What’s Wrong with the World

The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.

About

What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

I, Heretic

I have hoisted the following from comments, since it touches upon issues worth discussing in their own right. The awkward opening is a reference to an ongoing discussion about offering encouragement to unwed mothers to adopt out.

Neither is this principally about economics, from my perspective; I do not believe that the ethical and the politico-economic can be segregated, or even disaggregated so that discrete questions can be addressed without messiness. The ethical and the economic are inextricably bound together; they provide context for one another, and implicate one another in countless ways. It is not necessarily invidious, and quite possibly highly ethical, to encourage unwed mothers to surrender children for adoption; in the context of many elements of American political economy, which have decimated the opportunities of the working classes, not to mention many of the bugaboos of the political right - no minimum wages, benefitless jobs, no entitlement to even a public minimum level of health care, and so forth - that encouragement seems rather different in character to me. That context bids the poor and working classes to fend for themselves in a globalized, deregulated, deunionized, unsupported labour market, earning wages determined by a "natural market rate", to perhaps hope for a little charity, if some rich persons should condescend to them, and thereby undermines the material basis of family formation. Then, this cultural context, partly real, partly hypothesized, bids them not to do anything irresponsible by forming families; this is not primarily a question of marriage, but rather a question of finances: they can marry or sire bastards, and in either case, they don't really have the resources to sustain a family. The living wage, or any semblance thereof, has been repudiated as a socialist construct. We've had those arguments here; they're tedious, and I have no desire to revisit them. Hence, my reference to early political economists, like Steuert and Bentham, who sought to render to dispossessed peasantry more "suitable" for employment by Whiggish capitalists, and conceived of various punitive, disciplinary expedients towards this end; this is the context of which I speak, the analogy I draw between early industrial capitalism and the present: the lower orders are largely stripped of their means of remunerative provisioning within the system; they become pauperized and manifest various cultural dysfunctions; then, "enlightened" carceral policies are imposed to "reform" them, to make them amenable to the conditions imposed upon them. Is encouragement of adopting out one of these carceral policies? No. I'm not making that argument. But encouraging adopting out will be perceived in a definite way by the lower classes, as a statement that they are not entitled to much of anything from society, and aren't really entitled to have children, either. At least, they shouldn't have them. As I argued above, the economic incentives of such a situation are perverse, and militate against longer-term thinking; it is difficult to survive, married or not, and so men become reckless in pursuing the Main Chance, often criminal, and women opt to fulfill the biological imperative early. Apart from the ethical context, which I find dubious, we're warring against human biology. And when we fight biology, we will almost always lose. Biology will trump the ethics, as it already has, and it will trump the economics, unless the privation becomes catastrophic.

I have a fear - not a political one, since there is no reasonable prospect of this occurring in the actual American political system - but a theoretical one, about social conservatives; that fear is that, confronted by a policy programme of socially-conservative social democracy, such as existed in Sweden before the feminists took over, which would emphasize the male breadwinner family, living wages, cultural support for larger families and motherhood, the proscription of abortion, and so on, American social conservatives would opt against it. They would probably argue that they think it impossible, on any number of technical economic grounds; some would argue that the economic programmes themselves would be unjust (no use denying this). But here's the thing: they aren't willing even to attempt it, to meet halfway, or a quarter of the way. No, it's all unvarnished classical liberal economism, however arrayed in rhetorical finery, whether libertarian, neoliberal, whatever. Political economy should not take into account the human flourishing of the lower orders, not as an object of the art; no, what happens in The Market happens, and hopefully charity will help out at the margins. If it doesn't maybe people will feel guilty and/or generous; if they don't feel guilty and/or generous, them's the breaks. The ethics of the economic are univocal: obligations are towards The Market System, and from the poor to the system and the rich.

So, why is this my fear? Because, apart from my ethical estimate of the matter, I think that American social conservatives are tipping their hearts, showing where their treasures, and hearts, lie. That's perhaps harsh. But, as I have argued all along in my blogging career, we should be willing to accept a lesser degree of economic efficiency for the sake of justice. I believe that there are good philosophical arguments for this claim; there are also some technical economic ones, to the effect that a less efficient, but less unequal, system will be more stable in the long run. I also believe that there are theological and biblical arguments for this claim; certainly, the Bible speaks often about doing justice to the least of these; I don't recall it speaking nearly as often, or as forcefully, about chastising the lazy poor. I realize that virtually everyone here disagrees with these claims, and that's fine, really it is. Of the making of these arguments, there will be no end. But I stand by my claims: social conservatives should be willing to compromise a bit on the economics, in order to support families, but I don't see much willingness to compromise.

Comments (120)

I have a lot of sympathy with this, Maximos. I doubt it will surprise anyone else, given my distributist inclinations. But where I would push back strongly is on arguments such as:

this is not primarily a question of marriage, but rather a question of finances: they can marry or sire bastards, and in either case, they don't really have the resources to sustain a family.

the lower orders are largely stripped of their means of remunerative provisioning within the system; they become pauperized and manifest various cultural dysfunctions

The plain fact is that we have had poverty in America, even grinding industrial poverty, many times before, but it took the social and moral dissolution of the post-Second World War era to ruin families. The piling up, generation upon generation, of fatherlessness and bastardy is a relatively new phenomenon, and it began a decade before the modern era of globalization took root. So there is much more going on here than economics; and while explaining what has become of the American family should certainly take account of the loss of "remunerative provisioning within the system," it must go deeper, to that spiritual abyss which is the mark of late modernity.

Whittaker Chambers, in his masterpiece of an essay on St. Benedict, speaks of the "three great alienations of the spirit ... [which] can be seen at their work of dissolution among ourselves, and are perhaps among the little noticed reasons why men turn to Communism. They are: the alienation of the spirit of man from traditional authority; his alienation from the idea of traditional order; and a crippling alienation that he feels at the point where civilization has deprived him of the joy of simple productive labor."

For all the failings of conservatives, they yet retain some attentiveness to this spiritual content of our crisis; while the Left in the main denies that there is a spiritual aspect of man worth of attention, and certainly denies that traditional authority or tradition order are anything but impostures and oppressions.

Mike T posted an interesting comment in the thread from which this was pulled.

I don't gainsay the contention that the left itself discredited social democracy; it is for this very reason that I disavowed questions of practical politics - since this isn't going to happen - and focused on the philosophical aspect of the problem: if there were a conservative social democratic platform, such as were common in Europe until the late 60s, how would American social conservatives receive it? Every piece of evidence I can scrounge together, from political magazines to websites and blogs, suggests that they would decide in favour of liberal political economy, which is to say, the modernist myths of self-regulating markets, economic man, maximum efficiency, the self-positing economic superman, possessed of plenary rights in property, and so forth. I'm sorry to say it, but the facts are the facts. Or, if not facts, since we're talking about tendencies and regularities in argumentation, at least the strong propensities.

The piling up, generation upon generation, of fatherlessness and bastardy is a relatively new phenomenon, and it began a decade before the modern era of globalization took root.

Well, yes, the Sixties witnessed the mainstreaming of the loose sexual mores of the Upper Bourgeoisie, which themselves stretch back to the early twentieth century, and in some cases, back into the late nineteenth century; the consequences of this mainstreaming were catastrophic. However, now that the cultural dissolution is upon us, and has worked its iniquities, we have a third thing; no longer do we have the discrete phenomena of sexual decadence and politico-economic hollowing-out, as the economy is deindustrialized and financialized in return, but rather a unified reality in which these things are bound together, mutually reinforcing. Given the existence of this third thing, this new reality created by the merging of the trends in the 70s and beyond, we cannot recreate the status quo ante by removing - even were it possible - the welfarist policies that exacerbated the cultural dissolution. The cultural 'matter' upon which the new policies would act is different, and will not be malleable in the same ways it once was. I will be blunt: we will not alter the culture of the underclass by means of economic coercion alone, unless - possibly - we are willing to watch people die in the streets; and we shouldn't wish for this. Culture is a stubborn, intractable thing, responding slowly, when it responds at all, to exogenous inputs. We're not going to reform the culture of the underclass until and unless we confront it as a holistic problem - spiritual, above all, but also material - cognizant of the manifold ways in which these factors overlap and interact.

