How about: the train wreck of Obamacare implementation could result in the biggest electoral meltdown since the Republican Party nearly destructed in the Great Depression.
Because the meltdown of Obamacare is going to be personal to the millions of women who want to keep their healthcare arrangements and who spend half their lives discussing their healthcare experiences and procedures with their friends. That's why President Obama told Americans again and again that if they liked their health insurance they could keep it.
But now there's a good chance that not only will people not be able to keep their health insurance but everything about health care will be thrown into a maelstrom.
It's been telling this week that Obama campaign guru David Axelrod has been on TV saying that the government is just too big for one man to supervise. The HotAir guys were right on it.
The problem for conservatives is that, most of the time, the administrative welfare state sorta kinda rubs along. Sure the dollar has been reduced to $0.02 in a century by the repeated need to get the government out of a jam. But people still get their Social Security checks.What’s significant about Axelrod’s defense of O is that he’s pointing to the size of government as a structural reason for why scandal might proliferate, which is downright Reaganesque as a critique of the federal leviathan. The bigger the government gets, the less accountability there’ll be. That’s conservatism 101.
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| 05/17/13 3:52 pm ET
Dear Liberals: About Your Politics of HateI dare say that, after a month of two of denial, liberal pundits will start asking: How could this happen to good people like us? Let me help. The answer is simple. Racists, sexists, bigots and homophobes. No, I don't mean that racists, sexists, bigots and homophobes did this to you. I mean that liberal politics, which marginalizes anyone that disagrees with the liberal ruling class as a ...
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| 05/16/13 4:58 pm ET
Separation of Secular Church and StateSOMETIMES I have to agree with liberals. The writers of the US Constitution were living in another age. They just could not foresee how things would change and make the constitution obsolete.
Take the First Amendment and the Jefferson corollary. The whole idea of preventing an "establishment of religion" and enforcing a separation between church and state is just so 18th century, darling.
Because now the problem is the establishment of secular religion.
There's a British chappie who has penned a conventional-wisdom book about the decline of religion. In God is Dead: secularization in the West, Steve Bruce argues that people are just less interested in religion. He writes:
I expect the proportion of people who are largely indifferent to religious ideas to increase and the seriously religious to become a small minority.Of course, if you define religion narrowly as "believing in a transcendent God" Bruce's attitude might be partly right, although the Islamists would disagree. But if we are talking broadly about ideas and communities and rituals in which people construct a faith about the meaning of life and what to do about it, then Steve Bruce is bound to be completely wrong.
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| 05/15/13 4:03 pm ET
What If Romney Had Won?SINCE we are entering full-scale second-term scandal mode, what with Benghazi and the IRS scandal, it's worth stepping back to think about what things would be like if Mitt Romney had won. We would have divided government and a combative media looking for every opportunity to brand Romney and his policies as cruel and unfeeling. Because that's what political liberals do, whether in the ...
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| 05/14/13 3:41 pm ET
Mother's Day MeltdownREMEMBER the Saturday Night Massacre in the Nixon Administration? It was October 10, 1973 and the Watergate scandal was going critical. President Nixon wanted to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor, but Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than do the dirty deed. Finally Solicitor General Robert Bork agreed to do it. Last ...
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| 05/13/13 3:43 pm ET
Republicans Doing the Right ThingWAY back, 39 years ago, when President Nixon was impeached in the House of Representatives for lying about Watergate, three Republican senators went down Pennsylvania to tell the president that he had to resign rather than face trial in the US Senate. The three senators were Jim Buckley (R-NY), Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), and Hugh Scott (R-PA). By the way, Hillary Clinton was a young staffer on ...
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| 05/10/13 3:55 pm ET
| 05/09/13 5:45 pm ET
Capitalism is Not a SystemA great irony of our modern era is that at exactly the same time that the Cartesian-Newtonian world-view was emerging the anti-systemic capitalist culture was emerging as well. On the one hand you had the billiard ball determinism of Newtonian mechanics. On the other hand you had the infinite complexity of the market process. So why do we talk about the free-market "system", the price "system...
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| 05/08/13 5:09 pm ET
| 05/07/13 5:37 pm ET
| 05/06/13 4:03 pm ET
| 05/03/13 3:53 pm ET
The Theory of Willful BlindnessA while back I took a look at "Marx's Five Big Mistakes," five big things that Karl Marx got wrong. I mean things like the immiseration of the working class, the alienation of workers by the division of labor, the labor theory of value, the idea that bureaucracy would wither away under socialism, and that people would abandon the division of labor under socialism. But then I got to wondering...
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| 05/01/13 3:57 pm ET
The Age of the ScroungerIF you are a conservative or Republican, chances are that you are a member in good standing of the People of the Responsible Self. Nothing remarkable here. The Responsible Self was invented during the Axial Age, according to Robert Bellah. The idea developed that humans were not simply the helpless chattels of the gods but individuals, responsible before God for their lives. It's the ...
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| 04/26/13 3:59 pm ET
| May blogs | April blogs |
MANY OF THE commenters on my article last week on “Democrats: End of the Big Push” took me to task for underestimating the ruthlessness of the Democrats.
Maybe I do underestimate them. But here is something to back up my point. A well-known Democratic activist recently said this:
Planned Parenthood is not going ...
Last week, the pundits told us, was one of the worst in President Obama’s presidency. ...
WHAT WILL come after the welfare state? After 120 years, at the turn of the twenty-first century, it is clearly showing its age.... more
Lane, Frederick C., Venice A Maritime Republic
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, Reclaiming Education
How only a market in education will provide opportunity for the poor
James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
How the feminists wrecked education for boys and for girls
E.G. West, Education and the State
How education was doing fine before the government muscled in
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
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
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
How to Walk Away
advice for Obamison sunk costs.
The first important conservative thinker
new biography and critique of Edmund Burke and his ideas.
Danes Rethink a Welfare State
There is no more money.
Medicaid Doesn't Make People Healthier
Oregon study replicates Rand study from 1980s. People with insurance spend more on health care.
How Skynet Might Emerge From Simple Physics
Intelligence is a strategy to keep the future open: freedom
> archive
cruel . corrupt . wasteful unjust . deluded
Work to restore the Road to the Middle Class. Heres how. Ground it in faith. Grade it with education. Protect it with mutual aid. Defend it with the law. more>>
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 kingŽs peace, the law of contract, and private property.
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists, she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
[To make] of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier.
Gen. Hans von Seeckt, quoted in MacGregor Knox, Williamson Murray, ed., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050.
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
[The Axial Age] highlights the conception of a responsible self... [that] promise[s] man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.
Robert N Bellah, "Religious Evolution", American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 3.
©2011 Christopher Chantrill
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