Irving Kristol

From Myron Magnet (City Journal, The Godfather, R.I.P., September 18, 2009).

Irving Kristol, who died today at 89, was famously the godfather of neoconservatism, and he was the godfather of City Journal, too, having urged the Manhattan Institute’s then-president Bill Hammett 20 years ago to start a magazine.

R.I.P indeed. My condolences to his friends and family.

It would be a wonderful thing to face your last breaths knowing that you did everything you could to make the world a better place. In that sense only, Mr. Kristol's death was a wonderful thing.

His was a truly magnificent life and the world will be poorer for his passing.

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Cross posted at From the Maenianum Secundum (comments are open there).

The Usual

Ah, yes, the usual "when the Republicans had a majority" canard (Steve Chapman, Reason Magazine, The Republican Health Care Failure: Why the GOP should save a share of blame for itself), September 14, 2009):

But for four years under President Bush, we had not only a Republican president but also a Republican Congress.

And what happened? Nothing. Republicans left health care reform to wait until the Democrats regained power, and now the Democrats have.

Gee, a libertarian organization knocking both Republicans and Democrats. And they do that, why, possibly?

All that a simple majority allows is for the Party with the simple majority to set the agenda. It has nothing to do with getting anything passed. The Democrats successfully blocked victory of anything conservative by using the Filibuster rules, which require a super-majority of 60 seats.

When the Republicans did compromise to get a Bill passed, without leaving it to the Democrats to tackle, we ended up with the Prescription Drug program, a cash cow if there ever was one. That prevented a greater disaster, by leaving it in the hands of Democrats to craft a similar-subject and worse Bill, but it was still horrible. That's the political reality, but I wouldn't expect anyone from Reason to allow reality to enter into the mix.

There are/were liberal Republicans in the mix, just as there are conservative Democrats in the majority the Democrats have now, which is what is stopping the reform the liberal Democrats are trying to push through. The Democrats have a super-majority, but they can't get HR3200 passed because they don't have a liberal super-majority in Congress today, anymore than there was a conservative super-majority during Bush's first term.

You'd think that a group of people who proclaim to be about how unique individuals are would avoid fallacious arguments like this, but in politics, everything is relative, such as in this case, when the leaving out of facts that invalidates your argument. (Hey, Reason, "reason" requires relying on facts, not ignoring them.)

The argument should be that we don't need any reform of the health care industry. The fact that people are crying out for reform is an example of the public being duped by propaganda. The Congress has no authority to "reform" the health care industry... but never allow a political crisis to go to waste, and in this case, use it as an opportunity to assert that libertarians should be in charge, rather than Republicans or Democrats.

H/t Instapundit.

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Cross posted at From the Maenianum Secundum (comments are open there).

Throwing the 'Bums' Out

One of the common political refrains these days is to throw out all of Congress. It was a recurring theme that ended up on home-painted signs at the March on Washington, D.C. on Sunday. People do not see a difference between Republicans and Democrats, so the response to that inability to see a difference is to throw blame at all members of Congress for the mess we're in today.

While I'm admit that the light that shines between some Republicans and Democrats is as thin as star dust, not all Republicans and Democrats were created equal. What's important to note, however, is that the lack of differences meme works both ways.

If we were to trying to measure how conservative or liberal someone was we might begin to understand that the ideological differences are regional, not Party.

Compare, for example, the voting records of the Blue Dogs versus the Republican contingent from the northeast. The differences are marginal. The Blue Dogs refer to themselves as conservative- or moderate-Democrats and bark when there are programs designed to increase the size of the government's budget.

But that, unfortunately, is where the major differences end. The Blue Dogs might not want to increase the budget of the Federal government, but they have no problem with increasing the power of government (Blue Dog Statement on President’s Address to Congress, September 9, 2009 [pdf]) or behaving like attack dogs in the yards of private industry:

“Blue Dogs believe we have a responsibility to pass health care reform legislation that is deficit neutral, increases the value and quality of care for all Americans, and that takes a responsible approach to controlling costs over the long term."

And:

“Blue Dogs agree with President Obama that the insurance market should be reformed. We must end the practice of denying coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions, and we must eliminate the waste, fraud and abuse that is currently bankrupting the system."

It is not possible to reign-in health care costs and micromanage the way the Insurance market sets their rates or chooses their clients. If, for example, Congress was to pass legislation which prohibited the auto insurance industry from refusing to insure people with pre-existing auto accidents, it would be clear to everyone that auto insurance would rise for all, to cover the serial accident customer, especially good drivers, because they're the low hanging fruit with respect to raising rates. But somehow, magic would be applied to the health insurance industry to prevent that same outcome.