"The plain fact is that we have had poverty in America, even grinding industrial poverty, many times before, but it took the social and moral dissolution of the post-Second World War era to ruin families."

Paul, rural life can absorb unseen a whole lot of misery and no knowledgeable person would trade life now for life in the past. There have always been unhappy families, are there more now? Families were better off after enclosure then now?

I doubt "spiritual content" means more to that family in Arizona who are about to lose their husband and father then simply finding Medicaid. I'm sure your conservative concern for traditional order is a comfort to a black woman whose odds of finding an appropriate marriage partner has been considerably reduced by a penal code that irrationally punishes some drug use over other drug use.

I somehow have the feeling that things like minimum wage laws, SChip and the EITC mean more to the families who need them then your vague concerns over tradition, authority, and spirituality. Those are individual concerns. As a society we can act collectively to make folks' lives easier.

We now live in a world created by conservatives and neo-liberals. Just what do you have to offer besides vague nostrums from an ex-Communist spy who lived and wrote prior to Buckley's dream turning from an uphill walk to a downhill run?

A "conservative social democratic platform" is basically just distributism, no? My guess is that social conservatives (since you separate them out) would be far open to a distributist program than any other faction on the Right. There was a broad-spectrum of support for Bush's faith-based charity initiative, for instance. The primary complaint of social conservatives was based on the fear that government interference in religious institutions would be an eventual consequence; but the idea of leveraging the financial resources of the state through the middling institutions of mercy ministries and religious charities appealed to many of them, precisely because they are not the heartless social Darwinists that you sometimes seem to imply. It's the libertarians, globalists and Wall Streeters who would form the resistance to a truly conservative social democracy.

Thank you very kindly, al, for demonstrating my point.

"I don't gainsay the contention that the left itself discredited social democracy;"

Either this means that the right in America would have come up with a "good" social democracy all on its own (Andrew Mellon is laughing so hard he just dropped his shovel) or Mike and Paul have revealed that American conservatism has a terminal case of reactive resentment that channels into an empty idealism.

A conservative social-democratic platform would be consistent with certain expressions of distributism, and certainly with the social doctrines of the Catholic Church, and my church.

I don't see many social conservatives rushing to embrace distributism, however; to be certain, there is more interest in the school of thought now, after the crisis, than there was three years ago, when the recession had only started, and most people hadn't yet sensed it - but I still perceive a fair degree of liberal economism among social conservatives. Yes, many social conservatives were cautiously enthusiastic about the faith-based initiatives, though these programmes only scratched the surface of the human needs, and though many social conservatives worried about eventual government interference. Their worries were not entirely unreasonble, given the history of such programmes in Europe, which were very conservative in their origination, in the 30s through the 50s, but were co-opted by radicals in the late 60s and beyond. This history, however, though cautionary, only serves to render the question more pointed: is the risk of this co-opting and devolution obviously worse than the real human needs now going unfulfilled? The answer to that question is hardly obvious to me, because it seems to me that the peril of such declension, of unintended consequences and hostile takeovers, is of the nature of the political; given that there is no fixity to which we can lash ourselves, and thereby avoid all such evils, me must often assume the risk of reform. Too stringent an avoidance of risk becomes functional social darwinism.

Al, instead of carrying on quite as if you've mistaken this website for Reason magazine, perhaps while riding that John Deere you retreat to whenever the argument doesn't go your way, you could set aside a moment to ponder the fact that this website takes its name from a certain book (by happenstance published exactly 100 years ago) written by a certain man who had certain very firm opinions on subjects like political economy and even Andrew Mellon.

Also, I'm a bit reluctant to mention it, but let me clue you in to another critique of Andrew Mellon's political economy which, I know for a fact, has had a strong influence on the writer of this post: the Southern Agrarian critique. It might surprise you to discover that the English distributist tradition and the Agrarian tradition featured many points of cooperation and mutual admiration.

My reluctance to mention this, of course, emerges from my concern that, just when you and Maximos are starting to see eye to eye, upon reading this you'd sit up straight in a sort of shock and shout, "to the gallows with him, along with all the rest of the Confederate officer corps!"

Either this means...

The comment you're responding to is mine, inasmuch as I did not want to lift Mike's comment from the other thread, and paste it into mine. It's his comment, after all. The American left have discredited social democracy, in the minds of many Americans, precisely because of the excesses of the 70s and 80s. Yes, I understand full well that the problems of Welfare Queens often have been overstated, and sometimes fabricated from whole cloth; but many Americans gazed upon the dissolution of urban America and washed their hands of the political left. Now, were there other causes? Of course.

I have no illusions that the American political right would have evolved its own form of social democracy; I'm dubious that there even existed an American right prior to the New Deal era, apart from factions such as the Southern Agrarians, who became conservative as they beheld industrialism and capital subverting the society they loved: conservatism is the profound feeling of loss. That post-New Deal right has never reckoned with the deep structural logics of industrialial capitalism, and now, finance capitalism; it has too often clung to the hieroglyphs - Voegelinian term for any symbol transposed from its original context, to a setting in which it no longer makes any sense - of the Rugged Individual on the Frontier.

And you mine. Now that we are past that how about explaining how you go about doing something constructive? All you mention was a political strategy designed to sew up a segment of the electorate. What we actually got was a further concentration of wealth, unfunded entitlements, war, and debt.

We seem to agree on infrastructure improvements. These take time to ramp up. It would be useful to have an ongoing pool of projects ready for funding during slumps. Do you see any chance of this happening or being maintained by any conceivable Republican Congress or administration. Things like the EITC are effective and efficient. SChip helps families. These are concrete things. All you give us are vague concepts.

How about some concrete distributist programs that are more than political patronage. Is someone having to find the church that has appropriate boutique program more just and efficient than the EITC, SChip, Social Security, Medicare and Mediaid, unemployment insurance, etc.

BTW, Mike its easy to deal in generalities, beyond your (and others it seems) fixation on ADC programs which are gone anyway, just what would you do away with that you see the evil left responsible for?

Maximos, I was referring to Mike's statement. I would assign the problems of the left to the 1960s and 70s and put most, but not all, of the liberal decay and over-reach back then on the disruptions from Vietnam (the late '70s and through the '80s and to this very day has given us a different set of problems). There has always been an ideological aspect to conservatism in America in terms of its approach to capital (the mine owner who said,

"The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for. It will not be the labor activists who take care of him. It will be the Christian men to whom God in his great wisdom has given the control of the property interests of this country",

really believed it; the southern agarians are a sideshow for those who resonate to that sort of thing and as long as they vote the right way, who really cares?

I'm not convinced you're quite as “heretical” as you think, Maximos. As you note, there's no real prospect of conservative social democracy—or, indeed, any system informed by social-conservative principles apart from free-market ones—taking hold in the U.S. in the foreseeable future. People don't form opinions in a vacuum; most folks will construct positions based on what they are actually seeing and living. Given that, I'm not clear that you can neatly predict—based on what people are saying and not saying in the current, actual situation—what current social conservatives would do if confronted with an option that they don't, in fact, have.

Specifically, in our current political economy, there doesn't seem to be a very strong prospect of a truly unfettered market (the plutocrats will see to that, if nobody else does), but there is a very real prospect of unprecedented intrusions of government power into areas social conservatives hold dear. (Attempts to expand our nation's shameful propensity to slaughter our young in the womb come to mind here.) In such a climate, it's pretty easy for social conservatives to downplay (or even overlook) economic concerns, however proper—it takes a heck of an economic issue to overshadow the government-sanctioned killing of unborn babies.

Peace,
--Peter

"riding that John Deere you retreat to whenever the argument doesn't go your way..."

Real agrarians have chores that often trump mere argumentation :), drive tractor and watch deer or argue on computer, decisions, decisions.

"It might surprise you to discover that the English distributist tradition and the Agrarian tradition featured many points of cooperation and mutual admiration."

Which means what in the real world? All I have seen so far is an approving reference to political patronage. We aren't going to deal with social problems in a fair and comprehensive manner by throwing money at churches.

Given the present state of American conservatism and its political vehicle please explain how your noble ideas compensate for how you likely vote (and how most conservatives like you actually do vote)?

And how about translating some of those ideas into solid proposals.

BTW, Mike its easy to deal in generalities, beyond your (and others it seems) fixation on ADC programs which are gone anyway, just what would you do away with that you see the evil left responsible for?

