Tag Archives: government

Progressive Policies and the Poor

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Thomas Sowell, writing in the National Review, had some thoughts on the impact of modern Liberalism on the welfare of blacks in the US.  I think they apply to all minorities, to whites, to our poor generally.

Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.

And

Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the minimum wage.  Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum-wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment….

And

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.  Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time, but most grow up with only one parent today.

And

Liberals have pushed affirmative action, supposedly for the benefit of blacks and other minorities.  But two recent factual studies show that affirmative action in college admissions has led to black students with every qualification for success being artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with colleges for the sake of racial body count.

Sowell summarizes the matter starkly:

In all these cases, and many others, liberals take positions that make them look good and feel good—and show very little interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal policies are leaving havoc in their wake.

The party of Jim Crow may be attempting to correct its past.  It is, in fact, failing miserably.  Modern Liberals give so little thought to the 50 years of empirical evidence defining the consequences of their actions that I have to conclude that they’re well aware of those consequences.  One of those consequences, flowing from the poverty enforced maintained by their actions, is the continued dependency of our poor on the largesse of the Modern Liberals in government.

That’s not just petty ego stroke, that’s political power.

Freedom and Liberal Big Government

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Joel Mathis, in has some thoughts on the wonders of the Nanny State.

Why I’m a liberal? I believe you can have freedom and care about reducing income inequality.  I believe you can have liberty and smaller soda sizes.  I believe you can throw off tyranny and still have a smarter health care system that delivers care to more people.  I’m a liberal because even though conservatives and libertarians can sometimes come up with good ideas to address these problems, mostly you sense they’d rather not be bothered.  Which leaves good old-fashioned Big Government as the most likely option to actually fix stuff.

Nannies don’t imprison you, after all, and they never did.  Their job is to help you stand on your own.

Setting aside Mathis’ slur that our disagreement with him means we can’t be bothered, the problem of Nanny-ism has been recognized for some time.  Lionel Trilling suggested in his 1950 book, The Liberal Imagination, that liberalism itself had become stuck in its ways and had lost its ability to think freely.  He expanded on this years later, observing

this dull, repressive tendency of opinion which was coming to dominate the old ethos of liberal enlightenment [, and that liberal thought was losing its place as] a political position which affirmed the value of individual existence in all its variousness, complexity, and difficulty.

Exactly the sort of stultifying loss of flexibility and creativity—freedom of thought and of action—that liberals’ cumulative Big Government impositions (fall or a good cause, though) have on the freedom of all of us.

As Stephen Hayward noted at Power  Line,

[A]m I really less of a free person if I can’t buy a 32-oz soda?  Or [can’t] get a plastic bag in my local store?   In isolation, not really.  But what about when I can’t buy a 32-oz soda, can’t burn a fire in my home’s fireplace (now an air quality regulation in many places), can’t build a spiral staircase from my back deck (as I learn this morning from the San Luis Obispo County planning department), can’t own a gun (New York, Chicago), can’t get plastic bags at the store any more (even though I not only recycle them but reuse them for many of my own purposes), can’t patronize Ubercars because the incumbent taxicab monopoly gets the city council to block the new business in the name of “consumer protection” (naturally), or can’t start a small business except with great difficulty and dead-weight expense to the local bureaucracies?  And on the other side of the ledger, large bureaucratic interventions like Obamacare…stifle marketplace discovery and adaptation….

After a while, you’re not “standing on your own” any more.  The nanny hasn’t put you in prison, but it has changed a lot of things in a significant way.

Big Government, by insisting on making these decisions for ordinary citizens, by relieving men of their own responsibilities and freedom of action—including the freedom to be wrong (at least as liberals like Mathis define “wrong”)—reduces them to dependents on government for their welfare.  Even their Happiness (contra John Adams and the rest of our 18th Century Liberal forebears) is determined by Big Government.

