We're Poor! How Can You Think of Spending Less Money? A News Fisking RE-POST

[despite numerous attempts at editing, the original version of this post kept getting jumbled. So I'm trying again. Wish me luck.]

The Hill (h/t Protein Wisdom):

Representatives of three liberal advocacy groups on Monday blasted President Obama’s proposed two-year freeze on federal civilian worker pay.

And by "blasted" the gang at The Hill undoubtedly mean "made a series of fatuous and unsurprising comments about. Hey, you try making this shit interesting."

Tom Friedman: The Gorgias of National Greatness

Tom Friedman-bashing being apparently the sport of the day, The Other McCain demonstrates the distinction between himself and a sophist like Freidman:

The unfortunate fact that an argument may be both superficially persuasive and fundamentally wrong constitutes an eternal temptation to the minds of those people who permit their admiration of literary excellence to overcome their common sense.



Go read David Brooks’ infamous 1997 ode to “national greatness” and you will find no shortage of literary skill. Clear away the superficial eloquence, however, and you recognize that Brooks is arguing on behalf of the same sort of big-government, guns-and-butter, welfare/warfare state agenda that led LBJ into the political/policy debacle of the Great Society, the Dien Bien Phu of 20th-century American liberalism.

In Plato's dialogues, Socrates preaches against Gorgias and his ilk for exactly this reason: their ability to make the weaker argument appear the stronger (that the Thirty Tyrants handed Socrates his cup of hemlock for a similar charge is a perfectly classical irony). For his part, Gorgias wrote of nothing as consistently as the power of language to distort the mind and enflame the heart. Whenever I read the Sophits, I am struck by how post-modern they sound, how easily their arguments work in an academic format.

The Reason post that McCain hangs his deconstruction on has great fun pointing and laughing at Friedman's endless repetition of himself, especially his current obsession with "nation-building at home" (because we don't have a nation at home now). It's tempting to ascribe this tedium to a) blundering stupidty, or b) sheer laziness. But more likely Friedman knows exactly what he's doing, and knows that if he says "nation-building at home" enough times, people will decide that it means something. And to Aristotle, persuading people to think or do something means the rhetorician has succeeded.

But Don't Call it "The Ground Zero Mosque"

The fact that they've applied for 9/11 rebuilding funds means nothing. NOTHING.

In the end, Park51’s application is likely to be unsuccessful financially while mobilizing a new round of opposition. It’s a lose-lose proposition put forward by a tone-deaf organization that seems determined to alienate allies and embolden opponents.

I think that the true source of the outrage: the complete gob-smacked dumbfoundedness that anyone would be offended. "What, we're just applying for public moneys set aside to aid redevelopment of the lands our co-religionists laid waste to, so we can spread the good word of Islam. What's the big?"

It's like trying to explain table manners to a fifteen-year-old.

Civility? I Don't Think That Word Means What You Think it Means...

Stop Shouting:

I remained stoic when your acolytes spit on my car and called my husband a “baby killer” when I crossed through your phalanx at Walter Reed to take my children for medical care. I refused to respond as you smashed your fists into the hood of my car, destroyed my mirrors with bottles and keyed my doors in California, my children mute and terrified as you screamed your hate and bile.

Just because they've managed to toss all this down the memory hole doesn't mean we have.

Europeans: Say, The Government's a Bit Big

My copy of The Communist Manifesto (it is wise to know the ways of one's adversary, tovarisch) has an introduction from a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist from the 1980's or so. The old comrade claims that the "flexible-response" of Western Democracies when confronted with Bolshevism (permitting unions, mandating the eight-hour-work day, the minimum wage) caught the Reds completely by surprise. They didn't expect that the kapitalists had such foresight in them.

Anne Applebaum, in Slate, traces the return of this democratic flexibility:

It's saying too much to call it a pattern, and it may well not be a permanent change: I'm sure there are plenty of European politicians who won't survive their next encounter with the voters. But there is something in the air. It almost seems as if at least a few Europeans have actually drawn some lessons from the recent recession and accompanying turbulence in the bond markets. They have realized, or are about to realize, that their state sectors are too big. They are about to discover that their public spending, which seemed justified in good economic times, has to be cut. The middle class knows in its heart of hearts that its subsidies, whether for mortgages, university tuition, or even health care, can't last. Some voters even know that their pay-as-you go pension systems aren't sustainable in the long term, either.