I would do away with the entire welfare state at the federal level, but I suspect you already knew that.

Is someone having to find the church that has appropriate boutique program more just and efficient than the EITC, SChip, Social Security, Medicare and Mediaid, unemployment insurance, etc.

It depends on what your goal is. The Church's goal is supposed to be to win souls to Christ first and foremost. It has a duty to God to use charity to expose the poor to the Gospel. It's bad business for the Church to give the poor a secular outlet where they can be blissfully ignorant of the Gospel. This doesn't mean that it should go "awwww snap, you rejected Jesus... GTFO." It just means competition is not in the Church's interest.

Pushing morality through the state here is the same as punishing people for fornication. I don't approve of the latter, but I would have far more respect for someone like Maximos who might be sympathetic to the idea of doing both than someone who picks and chooses.

I don't gainsay the contention that the left itself discredited social democracy; it is for this very reason that I disavowed questions of practical politics - since this isn't going to happen - and focused on the philosophical aspect of the problem: if there were a conservative social democratic platform, such as were common in Europe until the late 60s, how would American social conservatives receive it? Every piece of evidence I can scrounge together, from political magazines to websites and blogs, suggests that they would decide in favour of liberal political economy, which is to say, the modernist myths of self-regulating markets, economic man, maximum efficiency, the self-positing economic superman, possessed of plenary rights in property, and so forth. I'm sorry to say it, but the facts are the facts. Or, if not facts, since we're talking about tendencies and regularities in argumentation, at least the strong propensities.

Actually, Huckabee has social democratic tendencies and is hugely popular with social conservatives. I think it comes down to the fact that social conservatives have no problem with giving a laid off family some assistance, but bristle at the idea that an unwed mother can treat her womb like an ATM. The same principle applies across the board with these programs.

I would do away with the entire welfare state at the federal level, but I suspect you already knew that.

To better answer your question, I'd do away with most of the programs immediately, but phase out Social Security and Medicare. As I've said here, I have no problem with a program that covers exigent circumstances on the public's dime until things can be sorted out later (such as let the feds bill the individual's insurance company or drop it if they're too poor).That is the sort of "socialized medicine" that doesn't bother me.

if there were a conservative social democratic platform, such as were common in Europe until the late 60s, how would American social conservatives receive it?

Reading European political history is always an interesting chore. The alignment of ideas and ideologies there traditionally have very little semblance to those in the U.S. The Christian social democrats who made up, say, the German Center Party in Weimar literally have no mainstream counterpart in the U.S., now or in memorable history. So it's more than the fact that Americans don't have these options. There's the problem that Americans are not culturally and socially attuned to those options. As a people, we lack the intellectual and philosophical equipment, the tradition, if you will, to assimilate those ideas into our conception of our own nation. Those conservative social democratic concepts are the products of a history we simply have not had. So I think, in a very real way, that it is simply not possible, not merely not practical, to introduce those ideas into American governance in a large scale manner.

That said, they're not bad ideas in many respects, and maybe social conservatives could be convinced of the usefulness of discrete proposals drawn from that tradition. Take, for instance, minimum wage laws, which many conservatives oppose because they 1) tend to over-value some labor, 2) treat non-bread-winners as if they were, and 3) consequently promote inflation. Now, if you could draft a minimum-wage law that, instead of creating a single monolithic minimum wage, a graduated wage law that required a household wage for single-job heads of families while permitting employers to pay teenagers substantially less, you could have a law that served its purpose without some of the attendant vagaries. There would be details to iron out, of course, and it's just an example. But bits and pieces would be the best you're going to get.

And even though I told myself when I started this that I wouldn't respond to al, I can't resist: if we're living in a world created by anyone, it is most certainly not modern conservatives. We live in a world created by Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshal, and the National Organization for Women (well, and maybe Toyota, but I don't know that they count as liberals or conservatives). Conservatives simply move the furniture around fecklessly; they certainly didn't build the house.

And how about translating some of those ideas into solid proposals.

Well, since you foreclosed any discussion of the spiritual matters that are at the heart of our crisis, and thus the heart of my concerns, my range for conversation is fairly limited, isn't it? I mean, if I demanded that you confine yourself to a discussion of spiritual revival in America, you would find yourself rather limited as well. Unlike you, however, I'd not dream of beginning a conversation by amputating a huge portion of what it means to be human.

As a fact, you will search my archives here in vain for any proposal to radically curtail, much less eliminate welfare. I favor a variety of reforms (all informed by those pesky matters of the spirit), such that, for instance, the kids my brother knows in NYC who were laid off from financier positions and are now content to live on unemployment while chasing skirts and getting hammered until the perfect marketing or advertising job appears, would be under some pressure to desist such activities. I favor reforms (mostly spiritual but some legal in character) to proscribe the sexualization of children, which sexualization aims to make them both fit consumers in our lovely global pornographic economy (which, according to you, "no knowledgeable person would trade ... for life in the past") and fit subjects, when the sexualization goes wrong, for the paternalism of the welfare state. I favor reforms to forbid the commodification human life, above all unborn human life; and to drastically reduce the objectification of women. I favor, though I have not yet worked out the specifics, laws to reduce or even forbid usury, and to incentivize productive business that pays a living wage.

Above all I favor everyone coming to the Cross of Christ, repenting of their sins, including the sin of usury; and I suspect that such a revival would immediately issue in a reformation of morals sufficient to horrify both cultural leftists and plutocrats.

Someone has to address the elephant in the room, so it might as well be me. A conservative social democracy might not be so bad for white America -- but does Maximos or al or anyone else who has seen the data on the amount of money America has spent on social services for the black poor and, to take just one dysfunctional measure, the black out-of-wedlock birth rate honestly think that such programs will make one wit of difference to the 70%+ rate?

Or in other words, to put it in Paul's words, "The plain fact is that we have had poverty in America, even grinding industrial poverty, many times before, but it took the social and moral dissolution of the post-Second World War era to ruin families." I would go further: we have tried the "War on Poverty" and we lost. Now Maximos might respond that it wasn't a conservative war, and he is correct. But would a conservative war now make a difference?

I agree with Jeff Singer. To take it further, talk of instituting elements of social democracy in America presumes the existence of an American people, but does such a people exist anymore? Sweden has been mentioned as an example from which we might learn something about social democratic policies, but notwithstanding Sweden's small Muslim minority, the Swedes are still a people. I think it's arguable that America hasn't been a nation in the fullest, traditional sense of the term since the white American majority delegitimized itself during the civil rights movement and abdicated its proper and rightful leadership role in American society in exchange for the proposition nation. And since then we've had the 1965 Immigration Act and over four decades of heavy unassimilable Third World immigration threatening the very existence of white America's majority status. America's increasing diversity is a huge roadblock standing in the way of any kind of distributist reform.

Now Maximos might respond that it wasn't a conservative war, and he is correct. But would a conservative war now make a difference?

I don't think it would be any different unless the policies were completely different. Hypothetically, a more overtly religious program like a faith-based initiative on steroids that uses traditional morality as a guideline for determining when to cut off aid (such as, first baby out of wedlock is fine, second, you're on your own, honey) might have a better chance. In practice, it'd be gutted like a fish by the courts for violating the first amendment.

Guys like Maximos would better served proposing ideas on how to free up the economy so that workers have more control over their own destiny. A lot of the power that corporations have today comes from the fact that there is so much red tape for the worker who wants to be his own boss.

The piling up, generation upon generation, of fatherlessness and bastardy is a relatively new phenomenon, and it began a decade before the modern era of globalization took root.

I can't add much to the conversation, but the idea that it took the"social and moral dissolution of the post-Second World War era to ruin families," is only partially correct. A similar phenomenon occurred after the First World War and was documented in the free online book, Only Yesterday. Divorce skyrocketed, loose morals prevailed, financial chicanery was rampant. In both cases, there was a sort of adolescent domination of society with its carefree, Daddy-will-make-it-right attitude (largely because of the return of displaced adolescents from the War). The Great Depression was a slap in the face that made people begin to sober up while World War II gave them a focused purpose.

