What Americans Want

[philunderwood]

Americans want the honor of ‘earned success’

By Michael Barone

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Why aren't voters moving to the left, toward parties favoring bigger government, during what increasingly looks like an economic depression? That's a question I've asked, and one that was addressed with characteristic thoughtfulness by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg in the New York Times last week.

Greenberg argues that voters agree with Democrats on issues but don't back them on policy because they don't trust government to carry it out fairly. I think he overstates their agreements on policies: They may favor "investment in education" until they figure out that it actually means political payoffs to teachers' unions.

But his larger point rings true. He points out that "the growth of self-identified conservatives" began during the fall 2008 debate over the TARP legislation supported by George W. Bush, Barack Obama and John McCain. The voters' take: "Government works for the irresponsible, not the responsible."

That was the complaint as well of Rick Santelli in his February 2009 "rant" calling for a tea party. Santelli was complaining about mortgage modification programs that used prudent homeowners' tax money to subsidize those who had made imprudent decisions.

But Greenberg's diagnosis is stronger than his prescriptions. To reduce the power of "special interest lobbyists," he calls for stronger campaign finance regulation. But as Walter Russell Mead points out in his American Interest blog, that's unlikely to happen any time soon.

Mead makes an even stronger point when he writes that "for large numbers of voters the professional classes who staff the bureaucracies, foundations and policy institutes in and around government are themselves a special interest." One, he adds, that acts "only to protect their turf and fatten their purses."

This helps explain why majorities continue to oppose the Obama Democrats' stimulus package and Obamacare. Democratic elites thought these laws would be seen as helping ordinary people. But they aren't.

They are seen as special interest legislation which helps politically favored constituencies. Which, as my Washington Examiner colleague Timothy Carney has documented, is an accurate view.

I think the larger mistake the Obama Democrats have made is that they suppose ordinary voters want government to channel more money in their direction.

They're not the only ones to take this view. In the Bush years, thoughtful conservatives -- David Frum, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam -- noted that most people's real incomes had not been rising and wrote books calling for government policies to bolster their incomes.

But ordinary Americans don't want money as much as they want honor. They want what the chance to achieve what American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks calls "earned success."

The housing policies that brought about the financial collapse, supported by almost all Democrats and many Republicans including Bush, promised something different.

They treated the old policies of requiring 20 percent down payments on houses as antiquated and bigoted. Mortgages with no money down and looser credit standards would enable Hispanics and blacks especially to accumulate wealth as others had in the past.

We know now that the old standards of creditworthiness made sense. Saving enough for a 20 percent down payment was difficult for young homebuyers. But once they did so, meeting the monthly payment was easier and any temporary drop in home prices didn't wipe out their equity. When home prices increased over the years, they had reason to believe they had earned their success.

"The progressive ideal of administrative cadres leading the masses toward the light has its roots in a time when many Americans had an eighth-grade education or less," Mead writes. That is still the mind-set of the Obama Democrats. Ordinary people are treated as victims who need government programs like Obamacare to help them out.

But Americans prefer to see themselves as doers rather than victims. They do not see themselves, as the masses in the Progressive Era a century ago may have done, as helpless victims of large corporations and financial interests.

They want public policies that enable them to earn success, and they resent policies that channel money to the politically well positioned or to those who have not made decisions and taken actions necessary for earned success. They want to be empowered, not patronized.

That's why voters here and, as Greenberg notes, in other advanced countries are rejecting policies that give more power to the mandarins who run government and provide less leeway for ordinary people to work for earned success.

[philunderwood]

www.qando.net/?cat=21

Public distrust of government has hit an all time high

Published September 29, 2011 | By Bruce McQuain




Yes, I know ¡­ what a surprise:

The public¡¯s trust in the federal government has dropped to an all-time low, according to a new national survey.


