Some Reality-Based Community

At a very fundamental, core level, Springston did not share our vision for a news publication with a progressive perspective. He held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News. It just wasn’t the right fit. - Atlanta Progessive News (HT: Derb)

Oh Really?

"Well, there is a third option. Republicans could realize that 1) the future of conservatism depends upon restraining entitlement spending, 2) They'll never restrain entitlement spending without Democratic cover, and 3) Democrats won't give them cover unless they give some substantive ground. That would entail...." - Jonathan Chait

What if, instead, we wipe out most of the Democratic Party as we know it today, and then restrain entitlement spending with or without the support of whichever Democrats are left over? For fiscal hawks that has to be the best-case scenario.

What They Said, pt XII

The central contradiction in modern liberal politics is that Otto von Bismarck's entitlement state for cradle to grave financial security is no longer affordable. The model has reached the limit of its ability to tax private income and still allow enough economic growth to finance its transfer payments. - Wall Street Journal

What He Said, pt XI

1. All Medicare savings must be used to shore up Medicare. None of those savings can be used to fund new insurance subsidies or entitlements. Medicare is unsustainable, and it is going to need every dollar that we can save, and more. There is nothing to spare for a new entitlement. - Arnold Kling

Mr. Kling has four other points to carry into the room as a hypothetical Republican negotiating a health care compromise with the Democrats. But this one is enough to kill the bill all by itself: no new subsidies, no new entitlements.

What He Said, pt X

My point is that the ones throwing the temper tantrum right now are the Progressives. They think that the 2008 election gave them the right to operate like China's autocracy, and they are lashing out hysterically at those they perceive as preventing them from doing so On the one hand, the villains are a small minority in the Senate. Or maybe the villains are the incoherent majority of the people. - Arnold Kling

As the prospects for the health care bill have dimmed over the last month, the liberals have taken several new talking points as outlets for their frustration. "America is ungovernable" is one, well rebutted by Jay Cost. But there are others as well: the filibuster is bad, the Republicans are obstuctionist, the American people are idiots who watch Fox News. This part denial, part shrewd calculation to avoid consideration of one obvious possibility (getting more obvious by the day): liberalism is comprehensively bad and wrong and should be repudiated root and branch.

The latest in this trend is from a colleague of Nate Silver, who argues that the complaints against the health care bill can be boiled down to "process" in which case they can be addressed and minimized. And Mr. Schaller (and Steve DeOssie, who he cites) are correct to characterize the problems as process. Unfortunately that doesn't mean what Mr. Schaller wants it to mean.

There's a scene in Patton, IIRC, where the general is receiving an order by radio that he doesn't want to obey. So Patton pretends that the radio signal is scratchy and inaudible and does what he wants instead. Unfortunately for the other team, that maneuver won't work for the health care bill. With the results of Massachusetts special election, we know that the health care bill has been repudiated and that message has been heard. The message of the election of Senator Brown is this: don't listen to Kevin Drum, Ezra Klein, or President Obama for that matter. You have to get right with us first. Anything else is raw insubordination.

At this point there are no real good options for the Democrats but the best one is to walk away from the bill, at least until it's no longer radioactive. It can't pass at this point, and the attempt to pass it will be severely repudiated by the voters.

What He Said, pt IX

"The decision to spend $2.5 million on a silly census ad is a remarkably damaging self-inflected wound, and I'm not sure anyone in the Obama administration grasps that . . . " - Jim Geraghty

The same goes for the Tim Tebow anti-abortion ad too by the way. The ad itself was obviously tame, contrary to the fears of some ideologues. But most grassroots or church-sponsored projects are run on a shoestring, because contractors either donate their services or sell them at a cut-rate price. I have to think $2.5M in prolife activism would go pretty far if it were spent somewhere else.

Cry For Help

Nate Silver wants to give Sarah Palin some friendly advice if she wants to remain a credible figure on the national political stage.

Truth be told most of his advice is good but it's missing the point. This wasn't a mistake of ignorance. At some level Gov Palin knows that it's ridiculous to write speaking notes on the palm of your hand for a nationally significant speech. I think she thought it was homey and cute, and also emphasizes the contrast with President Obama, who can't get out of bed without a Teleprompter. To some extent it really is homey and cute, but we also get a clue that Sarah Palin's character has a big streak of Drama Queen. In fact, I suspect that's why Andrew Sullivan dislikes her so much: she reminds him of himself.

For me at least the moral of the story is pretty clear: we like Sarah Palin but we're not invested in her.

