Friday, March 14, 2014

OH MY!

Thursday, March 13, 2014

JEFF SESSIONS IS AN ADULT AMONG CHILDREN:

OSTED ON MARCH 12, 2014 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN FEDERAL BUDGET

WHERE AMERICA WENT WRONG, AND HOW WE CAN GET BACK ON THE TRACK

This morning, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew appeared at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on President Obama’s FY 2015 budget proposal. Not a lot of attention has been paid to Obama’s budget, probably because, to an even greater extent than usual, it is dead on arrival. There is zero chance of it being the basis for federal spending next year, let alone the next ten years. Still, it has significance as an indicator of where Obama and his administration would like to take the country, given the opportunity.

So ranking member Jeff Sessions took advantage of the opportunity to sum up where the country has gone under Obama, what the results of his policies have been, and what we need to do to get the country moving forward again. It is, I think, as good a concise summary as you will find:

Thank you, Secretary Lew, for appearing before us today.

In 2009, the Administration wagered America’s financial future on the idea that a record increase in government spending and debt would revive the economy.

Since then, government debt has increased 64 percent and is on track to double by the end of the President’s second term. What are the results?

* America is in the midst of slowest recovery since the end of World War II.

* Workforce participation has shrunk to a nearly 40-year low.

* The Labor Department reports that most occupations pay less today than they did when the President took office.

* Government debt has leaped from roughly $10 trillion to $17 trillion, yet median income has dropped $2,268 per household over that same time, and the decline has actually accelerated.

This is a huge disaster.

The justification for this unprecedented accumulation of debt was the claim that it would lead to prosperity. And yet now, we have none of the prosperity and all of the debt. This plan has proven to be one of the most costly failed gambits in American history. The White House’s average 2013 growth projection in their 2009 through 2012 budgets was 3.9 percent. Economic growth is critical for America’s workers—translating into higher wages and better jobs with benefits.

But actual growth last year came in at half what was projected, 1.9 percent—a huge difference with real impact on millions of Americans. For example, CBO has repeatedly said that the Administration’s $870 billion stimulus bill would be a long-term drag on the economy.

So what does the President propose in his new budget?

The plan increases spending growth by almost $1 trillion, bursting through the Ryan-Murray spending caps he signed into law only two months ago.

So, while the military gets hammered, other agency budgets soar. The White House proposes the following increases next year:

* A 45% increase for the Department of Housing and Urban Development

* An 18% increase for the Legal Services Corporation

* A 15% increase for the Department of Energy

* A 30% increase for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and

* A 7% increase for the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.

The plan also raises taxes more than $1 trillion—in addition to the $1.7 trillion in taxes he’s already enacted. New proposed taxes include:

* Limit the value of itemized deductions to raise taxes by almost $600 billion.

* Raise the death tax and reduce the exclusion to increase taxes by over $100 billion.

* Increase taxes on unemployment insurance by $78 billion.

* Increase taxes on energy production by $49 billion.

So the President raises taxes to increase spending. It is a tax-and-spend budget that will never pass. Altogether, the White House budget plan would add another $8 trillion to our $17 trillion debt. [Ed.: And that assumes that all of the optimistic assumptions in Obama's ten-year plan come true--which has never happened yet.]

The seriousness of the situation is demonstrated by this fact: last year, we paid our creditors $221 billion in interest on our federal debt. Under the President’s plan, according to his own numbers, annual interest payments will nearly quadruple to $812 billion.

Rising interest payments represent arguably the gravest threat to our nation’s financial security. Should interest rates increase even slightly above projections, the costs of financing our debt would quickly surge to emergency levels. As the Director of the Congressional Budget Office warned, we face “the risk of a fiscal crisis.”

Clearly, we must pursue a new course that creates jobs and that does not add to our debt. Here’s how:

* Produce more American energy to create jobs right here in the U.S.

* Streamline the tax code and lower rates to make America more globally competitive

* Eliminate every unnecessary regulation that destroys jobs

* Adopt a trade policy that defends the legitimate interests of U.S. workers

* Enforce an immigration policy that serves American workers

* Turn the welfare office into a job a training center

* Make government leaner, doing more with less

* Balance the budget to restore confidence and growth

Regular readers know that I am a huge fan of Senator Sessions. I think his judgment is solid and his instinct for what issues deserve priority is unerring. If Republican politicians take this brief summary as a campaign blueprint–with elaboration on how Obamacare has contributed to the economy’s dismal performance during the Age of Obama–they won’t go wrong.