A CNN/ORC International Poll released Wednesday morning indicates that only 15 percent of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what¡¯s right just about always or most of the time. Last September that figure was at 25 percent. Seventy-seven percent of people questioned say they trust the federal government only some of the time, and an additional eight percent volunteer that they never trust the government to do what¡¯s right.
In the past five years the number who say they trust the government "always" or "most of the time" was usually in the low-to-mid 20¡äs. Before the recession hit that number was usually in the low-to-mid 30¡äs, and slightly more than a decade ago, it was in the high 30¡äs or occasionally just over 40 percent.

"The previous all-time low was 17 percent, set in the summer of 1994," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "Before the Watergate scandal, a majority of Americans said they trusted the government always or most of the time, but since 1974 that has happened only during a brief period in 2001 immediately after the 9/11 terrorism attacks."

I¡¯d say this is a well earned distrust. Over the years, the Federal Government has become more and more intrusive, and we¡¯ve seen our lives impacted more each year by that intrusiveness. We¡¯ve seen the militarization of the police. We¡¯ve seen bureaucratic creep into areas that most believe the government has no business. Government is borrowing and spending at an unsupportable rate, thereby binding unborn generations to debt they had no hand in incurring. And we¡¯ve seen an unwillingness on the part of government and politicians to modify their behavior and address the problems listed.

Government has always been a ¡°dangerous servant¡± especially when it has become an arrogant servant. In fact, what happens, as history teaches us, is government usually tries (and succeeds) to become the master most of the time and uses coercion and violence to have its way.

Part of the problem is so many people are invested in the idea that government is a panacea for all the perceived ills of human nature and that if done properly, utopia is just around the corner.

It is this sort of thinking that led to the disasters of the USSR, Nazi Germany and many other examples. What Frederich Hayek called the ¡°fatal conceit¡±.

What we¡¯ve seen develop in our government over the decades is a tendency toward central planning. In the name of social justice, more and more of our economy has been brought under government control by various means. And, as usual, we¡¯re headed in a very predictable direction because of it. James Piereson explains with some recent examples:


Their efforts to create "green" jobs, stimulate the economy, redistribute income and manage costs in the health care system are all examples of the fatal conceit run amok. A large and modern economy, made up of hundreds of millions of participants who make spending and investment decisions by the minute, is far too complex to allow for centralized coordination. Such efforts, Hayek warned, invariably make a difficult situation worse.

And that¡¯s precisely our experience which of course explains some of the distrust of government. The ¡°fatal conceit¡± was something the founders of this country tried to avoid. Unfortunately it¡¯s very difficult to weed out or prevent from growing (or perhaps metastasizing is a better word) within government regardless of its initial structure, no matter how well thought out. But we¡¯ve seen the results of the change so many times we ought to be able to recognize it and we obviously should try to avoid it:


ny effort to organize society around a common economic plan will inevitably lead to a loss of freedom and a return of the common man to a condition of servitude and dependence. Hayek reminded his readers that Hitler was not just a nationalist but a socialist as well, and that his brutal tyranny developed out of a malignant synthesis of these ideas. Market liberalism, in contrast to both ideologies, follows no overall plan but allows progress to emerge out of the coordinating actions of free individuals.

Yet here we are pursuing the former to the detriment of the latter. And by the way don¡¯t mistake crony capitalism for free market capitalism. Capitalism only demands the private ownership of the means of production. Whether or not the markets are free isn¡¯t a prerequisite. Hence the descriptors that differentiate the type. What we mostly suffer here is crony capitalism as demonstrated by the green agenda and Solyndra, et. al.

But to the main point that ties it all together, again from Piereson:


Hayek wrote the book partly in response to John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who had argued a few years earlier that government could lead the economy out of depression through deficit spending. Keynes believed that this would stimulate consumer demand and private investment.

