Doomed liberalism?

John Hinderaker offers up this insight on where we are now.  It's hard to refute this position on this subject.

IS LIBERALISM DOOMED?

Liberals are feeling triumphant these days, but in the backs of their minds there must be a sense of foreboding. They won this year by demonizing Republicans and by bribing various demographic groups with government largesse. But the Left’s tactical victory can’t conceal the fact that its ideology is bankrupt. The left’s real enemy isn’t Republicans, it is arithmetic.

Welfare states are collapsing all around the world. Ours is on the same course. It is commonly observed that America’s entitlement programs are Ponzi schemes, which is correct. What is less often noted is that federal government spending in general is a Ponzi scheme, sustained only by influxes of new money–real money from China and a handful of others, and fake money from the Fed–that cannot long continue.

It is characteristic of any Ponzi fraud that the people who get in on the ground floor do well. That makes the scheme popular; people clamor to get in. This is what has happened with Social Security and Medicare here in the U.S. Past and current beneficiaries are receiving benefits that are entirely disproportionate to what they paid in. This obviously cannot continue indefinitely. Every Ponzi fraud inevitably crashes when its exponential growth cannot be sustained because there is not enough new money–not enough suckers, to put it bluntly. In the context of entitlements, “new money” means young people. That point is now approaching rather rapidly.

This is why the Democrats cannot adopt a budget. A budget requires arithmetic, and arithmetic demonstrates that the welfare state must either come crashing down, or be exposed as the terrible deal it is for those who didn’t get in on the ground floor.

Crony capitalism at work

Here's an item from the blog of Walter Meade that will warm the cockles of your libertarian heart.  This is living proof of crony capitalism at work and it also exposes the real motive behind most liberals: the lust for power.

Big Pharma and John Kerry Raid Medicare

The fiscal cliff bill didn’t just raise taxes; it showered half a billion dollars on a canny Big Pharma company that knows its way around Capitol Hill. A provision in the newly-passed fiscal cliff bill allows pharmaceutical giant Amgen to sell one of its pills (Sensipar) for two more years without having to negotiate a fair price with Medicare. Sensipar is an expensive pill, and the two year delay will cost Medicare upwards of $500 million. What makes this bit of corporate welfare even more egregious is the fact that Amgen recently pleaded guilty to an unrelated charge of major fraud. Nothing, it seems, is impossible for the politically connected:

Amgen has deep financial and political ties to lawmakers like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, and Senators Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, who hold heavy sway over Medicare payment policy as the leaders of the Finance Committee.

Meanwhile, John Kerry found another way to raid the health care system. The Senator from Massachusetts did what diligent Senators do; he added a provision to the Affordable Care Act to allow his state’s hospitals to increase their Medicare reimbursements by a factor of ten:

Here’s how Massachusetts gets extra money: Hospitals in urban areas have to be paid at least the same amount as rural hospitals. Massachusetts only has one rural hospital—a 19-bed facility on Nantucket island. So, the Nantucket Cottage Hospital sets the floor for every hospital in the state.

But because Nantucket is so wealthy, its cost of living is high—and thus so are its Medicare payments. That drives up the payments for every other hospital in the state. And under Kerry’s provision in the Affordable Care Act, hospital payments come from a nationwide pool.

If the provision remains in place, Massachusetts’s payments will rise over the next decade from $367 million to about $3.5 billion. The pool operates on a zero-sum basis, so all the money the Bay State gets will be funded by cutbacks from other states.

These seemingly separate incidents both demonstrate a point we made about Obamacare last month. The damage doesn’t stop when a law like this is passed; special interest lobbies quickly go to work “helping” to write the regulations to implement the law, and in the years that follow they add nips and tucks in follow-on bills and regulations. By increasing federal control over the healthcare industry, Obamacare has made it easier for both private and public groups to capture rents and funnel taxpayer money into their coffers. Rot and corruption at the intersection of the health care industry and the political system are already destroying much of the good Obama’s health care experiment hoped to do, and the toll will only mount.

Black Swan author Hasim

In a nearly one hour interview on Reason TV by Nick Gillispie, the author of"Black Swan" holds forth on his philosophy.  Clearly he is of the Austrian School of Economics although he claims to be more influenced by the Roman Seneca and the ancients in general.  Distilling much of his argument, he makes the case that too big too fail is a failed concept and leads to the troubles we arenow experiencing in the economy.  There is also a lot of Schumpeter in his philosophy.


http://s3.amazonaws.com/reasontv-video/reasontv_video_179164.mp4

Insightful Michele Bachmann

Michele Bachman has been pilloried by the left and squishy conservatives like John McCain forever, except, of course, that history keeps suggesting she is right a lot more than the left on a wide range of subjects.  Regrettably Bachmann had a close win in the last election in her district, and has decided to keep a lower profile, at least for a bit.  This is a shame as it is pretty clear she has real insights into how the real world works.

