It’s an easy time to feel pessimistic about America. 

Forget the fact that we have the worst president in history (althought that doesn’t help much).  Part of the disaffected right would have you believe that our entire political class, GOP and Democrat, are about the same.  I see your objection – Boehner’s depressing cave on spending – and raise you Ted Cruz and Justin Amash and a few good Tea Party Republicans.

But yet I feel some optimism. 

Part of that is I’ve pretty much internalized Kevin Williamson’s The End Is Near (And It’s Going To Be Awesome), a masterpiece from last year about the inevitability of the eventual collapse of the current political system, and how, if we’re lucky and work hard, it could actually free up some space for the free market to actually solve things.

Along those same lines comes this piece from Victor Davis Hanson.  You need to read the whole thing – but this was buried near the conclusion:

America is not saved by our elected officials, bureaucrats, celebrities, and partisan activists. Instead, just a few million hardworking Americans in key areas — a natural meritocracy of all races, classes, and backgrounds — ignore the daily hype and chaos, remain innovative and productive, and dazzle the world.

The silent few of a forgotten America have given the entire country an astonishing standard of living that is quite inexplicable.

The road to that paragraph is well worth travelling.  Go there.

We’re already down to convention-planning time. 

And while the Democrat National Committee is pondering New York, Philly and Columbus, Ohio, Kevin Williamson has a more appropriate idea:

The Democrats, if they had any remaining intellectual honesty, would hold their convention in Detroit. Democratic leadership, Democratic unions and the Democratic policies that empower them, Democrat-dominated school bureaucracies, Democrat-style law enforcement, Democratic levels of taxation and spending, the politics of protest and grievance in the classical Democratic mode — all of these have made Detroit what it is today: an unwholesome slop-pail of woe and degradation that does not seem to belong in North America, a craptastical crater groaning with misery, a city-shaped void in what once was the industrial soul of the nation. If you want to see the end point of Barack Obama’s shining path, visit Detroit.

Not, he points out, that New York and Philadelphia aren’t headed in the same direction…

Kevin Williamson’s piece, “Five Reasons You’re Too Dumb To Vote“, concludes with a plea to those that Lena Dunham – producer of HBO’s insipid “Girls” – would inveigle into voting for the reasons Ms. Dunham gives:

I would like to suggest, as gently as I can, that if you are voting as an act of self-gratification, if you do not understand the role that voting in fact plays in a constitutional republic, and if you need Lena Dunham to tell you why and how you should be voting — you should not vote. If you get your politics from actors and your news from television comedians — you should not vote. There’s no shame in it, your vote is statistically unlikely to affect the outcome of an election, and there are many much more meaningful ways to serve your country and your fellow man: Volunteer at a homeless shelter; join the Marine Corps; become a nun; start a business.

And maybe think about acting like men and women rather than boys and Girls.

What?  You want me to add commentary to Kevin Williamson?  No – do us both a favor and just read the whole piece.

“For instance, we have a Bill of Rights, which could with equal accuracy be called the List of Stuff You Idiots Can’t Be Trusted To Vote On.”

— Kevin Williamson (from a National Review article I’ll go more deeply into later this week).

One of the more galling facets of the 2012 Presidential campaign was watching Mitt Romney taking flak from the social right, the Rick Santorum crowd, on having been marginally impure on social issues, while at the same time getting beaten up from the fiscal purists (egged on by the left) for Romneycare, and the Libertarians for having been insufficiently pro-Liberty, whatever that meant. 

Of course, the key difference was that Mitt Romney had been in office, governor of not only a large state, but a toxically left-leaning one, in which he had few legislative allies.  To get anything useful done as governor of Massachusetts – and he did – he had to compromise.  “Romneycare”, bad as it may be, was a better compromise than what the Massachusetts Democrats would have spawned. 

The lesson, of course, is that rock-solid principle is easy, when your job never involves having to engage on a daily basis with your opponents to get anything done.  US Congresspeople do that only on the most symbolic and ritual level. 

Governors?  It’s part of their daily job.

And so while the likes of Govenors Romney, Pawlenty, Walker and others may have great black marks against them in the great book of princples in the sky, those marks are given by people who’ve never had to negotiate with a recalcitrant state employee union, or horse-trade with a hostile legislative majority. 

Fact is – as I say all the time – politics is a marathon, not a sprint.  Things get done over time, not overnight.  It’s work for the obsessively patient. 

Society get changed not by the people who have the coolest slogan – “Repeal Now!” or “War on Womyn!” or “TRU LBRT!” or whatever it is that sends a tingle up one’s true believers’ legs – but by the people who not only show up, but keep showing up.

