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There is a fascinating article in the Los Angeles Times written by Mickey Edwards, a Republican Party apparatchik of many years standing, called Reagan wouldn’t recognize this GOP. This was the ‘money quote’ for me:
Over the last several years, conservatives have turned themselves inside out: They have come to worship small government and have turned their backs on limited government. They have turned to a politics of exclusion, division and nastiness. Today, they wonder what went wrong, why Americans have turned on them, why they lose, or barely win, even in places such as Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina.
So George W. Bush and John “I support the Bailout” McCain represented the worship of… small government??? So presumably this ‘small’ government must have consumed a smaller portion of the national wealth when it left office compared to when it took office, right? I mean is that not surely the most direct and uncontroversial measure of the size of a government? Ok, 9/11 happened… so if we were to factor out all military spending, would that give us a smaller state at the end of the Bush presidency than at the start? I will leave you to guess the answer to that very simple question. And are there more regulations governing, well, almost everything, now compared when Bush took power? If there are more, then how is that either small or limited?
In America, government is … us. What is “exceptional” about America is the depth of its commitment to the principle of self-government; we elect the government, we replace it or its members when they displease us, and by our threats or support, we help steer what government does.
Of course this ‘us’ of whom he speaks are in reality the political activists who gain the support of a plurality to sanctify the latest looting schedules. His contempt for ‘ Joe the Plumber’ says it all. Joe was indeed one of ‘us’, one of the great unwashed who dared to fart loudly during the chorus of media hosannas surrounding Obama’s stately progress across The Blessed Land. Mickey Edwards on the other hand was a career politician who now lectures on Legislative Politics and International Affairs… in other words, he is about as much one of ‘them’ as you can get.
And there is nothing particularly ‘exceptional’ about his description of American government unless Mickey Edwards thinks most of the rest of the ‘first world’ are organised as feudal states. The ‘limits’ to government expressed in the sainted US Constitution may be still be a viable tool for securing thing like freedom of expression and the right to defend yourself, well at least somewhat, but they do less than nothing to make anyone secure in their property or in any way less vulnerable to the political looter class (whom Mickey Edward could identify by simply looking in a mirror) from using the political system to help themselves to other people’s money.
And that, my chums across the ocean, is exactly why you are just as totally fucked as the rest of us.
Here is something very topical for today, Inaugaration Speech Generator:
A grassroots internet campaign helped Barack Obama get elected. Now he’s calling for the internet’s assistance one more time – to help him craft the best inauguration speech ever…
This is the result of my humble efforts to help out:
My fellow Americans, today is a psychadelic day. You have shown the world that “hope” is not just another word for “moon”, and that “change” is not only something we can believe in again, but something we can actually fly.
Today we celebrate, but let there be no mistake – America faces confusing and rigorous challenges like never before. Our economy is embarassing. Americans can barely afford their mortgages, let alone have enough money left over for spaghetti. Our healthcare system is lethal. If your nostril is sick and you don’t have insurance, you might as well call a dustman. And America’s image overseas is tarnished like a aubergine bullet. But cookin’ together we can right this ship, and set a course for Hebrides.
Finally, I must thank my excruciating family, my beautiful campaign volunteers, but most of all, I want to thank bankers for making this historic occasion possible. Of course, I must also thank you, President Bush, for years of shootin’ the American people. Without your rotting efforts, none of this would have been possible.
God Bless… the Internet!
Obama’s supporters should savour today, they really should. Even Obama’s detractors have at least something to be happy about. A black man has become President of the United States, The Leader of the Free-ish World, the Commander-in-Thief. And that at least is a fine thing.
But the mere fact it has happened shows it is much less important than it seems. A huge percentage of America’s blacks voted along racial lines, and thus presumably can have had no complaint if non-black people had likewise voted their race en-mass. Fortunately by and large even in race obsessed America most white people did not see it that way. Things have moved on, something obvious to anyone who has visited or worked in the US over the last few decades. Perhaps, just perhaps, the sheer folly of identity politics, the poison wellspring of all ethnic sectarianism, can be discarded once and for all. Yeah, as if. Well one can hope.
But today Obama does indeed become the very embodiment of a victory over an irrelevant thing which should never have divided people in the first place. And against that noble tableau, the calls for a New Hope and Bipartisan Unity will ring out strong and loud against a backdrop of Old Glory fluttering in the wind as Obama looks out at the horizon in all his Apollonian glory. Powerful stuff given how much Americans respond to appeals to the sentimental.