JANUARY 21, 2013 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN CONSERVATISM, LIBYA, OBAMA FOREIGN POLICY

RECONSIDERING MICHELE BACHMANN

The Washington Post reports today that al Qaeda’s successful attack on the Algerian natural gas plant has greatly boosted al Qaeda’s prestige in Africa. Along the way, the Post notes rather casually:

The assailants were well-trained and armed with what appear to have been weapons from the late Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi’s arsenal.

The overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi has turned out to be a terrible blunder. It has empowered radical Muslims, led directly to the Benghazi debacle, and scattered Gaddafi’s armory among terrorist elements, including al Qaeda. There has been, of course, no accountability for the Libya decision, either with respect to the Obama administration or others outside the administration who supported Obama’s policy.

All of which reminded me of Andy McCarthy’s column in National Review. McCarthy criticizes John McCain for his support of Obama’s failed Libya policy, and contrasts McCain with another Republican who gets less respect as a foreign policy expert:

[T]he senator and his allies in the Obama-Clinton State Department had a brilliant notion: The reason the “rebels” of eastern Libya hated America so much had nothing to do with their totalitarian, incorrigibly anti-Western ideology. No, no: The problem was that we sided with Qaddafi, giving the dictator — at the insistence of, well, McCain and the State Department — foreign aid, military assistance, and international legitimacy. If we just threw Qaddafi under the bus, the rebels would surely become our grand democratic allies.

This, of course, was a much more sophisticated theory than you’d get from lunatics like Michele Bachmann. Sit down for this, because I know it’s hard to believe anyone could spout such nutter stuff, but Bachmann actually opposed U.S. intervention in Libya. She claimed — stop cackling! — that many of McCain’s heroes might actually be jihadists ideologically hostile to the U.S. and linked to groups such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the terror enterprise’s North African franchise. She even thought — yeah, I know, crazy — that if Qaddafi were deposed, the heroes would get their hands on his arsenal, ship a lot of it to AQIM havens in places such as Mali and Algeria, and maybe even turn rebel strongholds such as Benghazi into death traps for Americans.

Good thing we listened to McCain, no?

McCarthy moves on to Egypt:

Now, however, McCain says he will push for American taxpayers to fork up another $480 million for Morsi. Or, to be accurate, borrow another $480 million. You see, the United States is already so deep in the red that a $16.3 trillion debt ceiling is not high enough. In fact, we’re such a basket case that our debt-service and “entitlement” payments alone put us in a quarter-trillion-dollar deficit hole even before we borrow and print another trillion-plus for such ancillary expenses as the Defense Department, the Obama family’s vacations, and the $80-odd million that funds “democratization” programs at McCain’s International Republican Institute. But hey, no problem — what’s another $480 million on top of the $2 billion–plus the Obama administration has already extended to Morsi’s regime . . . to say nothing of the sizable U.S. taxpayer chunk of the $4.8 billion IMF loan the Brotherhood government is also about to get its mitts on?

Naturally, “extremist” conservatives like Michele Bachmann are wet blankets when it comes to this gravy train, too. Get this: She thinks that when you get to the point where you have to borrow in order to pay the interest on the loans you already can’t pay off, somebody needs to cut off your credit line — not inflate it by another two or three trill. Even more daft: She thinks that if you subsidize an organization, like the Brotherhood, that promotes sharia and Hamas, you’re apt to get more sharia and more terrorism.

Andy notes something of which I was unaware–an effort to kick Michele Bachmann off the Intelligence Committee because she had the temerity to suggest that it was a bad idea for the Secretary of State to employ a staffer with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

McCain, between praising his Islamist “heroes” and championing ever more funding for Islamist Egypt, made certain to lambaste Bachmann on the floor of the Senate over her concerns about Brotherhood infiltration of our government – leading other influential Republicans to follow suit. And now, aping that display, People for the American Way — “PAW,” the outfit created by a hard-left Hollywood icon to smear Robert Bork and derail his Supreme Court nomination — is campaigning to have Bachmann booted from the House Intelligence Committee.