Which is Kevin Williamson’s point in this NRO piece, which you should read in its entirety, and which concludes:

The Democrats did not build the welfare state all at once in 1965, and Republicans didn’t have an honest shot at repealing it all at once in 1995. Everybody has a big plan, and Washington is full of magic bullets: leash the Fed, enact the Fair Tax, seal the borders. But what’s needed — what might actually result in a stronger American order — is a thirty years’ war of attrition against the welfare state and entrenched incompetency. Federal crimes and misdemeanors ranging from the IRS scandal to the fumbling response to Ebola suggest very strongly that we have management and oversight problems as well as ideological ones, but holding oversight hearings long after (one hopes) Ebola is out of domestic headlines provides very little juice for a presidential candidate facing a restive base all hopped up on Hannity. Being the guy who gets up and demands the repeal of Obamacare might get you elected president; being the guy who fixes the damned thing simply makes you a target for talk-radio guys who have never run for nor held an elected office but who will nonetheless micturate upon your efforts from a great height.

Everybody wants to run for president. But somebody has to save the country.

Read the whole thing.

And hold the sloganeering.

Kevin Williamson’s conclusion:

The only thing stopping federal authorities from suffocating free speech — not only by independent groups such as the SBA List, but by individuals, trade groups, National Review, and the New York Times — is the First Amendment.

And Harry Reid wants to gut it. Figure out why that is and you’ll know everything you need to know about the Democratic party, which with each passing day functions less and less like a political party and more like a crime syndicate.

What led him to the conclusion?

Well, here’s the opener:

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Dissent is the lowest form of crime. If you are a drone in the hive of the Left, it is possible — easy, in fact — to believe both of those things at the same time.

Just read the whole thing.

When the founding fathers created our Constitution, one of their biggest fears was that of the standing army.  In Europe at the time (and in most dictatorships today), the Army was a professional, full-time force, frequently composed of mercenaries whose loyalty to the local king was purchased; in larger kingdoms, it was composed of units from different parts of the kingdom, who had no loyalty or affection to the people of the local province.

The Army, in short, was an agent of oppression.

The first municipal police department (in London in the 1820’s) on the other hand was an attempt to distance itself from the idea of the military.

Kevin Williamson at NRO goes through the squandered legacy of Sir John Peel, the inventor of the modern police force.   Peel’s nine guidelines to the then-new Metro Police are – or were – a standard for cops for well over a century:

The first order of police work is, according to Peel, “to prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.” The second principle is “to recognize always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions, and behavior, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.” He called this “policing by consent.” The policeman, in Peel’s view, was a citizen: “The police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”

And the importance of the uniform.  The bright colors and towering headdresses of the uniforms of post-medieval Europe (still worn by the Guards at Buckingham Palace) were intended to try to intimidate the opposition, especially an opposition of peasants and rabble that didn’t have uniforms:

In that context, the function of the police uniform is simply that of an imprimatur — of the municipal government of London or of New York or Mayberry. It tells little Peter Pat whom he can trust.

We seem to have lost that idea:

Our contemporary and increasingly militarized police uniforms are designed for a different purpose: the projection of force. Peel organized the Metropolitan Police as an alternative to “military repression,” but we, in turn, have turned our police into quasi-military organizations: Armored vehicles roam the mean streets of Pulaski County, Ind. Why? “It’s more intimidating,” the sheriff says.

Cops will note in response that there are times when they do need to assert control – to “intimidate”.  That’s true.  But that “time” is not “when in contact with a general public that is exercising its right to protest”, among quite a few others.

The more I think about it, the more it seems modern law enforcement has become the standing army our founding fathers were worried about.

If you read my blog or listen to my show, you know I’m a huge fan of Kevin Williamson, writer at National Review and author of The End Is Near (And It’s Going To Be Awesome).

One of his book’s (and body of work’s) central theses is that politics is the worst possible way to allocate resources.

Yesterday’s story about the Green Line light rail – which was built as a relatively heavy, relatively high-speed “Light Rail” line down a crowded commercial street entirely due to the desire to play the political subsidy game, and was conceived in the first place less to move people than to re-engineer the layout of the area between the Twin Downtowns – is evidence toward the thesis.

“But if the government doesn’t build things – not just trains, but roads and streets – then who will?”

If people need to go from one place to another, somebody will find a way to get them from point A to point B.

The IRS scandal has been going on for a solid year now.  And while people who care about such things – “such things” as honest, transparent, non-banana-republic government – are up in arms, the media has successfully gundecked the issue. 

Let’s run it down:

1. Before the 2012 elections, senior IRS poobahs – Lois Lerner being the one everyone knows today – singled out conservative organizations for attention and harassment. 
2. The investigations had nothing to do with violations of the rules; they, all and sundry, were about nothing but the groups’ political identity.  “Tea Party” , “Patriot”, “Liberty” or “9/12”, “Taxes”, “Debt”, “Spending ” in the title was all it took to warrant the kind of harassment (“what do you pray about?”) that the American media would not tolerate if directed at a college Satanist alliance. 
3. When an IRS internal review threatened to highlight the fact that the IRS was acting in a corrupt manner, Lerner picked some scapegoats in Cincinnati (although the direction did in fact come from the IRS’ “director of rulings and settlements”, Rob Choi). 
4. At this very time, IRS staff were actively campaigning for Barack Obama – on IRS time, using IRS resources.  Nobody knows how much of this activity went on, but any is too much. 