There has been no such corrective in the post-World War II era and we are seeing the effects of a prolonged adolescents in mentality and morality. What is lacking in this adolescent phase is something to focus on beyond oneself - something to endow life with meaning beyond just living another day. Religion used to be this focusing agent, but the current adolescent phase has gone on long enough to mimic the loss of faith that often happens in adolescence including a slide into atheism. It is realizing that one has a responsibility to the future (which usually happens when one has the first child within marriage) that turns boys into men. This society simply is not one that realizes either responsibilities or has a sense of commitment to the future. This is where the change must occur, in my opinion.

One draconian way to solve the problem (which I'm only making note of), of course, would be to arrest and jail every one who does not have a job by the age of 19 unless they are making sufficient progress in either college or the military. Something like this essentially happened during the Vietnam Era and it made young people grow up really fast (or else go insane or run away).

The Chicken

The country is simply too large to be governable and any proposal for fundamental economic reform is guaranteed to fail until America breaks-up into regional state federations.

There are many existing proposals available to deal with the economy from a traditional Christian perspective once that happens. Here is just one.

http://www.ihspress.com/9781932528107.php

And Dr Rupert Ederer has been translating the economic work of the great Heinrich Pesch, S.J. I have read "Ethics and The National Economy," a book guaranteed to make Glenn Beck cry. Again

But any system must be built to serve local needs if it is to be successful. I used to live in Maine and I am well aware of what The Somali Muslims did to the town of Lewiston.

Essentially, they invaded that small town and drained the system established by White Catholics there over generations.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.6756/pub_detail.asp

Writing at The Brussels Journal,Takuan Seiyo, in his series, "Meccania to Atlantis," identifies the international gold rush - and he means like the one where Muslims broke the the system established by generations of Catholics.

With our govt electing a new people

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/brecht140806.html

what chance does the white man have?

Independence Day:

President Thomas Whitmore: What do you want us to do?

Captured Alien: Die. Die.

Re-written to reflect the current post 1965 reality?

POTUS. If we commit suicide, will you love us then?

Alien: Try it and we shall see.

America. Dying to be loved.

Something like this essentially happened during the Vietnam Era and it made young people grow up really fast (or else go insane or run away).

The only problem is it didn't work in that context: the war, and service in it, took place as part of a larger disintegration of social structures. The whole social fabric went to hell in a hand basket in the course of about twenty years right then. We haven't been dealing with new problems since then, we've just been dealing with the entirely natural fallout of an entire generation's poor decisions (or really two generations, because while the kids were doing drugs the parents were off enacting failed policies).

The whole social fabric went to hell in a hand basket in the course of about twenty years right then.

As it did after World War I, also. I have never really seen a good essay relating the two. There are so many similarities between the post-World War I and post World War II eras.

The Chicken

Maximos, if you are going to look at the theoretical instead of the practically possible, I imagine (projecting only from the small subset of social conservatives whose thought I know very well) that there would, in fact, be a significant amount support for social democrat ideas. But let me go deeper, and suggest that we look at the problem in terms that Benedict XVI suggested:

We need an economic/social environment that does NOT glorify competition alone as a bedrock quality, and seeks for cooperation as an equally valuable guide to choices economic. We also need a model that proposes subsidiarity at the same time that it discusses solidarity. We also need an approach that makes a norm of gratuitousness even while it demands justice in exchange. In these terms, socially conservative democracy methods (at least, so far as the examples we have seen) will be more similar to re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic than to changing its course.

Let me give you a pair of simple examples: taking away the context of a bad upbringing, most people have in their hearts a willingness to undertake an endeavor that is somewhat challenging if they perceive the end as worthwhile. But there is nothing essential that separates "somewhat challenging" from the notion of "work" except the latter (in the economic sphere) connotes "pay". But if you don't limit it to the economic sphere, work can be both challenging and very rewarding without "pay". Take the little woman busting her back over floors, dishes, laundry, and cooking - but of course, she doesn't work, since she doesn't get paid for that. Some women glory in forming a well-ordered household, though at odd moments they may hate portions of the work, in general they wouldn't choose it any other way. Other women find the notion extremely distasteful. Does the first kind of woman not provide all that society should be asking of a woman? They why does society not make sure that the woman receives all that she needs to continue being happy in exactly that work that she finds rewarding and that society finds beneficial? Similarly, some people work as waitresses only because they must, they view it as killing drudgery, and the pay as miserable. On the other hand: there are more than a few women who LIVE to cook and to be hospitable to people by serving them great meals (both friends and strangers). What kind of world would it be if THOSE women were placed in restaurants to cook and serve, women like my grandmother who made not less than 10,000 gallons of tomato sauce, and not less than 50,000 meatballs, every single one by hand, during her life? And was offended if you walked away not stuffed to the gills.

Second example: A few years ago, I proposed to a fiscal conservative a new notion of a strictly neighborhood grocery store: when you go in, you scan each item as you put it in your cart. When you scan, 3 prices come up: the price the object costs to get it into the store; and the price with the direct overhead of taxes, lights, heating, personnel, etc; and the price with these plus basic surplusage to deal with loss in other areas (which I will explain). The customer puts in the price he chooses to pay for the item, in light of his clear knowledge. His chosen payment for the item may be 0, or any amount higher, nobody decides for him.

My conversation partner was horrified: That's not just! Some people will walk away without paying anything at all!

Yes, that's true. But if there are enough like that, the store will go under, and they will have a very short-lived vacation from paying for their food. And, some people will see quite clearly that they must pay enough to ensure the store continues. And people who have enough to buy a smattering of luxuries will be encouraged to think that at least for their luxuries, they should be willing to pay a good bit over and above the first 2 prices - it is, after all, something they could choose to do without. And they know for a fact that every time they choose to pay a little bit more, this means that the poor slob who lost his job can get a few basic groceries without having to beg at the corner for loose change - he can come to the store just like he did the week before he lost his job and get food. Thus, the third price, the surplusage price, is set high enough to cover the amounts other people have not paid on other items (in proportion), so that everyone knows how much extra is needed to keep the store running.

Pie in the sky, idiotic, stupid, idealistic, assumes the best in human nature, that could never happen. Nobody would be stupid enough to try it. Those are the kinds of descriptions given. Interestingly, I heard on the radio 2 months ago that a coffee store was going to try this approach (well, roughly - they did not have set prices that must be paid). I have not heard more about it, so maybe the radio report was wrong. But my point is, that the idea of this kind of merchanting thinks outside the box, gets beyond cut-throat practices, and works toward solidarity without a single step toward mandatory wealth re-distribution. We need models of work that promote the attitudes of cooperating with God in creating good, and this creative power being at the service of our multiple levels of communities. Mere pay has not accomplished that.

People don't form opinions in a vacuum; most folks will construct positions based on what they are actually seeing and living.

Much of what people are "seeing and living" wants for interpretation and contextualization; these things are not, as in naive theories of biblical exegesis, self-interpreting and self-evident. In many instances, people are just flatly wrong. In many other instances, they have no direct experience of the thing in question, nor can they, and go with gut instincts, or untutored "common sense", which is often so stupid as to be be insentient.

Specifically, in our current political economy, there doesn't seem to be a very strong prospect of a truly unfettered market (the plutocrats will see to that, if nobody else does)

There is no prospect, even in the abstract, of a truly unfettered market, as such a thing is an ideological fantasy, incapable of instantiation in the real world; it is fully as fantasmatic as communism, albeit less sanguinary.

but there is a very real prospect of unprecedented intrusions of government power into areas social conservatives hold dear.

Yes, this is true.

In such a climate, it's pretty easy for social conservatives to downplay (or even overlook) economic concerns, however proper—it takes a heck of an economic issue to overshadow the government-sanctioned killing of unborn babies.