Congress has no authority to regulate the insurance industry, auto or health, other than applying universal rules to that industry, as they do any other, and that is the issue that few are willing to admit, or tackle. The only authority Congress has with respect to the health insurance industry is to reform Tort and put fraud criminals behind bars. The latter would require that government accept responsibility and actually do something, rather than pointing the finger at evil corporations. The former would target the professions of far too many Democrats in Congress.

A conservative Republican and a conservative Democrat are not the same thing.

Most of this is laziness. People want there to be a number, letter, or other symbol next to a person's name to identify them, to take the guess work out of voting. This is desired for the same reason that some students read Spark Notes rather than reading the text of the book assigned. It might not be forbidden, but it is unethical, and the only person the students are really cheating are themselves.

There are no shortcuts to vetting a candidate before voting for them. Even the ratings services, such as Vote Smart, require more than one search to determine a candidates' voting record or policy positions. Their policy statements often have no basis in fact and a comparison of their record to their policy statements is the only way to determine if they're being honest. But that requires work.

"Throwing the bums out" has been tried before. It never works. Often the new is worse than the old. There are always new bums, but more importantly, the good people get caught in the firestorm. It is simple-mindedness to believe that all of Congress are bad.

I happen to like my Congress folks, especially in my home district. They vote exactly the way I want them to. Why would I desire to throw them out?

"Throwing the bums out" is a punitive act, targeting a group, rather than the guilty. It is borne out of a desire to punish the many for the deeds of the few, and has nothing to do with reforming government. There are no shortcuts here, and the fault is not with Congress, but with us, the voters.

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Cross posted at From the Maenianum Secundum (comments are open there).

Oh, Lady Lay, Get Over Yourself

For someone so smart, she sure gets it wrong. I will admit that I read Camille Paglia as the last sound voice among Democrats, hoping upon hope that someone who identifies with that Party will show themselves to be something other than a tool fool. At least she writes with an HL Mencken style panache. She is my only guilty pleasure and is the only Democrat to whom I give the time of day, but really it is to remind myself of how morally vacuous they truly are. Reading her is like believing that a cheating husband really means it this time when he says he'll straighten out.

Paglia disappoints again with her latest screed (Salon, Too late for Obama to turn it around?, September 9, 2009):

Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis.

The only national coalition that existed was a fantasy in the mind of Democrats. While they constantly state Obama's election in terms of "landslide," the reality is that the margin of victory was incredibly narrow and was due to the masses of religious-conservatives (formerly Yellow-Dogs) staying home out of protest that McCain, of McCain-Feingold, was their Party's standard-bearer. The conservatives stayed home to teach Republicans a lesson, but the only one getting the punishment good and hard is, well, all of us.

Paglia may have believed that magic coalition was going to put an end to politics as usual, as Obama said he would do, but only fools believed him. What politician hasn't promised that? It was a classic case of wink-wink, nudge-nudge, as everyone to the Left of McGovern ssh'd their actual plans, and said whatever was necessary to fool the masses into temporarily allowing the Democrats a flash of majority. But like a child who has been caught with the neighbor's stolen toy, it will be ripped from their crying hands and returned to the rightful owner.

It seems that Paglia believed it, and more sadly, still believes the 1960s hype that Democrats have ever been about liberty rather than libertinism, and insipid emotionalism of the Baby Boomers pouting-ascendancy to Peter Pan-like adulthood, regardless of Lucy and her Diamonds:

I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party -- but I must be living in the nostalgic past. Remember Bob Dylan's 1964 song "Chimes of Freedom," made famous by the Byrds? And here's Richie Havens electrifying the audience at Woodstock with "Freedom! Freedom!" Even Linda Ronstadt, in the 1967 song "A Different Drum," with the Stone Ponys, provided a soaring motto for that decade: "All I'm saying is I'm not ready/ For any person, place or thing/ To try and pull the reins in on me."

It isn't a nostalgic past. It is a fantasy past. Bob Dylan and Linda Ronstadt were always pandering commies, of the Guthrie school of serial wife-abandonment and alcohol abuse. Paglia is stuck in the 1960s vision of a world without bad stuff and the dazzling marketing of it being about peace, rather than getting a piece. Somehow, she manages to forget that the peace her comrades delivered came with the death of millions in the Killing Fields, and mass executions in South Vietnam. But what's a few million brown people dying have to do with that cool dream of a world without war, eh?

You'd think that after all this time, with the bodies piled up for all to see, she'd have figured it out.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills).

I can't tell if she actually believes that nonsense or if she's repeating it like a mantra in hopes of convincing herself of a past that never was, and a Party that never has been.