Get Off My Cloud

Of the prominent liberals in today's blogosphere, Nate Silver is one of the more levelheaded. He does an honest job of handicapping the horse race of public opinion, so he was willing to acknowledge the unpopularity of health care reform while the rest of his liberal brethren were still drinking the Kool-Aid. But like his liberal brethren, he still wants Congress to pass the bill anyway.

It's not too hard why liberal non-politicians still favor the health care bill. If you believe in the power of government to fix the big-ticket problems of the day as they do, this bill is a big step forward. The negative electoral consequences are somebody else's problem. What's a little more interesting is the line of argument he uses to persuade fence-sitting Congressmen and Senators.

Yes you may lose your seat, Silver concedes, but you will still be better off if you pass the bill. The apolitical middle may turn against you if you support the bill, but the party base is guaranteed to turn against you if you don't. Silver and the others making this argument might even be correct as far as that goes. But that's not the end of the story.

First of all, if you're a Democrat gloomy at the prospect of facing the voters in November, eg Blanche Lincoln and her 27% approval rating, there has to be a strong temptation to wonder how we got here in the first place. And the answer for that has to be fairly clear: President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid and the liberal blogosphere have driven the party off a cliff, and arm-twisted the rest of the party to make sure they were in the car with them. Does Sen. Lincoln really want to trust her career to the likes of Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum, or Jonathan Chait, when her excessive trust of such people is what has gotten her in the fix she's in now?

And, we're starting to see the intellectual shakiness of contemporary liberalism. The likes of Sen. Lincoln have a fairly coherent story if they flip on the health care bill now. She was for it, but didn't understand or appreciate before how much the folks back home were opposed to it, so she'll change her mind to defer to her constituents.

No, it's people like Silver, Chait, et al who can't admit to themselves the faults of the health care bill. If they acquiesce to the defeat of health care reform, their status and self-identification as liberals is called into question. And the ontological assumptions of liberalism aren't strong enough to withstand much scrutiny.

Bandwidth, pt II

There will always be a scandal of the day in Washington. For those who otherwise might have missed it (ie, people with lives), Sarah Palin recently criticized White House advisor Rahm Emanuel for characterizing some temporary adversaries as "f***ing retarded" for not seeing things his way. She was offended by that usage, "retarded" not the profanity btw, for the sake of her son Trig who has Down Syndrome. We are supposed to show more sensitivity to the disabled, and so on.

In today's National Review Online, Hadley Arkes piles on. This is ridiculous on a couple of levels. Contrary to the opinion of some people, "retarded" will never be functionally equivalent to the n-word. The n-word is obviously intended as an insult by anyone who speaks it, because the speaker could have just as easily used "black guy" or some other formulation instead. But the reality is, some people are clever and others are dim, and there is no word for stupid that can hide the difference.

But more than that, we as conservatives have limited bandwidth, through which we can communicate to America at large. In some ways, that's the most precious resource we have. Moreover, bandwidth works like an investment. If we invest wisely, we will get more of it. If we squander it, it's gone.

With that in mind, we can't afford to crowd out our essential message: we can bring the return of prosperity and limited government to America, and the other team can't. And we're going to do that by X, Y, and Z. As long as we are engaged for this purpose, the American people will give us a fair hearing. And the same holds if we are talk about other important concerns worthy of the public's attention. But we can't appear to be engaged in cheap partisan point-scoring or mindless PC enforcement for its own sake. That's the same as telling the American people to ignore us, and it's a long time out of that wilderness.

Update: what he said.

What He Said, pt VIII

....President Obama will never be successful until he accepts the assignment that history has given him. No one (anywhere) believes for one moment that he can add 30-35 million people to the health insurance rolls and not increase (sharply) the cost of health insurance. President Obama has been peddling this fable for months now and it has only served to make him look either (a) naive, or (b) utterly cynical. - James Pethokoukis

What She Said, pt VII

Who are you more likely to leave: the spouse who makes a pass at another woman, and then thinks the better of it, or the spouse who goes through with it? Maybe you'll leave them either way. But it does not follow that they are better off going through with it. I don't think it is actually true that trying to pass a bill people hate, and then thinking the better of it because it turns out the electorate hates it, is no different from trying to pass a bill people hate, finding out that they really, really hate it, and then ignoring them and pushing it through anyway. - Megan McArdle

What He Said, pt VI

In theory, I'm against laws banning smoking in bars and restaurants. I don't smoke, and I hate being in places where smoke is concentrated, but on principle, I think the government shouldn't tell bars and restaurants they can't allow people to smoke there. - Rod Dreher

But even if, like Rod, I should oppose smoking bans in bars and restaurants, in practice this is one exercise of the nanny state that actually works.