This is illustrative of why "common sense" in not sensible. It seems reasonable enough for the average social conservative to at least go along with the plutocratic BS of the mainstream GOP; the issues of the plutocracy do not have the same moral gravity, and the libertarians are unlikely to realize their delusions of an unfettered market. However, this is to ignore the fantasy-function of ideology. The ideological fantasy of the unfettered, self-regulating market may guide policy, even if it itself impossible of realization, and even if its advocates themselves know it to be a delusion; ideological figments serve a pragmatic function, namely, to veil vulgar interests in luminous robes of truth, rationality, science, and beneficence. This is so regardless of whether any individual ideologue is a true believer or merely a cynic; the objective function of his advocacy is to entrench the interests which utilize the ideology. Wall Street was content to exploit the ideological fiction of the self-regulating market, and many economists sincerely believed in their dessicated, reductive models of such markets - but who cares whether Wall Street really believed in all of that "scholarship", or merely saw an avenue to higher profits? Allowing fantasy to inform policymaking leads to bad policy, and to deleterious consequences for society as a whole. It is manifestly insufficient for social conservatives to survey the ruination of fantasy-based policymaking, and conclude that, because the fantasy cannot be realized, it'll be alright in the end; it's the trying, sincere or not, that hurts. Besides, the plutocrats don't care about the issue-set of social conservatives, and wouldn't ever be interested in resolving them; keeping them politically alive keeps social conservatives energized, engaged, and voting largely for the GOP, the right-wing of the plutocracy.

Actually, Huckabee has social democratic tendencies and is hugely popular with social conservatives.

Those tendencies are weak, and were demonized by the conservative establishment, which peeled off a fair amount of social conservative support; social conservatives have since developed an enthusiasm for Palin, and she's about as socially-democratic as my dog.

I think it comes down to the fact...

Certainly, it comes down to more of that common sense. The difficulty is that the effort to extirpate every last vestige of moral hazard in such programmes will instead extirpate the programmes themselves; the attempt must be made, to a certain degree, but it impossible to separate the wheat from the tares in this life, and those who are too zealous in such endeavours will cause real people to suffer real harms. I don't know how one weighs the respective harms of exploited moral hazards and real deprivation of goods of human flourishing, but I don't believe the process to be as straightforward as many assume; if one overwhelmingly privileges the former, one ends up objectively supporting ideological economics, regardless of one's subjective intentions.

As a people, we lack the intellectual and philosophical equipment, the tradition, if you will, to assimilate those ideas into our conception of our own nation.

I don't know that this is entirely accurate; there are certainly intellectual sub-traditions which have assimilated these ideas, ranging from pragmatism and certain expressions of leftism to populism (of the Christopher Lasch variety) and some expressions of distributism. Each one of these sub-traditions has appropriated the ideas differently, and modified them, but they are there nonetheless. The trouble is that all of these traditions are non-mainstream. Pragmatism came closest, I suppose, to being mainstream, but I think that it was more a gloss on policies undertaken for other reasons than a coherent doctrine. The dominant American tradition, in these matters, I am sorry to say, is the hieroglyph of the Rugged Individual carving out out a living, by dint of his own unaided labours, on the frontier; this myth was already absurd with the rise of industrialization and mechanized, commodity-crop agriculture, and became obscene with its application, via legal chicanery, to corporations. America has never had an open reckoning with this myth, and with the consequences of the closing of the frontier, and the development of a massive internal market, dominated by corporate conglomerates. There is the alternative tradition, of melioristic liberalism, which acknowledged the defects of this political economy, its power to foreclose upon the independence and initiative of the labourer; its remedy - applied through various means, ranging from trust-busting to unionization and regulation - was to garner a larger share of the pie for labour, so that, if the labouring classes could no longer exercise independence in their work, they might at least have the means to exercise it in their personal lives. This is, whether anyone acknowledges it or not, the birth of lifestyle politics. One might call this latter thing the Servile State, and in many respects, it is. But so was that which preceded it. It's just that the latter Servile State is (was) less sadistic; it afforded a comfortable servility, which is at least preferable to a deprived one. That liberalism never challenged the fundamental structures of American society, but sought mainly to bend them a bit, and it is an error to assimilate this liberalism to radicalism.

Conservatism, as a movement, political and intellectual, has never made its peace with the history of political economy in America - never. Chambers knew it in the fifties, and his biographer has been pointing to it for fifteen years now. The hieroglyphs endure, blinding men to the sights before their eyes, and to the evidence before their reason. They have now expanded to encompass myths of exceptionalism, such that this hieroglyphic quality is taken as quintessentially American; this blinds us further, to the fact that we are less mobile, economically, than inhabitants of the European social democracies. The principal difference is now that the American who "makes it", though he is somewhat less likely to do so, is able to amass fantastic wealth, wealth beyond that available to the Europeans. Here, the hieroglyph merges with the American gambling culture: we would rather have a slim chance at become Croesus than a decent chance at becoming comfortable.

Those conservative social democratic concepts are the products of a history we simply have not had.

Well, yes, but given that so much of our historical understanding is mythological and unreal, this does not tell in our favour.

Now, if you could draft a minimum-wage law that...

That's a good idea. It would have to include provisions to prevent businesses from hiring only "teenagers" - moral hazard works in all sorts of ways - but it's a good idea. We're so far from the level of political maturity required to consider such proposals.

A conservative social democracy might not be so bad for white America -- but does Maximos or al or anyone else who has seen the data on the amount of money America has spent on social services for the black poor and, to take just one dysfunctional measure, the black out-of-wedlock birth rate honestly think that such programs will make one wit of difference to the 70%+ rate?

There is an irony here, namely, that while cultural troubles with the black underclass are invoked as reasons to believe social democracy futile, our history of racial discord is one of the reasons we have never really attempted social democracy. There are predictable reasons for this: socially and culturally homogeneous populations are more likely to feel the solidarity that is the precondition of such policies. Moreover, the history of racial disharmony in America, followed by the disasters of the late 60s through the early 90s, have left a legacy of ruination and - let's be honest - distrust.

Moreover, the contention is not that social democracy, or distributism, or whatever, would make a dent in the rate of bastardy; the contention is rather that any efforts at cultural renovation will founder, if the material conditions of flourishing never arrive. You cannot expect poor people to adhere to traditional norms if those enjoining the norms upon them maintain economic policies which keep them impoverished.

...the Swedes are still a people

Yes, but if, after 400 years, we still don't see African Americans as an integral part of American history, as a part of us, in a sense, that's just pathetic.

I think it's arguable that America hasn't been a nation in the fullest, traditional sense of the term since the white American majority delegitimized itself during the civil rights movement and abdicated its proper and rightful leadership role in American society in exchange for the proposition nation.

The American majority/establishment did not delegitimate itself in the civil rights movement, but in the decades prior to the 60s; the civil rights movement disclosed this delegitimation to the establishment, not by marching, or protesting, or becoming militant, or asking for quotas and getting them, or anything of the sort, but by demanding that the American establishment adhere to its stated credo of equal rights for all, given by God, without the contradictory codicil, 'except for black people'. That is to say, the civil rights movement demanded that the American establishment take its own ideology seriously, on its own philosophical terms, without any hedging, without any special exceptions or obscene secret supplements. The establishment never recovered its equilibrium after that, and had a collective freak-out, and instead of bringing African-Americans fully into the American story, just jettisoned the story for the proposition nation.

America's increasing diversity is a huge roadblock standing in the way of any kind of distributist reform.

Yes, as I've stated in numerous ways, this is true. But if the American people, instead of opting for a reform that would assist the disadvantaged, regardless of background, would choose plutocracy, well - that's just pathetic.

There has been no such corrective in the post-World War II era and we are seeing the effects of a prolonged adolescents in mentality and morality.

Carter attempted to apply such a corrective, with the (in)famous "Malaise" speech, in which he counseled an acceptance of limits, and a rejection of crass, consumptive lifestyles. I observe that energy figured highly in this counsel. The American people weren't buying it then, and they aren't now. They're entitled to anything their lifestyles require, even if that entails depriving future generations of those things.

The American majority/establishment did not delegitimate itself in the civil rights movement, but in the decades prior to the 60s;

It was during the civil rights movement when it was decided that, henceforth, white America could not refer to itself or identify itself as such, except in a negative sense, while not similarly restricting the various minority groups. This is what I mean by delegitimization.



There is the alternative tradition, of melioristic liberalism, which acknowledged the defects of this political economy, its power to foreclose upon the independence and initiative of the labourer; its remedy - applied through various means, ranging from trust-busting to unionization and regulation - was to garner a larger share of the pie for labour, so that, if the labouring classes could no longer exercise independence in their work, they might at least have the means to exercise it in their personal lives.