And the correct response to this is not to put your hand on your heart and get all misty eyed, it is to nod sagely at the agreeable symbolism of a clear triumph over America’s grotesquely racist past… and then, in answer to the calls for unity, raise your middle finger and make a loud raspberry sound. You will be drowned out by the cheering crowds but trust me when I say there will be millions of other people off-camera doing precisely that.
President Obama will only ever have one meaningful victory, and that is being a black man who was elected President. Cool. Seriously, very cool indeed. Celebrate that much in good faith. As for the rest, the things he actually wants to do, well that is the stuff that always should divide us and always will. Republicans and for that matter libertarians who cannot see that are, quite simply, political enemies who are part of the problem, not the solution.
So cheer the glorious apogee of the civil rights movement today because its significance ends the instant he takes the oath. Everything else that follows will be the start of a progressive and cumulative defeat for Obama. The One will get the laws he wants and his supporters will conclude that means he is winning, as if saying something is so makes it so. Let them do their worst because there is nothing anyone can do to stop them at this juncture in any case.
But Obama’s actual enemy is not the Republicans, who are prostrate at the moment and worthless as currently constituted. No, it is reality itself that is Obama’s utterly implacable opponent: that vast Ponzi scheme called ‘regulatory statism’ has reached the end of the cycle, as Ponzi schemes always do in the end. In previous times, economic growth has masked the pyramidal nature of what both parties did as they pushed the hard choices off into the future with the knowing connivance of millions of voters… but not this time. The future has arrived and the sainted American middle class, who acquiesced to it all and yet about whom no ill may be spoken, will find that future quite unsympathetic.
And when irksome reality stubbornly refuses to follow Hollywood’s script and accept the Triumph of the Will, more laws will follow. And then more. And more. The cannibalisation of the shrinking productive economy to ‘bail out’ the failing bits will become ever more intense. Much as John “I support the Bail Out” McCain would have done in fact. Pervasive political regulations trying to manipulate things back into health will become ever more pervasive, all to rapturous applause at first… and all to no avail. Obama’s progressive and spectacularly expensive defeat will be a defeat for the entire nation with implications that will be felt around the world. It will be a defeat that consumes much that is still gleaming and golden in the Republic and turns it into toxic waste.
So now is not the time for ‘unity’ and ‘bipartisanship’, which is just a genteel way of demanding surrender, it is the time for resistance and the renewal of purpose by those who see the liberty and prosperity that comes from constitutionally limited government as a prize worth any price to defend. This was never really about race other than as the final flourish of a very worthy battle that had already been won.
Andrew Roberts, the UK historian, pens what can only be described as a robust defence of soon-to-be-ex-US President, George W. Bush. It has stirred up a hornet’s nest of comments, some of which include open support for OBL’s cause, which makes me wonder about who edits the Telegraph blogs these days, if at all.
Unfortunately, this piece suffers from a number of basic factual errors that make one wonder about the quality of the editing of the Daily Telegraph’s print edition, never mind the electronic version. He says, for example, that Oliver North directed a movie about Bush, when in fact he meant Oliver Stone. These Olivers are a bit of a pest: I mean, there’s Oliver Reed, Oliver Cromwell, Oliver Twist, and loads of others. It might rather tickle both Messrs North and Stone – one a rather controversial soldier, the other a former-soldier-turned leftwing filmaker, to be so conflated.
On a more serious note, though, Mr Roberts suffers from over-reach in his understandable desire to set the record a bit straighter. For a start, any believer in the small government brand of conservatism, even a hawk who supported the overthrow of Saddam and the fight against the Taliban, has to confront the continuing expansion of government and debt under the Bush administration. Bush went over the heads of Congress to support the bailout of the US auto industry. Then there is the whole nonsense of No Child Left Behind, Prescription Drugs, Patriot Act, and the rest.
As for protecting America from attack, it is true, that he deserves – as I said some time ago – some, if not a lot, of credit for the fact that there has been no major repeat of a 9-11 sort of attack on US soil since that terrible September morning; and yes, I happen to agree with Mr Roberts that paying a pure “wait-and-see”, defensive posture after that day was not really plausible.