The Democrats since Truman have been about one thing, and one thing only: Power. They actually admire the world's thugocracies and authoritarian societies as models of what is possible, rather than something to avoid. She sees it in the current crop of Democratic powerful, but refuses to look into the crystal-ball of history to notice that it was ever thus:

Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

Because, Camille, self-actualization as practiced by the Baby Boomers has never been anything other than elevating the self above every other self., i.e, I matter and I have power and that comes by taking yours, rather than recognizing that there is abudance enough for everyone, if they just work for it. That's always been what the Me-generation believed, and there's no evidence to suggest that the most spoiled and coddled generation will ever be about anything else except blatant selfishness and materialistic gain. The expanding government authority will be their authority, so it won't be the same authority of their parents, so it will be different, this time! They still don't get that self-actualized, applied to everyone, means that no one is special, and no one gets to elevate their lusts above everybody else's lusts. Self-actualization is about overcoming and controlling lusts, not elevating them as some sort of laudable achievement. I have a really difficult time accepting that she doesn't see this.

The 1960s Democrats don't care about the poor and starving masses yearning to be free and they never did. That was just an excuse for a party and a reason to get high. They just want to have moon-lit parties at the base of the statue as a great backdrop as a party theme. They care about getting laid, getting high, and getting and doing everything else they want, without one shred of recognition that those things have consequences. In fact, it is the consequences of bad decisions that they've been battling with their entire lives. If they wish it really, really hard, perhaps they can continue to escape the banal reality that living life without a net means you really don't have a net, and it will hurt like Hell when the high wears off. They still want someone else to bear the burden of the consequences and feel their pain. The goal has been to figure out a way to make the high permanent.

But dreaming in the 1960s and '70s had a spiritual dimension that is long gone in our crassly materialistic and status-driven time.

No, it didn't. It was always about crass materialistic selfishness, but Paglia didn't see that through the pot fog and the marketing by music companies who released the peacenik-millionaires' pathetic music...

And sadly, she still doesn't.

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Cross posted at From the Maenianum Secundum (comments are open there).

Reality Land

From Peter Wallsten (latimes.com, Obama is fast losing white voters' support, September 7, 2009):

Still unclear is whether Obama's slide in the polls is due solely to his policies, or questions about his personal background or allegiances.

It is not unclear. It's "all of the above."

The article is swimming in left-wing bias. Take this, for example:

...in which some conservatives accused him of socialism

We've been accusing him of socialism since he entered the race. It's now obvious to anyone with an above 4th-grade reading-level that the accusations (at the time considered smear-tactics) are true.

And then there's:

But the drop in support among whites also comes as some conservatives have stoked controversies...

By stoking controversies, he means, "reporting on the facts," but let's not quibble on the details, eh?

One such episode came to a head Sunday when Van Jones, Obama’s green jobs czar, resigned after a week of criticism over past inflammatory statements and for signing onto conspiracy theories questioning whether the U.S. government played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks. A White House official acknowledged Sunday that Jones had been vetted less rigorously than other officials.

Jones was vetted "less rigorously" than, say, the other dozen people who resigned or couldn't pass Congressional scrutiny. That's rich. The "past inflammatory statements" was a nice touch, too, and lets on to how the Democrats are going to spin that one in the future: It was in the past they'll say, and don't we all have skeletons in our past? It wasn't representative of how he is now. Silly conservatives, always predicting future behavior by actual evidence of the past behavior, rather than those hope-and-changey emotions!

There are a few more examples given how those mean-old conservatives have stoked fires, ending in:

These controversies have followed conspiracy theories that the president was born overseas and is ineligible to hold office, and that his true religion is Islam -- false rumors that some Democrats worry could be affecting the public's view of the president and his party.

Nice one, but the public is no longer buying it. Trying to lump legitimate criticisms in with the small segment of extremists worked until Democrats started accusing Tea Party attendees of being nutters. Those are people's friends and neighbors they've been slandering. The complicit media have to cover the President and hiding Obama's faults and disasters is getting more and more difficult. Blaming someone else for your troubles works for a while, but Americans really do believe that "the buck stops with the President."

What's important to remember is that Americans are willing to give a new President some slack, and expect a few stumbles as they get their Administration staffed. It becomes difficult to continue to blame Obama's mistakes on newness or staff ineptitude. Eventually, the only reasonable conclusion is that the flattering opinion of Obama was a mistake. The flattery was based on Obama being an unknown quantity, with people reading into the blank slate what they wanted to see. That's no longer the case.

During the campaign it was possible for Team Obama to distance the candidate from his socialist sympathies (few actually researched Obama's voting record or took seriously his association with former-criminals, his friendliness for left-wing dictators, or read his American-apologist/ progressive agenda spelled out in his books). But this (despite the White House staff confusion on the matter) is no longer Candidate Obama. He is now President Obama and the people ready to give him a pass for his history can't dismiss the reality appearing on the news every night.

I'll go so far as to make a prediction: While Obama will have a bit of a roller-coaster ride in the polls over the coming years, the general trend will be lead balloon. He won't get renominated by his own Party.