No, Nannies don’t imprison us, at least not by putting us behind bars.  Instead, they imprison us by circumscribing our freedom of thought, our ability to rely on ourselves rather than on those Nannies.  They help us, permanently, to stand so that we never learn to not need their help.

In the end, dependents aren’t “unfree.”  They cannot be, as they have no conception of what it is to be free.

Middle Class, Luck, and American Power

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George Friedman, writing for Stratfor (he’s also their Founder and CEO), has an article out concerning the American middle class and American global power.  The whole article is well worth reading, but for now, the relevant remark comes near the end:

It would seem to me that unless the United States gets lucky again, its global dominance is in jeopardy.  Considering its history, the United States can expect to get lucky again….

The luck to which Friedman refers concerns some fortuitous unintended consequences, and he offers three examples:

The GI Bill was designed to limit unemployment among returning serviceman; it inadvertently created a professional class of college graduates. The VA loan was designed to stimulate the construction industry; it created the basis for suburban home ownership. The Interstate Highway System was meant to move troops rapidly in the event of war; it created a new pattern of land use that was suburbia.

The threat to our status as a global power—and by extension to our freedom of action as a nation—stems from a generation of the failure of a long-standing belief in American culture—the faith in the availability of economic upward mobility.  For instance, median household income in 2011 was $49,000, just below the level in 1989 in real terms; it seems that upward mobility has stagnated.

Luck matters, but to a very large extent, we make our own luck.

Underlying this making is individual responsibility, individual initiative, and individual risk-taking.  In all of our past booms, including those in which fortune played a role through those unintended consequences, the freedom to exercise those individual characteristics was both broadly present and not very much circumscribed by government intervention.

Here’s a present example of the role played by fortune, this time negatively: those individual characteristics, and parallel ones in business, are severely circumscribed by government regulation in all aspects of our lives.  We’re restricted in what we’re permitted or required to buy or to throw away (see Obamacare and CFL bulbs), in the decisions businesses are permitted to make in their own interests rather than government’s (see Obamacare and Dodd-Frank with its CFPB abomination), in what businesses are permitted to release as by-products of production or sales.

Our ability to make our own luck, today, is severely limited by government.  Fortuitous unintended consequences are a lot less likely in an environment of rapidly increasing government control over the economic environment which underlies the making of that luck.

There’s another factor at play, too: those government restrictions also have the unintended consequence of restricting upward mobility.  The poor become trapped in their stratum and cannot move up into the middle class due to those restrictions’ effect on job creation and hiring.  This not only works to the detriment of those poor, it shrivels the remaining middle class.

National Default on the National Debt

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President Barack Obama and his Senators keep saying that House RepublicansCongress must raise the debt ceiling or the US will go into default.  The latest example of this claim came when Obama, through his White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, said in response to the idea that the administration could simply mint a $1 trillion coin and then spend that,

There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills or it can fail to act and put the nation into default[.]

Here’s what the Constitution says on the matter (you might recall that bit of paper—a document that Progressives insist ought to be scrapped or that already is useless and non-binding; maybe its inconvenient limits on government are why).  From Article I, Section 8, in relevant part:

The Congress shall have Power…to pay the Debts…;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

Thus only the Congress can borrow—or create the conditions for paying what it has borrowed.  The President, as with all laws (nearly all of which, by the way, have his signature on them—he’s actively agreed with them, except in those very rare cases where his veto has been overridden), has only to execute them—here, to spend the money authorized, to collect the taxes authorized, to borrow according to the Congress’ budget and borrowing limit.  He’s Constitutionally, and by his oath of office, required to faithfully execute those laws.

(Incidentally, a later clause in that Section 8 says this:

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof….

Thus, only Congress can mint a $1 trillion coin, not Treasury.)

The 14th Amendment, which some Progressives like to cite as a means for Obama to bypass Congress on the national debt, says in relevant part:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

Notice that confusing part—it being more than 100 years old—”authorized by law.”  The clause not only says that the US’ debt must be paid—no getting around that—but the only debt that must be paid is that authorized by law—that budget thing (from an even older and apparently even more confusing part of the Constitution), which must be passed by Congress and signed by the President or his veto overridden.  The president cannot (not may not—cannot) create debt on his own recognizance.

