- Contempt for the Governed
- The "Me-Too" Tories
- "You Can't Mix Freedom and Free Lunch"
- Estrangement
- Two Sides to the Border
- Real Money
Top News Stories
Commentary by Robert Tracinski
1. Contempt for the Governed
This afternoon, I was a guest on Rob Schilling's radio show here in Charlottesville. (Sorry not to give advance notice of the appearance, but you can listen a podcast here.) We got caught up with guests, so I didn't get to talk much about was the main article linked to below, which sums up a lot of what's wrong with today's politics.
This is an entry from the Wall Street Journal's Political Diary blog about the Republican primary in Virginia's 5th congressional district, and I want you to notice a key premise behind the article. It notes that the local Tea Party movement has failed to get behind the Republican "front-runner." Since there are no good poll numbers for this race, I should note that Robert Hurt is only the "front-runner" in the sense that he is the candidate backed by the Republican establishment.
The article draws the conclusion from this that the Tea Parties could be responsible for getting the incumbent Democrat re-elected, because they will be dividing the vote of the right.
But isn't this completely backwards? The Tea Parties represent the Republican grassroots. If the establishment backs a candidate who does not appeal to the grassroots, i.e., to the actual voters, who is at fault? The establishment—or the voters? The premise of this article is that it is the voters who are at fault in any conflict with the Party establishment.
Well, doesn't that just about sum up the attitude that seems to be coming out of Washington these days? It's the same attitude Nancy Pelosi showed when she told us that Congress had to pass the health care bill so that we could find out what was in it—rather than doing things the other way around. It's an attitude of contempt for the governed.
The corrected headline for that Political Diary entry should read: "Will the Republican Establishment Save a Democrat?"
The attitude of the establishment can even be seen in some attempts to defend the Tea Parties. Columnist Cathy Young, for example, defends the Tea Parties against the leftist smear that they are racists. But notice that she accepts the basic methodology of her opponents on the left: she assesses the views of the Tea Partiers by over-analyzing their responses to vague and misleading questions in a public opinion poll.
This is the ideal methodology for the establishment. By limiting itself to the Tea Partiers' yes-or-no answers to pre-constructed poll questions, it renders them mute and unable to explain themselves—and thus provides an open field for commentators to project their own tendentious speculations about what the Tea Partiers must really be thinking. As opposed to actually attending a Tea Party event and asking the people directly. The attitude is: don't tell me what you're thinking; I'll tell you what you're thinking.
But this year, that arrogant attitude is turning out to be a real problem for establishment politicians. Thus, in a stunning piece of news, incumbent Utah Senator Robert Bennett was just denied the Republican Party nomination for the seat he already holds—after Tea Party activists boasted of having taken over the state's Republican Party. Bennett's sin: he voted for the TARP bailout.
But note that Bennett is still considering running as a write-in candidate. If he could, he would probably run as an independent, as Florida Governor Charlie Crist has decided to do after falling far behind in the polls for that state's open Senate seat. (Crist's sin: he backed the "stimulus" bill.) I generally oppose independent runs because they merely tend to divide the vote of the right, for no good reason. Most independent runs are more an expression of personal vanity than of principle—and that definitely applies to Crist.
Jay Cost looks at all of this and concludes that we are seeing "the early warning that something bad is about to blow through the District of Columbia. I don't think there's anything anybody there can do about it…. They're going to wake up on the morning of November 3rd and be reminded of who is actually in charge of this country." I think Cost is also right to caution that, even though the primary driver of this trend is a rebellion against big-government, the "anti-establishment" wave is not as ideological as we ideologues would wish it to be.
Meanwhile, in Europe—where the political establishment is about as entrenched as it was under the reign of Louis XIV—politicians are in absolute terror that the Tea Party movement could spread across the Atlantic, leading one commentator to make a tart note about the contrast between the Tea Parties and the forms of "populist" protest favored by European leftists—protests which most recently left three dead in an Athens firebombing.
"Will the Tea Party Save a Democrat? " Allysia Finley, Wall Street Journal, May 8
Virginia's liberal Democratic Congressman Tom Perriello faces one of the toughest re-election battles in the country….Mr. Perriello's best hope of salvation? A fractious local Tea Party movement, which might just bail him out by backing an independent candidate and dividing his conservative opposition in November.