Hayek was skeptical of Keynes¡¯ theory on economic grounds, but even more so on political grounds. Efforts by the state to manage the economy will certainly fail, he argued, but they will not be abandoned. Every failure would instead lead to more ambitious and extravagant policies to reach the elusive goals, until more and more aspects of the economy are brought under government control. This, Hayek argued, was "the road to serfdom."

Keynes was convinced that war and depression ended all hopes that the liberal order of the 19th century could be revived. His theory represented an effort to place the market system on new intellectual foundations. But Hayek was equally convinced that the tradition of Adam Smith and "The Federalist" had to be renewed as the basis for a restoration of liberty and progress. The intellectual opposition between Keynes and Hayek still underpins many of our current debates.

Keynes may have exercised the greater influence in political and academic circles over the second half of the 20th century, but the tide is turning today.

The problem, of course, is that today¡¯s politician, at least the one¡¯s holding power, still cling to the Keynesian notion that government can positively effect the economy in the face of overwhelming evidence and history that it cannot. Add to that the ¡°social justice¡± crowd who want to redistribute income and you have a fatal mix who will kill the goose that has been laying the golden eggs. And because of those beliefs held by each group that even the public has seen through, we continue down a disastrous road that has kindled great discontent and distrust in government.

Most Americans intuitively understand that what is being done by government isn¡¯t what needs to be done, but is instead driven by a mistaken and bankrupt ideology that has spent itself disastrously in numerous scenarios around the world. There was never any vision among our founders of a behemoth like the government we have today. Never will you find in any of their writings any inkling that government should be involved in things like health care, energy or even education. They successfully managed to avoid the fatal conceit, only to see subsequent generations fall into bad habits led by mistaken beliefs that have lead to our present and critical situation.

The problem, of course, is how do we back out of this? It has taken us decades to get to this point and unfortunately, at least to now, politicians have learned that what got us to this point worked to get them elected. The incentive for them, at least, to back us out of this isn¡¯t there yet.

And then there are the true believers among them that still actually believe that utopia is possible if only we have more government and a more powerful government.

If the liberal elite wonder what is at the base of the Tea Party movement ¨C a movement this polls suggests is only the tip of the iceberg ¨C they need only reflect on where we started and where we are. And then review how we did in between those times.

An honest appraisal would find that our greatest progress took place in eras in which government played more of a roll of night watchman than Santa Claus. When the attempts to use government as the great social equalizer began so did our decline. It was small in the beginning ¨C almost imperceptible ¨C but in hindsight, certainly recognizable if you bothered to look. And in the name of social equality, government grew exponentially and with that exponential growth came an equally exponential expansion of power.

And here we are.

The simple fact of the matter is this isn¡¯t working. Government is out of control, broken and pulling us all under. The question is how do we fix it ¡­ or is that even possible?

~McQ

[philunderwood]

Railing Against Reality

By Victor Davis Hanson

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Last week, protests broke out again in Europe, from Rome to London. The monthlong Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York have spread. The current unrest follows this summer's riots in London and flash mob incidents in U.S. cities. In 2009 and 2010, Tea Parties turned out hundreds of thousands in protests against the Obama administration's policies and eventually gave him the largest midterm rebuke since 1938.

All of these protests, of course, are vastly different -- or are they really?

Ostensibly, the Wall Street protests rail against a small elite who makes a lot of money lending, investing and speculating -- although the protestors don't seem to worry much about the mega-salaries of actors, professional athletes or sympathetic multimillionaires like Al Gore, George Soros or John Kerry. American flash mobbers and London hoods thought it was OK to take things that were not theirs, since they have less than others. The Tea Partiers were simply tired of paying more taxes for big-government programs that they thought only made things worse.

In the current left and right anger -- somewhat analogous to the upheavals of 1848 or the 1930s -- the common denominator is frustration that Western upward mobility of some 60 years seems to be coming to an end. In response, millions want someone or something to be held accountable -- whether Wall Street insiders, or wasteful and corrupt governments, or the affluent who have more than others.