On the first part above, then, Obama has it right—Congress can agree to continue spending and borrowing, or it can decide not to act (or anywhere between the two extremes: cut spending enough to fit it into current revenues, thereby eliminating the deficit and stopping the growth in borrowing altogether, or cut spending to fit within projected revenues and raise the debt ceiling somewhat, with a view to gradually reducing spending, eliminating the deficit over time, and ultimately stopping the growth in borrowing altogether, for example).

What are the practicalities of the matter?  Say the debt ceiling is not raised; what results?

The interest on our current national debt (some $16+ trillion at the end of 2012, an explosion of 60% in Obama’s first four years) ran to $220 billion.  Total revenue collected from various tax sources (including payroll taxes for Social Security, et al.,) by the Federal government was $2.5 trillion—a shade over 10x those interest payments.

In short, there is no risk of default from Congressional inaction.  There is plenty of money with which to pay the interest, thereby keeping our debt current and not in default.  There’s plenty of money with which to roll existing debt that’s coming due—essentially to refinance by paying off that old debt with new borrowing—within the current debt ceiling.  This is the same as us refinancing our homes, which we must do within our own debt ceilings, values our lenders determine based on our credit rating.  There’s even plenty of money with which to begin in aggregate paying down that debt, reducing it below those $16 trillion, and to reduce it further in subsequent years.

Thus, if Congress declines to raise the debt ceiling at all, there would be spending cuts, but no default.  Federal spending in 2012 ran to $3.7 trillion, rather more than those $2.5 trillion in collections.  Progressive (and Conservative) favored programs would be drastically curtailed.  Welfare programs like food stamps, subsidies for “green” energy companies, farm price supports, and the like would be severely curtailed.  Entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid transfers to the States would be greatly circumscribed.  Withal, no default, and not even very many existing programs eliminated.

However, if Obama and his Senators truly are concerned about “not paying for our spending on the backs of our seniors and the middle class” (and the poor—that group these Progressives have been ignoring right along), they’ll get serious about spending cuts, the deficit, and the debt.  The cuts then could occur in a deliberate, controlled manner, across programs about which Conservatives and Progressives compromise on curtailing.

Obama and his Senators know what the Constitutionally mandated priorities are.  They simply are lying when they make their claim of debt default, and the NLMSM are complicit in the claim’s spread.  What these Progressives really mean is that, absent a debt ceiling increase, they will default on their vote buying promises.  And that terrifies them, since among those to whom they “owe” their vig are unions.

Gun Control and the Purpose of Guns

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Governor Mario Cuomo (D, NY) has demanded we “end the madness now” and surrender control of our firearms to government.

No one hunts with an assault rifle.  No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer.

The tragic events of just the last few weeks in Newtown, CT, and West Webster, NY, have indelibly taught us guns can cut down small children, firefighters, and policemen in a moment[.]

A couple of things about this.

First, government doesn’t get to dictate to us our purpose in owning firearms or our purpose in owning magazines with capacities of our choosing.  Leaving aside the reason for the 2nd Amendment in the first place, which was to allow a population to protect itself from an overreaching government more than to put victuals on the table, this goes beyond the 2nd Amendment.  If we let government determine our reasons for owning or not owning a thing, it becomes a very short step to letting government determine what me must own or not own, what we must buy or not buy.  Like health insurance.

Second, Cuomo is right that guns can “cut down small children, firefighters, and policemen in a moment.”  When the murdering begins, and help is summoned, the responding police will be only minutes away.  In those intervening moments, though, the killing of the unarmed, including unarmed adults also on the scene, continues apace.  It’s the folks present at the start who are in the best position promptly to interfere with the killer, but when they’ve been carefully disarmed by a Know Better government, they’re as helpless as those children.