Though none of his GOP rivals had even begun campaigning in earnest, a February poll already had him trailing the Republican frontrunner, state Sen. Robert Hurt, and leading most of his seven other largely unknown GOP opponents by less than 10 points. But here's the catch for the GOP. For Tea Party conservatives, Mr. Hurt would be a far-from-ideal standard-bearer because of his 2004 vote in favor Democratic Gov. Mark Warner's big tax hike. All six of his GOP rivals are positioning themselves to the right of Mr. Hurt, and several have hinted they would back an independent run if he becomes the nominee.
2. The "Me-Too" Tories
The problem with the Republican Establishment is that, like all entrenched establishments, it places the advancement of its own members and their careers over the advancement of any distinctive principles for which the party is supposed to stand. Britain is providing an example of what this looks like in an extreme case.
As the Daily Telegraph's James Delingpole notes, the first move made by Britain's presumptive next prime minister, the Conservative Party's David Cameron, was to pledge to pursue a "low carbon economy"—that is, to adopt wholesale the radical environmentalist, central-planning agenda of the left.
This "me-too" platform is precisely why the Conservatives failed to win a clear electoral victory—and it is why Cameron may now be denied the prime ministership as Gordon Brown tries to negotiate a "coalition of losers" between the Labor Party and the Liberal Democrats.
"Cameron's First Stupid Mistake," James Delingpole, Daily Telegraph, May 8
Not content with having destroyed British conservatism, David Cameron has decided he might as well go the whole hog and finish off the British economy as well.He announced it yesterday as one of his key priorities if and when he forms his Coalition of the Suicidal with Nick Clegg. He said he would make "the creation of a low carbon economy a priority."…
I agree entirely with Harry Mount: if I were a proper Conservative who'd squandered five years of my life paying lip service to the Cameroons' liberal pieties in the belief that this would get me into government, I should be perfectly livid right now and itching for revenge. Cameron has failed his party and failed his country. He deserves all the lack of the support we can possibly give him.
3. "You Can't Mix Freedom and Free Lunch"
The impact of the Greek fiscal crisis goes way beyond the impact of the tiny Greek economy, or the potential effect on investors if it defaults on its debt. Greece is reverberating through the global economy because it is a harbinger of what will soon happen elsewhere.
"PIGS" is a delightful acronym for Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, and it captures the swinish greed for unearned wealth that has bankrupted Southern Europe's welfare states. But as Robert Samuelson reminds us, we're all "pigs" in this sense; it's just a matter of degree and of timing.
Countries everywhere already have high budget deficits, aggravated by the recession. Greece is exceptional only by degree. In 2009, its budget deficit was 13.6 percent of its gross domestic product (a measure of its economy); its debt, the accumulation of past deficits, was 115 percent of GDP. Spain's deficit was 11.2 percent of GDP, its debt 56.2 percent; Portugal's figures were 9.4 percent and 76.8 percent. Comparable figures for the United States—calculated slightly differently—were 9.9 percent and 53 percent.
Samuelson calls this pattern the "death spiral of the welfare state." But I give the main link below to an even sharper commentary from Bill Frezza, who captures, not just the fiscal insolvency of the welfare state, but its inherent moral depravity, which he sums up in a terrific formulation: "You can't mix freedom and free lunch."
"Are the Greek Riots a Picture of Our Future?" Bill Frezza, RealClearMarkets, May 10
The spectacle of government workers, cranky retirees, militant unionists, and mad dog socialists locked arm in arm protesting reality is a sight we'd better get used to. The Germans may think they can staunch the panic with a mere hundred billion because Greece's feeble economy is so small. But the same fatal flaw that gives democratic majorities everywhere the power to vote themselves a comfy retirement now infects a greater part of the developed world. It's only a matter of time before a demographic tsunami swallows us all….The Turks we met reminded me of what Americans used to be—a nation on the hustle. The Greeks? Take a good hard look at the donkey boys, Pinocchio, because that's what we are becoming. You can't imagine how hard this is for a Greek American like myself to say, raised to believe that our ancestors single handedly invented Western civilization [which they did, but a long, long time ago—RWT]….
What the world's political leaders and those who elect them need most right now is a shocking example of the only possible outcome of trying to practice redistributive justice on a national or even global scale. Rescuing Greece is a mistake. What they deserve is a good hard dose of exactly what they are asking for—unvarnished socialism.
Throw Greece out of the European Union. Let them default on their debts. Teach buyers to beware before they invest in sovereign bonds. Dare Greece to print Drachmas by the wheelbarrow. Put the whole country on the public payroll then challenge them to demonstrate what a truly egalitarian society looks like. Maybe a dramatic spectacle of what a workers paradise looks like under the media's glare will teach us what's in store if we don't change our ways.
Democracy is broken. You can't mix Freedom and Free Lunch. One or the other has got to go.