Libertarians continue to argue among themselves, never mind with others and often vehemently, about the proper scope of foreign policy, or whether a libertarian foreign policy is an oxymoron. For me, the principle of self-defence cannot rule out the need, in certain circumstances, to go after declared enemies with a track record of violence and mayhem. Bush went after some of those enemies and made mistakes along the way. But I think, that on foreign policy at least, the judgement of history on this man will be rather kinder than at the present time.
There is an outpouring of ‘good will’ towards Obama coming from the statist establishment on the so called ‘right’, whatever that means, in the USA, such as this fellow. These are exactly the sort of apparatchiks I have talking about before who are at the very heart of the Republican party’s problems. They may well be personable but now is the time for radicalisation and resistance, not conciliation and surrender.
Noting how specific Republicans react to the beatification, sorry I mean inauguration of Obama will be a useful guide to who ‘gets it’ and who does not… who is part of the problem rather than the solution. Of course the easy entries on the ‘kick the fools out’ list needs to start with the party worthies who actually thought it was even good politics, let alone good for the country, to run such a profoundly statist candidate like McCain against the most left wing Democrat since FDR. Even the most clueless of marketing men (and that is an industry more awash with cluelessness than most) understand the importance of product differentiation.
Feel free to use the comment section to stay who on the Big Government wing of the Republican Party most urgently needs to be given the boot so that the Republicans have any value at all as a worthwhile alternative. Of course I am well aware that the answer may be ‘kick out all of them’ but that is not a very useful observation. The current crisis is a golden opportunity to actually do some creative destruction that could yield interesting results in the years to come. If that possibility is not of interest to you, then you have nothing to add to this particular discussion.
Take a look at this, and scroll down for some of the comments. I still occasionally come across the sort of comments in the vein of “would it not be a good idea to stick all those yobs in the Army/whatever or make them do unpaid work?” etc, etc. These comments come up when there is a discussion about problems of our terrible young people. And this seems to be a viewpoint that transcends the usual left/right political divide: conservatives like the “get em sorted out” mindset while the left goes more for the “building a sense of community” approach. As usual, the notion that individuals are entitled to live their lives for their own sakes gets lost. I mean, that is just so damned selfish.
The issue is quite simple: if the problem is youngsters getting bored and into trouble, then the obvious solution is paid work, hence removing all the legal and tax barriers to said, such as minimum wage laws, restrictions on hiring teenagers, and so on. Acquiring the pride of getting a paycheque strikes me as far more useful in encouraging positive behaviours than some sort of conscription plan for young adults, as seems to be on the cards in the US.
And I’ll repeat my point that it is not enough just to speak out against plans to conscript 18 to 25-year-olds, for example. Proposals to make people attend schools (or whatever euphemistic words for such places exist) until they are 18, for example, is also wrong, and in many cases, counterproductive, particularly where non-academic youngsters disrupt the teaching of their fellows because they are bored senseless. Far better to encourage apprenticeships, with things like tax breaks, than keeping them in one damned education project after another.
If this idea of a young civilian corps in the US becomes fact, I wonder how many of all those young Obama fans will became disenchanted with him? But then I recall that Mr McCain, his vanquished opponent, was pretty keen on all this service stuff as well.
2009 is going to be an interesting year, particularly in the USA. Big State Democrat Barack “The One” Obama crushed Big State Republican John “I Support the Bail Outs” McCain and this means the country is going to have a new president whose politics make him the most committed statist since LBJ. The country was given a choice between statism and statism and it voted for… statism.
Well to quote Mencken, the American electorate are going to get what they voted for good and hard, because this is also the year the global economy is truly going to crash, big time, plunging us into a recession and indeed a depression that will last longer and be driven deeper by the policies being implemented by governments on both sides of the Atlantic.
And this presents friends of liberty with a great many opportunities.
Never has there been a better time for cleaning house. The usual excuses given for pragmatic ‘broad church’ politics no longer apply on the so-called ‘right’… no amount of unity will change the fact that regulatory tax-and-spend politicians will be in charge for the next few years regardless of what people of a classical liberal disposition do. And so I would strongly urge such people to get into politics like never before, not primarily to fight the statist left just yet, but to create opposition parties that are actually worth voting for.
In short, I am calling on anyone who believes in liberty and limited government to reject all thoughts of party unity and work tirelessly to drive the statist right from their parties.