There is a war on over the course of American foreign policy and the security of the United States. The Left has aligned with the Brotherhood — some naïvely relying on the fiction that the Brothers are not the enemy vanguard, others seeing the Brothers as comrades in the quest for a utopian, post-American future. In opposition, the GOP can either continue looking to McCain for leadership or rally behind Bachmann the way the Left always circles the wagons around its stalwarts.

McCain isn’t sanguine about which way the GOP will jump.

All of this reminded me of the dark days of 2008, when the original TARP bill was cobbled together virtually overnight in response to panicked assertions by President Bush’s advisers that a financial collapse was in the offing. I didn’t blame Bush at the time for going along with the advice he was getting, but with hindsight, TARP was a huge mistake. Once the bailouts started, there was no turning back, and the result, a mere four years later, is that the relationship between the the federal government and the private sector has dramatically changed, perhaps forever. Whatever the result of letting one or two major banks fail might have been, it would have been far better than the state capitalism that we have been bequeathed by the Obama administration.

So once again, it is worth asking, who had the foresight back in 2008 to see where all of this was going and to stand vigorously against it? Well, Michele Bachmann, for one. The Political Guide recalls:

Congresswoman Bachmann has opposed the TARP program from its inception, and voted against the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which created the TARP program. With the initial collapse of Bear-Stearns and the panic which ensued afterwards, Congresswoman Bachmann called for calm, and mocked the repeated assertions of “too big to fail.”

As it became obvious that a government program would be created to address the financial crisis, Congresswoman Bachmann stated that Congress was being told that the consequences of inaction or even of deliberative action would be severe; but that the consequences of hasty action were just as dire. She noted that Secretary Paulson is asking taxpayers to pony-up $700 billion to buy Wall Street’s debt without a vote by the American people. She stated that shareholders in companies that receive government funds should not make a profit off those funds, and referred to the taxpayers as the “forgotten man.”

As the TARP program came into focus, Congresswoman Bachmann noted that the US people had been told numerous times that financial commitments to Bear-Stearns, AIG, and Fannie-Mae and Freddie-Mac would solve the problems and each time more bailouts were requested. She stated that the bailouts should stop and that Fannie and Freddie should be placed into receivership.

Just before the initial vote on the EESA, Congresswoman Bachmann noted that if a lack of credit was the problem in the economy, suspending mark to market rules and other items would have a larger and better effect than the infusion of cash. When the vote initially failed in the House, Congresswoman Bachmann stated that the plan was rushed, unworkable, and short-sighted.

When President Bush and President-Elect Obama asked for the second half TARP, Congresswoman Bachmann again stated that the measure was rushed and done without proper consideration. She stated that Congress was committing the next generation to servitude in passing the legislation.

When President Obama had the stock purchased with TARP changed from preferred to common stock, Congresswoman Bachmann noted the illegality of the move and cited it as further evidence that the program was out of control.

Unfortunately, not enough people–not even enough conservatives–listened to those warnings at the time.

Michele is a personal friend, which has not stopped me from occasionally expressing frustration with the fact that she has been known to go off half-cocked, and instinctively tries to fight every battle rather than picking her spots. Michele’s combativeness has come at a price; in November she eked out her narrowest win yet. The Minneapolis Star Tribunegleefully headlined: “Humbling year ends in silence for Bachmann.”

Now the Minnesota Republican is hardly heard from anymore, barely uttering a word in public during the simmering build-up to the “fiscal cliff” deal in Congress, which she opposed.

Gone are the boisterous rallies opposing Obamacare, the rousing church testimonials and the controversial TV utterances about Islamist moles in government that raised money even as they rained down critical headlines.

Since her wafer-thin re-election in November in the state’s most solidly Republican district, Bachmann has sharply dialed down her national profile, staying off television and remaining in the background of a raging congressional debate over taxes, her signature issue as a former IRS attorney and deficit hawk.

There is nothing wrong with keeping a lower profile for a while, but let’s hope that Michele has not fallen silent for long. With respect to the major issues of the last few years, she has been not just a bellwether, but a prophet.

The NRA political model

The Democracy Initiative: a Coup in Plain Sight

By Clarice Feldman

Matthew Continetti, one of my favorite writers, wrote an eye opener last week, "'A Conspiracy so Immense': ideological commitment and the timidity of pragmatic politics", too late for me to discuss in my column. It is one of the most important stories you'll ever read anywhere and shows how far behind conservatives are in the fight against "progressive " ideologues.