4. Estrangement
Barack Obama ran for president as a "post-racial" candidate who would transcend the old conflicts over race. Of course, we all know now that this was a lie. But it's still remarkable how President Obama has used his Supreme Court appointments—which ought to be the most insulated from the narrow political considerations of the day—to deliberately stir up political pressure group warfare.
His previous appointee, Sonia Sotomayor, was noted for touting the advantages of a "Wise Latina" over those unenlightened troglodytes, white males, while her most famous ruling was a case in which she upheld the validity of reverse discrimination. And in nominating her, Obama was baiting the Republicans to vote against a Hispanic judge. Way to heal those racial and ethnic divides.
Now he has picked an academic, former Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan, whose most notable decision was to kick military recruiters off campus in protest over the "don't ask, don't tell" policy on homosexuality. And she's a rather radical advocate of "gay marriage." So now Obama is deliberately re-opening the whole "culture war" rift.
Fortunately, though, there is actually more at stake here than the gay marriage debate. (My attitude toward that debate is the same as Henry Kissinger's toward the Iran-Iraq War: it's a shame they can't both lose. The religious right wants to use the power of the state to defend religious morality—while the left wants to use the power of the state to coerce social acceptance of homosexuality.)
What is actually at stake is the left's view of the military. Consider the value system implied in banning military recruiters from campus—in time of war—over so lame and evasive a half-way policy as "don't ask, don't tell." It implies a view of the United States military as evil—and by extension, a view of America as a society so oppressive that it does not deserve to be defended against foreign enemies.
I was surprised to find an article in which a left-of-center commentator, Peter Beinart, made a similar point last month, describing Kagan's decision as an act of "estrangement" from her own country. "Estrangement" from America, and from the inestimable value of liberty for which this nation stands, is the last thing we can tolerate in a Supreme Court Justice, or in a president.
"Elena Kagan's Achilles' Heel," Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast, April 19
If Solicitor General Elana Kagan gets the nod, conservatives will beat the hell out of her for opposing military recruitment on campus when she was dean of Harvard Law School. And liberals should concede the point; the conservatives will be right."I abhor the military's discriminatory recruitment policy," wrote Kagan in 2003. It is "a profound wrong—a moral injustice of the first order." So far, so good. Not allowing openly gay and lesbian Americans into the military is a grave moral injustice and it is a disgrace that so many Republicans defend the policy to this day. But the response that Kagan favored—banning military recruiters from campus—was stupid and counterproductive. I think it showed bad judgment.
The United States military is not Procter and Gamble. It is not just another employer. It is the institution whose members risk their lives to protect the country. You can disagree with the policies of the American military; you can even hate them, but you can't alienate yourself from the institution without in a certain sense alienating yourself from the country. Barring the military from campus is a bit like barring the president or even the flag. It's more than a statement of criticism; it's a statement of national estrangement.
I doubt that's how Kagan or her fellow administrators meant it. But it is certainly the way it has been received…. Yes, dissent is patriotic, as liberals love to declaim, but assent is an important part of patriotism too. Saying you show your love for your country only through criticism is like saying you show your love for your spouse only through criticism. It isn't likely to go over well.
5. Two Sides to the Border
I am an advocate of free immigration and oppose the enforcement of our current arbitrary and absurdly limited system of centrally planned immigration quotas.
But it is important to grasp what is partially motivating the anti-immigration frenzy among a minority on the right. (Poll numbers I've seen put the number of people on the right for whom illegal immigration is a major issue at about 20%, but it is a very vocal minority.) What motivates them are videos such as this one, sent to me by a reader.
This is video of a speech at a pro-immigration rally at UCLA by a teacher—it's not clear whether he's a professor at UCLA or teaches somewhere else—who espouses a kind of Hispanic fascism. He begins by describing California as "stolen, occupied Mexico." He then touts the Hispanic race—"La Raza"—as a kind of revolutionary vanguard for socialism, which is turning the United States into the "northern front" of a Latin American war against capitalism.
But to take this too seriously is to buy into this creature's posturing, his pretense that he actually speaks for a majority of Hispanic immigrants. I can guarantee that he doesn't. He speaks for a relatively small radical fringe, mostly based in the universities.
And on the other side, there are incidents like this one, in which a Mexican immigrant was beaten by police and had racial slurs hurled at him when he was briefly detained for a crime he didn't commit. So you can see that some of the sense of grievance on the other side is justified.