Unfortunately, political leaders -- unwilling to risk their careers by irking the people -- have offered few explanations for the root causes of all the various unrest. Instead, they assure us that Social Security is solvent, or that pensions and wages can remain sacrosanct, or that billionaires and millionaires are alone culpable. Sometimes they exploit race and class divisions in lieu of explaining 21st-century realities.

So here goes an explanation for the multifaceted unrest. For the last six decades, constant technological breakthroughs and growing government subsidies have given a billion and a half Westerners lifestyles undreamed of over the last 2,500 years. In 1930, no one imagined that a few pills could cure life-threatening strep throat. In 1960, no one planned on retiring at 55. In 1980, no one dreamed that millions could have instant access to civilization's collective knowledge in a few seconds through a free Google search.

Yet, the better life got in the West for ever more people, the more apprehensive they became, as their appetites for even more grew even faster. Remember, none of these worldwide protests are over the denial of food, shelter, clean water or basic medicine.

None of these protestors discuss the effects of 2 billion Chinese, Indian, Korean and Japanese workers entering and mastering the globalized capitalist system, and making things more cheaply and sometimes better than their Western counterparts.

None of these protestors ever stop to ponder the costs -- and ultimately the effect on their own lifestyles -- of skyrocketing energy costs. Since 1970 there has been a historic, multitrillion-dollar transfer of capital from the West to the Middle East, South America, Africa and Russia through the importation of high-cost oil and gas.

None seem to grasp the significance that, meanwhile, hundreds of millions of Westerners are living longer and better, retiring earlier, and demanding ever more expensive government pensions and health care.

Something had to give.

And now it has. Federal and state budgets are near bankrupt. Countries like Greece and Italy face insolvency. The U.S. government resorts to printing money to service or expand entitlements. Near-zero interest rates, declining home prices, and huge losses in mutual funds and retirement accounts have crippled the middle classes.

Bigger government, marvelous new inventions and creative new investment strategies are not going to restore the once-taken-for-granted good life. Until "green" means competitive renewable energy rather than a con for crony capitalists, we are going to have to create and save capital by producing more of our own gas and oil, and relying more on nuclear power and coal.

Westerners will have to work a bit longer and more efficiently, with a bit less redistributive government support. And they must confess that venture capitalists, hedge funds and big deficit-spending governments are no substitute for producing themselves the real stuff of life that millions now take for granted -- whether gas, food, cars or consumer goods.

Otherwise, a smaller, older and whinier West will just keep blaming others as their good life slips away. So it's past time to stop borrowing to import energy and most of the things we use but have given up producing -- and get back to competing in the real world.

[philunderwood]

There Ought Not to Be a Law

By John Stossel

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

I'm a libertarian in part because I see a false choice offered by the political left and right: government control of the economy — or government control of our personal lives.

People on both sides think of themselves as freedom lovers. The left thinks government can lessen income inequality. The right thinks government can make Americans more virtuous. I say we're best off if neither side attempts to advance its agenda via government.

Let both argue about things like drug use and poverty, but let no one be coerced by government unless he steals or attacks someone. Beyond the small amount needed to fund a highly limited government, let no one forcibly take other people's money. When in doubt, leave it out — or rather, leave it to the market and other voluntary institutions.

But this is not how most people think. Most people see a world full of problems that can be solved by laws. They assume it's just the laziness, stupidity or indifference of politicians that keeps them from solving our problems. But government is force — and inefficient.

That's why it's better if government didn't try to address most of life's problems.

People tend to believe that "government can!" When problems arise, they say, "There ought to be a law!"

Even the collapse of the Soviet Union, caused by the appalling results of central planning, didn't shock the world into abandoning big government. Europe began talking about some sort of "market socialism." Politicians in the United States dreamt of a "third way" between capitalism and socialism, and of "managed capitalism" — where politicians often replace the invisible hand.