Most of them will win, too: today’s Rasmussen Reports finds that only 29% of likely voters think the U.S. is headed in the right direction, and 60% think that more government spending and higher taxes hurt the economy. Despite all of the efforts of the news media, the academy, Hollywood and so on, a clear majority of Americans are receptive to the conservative message. But the message needs to be conveyed with clarity, consistency and conviction.

AND HERE Jeff Sessions for President IS AN ARTICLE BY SESSION IN THE NR MAGAZINE

Monday, March 10, 2014

AH YES, FOR MORAL CLARITY THERE'S JOSEPH CONRAD:

The Noble Conrad

For the great novelist, art, entertainment, and moral purpose were one.

Winter 2014

In his Portraits from Memory, Bertrand Russell ends his brief memoir of Joseph Conrad:

THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NYC

Joseph Conrad

Conrad, I suppose, is in process of being forgotten. But his intense and passionate nobility shines in my memory like a star seen from the bottom of a well. I wish I could make his light shine for others as it shone for me.

Russell was wrong about Conrad’s literary reputation (the critic Richard Curle had already predicted in 1914, ten years before the writer’s death, that “Conrad’s day is at hand and once his sun has risen it will not set”); but he was right about Conrad’s character. That “passionate nobility” shines from everything he wrote, without detracting in the least from its literary quality, as too directly or strongly expressed a moral viewpoint is apt to do.

Conrad’s biographical trajectory was an extraordinary one, even for a writer. He was born in 1857 into the Polish landowning class in the Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire; his father, an aristocratic litterateur who translated Shakespeare into Polish, was exiled for his support of the Polish uprising in favor of independence, and the young Joseph, aged five, went with him. By the time Conrad was 11, both his parents were dead of tuberculosis; he was brought up by an uncle and schooled in Kraków.

In his adolescence, Conrad conceived of the extraordinary idea, for his time and place, of going to sea, for Poland was then landlocked and had no maritime tradition whatever. It was the naval novels of Captain Marryat, for which he always retained his admiration, and those of James Fenimore Cooper, that inspired him in his choice, from which his uncle did everything possible to dissuade him as being unsuitable for a Pole of his social standing. But Conrad insisted, and at age 17 traveled to Marseille, where, already speaking perfect French, he worked on French ships. His French career included an episode in which he was a partner in a failed gun-running voyage to the Carlist rebels in Spain, who sought to replace the reigning Spanish monarch with another.

He was 20 when he joined the British merchant marine, then the largest in the world, learning English in the years thereafter. In his books, Conrad says that sailors (at least of his era) were great readers, and he took Shakespeare and Dickens with him on his long journeys to the Far East. He passed his examinations to qualify as second and first mate, and then master (captain). For many years, he wrote, the red ensign, the flag of the British merchant marine, was his only home. For three years, though, he sailed on the Congo for the Belgians, an experience that a few years later would yield material for one of his most famous stories, “Heart of Darkness,” which he said was only a little exaggerated.

After 1894, partly because of illness, Conrad never went to sea again, except once, near the end of his life, as an ordinary transatlantic passenger to America. He settled down in Kent, in the rural southeast of England, to lead an almost eventless life for the remainder of his days. He described himself as having become a writer almost by accident, without any firm ambition to do so, but this is scarcely credible for a man who would become not only one of the greatest prose stylists in English—his third language—but also one of the greatest novelists of all time.

Anyone who has struggled to express himself not only adequately but with elegance and beauty in a foreign language will be struck with admiration by Conrad’s gift. I take at random (because there are hundreds of other passages I could have chosen by way of illustration) the opening paragraph of his 1902 long short story, “The End of the Tether”:

For a long time after the course of the steamer Sofala had been altered for the land, the low swampy coast had retained its appearance of a mere smudge of darkness beyond a belt of glitter. The sunrays fell violently upon the calm sea—seemed to shatter themselves upon an adamantine surface into sparkling dust, into a dazzling vapour of light that blinded the eye and wearied the brain with its unsteady brightness.

As someone who has spent a number of years in a place where “a dazzling vapour of light . . . blinded the eye and wearied the brain with unsteady brightness,” I can testify that no better description exists, or probably will ever exist, of the phenomenon; but it is worth pausing to reflect upon what qualities went into the making of such a marvelous passage—a passage that is only incidental to the story but written by a man who never wanted anything to leave his hand less perfect than he could make it.

Of course, the writer must have a fine command of English, far beyond that of the vast majority of native speakers of the language. Ford Madox Ford, Conrad’s friend and collaborator, makes an interesting, but not indubitably true, point in Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, published immediately after Conrad’s death in 1924. He says that Conrad to the end of his life was more comfortable speaking and writing French than English, and actually thought in that language. He therefore had to take special care when composing prose in English, which accounted for its superb quality. In other words, it was Conrad’s lack of mastery that, overcome, gave him his mastery.