There is only one word for this – corruption. The kind of thing that would make a Boliviancommandantegag up his skull with embarassment. 

h Kevin Williamson at NRO on not only the scandal, but what it says about the future of American democracy:

The IRS is not just a revenue agency — it is a law-enforcement agency, a police agency with far greater powers of investigation and coercion that any normal police force. Its actions in this matter are not only inappropriate — they are illegal. Using government resources for political ends is a serious crime, as is conspiring to mislead investigators about those crimes. But so far, other than holding Lois Lerner in contempt for refusing to comply with the demands of congressional investigators, almost nothing has happened. The characteristic feature of a police state is that those who are entrusted with the power to enforce the law are not themselves bound by it.

Read the whole thing.

And confront what it really means.  Conservatives have been warning for decades that goverment is becoming too big, too powerful, too much an end unto itself, with the whole goal of perpetuating itself. 

It’s anti-American, and it needs to be treated as such.

 …we’d have an administration with Kevin Williamson running domestic policy…:

Our choice is not really between neat ideological verities with their roots in Adam Smith or Karl Marx, but between the DMV and the Apple store. Each model has its downsides, to be sure, but it does not seem like a terribly difficult choice to me.

 And Richard Fernandez as Secretary of State:

Suppose Benghazi was a catastrophic failure, made all the more dangerous by the possibility that Russia had a hand in it. If Putin, having studied how Reagan used the jihad to bring down Soviet Union, played the same game on Barack Hussein Obama, it would explain many otherwise inexplicable things. The role of Snowden. The disgrace of Petraeus. The exile of anyone and anything to do with Benghazi. The kid-gloves treatment of the Ansar attackers. The strange enmity between Hillary and Obama. Each is bound by the same secret. Each lives in fear of the same smoldering fire burning in the bowels of the administration.

The lie is much more dangerous than the truth. America can live with an Obama mistake. But it can’t live with an Obama who cannot acknowledge his mistakes.

 The world is, of course, not just.

But both of them provide some useful templates for gauging candidates and what they believe.

Throughout this series, I’ve referred to Kevin Williamson’s year-old classic, The End Is Near And It’s Going To Be Awesome.

In it, Williamson – perhaps the best political-philosophy writer doing business today – notes that politics is the worst possible means to allocate resources among a population, in large part because politics, alone among life’s institutions, is immune to evolution.

Politics never evolves – or does so slowly, and only in response to political, rather than market, pressure.

It’s as if a species of animal governed its genome by committee – changing and evolving and mutating not in answer to nature’s stimuli, but according to decisions made by committee.

(more…)

I don’t really like politics.

“But Mitch – you write a bizarrely-prolific blog about politics!  You host the top-rated radio talk show in the United States [1]Surely you are obsessed with politics!”

Nope.  Hate ’em.

Can’t stand most politicians, either…

…well, no.  That’s not really true.  For all of the joking people make about the depravity of politicians, I’ve found most of the politicians I’ve actually gotten to know personally – most of them state and local, since that’s my social circle – to be perfectly good people.  Some of them very, very much so.

“Operatives?”  The staffers that work for politicians, and the campaign consultants and issue and organizations?  They’re a mixed bag in many ways – some of them greasy and sleazy, some of them really good people – but they seem to share a furious focus and a brutal work ethic.  I’ll give ’em that.

But politics, itself?  Never cared for it.

Partly because the best description of politics – the one I used to shake my head at 20-30 years ago, and attribute to the conspiratorial and overly-excited and the perspective challenged – is actually the best one there is; the monopoly on the legal use of force.    While the line does get repeated by the conspiratorial, the jacked-up and those with warped perspectives, it’s also true; to paraphrase Kevin Williamson, if you stop paying your taxes or send your kids to a non-government approved school or build your house taller or wider than the local zoning ordinances permit or get your buzz on or produce milk or cut hair outside of current government tolerances, you will, sooner or later, if you carry on with it,  eventually wind up with people with guns and handcuffs and tasers at your front door, ready to take your property, your money and your freedom with impunity.

There are really only two reasons I’m involved in politics:

1. Hi, We’re From The Government, And We’re Here To Help (you into a paddy wagon):  I try, in my own way, to try to make sure the “government showing up at citizens’ doors with court orders and guns” situations are limited to the absolute moral minimum; let’s save the SWAT teams for the meth-crazed robbery rings, and bother less with unlicensed Eritrean hair braiders or people who don’t pay their school lunch bill.  There is a place and time for government to use force; those places and times have been getting way too common for the past fifty years or so.
2. Those things that can’t be sustained, won’t be:  Our national debt is greater than an entire year’s GDP; every iPhone sold, every ear of wheat harvested, every lawn mowed and pair of shoes bought and class taught, every single whiff of economic activity including you buying food for your kids, for an entire year, might pay most of our current debt, and it’s not going anywhere.  And that doesn’t ‘even count the entitlements, over 100 trillion worth, that are lurking beyond that; over an entire year’s output from the entire planet’s economy; every grain of rice harvested in Indonesia, every Android assembled in Hunan, every bit of economic activity on the planet, for over a year, would pay it off.  Ready to go without groceries for 12 months?    Well, of course not – that can’t happen.  Either can paying off all those debts, without gutting the economy.  This level of debt can’t be sustained – and it won’t be.