George W. Bush ran for president promising a "lean" government, but he decided to create a $50 billion per year prescription drug entitlement and build a new bureaucracy called No Child Left Behind. Under Bush, Republicans doubled discretionary spending (the greatest increase since LBJ), expanded the drug war and hired 90,000 new regulators.

Bush's increases in regulation didn't mollify the media's demand for still more.

Then came Barack Obama and spending big enough to bankrupt all our children. That fueled the tea party and the 2010 elections.

The tea party gave me hope, but I was fooled again. Within months, the new "fiscally conservative" Republicans voted to preserve farm subsidies, vowed to "protect" Medicare and cringed when Romney's future veep choice, Rep. Paul Ryan, proposed his mild deficit plan.

It is unfortunate that the United States, founded partly on libertarian principles, cannot admit that government has gotten too big. East Asian countries embraced markets and flourished. Sweden and Germany liberalized their labor markets and saw their economies improve.

But we keep passing new rules.

The enemy here is human intuition. Amid the dazzling bounty of the marketplace, it's easy to take the benefits of markets for granted. I can go to a foreign country and stick a piece of plastic in the wall, and cash will come out. I can give that same piece of plastic to a stranger who doesn't even speak my language — and he'll rent me a car for a week. When I get home, Visa or MasterCard will send me the accounting — correct to the penny. We take such things for granted.

Government, by contrast, can't even count votes accurately.

Yet whenever there are problems, people turn to government. Despite the central planners' long record of failure, few of us like to think that the government which sits atop us, taking credit for everything, could really be all that rotten.

The great 20th-century libertarian H.L. Mencken lamented, "A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom."

There is nothing government can do that we cannot do better as free individuals — and as groups of individuals working freely together.

Without big government, our possibilities are limitless.

[philunderwood]

www.qando.net/?tag=self-reliance

“The government is the only thing we belong too …”

Published September 5, 2012. | By Bruce McQuain.

A video that claims “the government is the only thing we all belong too” is being disowned by the Obama Campaign, saying it was a video produced by the host city committee and not the DNC.

But, of course, it carries a Democratic National Convention banner in the lower left corner (another case of incompetence or refusing to be held accountable).

However I’m not so much concerned with who did it than I am with the implication of the message. It serves as a reminder of the premise under which most of the left works.

I don’t belong to any government. Government is my employee. It works for me. It is supposed to do my bidding in a democratic system, and not the other way around.

Now I’m sure that there are those who will listen to this and claim that the speaker is talking about a unity of effort or the uniting effect of government. I.e. regardless of party or ideology we all work under the same government.

But that’s not what he said. “Belong” has a very specific meaning. While talking about why the meme “you didn’t build that” isn’t going away, Rachel Larimore tells us why:


Many moons ago, I spent a couple of years in a fiction-writing program at a local university. I never finished the novel I aspired to write, but I did learn some valuable lessons. The most important: “It doesn’t matter what you meant. What matters is what you conveyed.” In the context of class, that meant when we were sharing our work and listening to feedback, we couldn’t butt in and say that we’d meant something else. We needed to take ourselves out of our own head and try to understand what our readers had heard.

What was conveyed was a message that, to me, is anti-liberty. Sorry to blunt about it, but it reflects a belonging that I reject. I’m not an American because of my government. I don’t belong to any group because of my government. My government exits at my forbearance. It exists solely to serve mine and other American’s needs.

And while we might disagree on is what those needs are and how much government is necessary, I don’t “belong” to the government in any sense whatsoever?

None.

But what this short segment highlights is the very large philosophical gulf that exists between those who believe in individualism and those who are statists. The statement is a statement that glorifies the state while attempting to lump all of us as collectively “owned” by it. Whether or not that’s what the speaker meant, it is what he said and conveyed by using the word “belong”.

It might not be such a big deal if it wasn’t so obviously the usually unspoken belief of so many on the left. What we’re going to see in Charlotte is a celebration of big government and that sort of “belonging”.