Six Of One

Megan McArdle has written an interesting piece pushing back against the argument circulating on the Right that Obama's (and Bush's) wasteful fiscal policies are risking hyperinflation, instead supposing that we will have to endure a fiscal crisis instead. She might be right, but it looks to me like a distinction without a difference.

The next big economic bullet we have to contend with is the threat that the government's access to credit in arbitrarily large amounts will be lost or reduced. As that happens, interest rates will rise and the federal government will have to make some very difficult decisions. Megan's argument seems to operate under the assumption that when push comes to shove, the feds will choose to cut entitlement benefits rather than attempt to inflate away the debt. If that's true we have certainly not seen any movement in that direction so far. I know if I owned long term Treasury debt I would be less than reassured by Megan. Furthermore the actual bondholders don't necessarily believe her either, their problem is that they really don't have any good alternatives.

The Obama Recovery

I agree with James Pethokoukis (and other commentators with a similar line) in the main, but his tone seems a bit churlish to me. The fact that GDP grew at 3.5% last quarter is good news, even if for technical reasons that number is exaggerating somewhat the growth in the real economy.

Instead of quibbling about whether last quarter's GDP growth rate was 3.5% or 2.0%, I would simply emphasize that appearances notwithstanding, we are actually in a recovery right now. This is what recovery looks like when Democrats are in power. If the voters want something better, they can vote Republican.

Obama On The Couch

“Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother’s milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career,” I wrote in Feb. 2008. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.” - David Goldman aka Spengler

We've seen quite a bit of this sort of thing from various people on the Right over the last year or so. Steve Sailer in particular has made an extensive study of it.

I have no particular beef with armchair psychoanalysis of political figures or prominent people in general. In many circumstances it's the only way to make sense of them. It's just that in this particular case I don't buy it, at least as it pertains to Barack Obama's performance as President of the United States.

Even if we accept that young Barack Obama was weaned on anti-Americanism, the 47-year old President Obama understands the gravity of his job and has circulated in "respectable" society long enough to render some analyses like Spengler's wrong if taken too literally. This is not just some speculation by the way, but clear from his performance through nine months in office. If Obama really intended to be the American Salvador Allende (and I for one was worried about it), he would have gone about things much differently.

No, the thing I fear about President Obama right now is that he is not just the President but also the First Groupie. Like some of his rockstar-worshipping fans, he in love with the sound of his own voice. As a consequence, he manages through atmospherics. The President's warm sonorous baritone isn't just a matter of soundbites, but serves in lieu of real engagement with America's problems.

Dede the Dissident Conservative

The tide has turned very quickly for Dede Scozzafava in the special election for Congress in the 23rd District of New York.

Just a week or so ago, prominent establishment Republicans wanted the Right to coalesce around Republican nominee Scozzafava when it was clear that conservative insurgent Doug Hoffman had the message and the momentum in the race. Now, in the last day or so and less than a week before the election, Scozzafava has not only dropped out, she has endorsed the Democrat in the race, Bill Owens.

Now Dede Scozzafava hasn't written any books about sustainable agriculture or climate change, but she seems to me to be the pol's version of the dissident conservative. We are led to believe such people are supposedly motivated by reasons of high principle. But it's a crock. What really counts is the repudiation of the legitimate lower case r republicans left in America, ie, people like the Palins.

Mixed Signals

Some of us on the Right are skeptical of the Church's instincts as it pertains to economic or political things. This is a matter of some exasperation for Church partisans. They can say, as Boethius does, "Look, the Church rejects socialism, the Church respects private property, the Church opposes class warfare. It says so right here in Rerum Novarum, written by the pope himself"

Well, our suspicions are not merely paranoia. Here's a couple of interesting links of back-and-forth from Rep. Joseph Kennedy and Abp. Dolan of New York (hat tip to the Corner). Note especially the words of Abp. Dolan: there's nothing in them that suggests any wavering on the traditional doctrines of the Church, in this case the prohibition against abortion. But, without explicitly agreeing, he seems to acquiesce to Rep. Kennedy's premise that of course we all support Democratic-sponsored health care reform once we can resolve these small side-issue dealbreakers.

Of course this ignores the multitude of problems with the various Democratic proposals that have nothing to do with abortion. So, statements such as Dolan's which I suggest are fairly typical are one step up and two steps back: the Church's doctrines are affirmed while at the same time seeming to place them in an improper or uncertain context and conceding too much to the Left on non-doctrinal issues.

The Priority of Labor

Boethius has written a lot of worth responding to. At the risk of repetition, let's pick up on this business of the priority of labor over capital one more time.