So outside of local government – trying to inveigle Saint Paul into maybe plowing and patching streets, instead of building trains and refrigerated ice rinks in one of the coldest state capitols in America – my main goals out of politics are to…:

Try to bring the economy in for the softest landing possible:  Remember those debt numbers?   Of course you do – they’re like two grafs up there.   Worse comes to worst, and people will look back on 1933 as the good times.  The road back from debt like that is brutally difficult if you do it right – and let’s be honest, neither of our major political parties is going to do a damn thing about it (although the GOP pays the task the most convincing lip service, and I suspect contains the very few people who have both the chance and will to try to affect policy beyond the “lip service” (or, in the case of the big-L Libertarian party, “pipe dream”) level.  And John Boehner isn’t one of them; of Minnesota’s current congressional delegation, Michelle Bachmann is the only one I’ve even heard try to explain the problem to voters.  And she’s outta there in less than a year.

My main goal in politics is to try to do what I can to make sure my kids, and grandkids, and their kids, aren’t living on soup lines and scraping for change under bus seats because of our current government’s profligachy.

Shall Never Disappear From The Face Of The Earth:  And it’s not just the economy, stupid; poor societies become ugly societies, but quick. If you think “majority rules” is an ugly thing today, at a time when even a long recession has left us more prosperous than any society in history, then mob rule during the mother of all depressions will certainly leave a mark on you.

Progressivism – and its much more evil older brother, Statism – never, ever wastes a crisis.  It used World War I and the breakdown of European power to establish statist governments in major countries; the Depression allowed it to metastasize in a more benign form to the western liberal democracies and constitutional monarchies.

Imagine what everyone from George Soros on down the ranks to Alida Messinger could do with a complete collapse of the world’s lynchpin economy, taking down the entire world’s economic order?

I stay involved in politics because if good people don’t try to maintain some control of – again, being honest here – the state’s monopoly on force, bad people most certainly will.

And Yet…:  The collapse of the economy doesn’t have to be all bad.  The fact that government will be unable to afford to do much will mean that people will have to do things they way they did them – almost invariably better, at least in the US – before World War I.

I’m unstinting in recommending the book The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure, by Kevin D. Williamson.  In it, Williamson points out that not only did the private market, and just-plain-citiziens, do most of the things that government does today, but did it much better and much cheaper.

Wanna privatize Social Security?  There’ll be your chance!

Wanna make welfare work-based, and end the decades of fruitless debate here in Minnesota?  Oh, it’ll be work-based all right.

Education?  A hundred years of government education modeled after the Prussian system (and intended more to stomp out radical immigrant allegiances and create “good citizens” than to “educate”), the literacy rate has scarcely budged – and when you consider than an eighth-grader in World War 2 (the average level of education back then) was more literate, and a better critical thinker, than most college Freshmen today, you can see there might be a better approach to the problem.

Healthcare?  You do realize that fraternal organizations like the Elks, the Moose and the like, as well as religious organizations, not only handled group health 100 years ago, and did it almost as effectively as employer paid healthcare today (to say nothing of MNSure), but did it in such a way as to ensure the growth rather than stagnation of the medical profession, right?

Law enforcement?  Yeah – the “Wild West”, where most “justice” and “law” was privately negotiated, was one of the most peaceful places and times in American history (provided you weren’t a native tribe; every premise has its gaps).  Even Dodge City and Abilene – both were vastly more peaceful than the law-clogged, politics-dominated fever swamps of the coastal cities.

But Wait!:  But don’t start bombarding me with Ron Paul quotes – because Libertarianism, especially the brutalist, Ayn-Rand-sodden variety popular among the Austrian-school fratboys that make up the driving force of the Big-L party these days (pushing out the raw milk and help set, although they share all sorts of rhetoric) is a loser with real people in the real world.

No, not liberty – the idea that we should be free, that our society should be a free association of equals, that we should all be equal in the eyes of the law and at the ballot box, and free to prosper according to our merit and energy.  Those are winners for most people; that’s why most of our forefathers came here. 

But today’s brutalist Libertarianism considers “community” a dirty word.  Which is fine – except that humans are a communitarian species.  We gather in groups, and establish rules amongst ourselves pretty instinctively.  Don’t believe it?  Watch a group of six year old boys playing in an open field.  Libertarianism resonates with me in terms of keeping “the community” from taking over and running the individual’s life, and making sure the “community” is focused as close to the individual as possible. 