Isn't it interesting that these paleo-Leftist sympathies of Maximos (or whatever term you might prefer for a defense of the old union-based Left before the advent of the dominant cultural and sexual Leftism we face today) point to the early post-war America, which is precisely the kind of nostalgia that Al's Leftism will not tolerate? Remember how the first thing he pronounced was that "no knowledgeable person would trade life now for life in the past"? It's just "reactive resentment" to, say, emphatically favor the New Deal's attempts to support families through male heads-of-households over the Great Society's active (though perhaps unintentional) dissolution of such families.

Let me add that Maximos (despite how it sometimes seems) is far from alone in his "heresies" along these lines. Allen Carlson has produced several thoughtful studies on these subjects. John Zmirak has written brilliantly on related matters as well.

Is Al even aware that thinkers like Profs. Patrick Deneen and John Medialle and the bloggers at Front Porch Republic exist?

The fact is that today's Left will never give these right-wing social democrats the time of day. Why? Presumably for the truly intolerable heresy of affirming Christian morality, the differences between men and women, the superiority of the intact traditional family, the duty of public and not just individual worship, etc.

So all the while he stamps his foot demanding that we come up with Specific Policies for the Real World, his prior dogmatism in rejecting anything that emerges from the Christian understanding of that world, precludes the very conversation he wants us to have.

Such is the madness of today's liberalism. Unless we accept the picture of man as a creature of mere appetites, truncating all the spiritual dimension that is evident in even the most desperate privation, we cannot even enter the discussion.

"Is Al even aware that thinkers like Profs. Patrick Deneen and John Medialle and the bloggers at Front Porch Republic exist?"

I appreciate what you're saying, but heck, Paul, 90% of the 'conservatives' in the country, including quite a few here, apparently, don't know they exist. When Dreher's 'Crunchy Cons' came out I was hoping it'd get some on the Right interested in reading Kirk and maybe even Berry, but it was ridiculed by the neo-cons and the mainstream GOP types, and seems to have had an only minor effect on the Right as a whole.

The fact that those of us of the decentralist Right have some ideas in common with those of the decentralist Left seems to frighten both mainstream conservatives and mainstream liberals. Hence Huckabee, who's a bit of a social democrat lite, gets the "he's a nice guy but he's not really a conservative" treatment, while Glenn Beck, who's some sort of libertarian/populist hybrid, gets touted as the savior of the conservative movement in the United States. As my teenage daughter is fond of saying, what the crap?

Al and some of these bloggers, etc., you folks are bringing up should have a great deal in common, ISTM. But then, I'm one of those "mainstream" types without much patience for it, so I don't mean that as a compliment. I know of one of these folks of the type you are discussing whose notion of a crushing rejoinder to suggestions of concern about over-demand if healthcare is not tied more tightly to a supply-demand mechanism is to ask aggressively, "So, do you think the poor should *just die, then*" over and over again. He and Al should be blood brothers, only Al would make a better attempt at argument-making.

Over at one distributist web site I read an absolutely appalling article on the homeless that implied *not only* that the plight of all the alcoholics and drug addicts is unilaterally the fault of "the rich" (they turned to these things inevitably as a refuge from the nastiness of their existence, which nastiness was someone else's fault) *but also* that we should supply them with fixes because it's the only comfort they have. Frankly, I'd expect _better_ than that from Al. I'd expect him at least to tip the hat to rehabilitation programs (as this piece did not) instead of openly advocating enabling people in their degradation and addiction until they die in a ditch!!

Honestly, I think y'all need to be a bit careful about romanticizing anti-capitalists just because they call themselves "distributists" and therefore you think of them as being "conservative" and hence admirable in some other sense. Maybe yes and maybe no. I saw _nothing_ to respect or recommend in that piece on the homeless. It exemplified the worst of cruelly sentimental leftism, the kind of sentiment that gravely harms the objects of its solicitude, more so even than one would get from many self-styled leftists.

All too true, Rob: which is precisely why Al's shtick of arguing as if this website were an offshoot of Reason magazine or the Club For Growth is so bizarre.

As for Huckabee, his unconscionable softness in paroling merciless criminals has (hopefully) ended his career as an elected politician.

Yes, as I've stated in numerous ways, this is true. But if the American people, instead of opting for a reform that would assist the disadvantaged, regardless of background, would choose plutocracy, well - that's just pathetic.

As I understand it, distributism is about much more than helping the disadvantaged, it is about allocating an entire nation's wealth in a sensible, equitable manner that advances the common good. This is a massive undertaking that requires a functioning American nation which in turn requires a large, confident, cohesive, just and self-conscious white majority to lead the way. But such a thing was declared morally wrong during the 60's and the '65 Immigration Act was the enforcement mechanism.

The Tea Partiers (I know you referred to the American people but I don't know who they are) are not and would not choose plutocracy over helping certain disadvantaged groups. I think they understand inchoately that the government and nation are broken. They have no self-understanding of themselves other than as individuals who think they are channeling the Founding ideals; welfare statism and big bank financial capitalism have been discredited in their eyes and in the absence of a unified country and the moral right for a large, self-conscious and virtuous white majority to emerge and lead, the Tea Partiers are opting out. In the absence of a real nation, the people just want to be left alone.

The biggest change we are witnessing is that the rentier class can no longer just troll the white middle and lower classes for support to maintain their lifestyle and expect to win politically. Presently, a lot of these folks still maintain their attachment to the rentier class's priorities. Goodness, is there anything more pathetic than a white homeschooling family making under $50,000 (the median household income) per year without health insurance arguing that the world will come to an end if they are able to purchase affordable insurance and if the the marginal rate on income over $150K goes up 3 percentage points? Their children receiving health care from government dollars is no better than being a crack addled octomom in the ghetto after all, right? The proper family after all is white, income secured, and carrying a $15,000 loan for in vitro fertilization. Well, maybe not the last part, since if God won't grant you babies in your 30s and 40s you should just suck it up. You can be good like the lower classes that recognize their worthlessness and don't marry and don't have children. After all, being pleasing to God, I mean the rentier class, is what you should seek in today's world.

A man in my parish, whom I would locate on the economic left and the cultural right, runs a ministry to the homeless. He'd not agree with that 'distributist' proposal, of that I'm certain. He'd like local governments render more assistance to the homeless, but recognizes the prevalence of mental illness among the homeless.

It was during the civil rights movement when it was decided that, henceforth, white America could not refer to itself or identify itself as such, except in a negative sense, while not similarly restricting the various minority groups.

This was decided, to the extent that 'decision' is the proper description, on the occasion of the civil rights movement, and not because it was entailed by the civil rights movement. We can say this, because allowing white America to identify itself as such does not entail Jim Crow, or anything of the sort; hence, the abolition of Jim Crow does not entail de-recognizing white America.

This was decided, to the extent that 'decision' is the proper description, on the occasion of the civil rights movement, and not because it was entailed by the civil rights movement. We can say this, because allowing white America to identify itself as such does not entail Jim Crow, or anything of the sort; hence, the abolition of Jim Crow does not entail de-recognizing white America.

Agreed.

Goodness, is there anything more pathetic than a white homeschooling family making under $50,000 (the median household income) per year without health insurance arguing that the world will come to an end if they are able to purchase affordable insurance and if the the marginal rate on income over $150K goes up 3 percentage points?

Yes there is: A "compassionate" Leftist arguing that, unless we are all protected from even the slightest disapproval concerning the particular type of fornication we prefer, we are not free; that, unless the High Court of Wise Men enjoins every public institution in the country against such disapproval, we live under tyranny; and then that same Leftist wondering what happened to the mores of the poor.

Yeah, even though I liked a lot of what Huck had to say, I never thought he was presidential material.

Arguing with Al reminds me of arguing with a Muslim about the Trinity. "You worship three gods." "No we don't." "Yes you do. You just don't realize it."

In the same way, to Al all conservatives are Social Darwinists. We just don't realize it.

This is a massive undertaking that requires a functioning American nation which in turn requires a large, confident, cohesive, just and self-conscious white majority to lead the way. But such a thing was declared morally wrong during the 60's and the '65 Immigration Act was the enforcement mechanism.