He picks up on a report by Andy Kroll in Mother Jones about a coordinated effort by about 36 different interest groups with reported revenues of no less than $1.69 billion, pledging millions of dollars to work together to attack conservative supporters and organizations, to intervene directly in Democratic politics, to push for filibuster reform to better enable a push through their agenda without any input from the opposition, and expanding "voting rights" and fighting voter registration laws to further grease the skids for their legislative agenda.

The group's organizers are Michael Brune, formerly director of the radical Rainforest Action Network, and presently director of the Sierra Club , Phil Radford, head of Greenpeace, Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America and Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP.

All of this is taking place with no comment by the media -- which like their counterparts in academia, Hollywood. Silicon Valley (and unfortunately too many big corporations) -- are ideological partners in "progressivism".

Here are some of the highlights of the article, though I strongly urge you read it all:

1. Who belongs: Kroll didn't name all the participants in the organization's latest retreat in December which took place within blocks of the White House at the headquarters of the National Education Association. Here are those he did name:

"the AFL-CIO, the Center for American Progress, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Color of Change, Common Cause, Demos, the Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, Mother Jones (in a "non-editorial" capacity!), National People's Action, the National Wildlife Federation, People for the American Way, the Piper Fund, Public Campaign, the Service Employees International Union, the United Auto Workers, and Voto Latino. Brune of the Sierra Club predicts there will be 50 participating organizations by spring."

2. How much money will they throw into their effort? Continetti thinks there should be "at least two high numerals inserted before Kroll's estimate of "millions of dollars". This from people claiming they want to get money out of politics.

Continetti repeatedly attacks the mainstream media for failing to cover this story, concluding,

What little we know of the Democracy Initiative provides a useful lesson in the ability of fantasy to inspire political action. Progressivism sets the political and cultural and social agenda; it is embedded in Hollywood, in Silicon Valley, in the academy, in journalism, and in much of corporate America; many of the richest counties in the nation support liberal Democrats; President Obama outraised and out-spent his Republican challenger; the combined budgets of progressive interest groups and foundations and think tanks and nonprofits and community organizations is practically incalculable; the most liberal president since Lyndon Baines Johnson is barreling ahead with a confrontational and ideological approach to cabinet appointments and budget fights; Republicans and conservatives are in their greatest state of shock and disarray since 1992 and perhaps since 1964; and yet progressive elites such as the well-compensated Radfordof Greenpeace still are swinging at the windmill of the "40-plus-year strategy by the Scaifes, Exxons, Coors, and Kochs of the world" to "take over the country."

Someone needs to give the members of the Democracy Initiative a tap on the shoulder, a kick in the pants, a wonk-like nudge -- anything to wake them from their fantasy of being weak and isolated and besieged, anything to alert them to the fact that it is they, not "the Scaifes, Exxons, Coors, and Kochs of the world" who actually run the country and therefore ought to be covered in a diligent, scrupulous, and adversarial fashion. One thing is for sure: It won't be the mainstream media that holds the progressive movement to account.

Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom, like me, found the Continetti article extremely important. Jeff's forte is language as a tool to stifle debate and control thinking, and he viewed the article largely from that angle.

It is post-modernist philosophy put into physical usage: we have witnessed, if we cared to take notice, the studied and inexorable deconstruction of our Constitution, such that we now have laws deemed Constitutional by the Court that claim that of course a country formed on a Declaration of Independence from a tyrannical centralized authority can be compelled by that centralized authority to enter into private contracts -- and that businesses be compelled to offer those contracts -- the specifics of which are set by the central government. We have a Court that deemed it Constitutional that of course the government can take private land and give it to a shopping mall developer if the promise of increased revenue for that government comes to be considered and act in the public interest. And soon, we'll be told that "shall not be infringed" is naturally open to infringements of all kinds, because shut up and think of the children.

"Equality" today means equality of outcome, or egalitarianism and homogeneity. "Tolerance" today means how dare you give offense -- and your "hate speech" must be controlled. "Fair share" today means an immensely disproportionate amount is paid by those scapegoated by the left and given over to the left's cronies, with some crumbs going to the poor, who become more and more entrenched in their dependence on the state, and more and more permanent clients to the state's war on the free market.