And don’t get me started on the “anarcho-libertarians”, which is what too many of the Austrain-school fratboys think they are; while “anarchy” has a nice set of platitudes that pass for an “intellectual case”, they collapse over two key points:

1. Human nature is not a “construct”. 
2. Evil exists.

No matter what stasis you and your similarly-anarchic neighbors find amongst yourselves, in your existences as lone gentleman farmers on your farms in the hypothetical social void, at some point someone who doesn’t have what you want is going to come along and want what you have.  And they’ll realize that while you, Gentleman Farmer, are more than a match for him in a duel, he’s not going to come alone.  This group – let’s say they’re Methodists, because we know how warlike and acquisitive Methodist theology is – comes in groups of 15-30, because they are not anarchists. 

Human nature is not a construct.  Evil exists.  Not every human wants to take other peoples’ stuff by force – but enough do, that communities find it advantageous to band together to keep those pesky Methodists (or other aberrations of human nature) at bay. 

Which involves rules.  And the tension between authority and liberty. 

And a world that doesn’t fit nicely into that anarchist worldview. 

So there’s a conundrum.

The Problem, Of Course, is getting to the point where we, the not-stupid people, can drive society in a direction where, if (hah hah hah) and when the debt finally crushes our economy, it can recover in a direction that leaves us with more, not less, freedom.

More on that – much more – next week.

At any rate – that, and only that, is why I’m involved in politics, here or on the air or in my real life.

Beyond that, what’s the point?

And yet beyond that, what else matters?

[1] As measured in moral terms, not necessarily raw audience numbers.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A buddy notes the insidious lure of Somebody Else’s Money:

 The old Federal rule was that you can’t get food stamps unless you qualify under income guidelines. OR if you get at least $1.00 of heat share relief. So of course the various state programs freely handed out the $1.00 because they could leverage that dollar into 50 times as much in food stamps for their citizens.

 Congress, in an effort to curtail the cheating, raised the cut-off to require $20.00 in heat share assistance, thereby avoiding the token assistance cheating. Well, except that the states now simply raised the payment to $20.00. The heat share comes out of federal funding also, and in another article the funding was described as block share grants that typically have left-over funding at the end anyway. So there is no incentive not to hand out more of one welfare to qualify for more of another welfare.

 Right back to the typical hamster wheel. The voters would never vote to raise their own taxes to build a street car, or refrigerate an outdoor ice rink, or put art on $50,000 drinking fountains for the bums. We only go along with it because it’s paid for with magic federal money that doesn’t come from OUR taxes. So if we now need to kick in a small portion of the total wasted cost in order to get someone else to pay for the rest, we’ll gladly do it.

 This is akin to what is taught at the college level, of course. For one easy example: Housing on campus routinely costs double or triple what housing on the local economy will cost. (And of course either costs more than housing at the parental home but that comparison would ignore the value of NOT living at home while in school–the value of actually being part of the school environment.) Although it costs double or triple to live on campus, the financial aid office is geared to get you more in loans and grants to subsidize (short term) that inflated cost. Of course the same is true for any other cost on campus. Books that are used one day but cost $200/e. Lab fees for history class, things like that. Since it all gets hidden into the grants and loans the kid is taught that it isn’t worth discussion or worry. Just run up the tab and go with the flow.

 Joe Doakes

If you haven’t read “The End Is Near (And It’s Going To Be Awesome)” by Kevin Williamson, you need to.

Our labor force participation rate is such that employment, for all the jabbering about the current ~7% rate, is scarcely better than it was in 2009.  Investment is still glacial (except in the stock market – which is not the same as “investing in the economy”. 

Kevin Williamson at the National Review may be the single best writer in America on the subject of government and its effect on the nation, the economy, and The People.  He combines off-handed humor with blistering, airtight analysis. 

And as such, I highly recommend you read his New Years’ wrapup, “A Year of Fear“.  The whole thing is worth reading.  But I’m pulling out the conclusion, about the effect  uncertainty has in crippling an economy. 

“But wait”, lefties say; “my pension fund is going great guns!  The Dow is over 15,000!”

Yeah, it is.  And that’s a little like seeing your car idling at 10,000 RPM and assuming that’s because it’s raring to go. 

The conclusion is the big beef, here; I’m adding emphasis:

The Obama administration has achieved a special distinction here: Investors are faced with considerable uncertainty vis-à-vis how it might interpret rules as compared with the Bush or Clinton administrations — and also about how it might interpret rules as compared with the Obama administration the day before yesterday. Now you see a mandate, now you don’t. And as bad as it is in 2013, the seething hostility of Elizabeth Warren is ascendant on the left, a fact that offers very little encouragement to entrepreneurs and investors considering illiquid, long-term positions — things like factories, stores, and buildings, as opposed to easily liquidated investments in financial instruments.

Another common lefty complaint?  “Companies are too focused on profits!”