Still, linguistic mastery, however obtained, does not account for the magnificence of the passage. Both a cognitive and a moral quality are required to produce it—or rather, two moral qualities. The cognitive quality is the ability to attend closely to a phenomenon such as the sun shining on the sea and to fix the mind upon it—an ability that will, perhaps, be undermined or eliminated altogether by too great a use of electronic media of communication. And the first moral quality is the realization that one should not take such a phenomenon for granted. Not taking the world for granted is part of a philosophy of life (one cannot imagine Lenin, who died in the same year as Conrad, fixing his mind on the effect of sun rays on the sea, for example; he would doubtless have regarded it as inconsequential, almost a betrayal of his mission, to do so).

The second moral quality is a willingness to wrestle with words until they are the best that can be found, a process that Conrad found agonizing. In Conrad’s case, this desire for perfection was not an egotistical wish to show himself superior to others or to secure superficial admiration, but a manifestation of his belief that, as he put it in the preface to Typhoon, it is a writer’s duty “by the power of the written word” to make the reader “hear . . . feel . . . before all . . . see.” Indeed, Conrad’s attitude toward prose was only a special case of his overarching philosophy, which was that of Ecclesiastes:

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

Getting the words right was not, in Conrad’s estimation, the whole task of the writer. He was no artist for art’s own sake; his art was both to engage the reader’s attention and to make him see in more than the mere perceptual sense—to make him see “that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.” Art, entertainment, and moral purpose were indivisible for Conrad.

In finding something for his hand to do, and doing it with all his might, Conrad always kept morality in view. For Conrad, probity was perhaps the highest good, the moral quality he admired most; for him, very distant goals diluted probity and finally dissolved it utterly. The good that resulted from doing something with all one’s might had therefore to be tangible or immediate, and not so far removed that it entailed or permitted the doing of evil in the name of the eventual good that it would supposedly produce. The risks of distance are shown by the colonialists in “Heart of Darkness” and the revolutionaries in The Secret Agent (and other antirevolutionary books and stories). Kurtz has grand plans for a mission civilisatrice in the depths of the primeval forest that end with decapitated heads impaled on poles; while the principal achievement of the revolutionaries surrounding Verloc in The Secret Agent is the death in an explosion of a half-witted boy, much loved by his sister, revolutionary rhetoric having driven him to a willingness to commit a bomb outrage.

The principal truths for which both the revolutionaries and the colonialists have forgotten to ask are about themselves and about the limits of human possibility. On this matter, Conrad is both clear and, many would say, bleak. In “A Smile of Fortune,” for example, a tale of the hopeless love of a passing ship’s captain for a silent girl living in a remote eastern outpost—a story with a strongly autobiographical flavor—the narrator says:

I felt in my heart that the further one ventures the better one understands how everything in our lives is common, short and empty; that it is in seeking the unknown in our sensations that we discover how mediocre are our attempts and how soon defeated!

Conrad allowed no transcendent meaning, purpose, or design to the universe; there were therefore no ultimate consolations for our earthly travails, except such as we can find for ourselves, and that are inevitably modest. Attempts to transgress those dimensions are intellectually absurd and practically disastrous.

In The Secret Agent, published ten years before the Russian Revolution, revolutionary dreamers and agitators foregather in Verloc’s living quarters behind a grubby shop of semi-pornographic wares in a down-at-the-heels area of London that serves as his front. (Verloc is described vividly as possessing “an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed.”) Michaelis, a middle-aged theorist of revolution who is supported by a rich patroness and is on parole from prison, gives a wonderfully concise précis of Marxist doctrine, a reminder that Conrad was extremely well-informed (his knowledge of history was immense) and had the capacity, instinct, and judgment to distinguish the humanly significant and important from the trivial and the fleeting. Michaelis says:

History is made by men, but they do not make it in their heads. The ideas that are born in their consciousness play an insignificant part in the march of events. History is dominated and determined by the tool and the production—by the force of economic conditions. Capitalism has made socialism. . . . The future is as certain as the past—slavery, feudalism, individualism, collectivism. This is the statement of a law, not an empty prophecy.

Michaelis’s views are reworkings of Marx’s dicta, which would have been little known in Conrad’s day: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please”; “It is not consciousness that determines being, but being that determines consciousness”; “This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production . . . as the basis of all history”; “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

While Conrad was knowledgeable about Marxist doctrine well before it obtruded itself onto world consciousness, he also had imaginative insight into the psychology of the revolutionaries of his time. None was of the lowest or poorest social stratum; they were educated and semi-educated people who “are enemies of [the] discipline and fatigue” necessary to achieve something in the normal way, who dislike “all kinds of recognized labour.”