I am not calling for the ‘libertarianisation’ of the Republican party along the lines I would actually like, just for the party’s rationalisation. I am in essence calling for a nominally conservative party to become… conservative. The simple fact is that people can be fellow travellers on a path that leads to liberty without all marching in ideological lock-step. It just boils down to asking the question “do you want the state to have less control over people’s lives or more control?” If a person can honestly answer that they think the state is too powerful and needs to be reduced, that is a fellow traveller. → Continue reading: An appeal for disunity
The One is not yet in the White House, but already, one of his most enthusiastic cheerleaders in the blogsphere, Andrew “Excitable Andy” Sullivan, has discovered that Mr Obama might not be totally signed up to the notion that consenting adults should be left alone to make arrangements to their liking, such as gay marriage.
Well done, Andrew. It took Mr Sullivan just two years to swing from rather gushing praise for George W. Bush to treating him as as worse than Attila the Hun. Will Obama’s fall from Sullivan’s pantheon of political heroes be even quicker?
Just to be serious – and lest folk think I am just engaging in a spot of mud-throwing at Sullivan – it is truly sad to see how this influential commentator has made a prize ass of himself over his assumption that voting for Obama was something that anyone who favoured small, limited government could be comfortable with. Oh for sure, Mr Obama may remove some of the bad things that the Bush White House encouraged, but I would not bet on it. Come to that, I am not at all sure that civil libertarians, be they concerned about issues like gay marriage, drugs, free speech, abuse of police powers, etc, can be at all confident that Mr Obama, a scion of the Chicago political machine, is good news. That’s not to say that the GOP will be any better, of course.
What Sullivan, and indeed all of us, need to remember is that Bush, Obama, or for that matter Brown, Sarkozy and Merkel, are politicians.
Here is an interesting article about how Wal-Mart, the bete noire of the anti-globalistas, acted much more effectively and efficiently in helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina a few years ago than was the case with Federal or other state agencies.
What the article does not really discuss, however, is whether companies ought to be doing things like this at all. There is the old Milton Friedman line that a company has one duty only: to benefit its shareholders by making a profit. But of course if shareholders vote in company meetings in favour of allowing their company to spend some money in certain civic endeavours, then as a supporter of private property rights – of shareholders – then I have no problem with that at all. If a company whose shares I own starts to engage in all manner of “social” projects that I think show the firm is increasingly being run by twerps, I can always dump the stock or even, assuming it is not banned, short-sell the shares to punish the firm for not being professionally run.
That approach is, of course, very different from those advocates of what is called “corporate social responsibility” who might want to legislate to force firms into such activities, which blurs the political and business spheres. It enables politicians, for example, to bring about changes without having to explicitly say how these are going to be paid for. Such public-private partnerships are all too often about concealment of cost.
Richard North on UK writer, actor and travel writer, Stephen Fry:
As he takes us on his taxi-ride around the US, he is not ostensibly defending the place, though in his accompanying notes (in interviews and on his website) that seems to be his mission. It is easier to warm to Mr Fry’s account. He seems a nice old thing. But he has a striking narrowness of mind, best exemplified by the disdain with which he passed by Miami as too horrid to detain him. He sneers too easily. I doubt that he is quite as clever as he thinks, though he clearly has a good memory and has an intense middlebrow love of science.
Brrr, that was venomous! Considering that Mr North dislikes Fry’s sneering, that is quite a snide comment itself. Ouch, as they say. Even so, Mr North has a good review of a number of books written by folk about the US recently. He does not seem very impressed by them.
I still think the greatest book written about the US from an outsider is Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
Andrew Sullivan, commenting on a remark about the enormous bailouts being put into place by Western governments, has this to say:
“The debt was so reckless and so immense that it now threatens to destroy the entire financial system. That’s what electing George W Bush twice has done for us. But then we are told that this threat requires us to do even more of the borrowing and spending before we can begin to get ourselves back in balance again. The unchallenged doctrine of the day is that: doing nothing would provoke a worse collapse than necessary and so we have to make our fiscal situation much worse now in order to make it much better later. Why am I not convinced?”