Many on the left complain about the “financialization” of the U.S. economy, while unwittingly helping to encourage that very phenomenon. Given a choice between dividing up his investments between a couple of hedge funds and financial firms or locking it up for ten years in an assembly line in Indiana, a sane man will consider the question of uncertainty and predictability. And under current conditions, the assembly line is a risky bet.

Perhaps 2014 will be the year in which we learn the value of predictability. Who can say?

Read the whole thing. 

Better yet, get an Obama supporter to read it.

Kevin Williamson concludes:

But the next time you hear a chorus of “Hooray, science!” from the Left, ask them why Barack Obama’s signature health-care program is going to recognize theworst sort of quackery and pseudoscience, with no more regard for the scientific record than the most fervid young-Earth creationist, swami, or snake-handler.

Williamson is writing about the fact that Obamacare specifically covers naturopathy, chiropractic and acupuncture, “sciences” with no more scientific basis than Christian prayer therapy (which is not covered, by the way).

Read the whole journey to the conclusion.

…the President’s “fix” were to throw the entire insurance market into complete chaos?:

The debacle threatens to swamp Obama’s entire second-term agenda, raising questions about his competency and credibility. Polls released this week show the president’s job-approval rating at a historic low and a majority of voters saying, for the first time, that he isn’t trustworthy.
“A White House interested in stabilizing this presidency would want to leave no stone unturned in the effort to deal with both those problems,” said William Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton who’s a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a center-left policy research center…Insurance companies already have devised plans for next year, received the necessary approval from states and begun to sell policies. They aren’t required to continue to offer their existing policies and state insurance commissioners aren’t required to approve those 2013 plans.

“Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers,” Karen Ignagni, the president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents the industry.

What was it that Kevin Williamson said? Politics are the worst possible way to allocate resources?

 Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the left’s current ascendancy, across the US but especially in currently-single-party Minnesota, is the complete control they have of the long-range planning bodies that control the spending of so very, very much money in our society. 

And Katherine Kersten is onto the biggest and baddest such body in Minnesota, and their real aim – to take control of life as we know it in Minnesota.

The goal – from the Obama administration all the way down to the State of Minnesota – is to view metropolitan areas as “Regions”, and plan those regions so as to start funnelling people, by means subtle and brash, from the outskirts back into the cities. 

It’s called Regionalism, and it’s not merely for your and society’s own good; it intends to set things straight:

Regionalism is driven by a core ideological conviction: The cause of the poverty and social dysfunction that bedevil America’s cities is the greed and racial bigotry of suburbanites — especially those in prosperous, outer-ring suburbs, which are viewed as unjustly excluding the poor. Regionalists believe that financial aid for the inner ring won’t remedy this injustice. A profound change in governance is required.

It’s an authoritarian approach to building Utopia.  And like all such attempts throughout history, it requires a villain. 

What sort of change? The title of a book by regionalist guru David Rusk puts it bluntly: “Cities without Suburbs.” In regionalists’ view, suburbs with their own tax bases are, by definition, a menace to cities, and the distinctions between the two must be wiped out as completely as possible.

Regionalists’ strategy to effectively merge cities and suburbs turns on two ideologically freighted buzzwords: “equity” and “sustainability.” “Equity” is code for using public policy to redistribute wealth and to engineer economic equality among demographic groups.

Regionalists view metrowide “economic integration” as one of government’s primary responsibilities. Their plan to accomplish it is twofold: Disperse urban poverty throughout a metro area via low-income housing and make suburban life so inconvenient and expensive that suburbanites are pushed back into the city.

So the suburbs – and suburbanites – are the enemy, the Emanuel Goldsteins against whom the Regionalists will muster their side’s ignorant rage. 

“Sustainability” means policies that would override market forces to ensure that in the future, the great majority of new jobs, economic development and public works projects are funneled into the metro area’s urban core and inner ring — where, not coincidentally, regionalists’ own political base is concentrated. “Sustainable” policies promote high-density, Manhattan-style living, and attempt to wean us away from our cars and push us to walk, bike or use public transit to get to work.

As one critic — speculating on MSP 2040’s likely outcome — lamented: “Do we all have to live in a 1,500-square-foot condo above a coffee shop on a transit line?”

That’d be the goal. 

Of course, if you’re a conservative – at least, a libertarian-conservative – you know that allocating society’s resources via political means, especially to promote political ends, is the least-efficient way to do it.  And it’s Economics 101 to observe that “making people pay more, or less, than they naturally would for a good, or service (or, by extension, government) is the road to wrenching unintended consequences”. 

But that’s the point – making society, or at least the less-favored part of it, pay the bill for utopia:

Suburbanites will disproportionately shoulder the costs of this socially engineered transformation, paying more in taxes and getting less back in infrastructure and public services…Regionalists’ strategy for imposing their agenda hinges on giving regional bodies like the Met Council the ultimate trump: the power of the checkbook. The Obama administration’s “Sustainable Communities Initiative” (SCI) provides a model. SCI channels federal funds for land use, transportation and housing projects through regional bodies. The catch is that, to participate, municipalities must embrace redistributive “equity” goals.