Conrad was fully aware of the corrosive effect of poverty and injustice and was therefore no dyed-in-the-wool reactionary without sympathy for the downtrodden. How could he be, when his first memory was of the political exile that worsened his mother’s tuberculosis, accelerating her death from it? But he did not think that resentment, however understandable, was an emotion that should be inflamed or that could lead to anything but destruction. Karl Yundt, one of the revolutionaries in Verloc’s parlor, “took the part of an insolent and venomous evoker of sinister impulses which lurk in the blind envy and exasperated vanity of ignorance, in the suffering and misery of poverty, in all the hopeful and noble illusions of righteous anger, pity and revolt.” Hatred is by far the strongest of political emotions, against which love or the desire for progress is a reed in a tornado. And this is as true of colonialists as it is of revolutionists. In his report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, Kurtz had written: “By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.” He ended his life proclaiming his desire to “Exterminate all the brutes!” Moral grandiosity is the sovereign path to moral dissolution.

Conrad was attracted to England precisely because he saw the English national character as lacking in moral grandiosity and metaphysical flamboyance. The English people did their duty without the apparent need, or desire, to found it on any philosophical first principles. Of all nations, the English were the most seamanlike, a term of his highest praise. (“This could have happened nowhere but in England,” he begins the long short story “Youth,” “where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak.”) Especially admirable was the merchant marine, in which ordinary men performed extraordinarily heroic acts as a matter of course and displayed a magnificent but completely stoical endurance.

Even when ships are about to go down with all hands aboard, the discipline remains, the hierarchy holds, the captain is obeyed. In Typhoon, the unimaginative, dull, and stolid Captain MacWhirr steers his ship into a tropical storm of terrible violence, largely because of his refusal to believe that what he has not experienced after so many years at sea can exist. On board his ship are 200 Chinese passengers, for whom he has little personal sympathy and, indeed, feels casual racial disdain. But it is his indomitable will and his unquestioning, metaphysics-free devotion to duty, not any high-flown rhetoric or rodomontade, that saves the day and his passengers’ lives. True, it is the defects of his character that produced the crisis in the first place; but in a universe in which accidents happen and events are not parceled out according to desert, you are better off with a Captain MacWhirr than with, say, a Captain Byron.

The qualities that Conrad admired, on the one hand, and deprecated or despised, on the other, are clear in the contrasting characters of two sailors in The Nigger of the “Narcissus”. In this novel, a ship returning to England from Bombay takes aboard a black sailor named James Wait, who is dying of tuberculosis and is eventually buried at sea. His presence haunts the ship throughout the voyage, which is again beset by a horrific storm. (It is, incidentally, evidence of Conrad’s brilliance as a writer that one can read the lengthy descriptions of the two storms in the above works without any sense of repetition.)

The contrast between the two sailors, Singleton and Donkin, on theNarcissus is stark. Singleton is a strong, silent type; he has been at sea for nearly half a century. He speaks little and is self-contained, devoted to doing his duty. He is principled but not of obviously high intelligence. (There is a slight implausibility in Conrad’s depiction of Singleton, for though he signs for his pay with a mark instead of a signature, he spends much of his off-duty time reading Bulwer Lytton: and it seems unlikely that someone who reads Bulwer Lytton for fun could not sign his name.) Singleton was one of those men

who knew toil, privation, violence, debauchery—but knew not fear, and had no desire of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage, but easy to inspire; voiceless men—but men enough to scorn in their hearts the sentimental voices that bewailed the hardness of their fate. It was a fate unique and their own; the capacity to bear it appeared to them the privilege of the chosen! Their generation lived inarticulate and indispensable, without knowing the sweetness of affections or the refuge of a home—and died free from the dark menace of a narrow grave.

Conrad’s admiration for men such as Singleton is evident. Donkin, by contrast, is voluble, a barrack-room lawyer, trouble stirrer, and stickler for what he calls “justice.” The description of Donkin as he boards theNarcissus is memorable:

Another new hand—a man with shifty eyes and a yellow hatchet face, who had been listening open-mouthed in the shadow of the midship locker—observed in a squeaky voice:—“Well, it’s a ’omeward trip, anyhow. Bad or good, I can do it on my ’ed—s’long as I get ’ome. And I can look after my rights! I will show ’em!” . . . He looked as if he had known all the degradations and all the furies. He looked as if he had been cuffed, kicked, rolled in the mud; he looked as if he had been scratched, spat upon, pelted with unmentionable filth . . . and he smiled with a sense of security at the faces around. His ears were bending down under the weight of his battered hard hat. The torn tails of his black coat flapped in fringes about the calves of his legs. He unbuttoned the only two buttons that remained and every one saw he had no shirt under it. It was his deserved misfortune that those rags which nobody could possibly be supposed to own looked on him as if they had been stolen. His neck was long and thin; his eyelids were red; rare hairs hung about his jaws; his shoulders were peaked and drooped like the broken wings of a bird; all his left side was caked with mud which showed that he had lately slept in a wet ditch. He had saved his inefficient carcass from violent destruction by running away from an American ship where, in a moment of forgetful folly, he had dared to engage himself; and he had knocked about for a fortnight ashore in the native quarter, cadging for drinks, starving, sleeping on rubbish-heaps, wandering in sunshine: a startling visitor from a world of nightmares. He stood repulsive and smiling in the sudden silence. This clean white forecastle was his refuge; the place where he could be lazy; where he could wallow, and lie and eat—and curse the food he ate; where he could display his talents for shirking work, for cheating, for cadging; where he could find surely some one to wheedle and some one to bully—and where he would be paid for doing all this. They all knew him. Is there a spot on earth where such a man is unknown, an ominous survival testifying to the eternal fitness of lies and impudence? . . . He was the man that cannot steer, that cannot splice, that dodges the work on dark nights; that, aloft, holds on frantically with both arms and legs, and swears at the wind, the sleet, the darkness; the man who curses the sea while others work. The man who is the last out and the first in when all hands are called. The man who can’t do most things and won’t do the rest. The pet of philanthropists and self-seeking landlubbers. The sympathetic and deserving creature that knows all about his rights, but knows nothing of courage, of endurance, and of the unexpressed faith, of the unspoken loyalty that knits together a ship’s company. The independent offspring of the ignoble freedom of the slums full of disdain and hate for the austere servitude of the sea.

It was Conrad’s mistaken romantic belief that, in England at least, the Singletons would always prevail over the Donkins. History has proved him wrong: all that he admired has been defeated, and all that he detested has emerged victorious. The self-seeking landlubbers have won.

Theodore Dalrymple is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of many books, includingNot with a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

CORRUPTION IN DEMOCRAT CIRCLES IS RAMPANT:

The Really Big Money? Not the Kochs

Harry Reid surely must have meant the unions when he complained about buying elections.

March 6, 2014 7:09 p.m. ET

Harry Reid is under a lot of job-retention stress these days, so Americans might forgive him the occasional word fumble. When he recently took to the Senate floor to berate the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch for spending "unlimited money" to "rig the system" and "buy elections," the majority leader clearly meant to be condemning unions.

It's an extraordinary thing, in a political age obsessed with campaign money, that nobody scrutinizes the biggest, baddest, "darkest" spenders of all: organized labor. The IRS is muzzling nonprofits; Democrats are "outing" corporate donors; Jane Mayer is probably working on part 89 of her New Yorker series on the "covert" Kochs. Yet the unions glide blissfully, unmolestedly along. This lack of oversight has led to a union world that today acts with a level of campaign-finance impunity that no other political giver—conservative outfits, corporate donors, individuals, trade groups—could even fathom.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the Capitol Building, Jan. 25. Associated Press

Mr. Reid was quite agitated on the Senate floor about "unlimited money," by which he must have been referring to the $4.4 billion that unions had spent on politics from 2005 to 2011 alone, according to this newspaper. The Center for Responsive Politics' list of top all-time donors from 1989 to 2014 ranks Koch Industries No. 59. Above Koch were 18 unions, which collectively spent $620,873,623 more than Koch Industries ($18 million). Even factoring in undisclosed personal donations by the Koch brothers, they are a rounding error in union spending.

Mr. Reid was similarly heated over the tie-up between outside groups and politicians, by which he surely meant the unions who today openly operate as an arm of the Democratic Party. The press may despise the Kochs, but even it isn't stupid enough to claim they are owned by the GOP. Most outside conservatives groups, including the Koch-supported Americans for Prosperity, back candidates and positions that challenge the Republican line. And in any event, every conservative 501(c)(4) is so terrified of the hay the media and regulators would make over even a hint of coordination with the GOP, they keep a scrupulous distance.

Unions, as 501(c)(5) organizations, are technically held to the same standards against coordination with political parties. Yet no Democrat or union official today even troubles to maintain that fiction. Hundreds upon hundreds of the delegates to the 2012 Democratic convention were union members. They were in the same room as party officials, plotting campaign strategies. The question therefore is how much of that $4.4 billion in union spending was at the disposal of the Democratic Party—potentially in violation of a bajillion campaign-finance rules?