I don't know of a precedent for a President becoming a lame duck in their first year in office, but Obama has always been about beating odds. If Obama is half as smart as his supporters thought he was, he'll feign some sort of illness to allow him to step aside. I'm not certain that a narcissist of Obama's league can handle being loathed by so many.

When a politician can make Joe Biden seem like a brilliant statesman, you have to know how bad things really are in reality land.

H/t Instapundit.

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Cross posted at From the Maenianum Secundum (comments are open there).

Succint

From Paul Howard (City Journal, It’s the System, September 3, 2009):

The real health-care problem isn’t moral, as the president claims, but structural.

What he said.

Cross posted at From the Maenianum Secundum (comments are open there).

Neo-Federalists and Competition

Wendell Cox provides us with proof that New York's current government policies are driving people from the state (City Journal, Escape from New York, September 1, 2009):

Not only is New York losing talented people to the rest of the country, then; it is also losing enormous financial resources at a time when it can least afford to.

Mr. Cox also details where the people in New York are migrating to, which includes:

• Florida
• New Jersey
• Pennsylvania
• North Carolina
• Georgia
• Connecticut
• Virginia
• South Carolina
• Maryland
• Texas

It would be reasonable to conclude that some of the people who are leaving New York to go to Florida are doing so as part of their retirement strategy (Florida, humorously referred to as "God's Waiting Room"). Some of the outmigration is for retirement, but not all of it. This means that people are discovering that there are greater freedoms and prosperity in other states in the nation.

California has similar outmigration statistics (with more productive citizens leaving the state than going to it).

That's all fine. If people want to move to other states in the nation, they have every right to do so. When looking at the unemployment statistics, it is easy to understand why people are leaving some states (New York, California, Michigan, etc.) in greater numbers than those going to them.

That's what competition is all about. States, like Texas, have become "business friendly" to encourage more people to come to the state to work and to create new businesses. This, of course, irritates the Democratic-majority states, because it means that there will come a point where their onerous taxes and regulations cause a person to run to a state without those burdens. It also means that these states will be left with the whey and not curds of society.

States have the right (and some would include duty) to make their state attractive to their current residents and to future residents. They can do this in many ways, but the significant methods include low taxation, recognition of rights, and greater job opportunities in traditional employment and in starting new businesses. When a state puts in place onerous restrictions on starting a new business, or penalizes the self-employed/small business owner over the employed-by-others citizens, it is not surprising that entrepreneurs are going to respond to the carrots being offered in other states.

This is why the Left has been doing its darndest to level the playing field. Neo-Federalists attempt this by inventing Federal authority to regulate more and more areas at the Federal level.

The recent attempts to Federalize health insurance and health care is just one example. As more and more of the entitlement dollars are fed through the Federal coffers (rather than through State coffers as the Constitution clearly stipulates), the competition between the states for productive and entrepreneurial citizens is diminished.

The goal of Neo-Federalists is to make the states indistinguishable so that their ideas of entitlements and socialism are imposed on all states, making escape from these types of tax burdens moot. In other words, the Neo-Federalist goal is to homogenize America by intruding on the legislative authority of the individual states.

Some states have or have attempted to make laws to weigh outmigrants with the tax burdens of the state, long after they have left the state. New York, for example, wanted to make it a requirement that businesses who move out of the state have to continue to pay New York taxes for 10 years. The idea that a one state can impose taxation on a business or individual who establishes residency in another state is a kind of indentured servitude (and it is unconstitutional).

Unfortunately, the Federal government has done just that, by rejecting residency as the single condition of tax liability. For example, if a U.S. citizen leaves the country and establishes a business in another country, they are liable for U.S. taxes. They are liable for those taxes, regardless of country of residency. All other countries rely on residency rules for taxation, not citizenship. Further, if that citizen renounces their citizenship, taking citizenship of another country, they are still liable for U.S. taxes for a period of ten years. We are the only country to do that.

That type of tax liability discourages people from starting businesses in a particular state, or in the U.S. in general. We also have one of the highest corporate taxes in the world, discouraging foreigners (and citizens) from creating new businesses in the U.S.

We must compete with other states and with other countries for tax dollars based on incentives, not punitive measures, if we want to stop the John Galt effect and the exodus of productive and creative entrepreneurs from our nation. Each state has the right to legislate their tax code in any manner they choose. They also have the right to regulate commerce in their state, imposing onerous rule and requirements or to be "business friendly."

Today, U.S. citizens have the right to vote with their feet, as many in New York are doing in response to the onerous regulations and taxes in New York. We must do everything possible to keep it this way. Reversing the trend and schemes of Neo-Federalists would be even better, restoring the legislative and taxation authority to the states, but that will require a Republican-party super-majority in the Congress.

Cross posted at From the Maenianum Secundum (comments are open there).