Well, Sullivan is obviously right that the way to solve our debt addiction is not to go on the equivalent of yet another binge in the hope of relieving the hangover. Although his glib remark that re-electing Bush twice has added to the debt addiction does rather ignore, for example, the role of the Democrats, for example, in opposing Bush’s attempts to constrain the US federal home mortgage agencies, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. He is right though to chide the Republicans for letting spendng soar, but then I fear that Sullivan has become such a victim of Bush Derangement Syndrome that even a good point now becomes distorted through his worship of Mr Obama. And if it is debt addiction Sullivan is worried about, I somehow do not expect the Community Organiser to be the one to decisively take us back to the days of small government.
A conservative friend of mine in the USA sent me a link to an article in Weekly Standard called The Sector Formerly Known as Private: how Obama intends to use corporations to effect social change… and I must say that it somewhat surprised me. The following is largely based on the letter I sent him in return.
We’re beginning to get a sense of what the next four years will look like. It won’t be a conservative era, that’s for sure. Nor will it, despite appearances to the contrary, be a reprise of the Clinton era. Bill Clinton’s version of economic liberalism meant slightly higher tax rates on income and capital, a slightly more burdensome regulatory apparatus, lower deficits, and a commitment to free trade. The public sector didn’t meddle too much in the private sector. It was content, for the most part, to sit back and enjoy the tax revenue that the tech boom poured in. Obama’s liberalism will be different.
Let us gloss over the absurd American use of the word ‘liberal’ when they actually mean ‘illiberal’, but my response to “We’re beginning to get a sense of what the next four years will look like” was… we? Was article author Matthew Continetti not listening to Obama during the campaign? Has he not examined the copious record of the vile man’s public statements ever since he entered politics? Nothing Obama is going to do should be unexpected. For Obama to do anything unexpected he would have to slash public spending and roll back regulation.
Is it really only now dawning on some people that Obama ain’t Bill Clinton? But guess what, do you actually think McCain would have shrunk the state and lowered the regulatory interference that not so much led to but actually mandated the sub-prime melt down? McCain is the one who is Bill Clinton, just with zipped flies and less charisma.
Let the whole stinking system of patronage politics burn I say because nothing is going to change for the better until the piles of garbage and rats in the streets reality rubs people’s faces in the true cost of voting in a political class who thinks wealth is something that is created by political actions rather than markets. Hell, it does not matter what I think, just look at the numbers as the economy slows, then contracts, and at the same time state expenditure actually increases. Do you really have to be an Austrian School economist to see the implications of that?
Never was there a better time for openly authoritarian regulatory statists to be in power, right when the global economy is on the edge of an abyss. There will be no economic growth to mask the expansion of the state this time. Personally I am looking up at them standing on the edge and chanting “Jump! Jump! Jump!”
Just at the point where the state’s tax take will nose dive because of the economic slow-down, the USA has elected someone who is going to massively increase ‘public’ expenditure. The money will come from where exactly? Tax the middle class? That kills consumption and the economy tanks even more. Print more money? That fuels inflation and the economy tanks even more. Screw it out of productive sectors of the economy? That makes marginally productive businesses go bust and makes them all cut their labour forces and increases unemployment… and the economy tanks even more. My guess is that by the time he is done Obama will do all of the above. It does not matter that the media will love The One all the way down to the crater, the pain will be spread around so widely no amount of propaganda will be able to shift the blame. If the so called ‘right’ cannot turn that into political success a few years from now then they are worthless fools.
A lot of people are going to get hurt and that is just too damn bad. Has the GOP actually run a free-market candidate for president since Barry Goldwater? Well Reagan was at least half way there, but only half way, but I give him a free pass because busting the Soviets actually was worth the money he spent. The GOP is as much to blame as the Democrats for where the USA is now, so a plague on both their houses. The situation now is exactly where ‘pragmatic’ and ‘realistic’ voting gets you. Why anyone who wanted a smaller state would have turned out and voted for McCain was beyond me… and of course many did not, they stayed home in droves and quite right too.
Guys, you have been voting for the lesser evil for so long you may have lost sight of the fact that you have been voting for evil, just a tiny bit less than the other guy. Well no more easy options, no more putting the day of reckoning off for some point in the future… the day of reckoning has arrived and I for one am delighted. Do your worst Obama… to quote Lenin’s inspiration Nikolai Chernyshevsky, “the worse, the better”. Do not think of it as a disaster but rather an opportunity to actually create an opposition worth voting for. Never has there been a better time to destroy the political careers of really large numbers of Big State Republicans.
That is what I think. Have a nice day.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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