As for Mr. Reid's complaint that some "rig the system to benefit themselves," that was undoubtedly a reference to the overt, transactional nature of union money. Nobody doubts the Kochs and many corporations support candidates who they hope will push for free-market principles. Though imagine the political outcry if David or Charles Koch openly conditioned dollars for a politician on policies to benefit Koch Industries?

In the past months alone, unions demanded an exemption to a tax under ObamaCare; the administration gave it. They demanded an end to plans to "fast track" trade deals; Mr. Reid killed it. They wanted more money for union job training; President Obama put it in his budget. Everybody understands—the press matter-of-fact reports it—that these policy giveaways are to ensure unions open their coffers to help Mr. Reid keep the Senate in November. The quid pro quo is even more explicit and self-serving at the state level, where public-sector unions elect politicians who promise to pay them more. If the CEO of Exxon tried this, the Justice Department would come knocking. The unions do it daily.

Democrats hope to make a campaign theme out of conservative "dark" money, something else Mr. Reid knows about. In addition to other spending, unions have been aggressively funneling money into their own "dark" groups. One of these is the heavyweight 501(c)(4) Patriot Majority USA. Patriot Majority doesn't disclose its donors, though a Huffington Post investigation found it had been "fueled" in 2012 by $2.3 million in union donations. Amusingly, Patriot Majority used its undisclosed money on a campaign to expose the Koch brothers' "front" groups. Oh, and Patriot Majority is run by Craig Varoga, a former aide and close ally of . . . Harry Reid.

The unions have had a special interest in funding attacks on conservative groups, since it has led to the IRS's regulatory muzzling of 501(c)(4) speech. Under the new rule, conservative 501(c)(4)s are restricted in candidate support; unions can do what they want. Conservative groups are stymied in get-out-the-vote campaigns; unions can continue theirs. Conservative outfits must count up volunteer hours; not unions.

So now, in addition to a system in which organized labor spends "unlimited money" to "rig the system to benefit themselves" and "buy elections," (to quote Mr. Reid), Mr. Obama's IRS has made sure to shut up anyone who might compete with unions or complain about them.

Supporters of campaign-finance rules never want to acknowledge that their maze of regulations serve primarily as a tool for savvy politicians to manipulate and silence opponents. For proof, they need only listen to Mr. Reid—who is pretty savvy, and who didn't misspeak after all.

Write to kim@wsj.com

and the demise of opportunity continues unabated...

Presented with little comment aside to note that when 'work is punished' the demise of 'opportunity' will continue...

The painful reality in America: for increasingly more it is now more lucrative - in the form of actual disposable income - to sit, do nothing, and collect various welfare entitlements, than to work.

And that trend appears to be accelerating as more and more men drop out of the workforce...

and the demise of opportunity continues unabated...

... "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" regardless of social class or circumstances of birth (or amount of stock ownership).

THIS DEALS WITH THE ISSUE OF MONOPOLY UNIONS:

Labor Unions and Freedom of Association

Mises Daily: Tuesday, March 04, 2014 by Gary Galles

Mandatory union membership and mandatory dues imposed on those who do not want to join are again at issue. On the heels of contentious “right to work” disputes in several states, the Supreme Court has recently heard arguments challenging an Illinois mandate requiring home health care workers to pay representation fees to a union they did not want. That case, Harris v. Quinn, has the potential to even challenge the Court’s 1977 Aboud precedent upholding mandatory union dues for public sector workers. Such a result would be a victory for liberty.

Unions and their allies in Harris v. Quinn reiterate the claim, accepted in Aboud, that “union security” rules are needed to prevent workers from unfairly opting out of paying for union services. But that claim, which portrays the issue as defending the property, contract, and freedom of association rights of unions (to be paid for services rendered to workers they represent), intentionally misrepresents the core issue, which is the liberty of workers and employers.

“Union security” rules are clear violations of the liberty of workers’ and employers’ freedom to not be forced to associate with certain groups against their will, a freedom unions ironically steamroll in the name of freedom of association, asserted only for themselves, despite its inconsistency with freedom of association for all. Consequently, unions must find a legitimate sounding way of defending the coercion involved. That is where the free-rider argument comes in, which frames the issue as protecting legitimate rights, rather than the illegitimate use of government-granted coercive powers to impose employment terms violating government’s primary role: protecting individual rights.

Labor laws have made unions exclusive representatives for groups of workers. Therefore, unions assert that every worker must be forced to pay for his or her representation, or he or she will be able to “free ride” on those services. That is, workers’ rights must be abrogated to prevent non-members’ unethical behavior.

But free-riding on unions is not the fundamental problem. Mandatory exclusive representation in the form of monopoly unions imposed to the detriment of those who disagree (pro-union legislation exempted unions from antitrust laws) is the fundamental problem.

