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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.
But suppose that the complete centralization and bureaucratization of health care leads to a meltdown?
Imagine that Mitt Romney had won the presidential election and the Democrats had kept the Senate. Then any problems with Obamacare implementation would be cried down by the mainstream media and Democratic lawmakers as all the fault of Romney, who didn't care who dies, as in Joe Soptic's wife. One-term president anyone?
Look, the American people had a choice in 2012. They could go with the man that had spent his entire life fixing dysfunctional organizations or they could go with the president who was not Mitt Romney. Anyone who knows anything can see that a turnaround is needed and that the administrative welfare state is heading for the rapids.
But the American people said No. We ain't ready for strong medicine, not yet, they said.
OK, fellas. If you don't want to respond to the writing on the wall, how about getting slapped upside the head. That is what the meltdown of Obamacare will mean, and it has the potential for a sea-change in US politics.
In that scenario the current scandals -- Benghazi, the IRS, and the AP wiretaps -- are just icing on the cake, warmup bouts for the Main Event.
| perm | comment(0) | 
| 05/17/13 3:52 pm ET
Dear Liberals: About Your Politics of Hate
I 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 ...
| perm | comment(1) | | 05/16/13 4:58 pm ET
Separation of Secular Church and State
SOMETIMES 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.
And the proof of it is that as soon as the philosophers and the philologists drove a stake through the heart of God in the early 19th century the world became flooded with secular religions. There was Fourierism, Saint-Simonism, Comte's Religion of Humanity, Marxism, Socialism. And that was just in the 19th century. Now we have feminism, environmentalism, identity studies.
If we take the universal Catholic Church as our model, we can see the replication of its forms and structures in all the secular religions. They have the sacred founder that is in the process of divinization. They have their holy scriptures. They have their orthodoxy, the systematic doctrine of the faithful. And they have ways of enforcing the orthodoxy. In our mild modern case we have "political correctness" that shames and marginalizes people with incorrect opinions. Other secular religions refined the prototypical Spanish Inquisition into the KGB. Then there is the church of the faithful. Every left-wing group organizes its little community of the faithful just like the local enthusiastic Christian church.
And then there is ritual. The preferred ritual of the modern secular religion seems to be the "peaceful protest." While Christians gather weekly in church or attend evening Bible study the secular religious attend organization meetings and gather in frequent peaceful protests where they wave placards and chant secular-religious slogans. In the old days, and recently in Wisconsin, they sang hymns like "Solidarity Forever."
The Founding Fathers determined that it was not a good thing for a single Christian sect to get its hands on political power through establishment as a state church and support through taxation.
But tell your liberal friend that her liberalism, as expressed through the liberal teachers at the local government school or at the local government university, amounts to an establishment of secular religion and she will object. No, no. We are not talking about religion, but ideas.
Quite so. But as soon as you organize ideas about the meaning of life into some sort of system you have already a proto-religion. And if you add to that proto-religion the power of the state then you are all ready to start legislating your morality. So when liberals start regulating the food laws and regulating sugary soft drinks, when liberals mandate recycling and composting, we are talking about an established church legislating its morality.
Remember? Rules about diet were big in the Old Testament.
Of course, as a conservative, I'm particularly irritated about liberal secular-religionists imposing their morality on me. Hey, they are goring my ox.
But I think there's a bigger issue. The whole idea of proscribing an establishment of religion was precisely to avoid any one sect or world-view from getting too much power. The Founding Fathers realized that a successful society needed to keep an open conversation in the public square. Society needed to prevent power mongers from monopolizing the public square with their own brand of religion, whether a God religion or a secular religion.
And that hasn't changed at all.
| perm | comment(0) | | 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 ...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/14/13 3:41 pm ET
Mother's Day Meltdown
REMEMBER 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 ...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/13/13 3:43 pm ET
Republicans Doing the Right Thing
WAY 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 ...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/10/13 3:55 pm ET
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs and Politics |
| 05/09/13 5:45 pm ET Capitalism is Not a System
A 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...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/08/13 5:09 pm ET
Horowitz's Foreign Policy Indictment(2) |
| 05/07/13 5:37 pm ETKeynes is Still Get-out-of-a-jam Economics |
| 05/06/13 4:03 pm ETNobody Knows Nothing Except Cooperation |
| 05/03/13 3:53 pm ET The Theory of Willful Blindness
A 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...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/01/13 3:57 pm ET
The Age of the Scrounger
IF 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 ...
| perm | comment(0) | | 04/26/13 3:59 pm ET
| May blogs | April blogs |
Politics Isn't Just Tactics
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 ...
Democrats: End of the Big Push
Last week, the pundits told us, was one of the worst in President Obama’s presidency. ...
Why They Hate Her
RMC Contents
Chapter 1: After the Welfare State
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
Chapter 2: Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn
Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism
Chapter 4: The Nineteenth Century From the Top Down
Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century From the Bottom Up
Chapter 6: Popular Religion in the Nineteenth Century
RMC Book of the Day
Lane, Frederick C., Venice A Maritime Republic
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, 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
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
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. Here’s 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.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[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
US Life in 1842
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
Taking Responsibility
[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.
Society and State
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
Socialism equals Animism
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
Sacrifice
[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
Responsible Self
[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.