If 'white America' cannot, or will not, organize to establish common ground with minority groups, so as to undertake such a programme of economic reconstruction, then 'white America' is opting for plutocracy, by default, by circumstantially necessary implication. Now, there is a literature on the economic consequences of the diversity fetish, which displaced the prior focus on issues of economic class, opportunity, and shared prosperity, so it is manifest that diversity is a structural impediment to economic reform. But it is an impediment in two distinct structural senses: first, in the sense that inter-group distrust, and the belief that The Other is undeserving of the programmes we might wish for ourselves, inhibit such reforms; second, in the sense that the meritocratic elite are quite content to pander to diversity - because it affords access to global markets, because the elite feel comfortable with those who have attended the same universities, passed through the same screening mechanisms, and so forth, regardless of race - but blanch at any suggestion of income/class-based critique, since it threatens their prerogatives. If 'white America', the American people, the Tea Parties, whatever, cannot overcome the first structural impediment, they thereby entrench the second impediment, garnering plutocracy by default.

In the absence of a real nation, the people just want to be left alone.

Maybe, maybe not. The "leave us alone" coalition usually wants its members to be left alone in one sense, and other groups to be left alone in another sense. They cling to their Medicare - and I'm not objecting to that, per se - but they certainly object to any spending they feel is benefiting other groups, groups they consider unworthy. Perversely, this is precisely what the "meritocracy" desires, since playing different social and racial groupings against one another in the fight for spoils entrenches plutocracy by default.

The biggest change we are witnessing is that the rentier class can no longer just troll the white middle and lower classes for support to maintain their lifestyle and expect to win politically.

I wish that I could believe this, but it seems to me that the Tea Party right, by a mixture of intent and inadvertence - owing to the diverse nature of the movement - is objectively serving the interests of the rentier class. This was a movement formed in opposition to some of the bailouts, which were made necessary (or expedient) by the financial crisis, itself caused by the excesses of finance capitalism; yet, by a fascinating dialectical reversal, these folks who opposed Wall Street and its works were brought round to opposing even the tepid reform initiative of the Obama administration, a weak attempt to curtail the excesses of Wall Street, on the grounds that it was "interference with capitalism" - and this objectively served the interests of Wall Street, which now pours millions of dollars in to GOP coffers, hoping to secure its malign interests.

As regards the dialectical reversal mentioned in the previous comment, one more thing must be said: this reversal is reflective of magical thinking. If you oppose the excesses of Wall Street, which have been enabled by bad law and regulation, then you must, of necessity, support good law and good regulation, in order to prevent a recurrence of the excesses. You might oppose the FinReg bill, on the grounds that it will be ineffective, but you cannot then oppose it on the grounds that it interferes with the fantasy of self-regulating capitalism; to do so is to engage in fantasy, and the think magically, as though the bad Wall Street stuff will just stop happening, if only no one does anything. This sort of thing is, frankly, childish.

it seems to me that the Tea Party right, by a mixture of intent and inadvertence - owing to the diverse nature of the movement - is objectively serving the interests of the rentier class. This was a movement formed in opposition to some of the bailouts, which were made necessary (or expedient) by the financial crisis, itself caused by the excesses of finance capitalism

I think at least some of this can be explained by the excessive focus on the TARP as a sort of concentration of all the extraordinary activity of autumn 2008. The TARP legislation authorized $800 billion, at the time a truly staggering figure which understandably alarmed a lot of people; but just this week we've seen the reports that the true cost of that program will barely top $20 or $30 billion, and much of that because of the money thrown at the auto companies. The TARP was, objectively, a fairly successful piece of legislation according to its own limited purposes.

The real action of what has been rightly called socialization of credit was in the operations of central banks: the guarantees to the commercial paper market, the money market fund backstop, ZIRP, dozens of loan facilities, quantitative easing (which everyone expects to ramp up again soon), and all the rest of it.

So the faction of the Tea Party that has a closer bead on the real action when it comes to the bailouts, is the End/Audit the Fed faction.

"this objectively served the interests of Wall Street, which now pours millions of dollars in to GOP coffers, hoping to secure its malign interests."

And yet over the past few days I've heard Rush, Hannity, and other GOP mouthpieces moaning about the Dem hypocrisy reflected in the report that Wall St. has given just as much to them as it has to the GOP. As if the issue is not the coffer-pouring itself, but the recipients' admission that they receive such pouring. Granted, Dem hypocrisy is self-evident on all kinds of levels including this one, but really, is the hypocrisy the actual problem here? Talk about straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel (or maybe straining at a donkey and swallowing an elephant).


I'd expect him at least to tip the hat to rehabilitation programs

Amen.

The rehab programs work - especially if they are locally based and operated by those who know the people who need the services.

And those programs not only work but they are quite successful when they are anchored in Faith and run by former drunks or addicts. They know all the games played by the program's clients.

Sadly, the territories operated by those charities were easily invaded and occupied by professionals because the Christian Charities themselves had become professionalised,(cough, cough))and they surrendered their territory/programs to the same ideological tribe they were part of and the success rate of those Charities declined.

Mr. Olasky has documented all of this:

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/book-review-the-tragedy-of-american-compassion-by-marvin-olasky/#

In Florida, I worked in a homeless outreach program where an individual could qualify for an entire range of services if he but peed in a cup to prove he was drug free. And if he wasn't, we'd pay for him to get treatment to become sober and eligible for our program.

Preferring their highs, many decided not to even come in from the warm.

Of course I am not discounting the need for these Charities to be supervised by well-educated Doctors/Psychologists/Psychs, etc but the programs themselves must be run by men who do not administer their programs on a medical model.

All individuals have strengths and weaknesses and it is the job of the man exercising charity to know his clients personally so he can tailor his charity accordingly.

What good does it do to blame the rich? Blaming others is,fundamentally, a tactic of the left.

What good does it do to blame the rich? Blaming others is,fundamentally, a tactic of the left.

Yes, and worse (in a way): It's fundamentally a tactic of the addict and a major obstacle to his recovery.

I know of one of these folks of the type you are discussing whose notion of a crushing rejoinder to suggestions of concern about over-demand if healthcare is not tied more tightly to a supply-demand mechanism is to ask aggressively, "So, do you think the poor should *just die, then*" over and over again.

A lot of Americans think that if they visualize it hard enough, focus their crystals just so and chant "si, se puede" with sufficient faith and fervor, the supply will spontaneously generate.

Yes there is: A "compassionate" Leftist arguing that, unless we are all protected from even the slightest disapproval concerning the particular type of fornication we prefer, we are not free; that, unless the High Court of Wise Men enjoins every public institution in the country against such disapproval, we live under tyranny; and then that same Leftist wondering what happened to the mores of the poor.

You forgot to add in the part about arguing that human mating preferences are social constructs rooted in historic patterns of oppression. Sex is nothing if not class warfare.

Oh, man, Mike T., amen and amen and amen.

Paul,

I'd be surprised if TARP doesn't end up costing the taxpayer over $75B between AIG and the auto companies:

http://www.thestreet.com/story/10877846/opinions-differ-on-tarps-real-cost.html

Maximos,

Your theories about how to help the poor are as amusing as your theories about American conservatism (i.e. some conservatives have never made their peace with our political economy, but most American conservatives are quite happy with capitalism thank you very much -- you can continue to rail against the plutocrats and the corporations from your front porch and fade into irrelevancy like the rest of the paleos). While it is certainly true that Christ urges us to help the poor and Christian missions around the world have always tried to provide for the poor's material well-being, I think if you talked to the missionaries I support in Mexico, they would be surprised and confused if you told them that the average inner-city black welfare Mom or inner-city black man doesn't have the proper material resources to focus on their spiritual renewal (especially when many of those black men and women suffer from obesity!) You are talking about the inner-city poor just like a typical liberal would -- how can they help themselves Jeff, unless we provide each and everyone of them government program X, a job that pays Y, and services for their kids that cost Z. Don't you care about the poor Jeff? Didn't you read the Sermon on the Mount? Where is Jim Wallis when you need him...

If 'white America', the American people, the Tea Parties, whatever, cannot overcome the first structural impediment, they thereby entrench the second impediment, garnering plutocracy by default.

There are several problems that make this very difficult. First, white America has been raised to believe that its past is evil and shameful. Second, white America has been told that it and it alone is virulently racist under the surface. Third, minorities have been largely left untouched by the "anti-racists" on the left for whom racism is only possible if you have "power."