Given majority approval in a union certification election, current labor law interpretation requires all affected workers to submit to union representation and pay the union’s price for it. Those terms are imposed not only on workers who voted for the union, but for those who supported another union, those who preferred remaining union-free, and those who did not vote (including those hired after the union is certified, who never get an effective chance to vote). Workers (or the agents they select voluntarily) and employers are prohibited from negotiating their own arrangements, including labor-management cooperation not controlled by the union and “yellow-dog” agreements requiring abstention from union involvement (which, before labor laws eliminated such rights, the Supreme Court called “part of the constitutional rights of personal liberty and private property”).

The supposed “free-riding” workers are those who would refuse union representation, but are not allowed to. They are harmed by the imposition, revealed by their unwillingness to pay the “price” for those services. They are not free-riding on the union. They are “forced riders,” required to abide by, and pay for, violations of their rights and interests, to benefit unions. That violation of workers’ (and employers’) rights, not their attempts to escape the harm unwanted representation imposes on them, is the central issue.

Despite union rhetoric, they don’t really want to solve the “free rider” problem they hang their argument on, because it is easily fixable. But unions stop at nothing to prevent the solution. All a fix would require is ending mandatory exclusive union representation. If workers were allowed to choose representation by different unions or other agents or to negotiate for themselves, the problem would disappear. Each union would only negotiate for its voluntary members, eliminating so-called free riders. But unions have fought with tooth, nail, and their members’ wallets to impose and maintain exclusive representation, knowingly harming all dissenters and thereby creating the “free rider” problem. And their recent behavior, as in Michigan, reveals how far they will go to maintain that power to circumvent competition in the labor markets they control, now largely in the public sector.

Despite unions’ deceptive arguments for their government-granted exclusive, abusive powers in terms of freedom of association, real, general freedom of association does not invalidate the potential of workers forming unions. Scholars who are part of the Austrian School have been at the forefront of making that clear.

As Walter Block put it in “Labor Relations, Unions, and Collective Bargaining: A Political Economic Analysis,” “unionism ... admits of a voluntary and a coercive aspect. The philosophy of free enterprise is fully consistent with voluntary unionism, but is diametrically opposed to coercive unionism.” Voluntary unions are consistent with liberty because “if it is proper for one worker to quit his job, then all workers, together, have every right to do so, en masse.” And in his “The Yellow Dog Contract: Bring It Back!” he addressed this issue directly:

Are unions per se illegitimate? No. If all they do is threaten mass quits unless their demands are met, they should not be banned by law. But as a matter of fact, not a one of them limits itself in this manner. Instead, in addition, they threaten the person and property not only of the owner, but also of any workers who attempt to take up the wages and working conditions spurned by the union. They also favor labor legislation that compels the owner to deal with the union, when he wishes to ignore these workers and hire the “scabs” instead.

Ludwig von Mises, in his 1966 magnum opus, Human Action, also made the distinction between voluntary and coercive unions clear:

The issue is not the right to form associations. It is whether or not any association of private citizens should be granted the privilege of resorting with impunity to violent action. ... The problem is not the right to strike, but the right — by intimidation or violence — to force other people to strike, and the further right to prevent anybody from working in a shop in which a union has called a strike.

Requiring union representation and endowing those unions with monopoly powers violates the liberty and freedom of association of dissenting workers, employers, non-union workers, and consumers. Undoing that abuse would fix every union free-riding and forced-riding problem. And it would be easy to do. As Murray Rothbard put it, in his 1973 For a New Liberty, “All that is needed, both for libertarian principle and for a healthy economy, is to remove and abolish these special privileges.” That is why Harris v. Quinn, which offers the Court another chance to see through the “free-rider” smokescreen to the central issue, presents an opportunity for a reform that would benefit the vast majority of Americans.

Note: The views expressed in Daily Articles on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

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Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. He is the author of The Apostle of Peace: The Radical Mind of Leonard Read. Send him mail. See Gary Galles's article archives.

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Entrepreneurship without Romance

By Matt McCaffrey

Friday, March 7th, 2014

James Buchanan’s work on the economics of public choice has been called “politics without romance,” because it looks beneath the glossy exterior of government and reveals the underlying reality of political behavior. Unfortunately, the “romantic” view of politics is shared by supporters of all types of political power, who seem to don rose-colored hazmat suits in order to promote their particular candidates, parties, or ideologies. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, from the perspective of economics, politics looks less like romance and more like an abusive marriage.