But what I think sheds the most light on the immigration issue is an understanding of how it is aggravated by another misbegotten government program: the war on drugs. In effect, our drug prohibition laws have fed and armed a massive structure of organized crime in Latin America, which then throws those nations into chaos—and is now beginning to bring some of that chaos back over the border.
Mary O'Grady has what looks like a good new article on this in the Wall Street Journal, though you need to be a subscriber. I've given the main link instead to a slightly older article from Ralph Peters.
"Border Disorder," Ralph Peters, New York Post, April 29
South of the border, down Mexico way, a new and savage revolution rages just beyond our inspection lanes. After less than five years of fighting, estimates of the dead have reached 22,000….The rule of law has collapsed from Tijuana on the Pacific's edge to Matamoros and the Gulf of Mexico. Major cities are now "ungoverned spaces," as our diplomats refer tidily to distant trouble spots.
More people now die violently on our southern border than in Somalia, Yemen, or even Afghanistan. But Washington doesn't know what to do about Mexico. So Washington does nothing much.
Our ruling class simply doesn't feel the pain. So the DC elite demonizes Arizona's desperate effort to shove the narco-revolution's disorder back across the border. Murdered ranchers, overwhelmed emergency rooms, and soaring crime rates in our border states mean less to the White House than a terrorist detainee's claims of abuse. Our governing elite pretends that illegal immigration, torrential crime where illegals cluster, overcrowded prisons, Mexico's narco-insurgency, legal cross-border commerce, and the drug trade are separate issues, to be addressed discreetly.
But these issues are all interwoven with the Mexican government's existential crisis. Drug wealth fuels criminal empires. Those narco-empires are now so powerful that they've risen against the state. Human trafficking is a useful sideline for drug lords. And illegal immigration drives crime rates in bankruptcy-threatened US cities and states.
6. Real Money
This article is not especially timely, but it deserves to be linked to because it uses an unanswerable language—the language of mathematics—to make an important and underappreciated point: the destructive impact of the government's manipulation of our money.
The basic argument is that the price of gas is not really higher than it was thirty years ago. It's just that our our dollars are cheaper. In fact, John Tamny argues, there is an invariable long-term relationship between the price of oil and the price of gold.
This also gives the lie to the idea of an impending shortage of oil. If we were running out, the price would be going up. And in fact, another interesting article predicts that we are about to see the enormous impact of new natural gas deposits discovered in shale oil beds.
This discovery—made possible by new technology that reduces the cost of drilling for natural gas—could be what helps to save the US economy, despite the best efforts of the current administration.
"Oil Isn't 'Expensive', the Dollar Is Cheap," John Tamny, RealClearMarkets, May 6
Perhaps unaware of the dollar's undefined, floating nature, commentators continue to point to the oil price to support their suggestions of foul play on the part OPEC, too much global demand for what is allegedly a limited commodity, or greedy "speculators" keeping the price of the world's fuel at abnormally high prices. Influential newsman Bill O'Reilly frequently fingers speculators when attempting to explain the price of oil to his viewers.In each instance commentators mistake the symptom of expensive oil for its true cause. Von Mises frequently touched on money values in his brilliant expositions on markets, and it's because the dollar has no true value or fixed definition that oil is presently expensive. In short, oil is dear because the dollar in which it's priced is cheap….
[F]rom 1970 to 1981 the price of gold rose 1,219 percent, versus a rise in the price of oil 1,291 percent. This wasn't coincidental. With gold and oil both priced in dollars, and with gold serving as the best proxy for the latter's value, a jump in the gold price neatly foretold the oil "shocks" of the 1970s that were merely dollar shocks.
Given the strong price correlation between the two commodities, many economics writers took to explaining the gold/oil relationship in terms of a 15/1 ounce/barrel ratio. As the late Warren Brookes wrote in his 1982 book, The Economy In Mind, "In 1970 an ounce of gold ($35) would buy 15 barrels OPEC oil ($2.30/bbl). In May 1981 an ounce of gold ($480) still bought 15 barrels of Saudi oil ($32/bbl)….
Right now gold trades in the $1176 range, and the price of oil is roughly $79 per barrel. That an ounce of gold buys 15 barrels of oil signals yet again that the real price of oil has hardly changed at all over the last 10 years of allegedly costly crude….
So the answer is really quite simple. If we want cheaper gasoline, we need the US Treasury to target a stronger dollar, and for it to even threaten intervention if markets unexpectedly fail to comply. If a $500 gold price is targeted as so many gold-watchers would prefer, the stronger dollar will sooner rather than later reveal itself in greatly reduced oil prices; roughly $33/barrel if historical gold/oil ratios once again prevail.
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