Kersten doesn’t mention – because it’s outside the scope of the piece – that the “unintended consequences” of this sort of gigantistic destruction of the free market toward political goals are always, always vastly worse than planned.  Trying to force people and jobs back into cities at a time when the market is obsoleting the central core city – a concept that never actually occurred in human history outside of the 200-year window of the Industrial Revolution, a period that is drawing to a close even as we speak – is going to cause huge problems. 

Kevin Williamson may have been dead right; it may well be that the faster the Federal government goes broke, the better.  At least it’ll stymie this sort of authoritarian meddling.

I grew up in pretty boring times.  If you’re reading this and you’re under the age of 86, so did you, really. 

And let’s be clear; when it comes to the march of human history, boring is good.  “May you live in interesting times” is often attributed as an ancient Chinese curse; it appears to be as “Chinese” as Leann Chin, but the sentiment is dead-on.  For most of human history (and the entire time before it), life was fascinating, brutish and short.

In contrast to most of human history, with its wars and plagues and cataclysms, human history as known to people alive today has been blessedly, wonderfully boring. 

Some react to the boredom by turning the idea of the collapse of civilization into entertainment, from campy “zombie” fiction (The Walking Dead) to breathlessly pompous asteroid fantasies (Armageddon) to moralistic sermons about being our own undoing (The Day After Tomorrow) to conjuring genocidal invaders from the world of fiction (from the sublime Battlestar Galactica  (the 2004 version, not the loathsome seventies one) to the ridiculous Independence Day). I find “end of the world” p0rn unseemly; I didn’t spend this much time and energy raising kids to laugh about the whole world collapsing.  (And may I add “stop being an idiot”).

Others react by hedging their bets against what, throughout human history, seems to be an inevitable. sooner or later; stocking up on food, land, ammo and other supplies to ride out a bad spell the best they can. 

What goes up must come down.  Things tend to move from a state of order to disorder. 

S**t Happens.

And it’s happening all around us. 

And not only is it inevitable – sometimes it can be a very good thing.

———-

A couple of weeks back I had the pleasure of interviewing Kevin Williamson of National Review Online.  We talked in re his new book, The End Is Near (And It’s Going To Be Awesome).   Like all of Williamson’s writing, it’s as breezy and readable as it is intellectually beefy.  He’s like a modern-day Paul Johson – and that’s a huge spiff.

I recommend you read it.  Like, go get a copy.  You’ll thank me later. 

I’ll oversimplify; the book has a few major premises:

• Politics is the worst possible way to allocate scarce resources.  Not because people are evil or democracy is wrong – but because while every other aspect of life has evolved, politics remains essentially unchanged over the centuries.  Politics is a perfectly valid way of dealing with many of the human condition’s issues – contracts, justice, dropping bombs on people who try to kill you, issuing restraining orders and the like.  But for purposes of driving the allocation of our society’s resources, it just doesn’t work.
• No, really.  It’s a disaster.  Our national debt is hanging around a years’ worth of our national GDP.  But the unfunded mandates that nobody wants to talk about currently equal, roughly, the GDP of the entire planet.  As in every single bit of economic output from every man, woman and child on the planet for a full year.  Every Big Mac sold, every Android Phone built, every bag of rice hauled in from a paddy in Bangladesh, every Justin Bieber download sold, everything – just to pay our nation’s mandates.  And most of the world’s other “advanced” economies are the same, and maybe worse – they have no senses of dynamism, little familiarity with the notion of “Creative Destruction”, and even nastier senses of societal entitlement than Americans have developed.  Go ahead – tell a Greek that she can’t have nine weeks’ vacation. 
• It literally can not go on.  It’s like trying to run a family when your significant other is running off to Ho Chunk with the credit and debit cards six days a week.  It is not sustainable.  No matter how vigorously the world’s political bodies affirm their interest in building roadmaps and finding solutions, bla di blah di blah, it is virtually inevitable that the system is going to misallocate its way straight out of business.   Only instead of a divorce or a painful stretch of credit counseling, it’s going to involve some degree or another of the government running out of money, presuming it stops short of taxing every Big Mac sold, every Android Phone built, every bag of rice hauled in from a paddy in Bangladesh, every Justin Bieber download sold, everything. 

So eventually, and pretty much inevitably, government is going to grind to a halt. 

And to Williamson, that’s the good news.  Again, read the book.  You’ll thank me.   Because once you get government out of the way, things actually look pretty good.  We’ll come back to that later.

And you can thank the good folks in New Orleans, Detroit and – soon, I suspect – Camden New Jersey for giving us a previous of how it’s going to work.  Or not work.

And if you think about it, there is some good news in there. 

More tomorrow.

On the NARN over the weekend I had the pleasure of interviewing Kevin Williamson, the National Review writer whose latest book, The End Is Near (And It’s Going To Be Awesome) is a fascinating exploration of both the power of the natural human trait of adaptation to solve most problesm – and government’s immunity to it. The book is a smorgasbord of food for thought, and I highly recommend it. 