I want no part of it.

~McQ

[philunderwood]

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324469304578143344246556774.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

McGurn: How Obama's 'Life of Julia' Prevailed

Conservatives don't need to compromise their values. They need to do a better job of selling.

By WILLIAM MCGURN

The name of the program now escapes me. Several months ago, while flipping channels with the remote, I stopped on an MTV show about a working mom whose whole life was upended when her partner announced that he was splitting. It caught my attention because this mother lived in a nice apartment that looked like one in my suburban New Jersey town, and she was applying for food stamps.

This wasn't your caricature "taker"—the woman had a real job. With her partner leaving, however, she could no longer afford the rent, and she would have trouble providing for her two young boys alone. As she walked up to an office to sign up for food stamps, she said something like, "I can't believe I am applying for public assistance."

Her situation provoked two questions. First, how could her boyfriend just abandon his sons without having to pay child support? Second, what is the conservative response to a woman who finds herself in this situation?

The show comes back to me in wake of the thumping Mitt Romney took in the presidential election among the demographic this mom represents: unmarried women. During the 2012 campaign, we conservatives had great sport at the expense of the Obama administration's "Life of Julia"—a cartoon explaining the cradle-to-grave government programs that provided for Julia's happy and successful life.

The president, alas, had the last laugh. For the voting blocs that went so disproportionately for the president's re-election—notably, Latinos and single women—the Julia view of government clearly resonates. To put it another way, maybe Americans who have reason to feel insecure about their futures don't find a government that promises to be there for them when they need it all that menacing.

The dominant media conclusion from this is that the Republican Party is cooked unless it surrenders its principles. I'm not so sure. To the contrary, it strikes me that now is a pretty good time to get back to principles—and to do more to show people who gave President Obama his victory why their dreams and families would be better served by a philosophy of free markets and limited government.

Let's concede that those who are pushing to expand government have one huge advantage. Their advantage is that their solutions are immediate, direct and easy to explain.

Take that MTV mom. As it turned out, the reason her partner could abandon those two young boys is because they weren't his. He'd been supporting another man's children, and apparently decided he'd had enough. The conservative might feel vindicated here: Had the mom been married to and living with her children's father, chances are she and her boys would not find themselves so vulnerable.

Being correct, however, isn't the same thing as being persuasive. The conservative is rightly concerned with incentives and the long-term effects of any government program for relief, which are vital concerns for workable policy. The liberal is far less abstract: Here are some food stamps so your children don't go hungry tonight.

Never mind the long-term costs and consequences of these solutions. Yes, the education loans that supposedly make college "affordable" actually drive its costs up faster than normal inflation. Yes, housing subsidies have saddled people with homes they cannot afford. And, yes, minimum-wage laws price the people who can least afford it out of the job market. The dilemma for those of us who oppose big-government solutions is that the true costs of these "solutions" are seldom clear until it's too late.

So what's a Republican to do?

Surely not to embrace higher taxes for the rich. Leave aside the impact of higher taxes on investment. The political problem is that raising these taxes does nothing to challenge the larger liberal narrative about government. Conservatives' top priority should be promoting an alternative—that in a highly competitive, global economy, the only real economic security for ordinary Americans is the security of opportunity.

Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, describes the conservative task this way: "The left's approach to social policy is to shield people from the American economy, while conservatives' approach must be to enable them to enjoy its benefits—to enable people to move up rather than to make them more secure in poverty. Conservatives know that this is where our principles point, but we need to make sure that the striving immigrant worker or the struggling single mom knows that too."

It can be done. Three decades ago, Milton and Rose Friedman illustrated the benefits of capitalism to millions of ordinary citizens through their television series and book, "Free to Choose." We need a similar popular effort today, to bring home the benefits of the free market to Americans who think it works only for the kind of folks who work at Bain Capital—or write columns for The Wall Street Journal.