Road to the Middle Class - by Christopher Chantrill

You young-uns may not remember the last time that happened. So I will help you out. It was in the latter stages of the Carter administration, when the hostages were in Iran, when inflation was 10 percent, people had to line up to get gasoline, and President Carter made his "malaise" speech,

Well, you can understand why liberals felt that way. They were the best and the brightest; they believed in rational government. So how come things were going so badly wrong? It couldn't be them and their stupid ideas. Oh no. Liberals couldn't be to blame. It must the the American people. They were ungovernable.

So now, after the "year the locusts ate," with President Obama having failed to pass his signature reforms to heal the sick and stop the oceans rising, liberals are blaming the system, the politicians, the public. Anyone but themselves. Jay Cost has the goods.

Ezra Klein argued that it was time to reform the filibuster because the government cannot function with it intact anymore. Tom Friedman suggested that America's "political instability" was making people abroad nervous. And Michael Cohen of Newsweek blamed "obstructionist Republicans," "spineless Democrats," and an "incoherent public" for the problem.

Nonsense, says Jay Cost. The problem is that the "President has simply not been up to the job." He has governed too far to the left, encouraging the left-wing House to produce bills too far to the left to get through the Senate and the result is that he hasn't been able to get enough support to push his program through.

That's not a bug, it's a feature. The founding fathers meant to set things up that way. They created three branches of government to police each other. They created a bi-cameral legislature that balanced popular representation with regional representation. They created a Bill of Rights to limit government power.

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.

So be quiet, liberals. The system is functioning exactly as designed. And if you don't figure that out real quick your chaps are going to be tossed out of Congress in November in an election that will make 1994 look like a Sunday school outing.

The last time that liberals declared the United States "ungovernable" the voters elected Ronald Reagan in two landslide elections. And, if you remember, during the Reagan Era nobody complained about the American people being "ungovernable."

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| perm | comment(0) | 02/08/10 11:32 am ET

Employment Improves

THERE'S LIGHT at the end of the tunnel. The unemployment rate is down to 9.7 percent. But that really isn't the interesting number. The interesting number is that, in the Household Survey, there is an increase in the number of employed. It is up 542,000. That is big news. Of course, the Establishment Survey shows a decline in employment of 20,000. But the Household Survey shows a definite...

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| perm | comment(0) | 02/05/10 11:11 am ET

Howard Zinn's Philosophy

HOWARD ZINN, a World War II bombardier and GI Bill graduate who returned his thanks to the government by damning the US in a long career of left-wing ranting, died of a heart attack at 87.In The New York Times obituary Zinn is represented as a bit of a rogue. In National Review Online Roger Kimball finds him a monster.Of course, in his Peoples' History of the United States Howard Zinn was...

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| perm | comment(0) | 02/04/10 11:45 am ET

Man (ok, Woman) Bites Dog

I LIVE BY A rigid, inflexible rule. Whenever liberals attack a conservative politician as a dunce--amiable or stupid--I pay attention. I mark that conservative politician as a rising star, perhaps even called to greatness.So I am naturally drawn, as many others have been, to Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK). Given how vigorously liberals have demonized and stigmatized her, I suspect that she is truly...

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| perm | comment(1) | 02/03/10 11:19 am ET

Liberal Ignorance (about Conservatives)

AS TRITE AS it is to bring this up. Liberals don't really know much about conservatives. And that starts with the president.A journeyman blogger like John Hawkins posts an article like "Seven Huge Flaws in the Way Liberal Think" on a regular basis. Whether he's right or he's wrong, he's still thinking about the foundations of liberal thought.President Obama seems to be as bad as anyone. JSF at...

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| perm | comment(0) | 02/02/10 11:20 am ET

Fox News Most Trusted

YOU CAN UNDERSTAND that Fox News star Bill O'Reilly couldn't resist the opportunity to gloat a little. Public Policy Polling, a liberal polling outfit, had just released a poll on TV news pitched as:Fox News is the only major tv news operation that more Americans trust than distrust.Here are the results in a convenient table:News Org.TrustDon't TrustNot SureFox News49%37%15%ABC News31%46%22%NBC...

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| perm | comment(1) | 02/01/10 9:36 am ET

What's Wrong With Stocks?

THE 4TH QUARTER GDP came in gangbusters this morning, at 5.7 percent. So what's the matter with stocks? They've been in a swoon for a couple of weeks, and yawned this morning at the GDP numbers.The answer can only be that the market doesn't see the gangbuster improvement continuing for much longer. What's the problem?Maybe it's as simple as one word: Taxes. David Malpass looks at the outlook...

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| perm | comment(1) | 01/29/10 11:51 am ET

There is no Plan B(3) | 01/28/10 11:17 am ET
Freezing What Mr. President?(1) | 01/27/10 11:15 am ET
Obama's Bubble Politics | 01/26/10 11:18 am ET
Is Obama Serious? | 01/25/10 11:24 am ET
Noonan: Nuts vs. Creeps | 01/22/10 11:22 am ET
Will They, Can They Change? | 01/21/10 11:19 am ET
MA Voters Send Obama an Anniversary Present | 01/20/10 11:15 am ET
Conservatism in One Paragraph(1) | 01/19/10 11:17 am ET
Let's Count Some Chickens | 01/18/10 11:21 am ET
MLK and BHO(3) | 01/15/10 8:49 am ET
Obama's Tame Professor(1) | 01/14/10 8:58 am ET
Bank Crisis Inquiry: Where's Fannie? | 01/13/10 8:43 am ET
"It's the Peoples' Seat" | 01/12/10 8:58 am ET

| February blogs | January blogs |

OPED

Budget Fun with Fannie and Freddie

REMEMBER WHEN your liberal friends used to writhe on the floor in a foaming rage? They were outraged because the Iraq War never got into the federal budget, but got slipped in through the back door with “supplemental appropriations.”

Now there’s a new game in town. Advanced conservatives are going to class to learn how to throw themselves on the floor about the losses at the government’s mortgage giants, Fannie and Freddie: $400 billion and counting. Now that these GSEs are flat broke, why doesn’t the ...

| more | comment | 02/05/10

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Isn’t it great to have a Republican Senator from Massachusetts? It’s also good to have the First Amendment reaffirmed by the United States Supreme Court—even if our liberal friends are shocked and appalled at the notion of corporations sticking up for themselves. ...

| more | comment | 02/03/10

The Content of Obama's Character (1)

Obama's Jobs Hole

Repeal the Health Bill (1)

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

Stark, Rodney, Exploring the Religious Life

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

Tea Party's next chapter? Answers unclear

AP (!) cautiously starts to give the Tea Party movement some respect.

Why are liberals so condescending?

Gerard Alexander maps the terrain of liberal condescension.

Abstinence Works

Pity that the Dems just shut down abstinence education, writes Robert Rector

Howard Zinn, Professor of Contempt

Roger Kimball delivers the goods on radical prof Howard Zinn, dead at 87.

Howard Zinn, Historian, Dies at 87

NYT obit for radical author of People's History of the United States

> 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.