Facts are stubborn things, as a certain Founding Father put it. The state can only do so much, should only do so much. We are in the midst of discovering again where that line should be drawn. And our own President seems to be behind this learning curve:

Our recent foray into health care reform took us in the opposite direction from the rest of the developed world, too, not that we were really doing anything so different to start with. As Besharov and Call also note, Americans are wrong to think they currently enjoy "private" or "free-market" medicine. Even when it is not directly state-funded through Medicare or Medicaid, American health care is paid for by employers. And those employers, in turn, get a tax cut for providing health care to employees—in other words, a subsidy.

While I find the conflation of tax cuts and subsidies specious ("Because only taking ten dollars from people instead of fifteen is exactly the same as giving them five bucks. Dumbass." - Vodkapundit), basically, this is right: we don't have a free-market health care system. When Obama and the Democrats claimed that their "reform," far from being a takeover, was but the logical extension of current obligations, they were not lying. They had simply convinced themselves to extinguish a bonfire with gasoline.

Real health-care reform, on the other hand, will involve freeing health labor and capital, instead of funneling it into the insurance and legal industries. If we're not making it easier to build hospitals, we're not doing a thing to make health care more affordable.

We Can't Afford Illegal Immigrants.

Janet Daley, in the Telegraph:

If working people are to fend for themselves and support their own families without help, they cannot be under-bid for employment by migrants who, as often as not, have no dependants and no permanent obligations in the host country. The uncontrolled movement of peoples around the globe is problematic for welfare states – which can end up supporting them – but it may present even more dramatic difficulties for a country with a contracting state. The combination of reduced welfare and unlimited migration could produce ugly consequences which no responsible person wants to see.

The premise that immigration should never be limited is relatively modern and backed up by little besides an altruistic frisson. The libertarian responds that labor has the right to move where it wills. And it may indeed. But in a world where the supply of capital outweighs the supply of labor, the free movement of the latter penalizes the workers of nations that develop the former.

Too many promises have been made by altruists, promises based on faith that any good that could be imagined could be done without cost to other goods. Like an overextended credit card, we'll be paying for it for a long time.

GOP Should Seek Clarity

The DC Examiner:

Often when Washington insiders talk "compromise," they really mean engineering a situation where nobody really has to take a position, or responsibility. In those circumstances, clarity is better served by forcing positions into the open, even if doing so involves confrontation.

Ultimately, it is the people who are going to have to decide what course we take in these troubled waters. Politicians do well when they give people a choice between competing options rather than obfuscate the differences. The question is, do politicians believe they will be rewarded for this?

One of the main reasons for the Democrats' defeat this year was voters' sense that they wouldn't listen -- that they rammed through a predetermined agenda without paying any attention to voters' misgivings, and that they, in fact, seemed to glory in their lack of accountability. (Remember Speaker Nancy Pelosi's parade-with-gavel through the throngs of anti-Obamacare protesters?)
By listening to voters at town hall meetings, Republicans can not only show that they care, they can accomplish something else. They can actually learn something.

They represent us. They ought to give a damn what we think.

Read the whole thing.

Tommorrow.

I feel like Tommorrow means something, and I feel like it doesn't. It seems to me that we have but one final chance to pull back from the abyss, from the slow strangling descent into a New Class-managed Dark Age. On the other hand, even the forlorn hope of Dem-Plosion will result in nothing but the opportunity to slowly slip the Progressive Leviathan's grip. That crazed radical Paul Ryan, the man who's out of his mind, is planning on taking the next 75 years to restore us to fiscal sanity.

Given the high that the Democrats experienced 2 years ago, I don't know how the GOP can claim a mandate for their more radical (and necessary) plans. It might not at all be possible to forestall the utter and complete collapse of legitimacy.

The people are sick of Democrats. They're sick of Republicans, too. They're sick of "independents". They're bone-weary of Congress, the White House, the lobbyists, the activists, bureaucrats, the media. Everyone but the army can go to hell as far as most voters are concerned.

If that keeps up, then some tommorrow down the road, the other shoe will drop.