To anyone who has studied language -- and done so in a way where they didn't feel compelled to follow the academic party line and pretend the sophistry of the post-structural movement, which has reached its zenith (or from the perspective of Enlightenment classical liberalism, its nadir) in anti-foundationalism -- the physical, policy manifestations of such a corruption of our epistemology, informed by the premises we accept for the language that must necessarily describe and construct that epistemology, was an inevitability. As certain linguistic kernel assumptions were adopted, entrenched, and finally institutionalized -- by all political stripes ("Yay, it's the 'democratization of language and meaning!' We're all for democracy! Go us!" -- the effects of that adoption, played out in the world of language where language has performative functions (and no where is this more so than in law and legislative policy), were preordained: collectivism, consensus, mob rule, all dressed up in the finery of studied, rigorous legal interpretation that, once certain conditions for "interpreting" were legitimated, were inevitable. And that's precisely because the kernel assumptions were all cleverly laid by collectivists to deconstruct and or subsume the notion of individualism on every level.

This is a coup. And we've relied on cowards, charlatans, or know-nothings on "our" side to help push back against it.

While I agree with Jeff on the attempted coup and the failure of conservatives and the Republican party to effectively communicate what is going on and fight back against it, there are ways to counter this sort of thing but it takes time and the kind of effort I am not seeing.

In an article describing how the National Rifle Association became a political force to reckon with, the Washington Post 's Joel Achenbach, Scott Higham and Sari Horowitz show us how it was done.

1. Be firm in advancing your convictions and welcome controversy. "They are absolutist in their interpretation of the Second Amendment. The NRA learned that controversy isn't a problem but rather, in many cases, a solution, a motivator, a recruitment tool, an inspiration."

2. Don't try to be all things to all people. "The group has learned the virtues of being a single-issue organization with a very simple take on that issue. The NRA keeps close track of friends and enemies, takes names and makes lists. In the halls of power, it works quietly behind the scenes. It uses fear when necessary to motivate supporters. The ultimate goal of gun-control advocates, the NRA claims, is confiscation and then total disarmament, leading to government tyranny."

3. When the old order needs changing, change it:

In the second half of the 1970s, the NRA faced a crossroads. Would it remain an Establishment institution, partnering with such mainstream entities as the Ford Foundation and focusing on shooting competitions? Or would it roll up its sleeves and fight hammer and tongs against the gun-control advocates? [Snip]"Because of the political direction the NRA was taking, they weren't being invited to parties and their wives were not happy," says Jeff Knox, Neal's son and director of the Firearms Coalition, which fights for the Second Amendment and against laws restricting guns or ammunition. "Dad was on the phone constantly with various people around the country. He had his copy of the NRA bylaws and Robert's Rules, highlighted and marked. My father and a lot of local club leaders and state association guys organized their troops."

Theirs was a grass-roots movement within the NRA. The solution was to use the membership to make changes. The bylaws of the NRA gave members power on the convention floor to vote for changes in the NRA governing structure.

"We were fighting the federal government on one hand and internal NRA on the other hand," Aquilino says.

In Cincinnati, Knox read the group's demands, 15 of them, including one that would give the members of the NRA the right to pick the executive vice president, rather than letting the NRA's board decide. The coup took hours to accomplish. Joe Tartaro, a rebel, remembers the evening as "electric." The hall's vending machine ran out of sodas.

By 3:30 in the morning the NRA had a whole new look. Gone were the Old Guard officers, including Maxwell Rich, the ousted executive vice president.

3. Clean House when you need to,

Don't ignore your membership and their concerns and change leaders who go wobbly, but don't go off and become some fringe organization.

4. Choose spokesmen who effectively communicate your position in words that strike a responsive chord in listeners:

By 2000, the NRA had become even more closely aligned with the Republican Party and worked strenuously to keep Al Gore from becoming president. At the annual meeting in May of that year, Hollywood legend Heston provided what might be the signature moment in the history of the NRA. He spoke ofa looming loss of liberty, of Concord and Lexington, of Pearl Harbor, the "sacred stuff" that "resides in that wooden stock and blued steel."

Handed a replica of a Colonial musket, he said: "As we set out this year to defeat the divisive forces that would take freedom away, I want to say those fighting words for everyone within the sound of my voice to hear and to heed -- and especially for you, Mr. Gore."

He held the gun aloft.

"From my cold, dead hands!"

Of course, the NRA has been fortunate in its enemies. The Democratic party has done a lot to make it the heavily financed, powerful organization it has become:

"The D's keep coming back to this. This is so visceral to them," Norquist says. "Again, it's an expression of contempt for Middle America. They don't like you and yours and don't think you should be in charge of the capacity to take care of yourself. They know they can't do this for you, but they've hired these nice people to draw chalk outlines of your kids, and that's supposed to make you feel better.

5. Don't be afraid to just say no to people who want you to compromise your principles for their political advantage.

It'll be the death of you.