Entrepreneurship also attracts a kind of mistaken romanticism, although in a different way than politics. A couple of weeks ago, Isaac Morehouse wrote an insightful post on the Praxis blog warning that we should take care to avoid glamorizing creativity too much. His point is that creative success, especially in entrepreneurship, can derive from relatively straightforward decision making. Creativity is often simply an attempt to solve a problem while avoiding harm to oneself, as opposed to the flashy, dramatic, and heroic struggle against the odds we sometimes imagine it to be.

In other words, we often place undue emphasis on the personal magnetism and economic “heroism” of entrepreneurs. Yet despite being the “driving force of the market,” entrepreneurship is often quite mundane. Taking a romantic view can be misleading if we end up thinking in terms of only the most dramatic cases of disruptive innovation or personal entrepreneurial charisma (or lack thereof!), and less on the pervasive and vital role of entrepreneurial calculation and judgment.

The blame for excessively romantic views of the entrepreneur can probably be placed on Schumpeter. His theory remains the most well-known in economics, despite the many criticisms that have been leveled against it, and his approach lends itself easily to exaggeration. For him, entrepreneurs are economic revolutionaries, and their success is closely linked to their personalities, which are placed at the forefront of the analysis (especially via Schumpeter’s lavish prose). The notion of creative destruction, for instance, sets the stage for the entrepreneur-as-epic-hero, and glosses over Schumpeter’s more technical exposition of entrepreneurship, which in some ways is a rather boringexercise in equilibrium theory.

Similar ideas were also suggested by Wieser, who strongly influenced Schumpeter. In his book Social Economics, Wieser describes entrepreneurs as “Great personalities… bold technical innovators, organizers with a keen knowledge of human nature, far-sighted bankers, reckless speculators, the world-conquering directors of the trusts” (1927, p. 327). There are some entrepreneurs who fit this description, and, in a way, it’s natural for economists and teachers to focus on the most obvious examples of revolutionary economic change. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t lose sight of the myriad forms of entrepreneurship that drive the economy, many of which only become visible when we stop thinking of entrepreneurs as personalities and instead focus on the entrepreneurial function. We are surrounded by innumerable forms of entrepreneurship, yet because they are mundane we tend to take them for granted.

Contrast the Schumpeterian view with the alertness theory of Israel Kirzner. If Schumpeter is overly dramatic, perhaps Kirzner is not dramatic enough. By using the lure of pure profit opportunities as a fundamental explanation of why entrepreneurship happens, Kirzner actually removes the acting entrepreneur from the economic picture. His approach downplays practical entrepreneurial decision-making, instead focusing on the equilibrating tendencies of spontaneous alertness. But many of the concrete actions and judgments that we associate with entrepreneurship are absent from this view of the economic process. While I don’t wish to downplay Professor Kirzner’s many contributions, I do believe some objections are to the alertness theory are worth seriously considering.

Alertness is truly an example of “entrepreneurship without romance,” but in a sense it’s missing an entrepreneur of any kind at all. That is, Kirzner’s theory has been criticized on the grounds that alertness is just a kind of good luck. If this is true, then there isn’t much to be said about the distinct traits of entrepreneurs. To be sure, Kirzner has clearly stated that explaining the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs was never his goal. Nevertheless, it’s important to know how the character of the entrepreneur relates to his or her ability to use judgment and economic calculation, and how these factors come together in the entrepreneurial market process.

The key is to find a middle ground between the Schumpeterian and Kirznerian views, one that captures any necessary fundamentals of the entrepreneur’s character, while never losing sight of the particular economic actions involved in entrepreneurship. One economist who maintained this balance was Mises (another, I would argue, isFrank Fetter). For those interested, I highly recommend Joe Salerno’s illuminating paper on the entrepreneur in the Austrian tradition, “The Entrepreneur: Real and Imagined.”

Mises stressed the leadership role of entrepreneurs, although not really in the sense of personal magnetism. Instead, he focused on the ability to take control of the factors of production, combining them in original ways in order to satisfy the needs of consumers. Successful entrepreneurs have better foresight than other members of society, and are more willing to bear the uncertainties of the market; in this sense they are pioneers. For Mises, the entrepreneur’s incentive is monetary profit, a more realistic motivation than that of Schumpeter’s entrepreneur, who is driven by a ceaseless urge to create for the sake of creating, or Kirzner’s, who is attracted to profit without looking for it.

In my opinion, it is vital to stress the real-world relevance of entrepreneurial theory. This means avoiding too much emphasis on (a) on contingent personal characteristics and (2) abstract or mechanical problems (such as whether entrepreneurship is equilibrating or disequilibrating). If we avoid these pitfalls, we can find common ground that explains both the economic meaning of entrepreneurship and what entrepreneurs actually do.