Boethius, speaking with the Church, is certainly correct in one sense: we can have labor without capital but we cannot have capital without labor therefore labor is literally first. But as I argued in a prior comment, most contemporary thought on about this topic is about the ethics of compensation: how much labor gets vs. how much capital gets.

But even if we accept this to be an error, the train of thought is still interesting for me at least. The idea is that the material goods of the world are ordered to human welfare. Labor, having priority, is more fundamental to human welfare than capital therefore it must be compensated at the expense of capital if necessary. What's interesting about this is that if even if some of the Left's premises are faulty, not all of them are. In particular, I have no problem conceding to the Left that the goods of the world are properly ordered toward human welfare.

But there's something of a paradox that says that if property that is held privately serves public ends better than property that is held publicly. But paradox or not, that's what the history of the last 150 years or so tell us very strongly. There are substantial costs in trying anything else.

"Nothing is more useful..."

...than to look upon the world as it really is." This migh be mistaken for one of Koz's fundamental assertions, but this quote in fact comes from Pope Leo XIII, in his criticism of socialism in Rerum Novarum, section 18. Since Koz has additionally asserted that what passes for Catholic Social Doctrine includes "Economics for Leprechauns and Unicorns," my goal with this series of posts is to explore whether the difference in apprehended reality can be accounted for by 1) the Church's social doctrine is incorrect or deficient in some aspects; 2) Koz's opinions, on the contrary, suffer from those defects; or, 3) what Koz is criticizing is not actually church doctrine, but popularized versions used by factions within the Church for political ends.

"Capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital [R.N. 19]," for example, seems to be another principle at odds with what Koz says is claimed by the Catholic left, which apparently implies that the Church should be more concerned with laborers than with capitalists. I would like to see a reference to where this is claimed, though I don't dispute that this is indeed claimed by many. The problem with this position, the distorted 'liberal' view, is also documented by Pope Leo, when he writes:

The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth [19].

I would agree that there is largely a knee-jerk notion smoldering in areas of the American Church that capitalists, those who provide capital for the benefit of laborers, are basically evil people. Obviously the Church does not teach this, and by emphasizing the necessity of harmony between classes would actually seem to be closer to the Reaganometric 'trickle down' theory than, say, an Alinskian agitprop strategy. We will see, however, that this is far from a clear endorsement of a completely free market or 'unbridled captialism', though the extent to which the Church is clear on the precise duties of capitalists is still very much openly disputed by conservative Catholic economists. We have much more to wade through before weighing in on that dispute, but for today, suffice it to say that if Koz's criticisms are aimed at real assertions by real people, I would hold that they do not speak in accord with Leo XIII.

Is the Church by Nature Socialist?

At times, some within the Church have imagined that the ideal depicted in Acts 4: 32 should be the norm guiding the Church at all times:

"The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common."

For this reason, it has been an easy move for many Christians in the past 150 years to adopt a kind of de facto socialist point of view. However, already by the fourth century, and probably much earlier, Church Fathers were pointing out that this ideal from Acts was only lived in monastic settings, where in addition to a promise of poverty, monks and nuns also vowed celibacy. Marriage, being an institution of God for those in the world and not in monastic communities, necessitates the ownership of private property, which allows for parents to produce goods for the benefit of those who are helpless to do so for themselves, namely for children. Thus it is that Pope Leo XIII can write:

"it is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property. This being established, we proceed to show where the remedy sought for must be found."

He also makes the interesting exegetical argument that God Himself ordained private property, by noting that the commandment, "Thou shalt not covet," makes no sense if what someone else has to be coveted is in fact common property.

Finally in this section of Rerum Novarum (11-15), the pope accurately predicts the drying up of capital (=means of production) in communist states (as Koz noted in a recent comment on the current state of Polish labor) when he writes:

"the sources of wealth themselves would run dry, for no one would have any interest in exerting his talents or his industry; and that ideal equality about which they entertain pleasant dreams would be in reality the levelling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation."

It is worth noting that in both quotes, the interest of the Holy Father is in the alleviation of poverty, one of the Church's main projects while in the world. Thus, we see that the 'preferential option for the poor', is not an invention of Vatican II or socialists, but is inscribed in the very nature of the Church. However, when it comes to proposals on how to carry this out, the Church's preferential option, as we shall see, is realistic in the sense that it acknowledges the shortcomings of actual people and the need therefore of justice. The traditional definition of justice is the virtue of giving each person his or her due. In the area of our material existence, this means the preservation of justly acquired capital in the hands of the laborer who created it.