One of the key points is that politics, by the nature of its very immunity to agility and adaptibility, is the worst possible way to allocate resources in a complex society. 

With that in mind, Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Mayor of Dorset, Minnesota (a tourist town up North in Hubbard County), has a gimmick: they pull names from the hat to see who’s mayor. This year, it’s a 4-year old kid. By all accounts, the town is thriving under his administration.

Wonder if he’d consider moving to St. Paul? We could use someone a little more grown-up in charge of this place.

Joe Doakes

If the Mayor and the entire City Council were replaced by 4-year-olds, it would solve a lot of problems. 

No, I’m being neither glib nor hyperbolic.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talkradio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

• I’m back, and I’ll be talking with Kevin Williamson about his new book, “The Emd Is Near (And It’s  Going To Be Awesome).  
• Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
• Brad Carlson is  on “The Closer” from 1-3 tomorrow. Tune on in!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all four hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my new UStream video and chat channel (don’t ask)
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Here’s the Kevin Williamson piece we’re talking about in the 2PM hour.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talkradio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

• I’m in from 1-3.  It’ll be my pleasure to welcome Kevin Williamson of the National Review to the broadcast.  Also Senators Dave Thompson and Dave Osmek.
• Brad Carlson’s show – “The Closer” – is on from 1-3 on Sunday.

(All times Central)

So tune in to all four hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website,
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Check out our new UStream video and chat .
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• Podcasts are now available on the AM1280 page!  (Saturday show is #2 – Sunday is #3).
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

I’m going to give you all a little bit of homework.

Read this piece – “Risk, Relativism And Resources“, by Kevin Williamson, from National Review.   It’s a brilliant piece – and a beefy chunk of reading – on how risk-tolerance and risk-aversion affects peoples’ political choices.

Then tune in tomorrow, when I’ll be talking with Mr. Williamson on the Northern Alliance Radio Network, mostly (but certainly not entirely) about this piece.

And then think: how can we conservatives apply this to the task ahead of us – saving the country?

And I’ll also have David and David on the show:

No, not that David and David, although that’d be cool too.  No, I’ll have Senators Dave Thompson and Dave Osmek on the show as well!

Hope to see you then!

Kevin Williamson brilliantly sums up why people vote as they do, and what conservatism needs to do to have conservatism reach people.

To sum it up absurdly briefly: different ethnic, gender and social groups have different tolerances for risk; people with higher risk tolerances tend to vote conservative; ironically, “progressivism” is riskier in the long term.  Convincing them is the hard part.  What do you have better to do?

At various points in reading it – it’s 6,000 words – I thought about doing a couple of pull-quotes a day for two weeks.  I may do that still.  It is that good – and by “good”, I mean “very, very thought-provoking about what motivates people to vote conservative or “progressive””.

Read the whole thing when you get some time to spare.

UPDATE:  Mr. Williamson will be joining me on the Northern Alliance Radio Network on January 12.  Hope you can tune in.  This oughtta be good.

NRO’s Kevin Williamson notes that independents think the media has been unfair to Governor Palin (emphases added):

Strong majorities of the public say the press has been fair to John McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But fewer than four-in-ten (38%) say the press has been fair to Sarah Palin. Many more believe the press has been too tough on Palin (38%) than say it has been too easy (21%).

While opinions about Palin coverage are highly partisan, many independents share the view that the press has been too tough on the Alaska governor. Among independents, 41% say the press has been too hard on Palin, 20% say the press has been too easy and 36% say the press has been fair. Republicans overwhelmingly believe the press has been too hard on Palin (63%). Just 7% say the press has been too easy on her. Nearly one-in-five Democrats (18%) agree that coverage of Palin has been too tough.

Williamson reprises a question I asked in the past week or so: 

This brings up a question: Why do conservatives still feel the need to go through the dinosaur media? If you really want to talk ideas and policy, Rush Limbaugh’s show is probably the best forum, if you can get on. Rush doesn’t have a lot of guests, but when he does he gives them a chance to actually articulate their ideas in a developed way. If you’re looking for a place where substantive conservative ideas can get a hearing, there’s talk radio, the better blogs, Glenn Beck, NR/NRO, the Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, &c. It’s not so much that these outlets are conservative-friendly, but that they’re interested in ideas. The Wall Street Journal is not going to ask a lot of “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” questions, or game-show inquiries about the deputy fisheries minister of Hoogivsastan. Treating the fossil media as though they were still the only — or the main — game in town only serves to prop them up and to diminish conservatives’ ability to get a hearing for our ideas.

It would be much more interesting to hear Governor Palin spend an hour with Glenn Reynolds than with Katie Couric.

And the Northern Alliance (Volume II, the Headliners) is certainly a contender, too.

As Williamson notes, it’s time for conservatives to start playing to the few media strengths we have.