MZ is a perfect example of why this will be difficult. Comments like his about "the perfect family" reflect a belief system shared by white mainstream liberals in one form or another. That belief is that whites are virulently racist by nature and it is only through denial of "whiteness" that one can be righteous.

This is, of course, absurd. Humanity is tribal by nature. White racism is an extreme form of tribalism as is all racism. It is not natural for humans to prefer The Other or to even be comfortable with The Other when taken as a group, rather than individual members of The Other. The desire to advance the interests of your group against The Other's interests is hard-wired into human nature.

Diversity will only make matters worse because the more diverse society becomes, the more factionalized the "common good" will become.

The only solutions that will arise, short of a spiritual revival of epic scale, will be very bad.

Who cares if there are those that support sexual libertinism? When we recognize our obligations, I will bother to care about over indulgence.

The Tea Party is certainly a white preservation attempt in service of the rentier class. Given population dynamics, a candidate receiving a majority of white support is not assured victory. The diversity movement is an effort to invest minorities in the meritocratic myth, thereby making minorities more open to serving the rentier class before themselves.

Diversity will only make matters worse because the more diverse society becomes, the more factionalized the "common good" will become.

Is there anyone who does not think this is part of the intention of what our govt. does?

When chaos (diversity) is introduced into a culture, Cui bono?

The State/The Govt.

The chaos provides them with the rationale to exert an ever increasing amount of control along with the suppression of liberty. The Govt will "protect" us after it has fractured us.

This will sound radical, perhaps even evil, but the fact is that many of us in Fl are in agreement with St. Augustine and find it easier to communicate with our pets than with the alien invaders from south of the border.

Chapter 7: After the state or city comes the world, the third circle of human society,— the first being the house, and the second the city. And the world, as it is larger, so it is fuller of dangers, as the greater sea is the more dangerous. And here, in the first place, man is separated from man by the difference of languages. For if two men, each ignorant of the other's language, meet, and are not compelled to pass, but, on the contrary, to remain in company, dumb animals, though of different species, would more easily hold intercourse than they, human beings though they be. For their common nature is no help to friendliness when they are prevented by diversity of language from conveying their sentiments to one another; so that a man would more readily hold intercourse with his dog than with a foreigner.

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120119.htm

Jeff, Mexican poverty exculpates not a single American policymaker for the politico-economic contributions to inner-city poverty, privation, and misery. In fact, the poverty of Mexico is entirely irrelevant, inasmuch as material well-being, or the lack thereof, is to some degree a culturally and circumstantially-conditioned phenomenon; unless you are arguing that it is, or would be, acceptable for the American poor to live as wretchedly as the poor in a third world failed state, Mexico is meaningless in this connection.

So, don't waste my time with any further such declarations, as your comment will either vanish, or be redacted, at my discretion. To be fair, my intention here is coloured by the sarcasm with which you close your comment. So, no more of that, either. I've read the Sermon on the Mount, and much else besides in the Scriptures, and I've never once encountered a passage bidding us to cater to the entitlement mentality of the comfortable, their sacrosanct lifestyle choices never to be touched by the importuning of the poor.

As I say, don't waste my time.

"some conservatives have never made their peace with our political economy"

Most conservatives are so engrossed in their capitalist just-so story they don't even realize there's a conflict.

"most American conservatives are quite happy with capitalism thank you very much -- you can continue to rail against the plutocrats and the corporations from your front porch and fade into irrelevancy"

Yep, please continue to worry about your own wallet while the corporate/managerial Leviathan state gets bigger and hungrier day by day. If this is the current state of 'conservative' thinking, include me out, as Archie Bunker would say. Kirk, Weaver, etc., would be appalled.

"Where is Jim Wallis when you need him..."

I'm no fan of Sojourners Christianity, but that doesn't make Robb Report Christianity any less obnoxious.


Really, Maximos? You would "vanish" or "redact" another comment like that from Jeff Singer?

And here I put up with people calling for me to be cast into outer darkness, without batting an eye!

Seriously: blogging and a thin skin don't mix well.

Max, are the little people wasting your precious time? You know how it is, you bring up Sweden, someone else brings up Mexico, there's a lot models out there Max, you don't get to pick and choose, and given the paleolithic nostrums you kick out you{ Bismarck beat you to the punch, probably a few Roman emperors as well} and considering you are,as usual, urging a deeper reach in the pockets of others, you might forbear in your studied disdain.
Your timing could be better. 1930 has past you by, there are things going on in our own imperial city which I would have thought would buy some forgiveness towards the straw men you so artlessly attack.
Is it frustration Max?
The pace going to slow for you, the cavemen asking questions, boobs that they are, still unaware of government as savior?
Are the bloated bodies of the starved filling the streets, 42 million people on food stamps isn't hacking it? $1.4 trillion deficits, speaking as you did of future generations, not a large enough PARTIAL tab for your expansive heart, for your possibly closed wallet?
You do give generously and endlessly yourself don't you? Cold cereal for supper but the masses must be fed and I must do my own part, yes? I wouldn't want to even suspect otherwise.
"compromise a bit", Yes Max, just a "bit", a teeny weeny bit. On the planet Mars I'm sure it hasn't happened, here it is quite another story.

Libertarian talk show host Jim Quinn is fond of saying "Liberalism is standing on your head and telling the rest of the world it's upside-down."

Only in a bass-ackward conservatism, though, can the Weekly Standard crowd look at the ISI types and shout "Liberals!"

First and foremost, it is not that the Social Right is incapable of considering the needs of the poor, nor is it solely because the Left is wholly owned by intrinsic evils (a Dem will always, always betray his conscience, if he has one), nor even it is because of some social memory of double predestination or prosperity gospel. Rather, it is because the Social Right has beheld a form of distribution, more in line with Tolkien's "Scouring of the Shire" than with G.K. Chesterton's vision.

The plutocrats, an oligarchy of financiers, lawyers, and politicians (themselves also lawyers), overtly influence the Republican Party. Even so, these plutocrats are far more fond of the machinery of the Left, and thus have covertly for decades wholly owned the Democratic Party. If the Republicans reign, they grow richer; if the Democrats reign, they grow both richer and their competition poorer. Social programs are only a facade for bribing for votes; there can be no other excuse.

How is it that the working poor are left to fend for themselves without recourse, yet those who actively seek to be destitute can afford luxuries beyond the means of the middle class?

How is it that a woman can own a rather new Yukon Denali, acquire high end Bluetooth accessories, outfit herself and her children with the newest fashions, purchase two overflowing cartloads of premium victuals with her W.I.C. card, without either a job or a breadwinner? How is it that another woman must work 50-60 hours a week, at a job she has held for over twenty years, yet barely make ends meet supporting herself and her daughter? The former woman has made it a goal in her life to be absolutely indigent and depraved, and thereby beneficiary to a great host of programs tailored to her life, while the latter must toil to support the excesses of the former. Worse yet, the husband of the latter left her for a woman much like the former. Welcome to my neighborhood, and I mean this literally, as this is no parable. How do you hope to garner support when this is happening?

Even so, I do not believe that the Right will ever be able to disassemble the social atrocity that the Left has constructed. No, Maximos, do not fear for policies that would leave people starving in the streets. They, or perhaps rather we, will starve en masse in the streets because of our own decadence and myopic sense of justice.

Perhaps generations not yet conceived will be so inclined to seek justice through wisdom, and justly rebuke the greedy, the jealous, and the envious.

P.S. As for Mike Huckabee, his popularity tanked because of his pardoning every prison inmate that claimed to have found Jesus. such as Wayne Dumond.

"If the Republicans reign, they grow richer; if the Democrats reign, they grow both richer and their competition poorer."

The P.J. O'Rourke dilemma: Vote Republican and be robbed blind. Vote Democratic and be too poor to be worth stealing from.

It would be quite possible to restate Jeff Singer's comment about the Sermon on the Mount like this:

Verses in the Sermon on the Mount and other biblical injunctions to help the poor do not require nor even justify government welfare programs, and it is highly unfortunate that many Christians think they do and castigate their fellow Christians for allegedly un-Christian opposition to such programs.

I can't see anything offensive in that at all. In fact, I say it in my own voice. That is _very_ unfortunate.

Maximos says,

"inasmuch as material well-being, or the lack thereof, is to some degree a culturally and circumstantially-conditioned phenomenon"

Get rid of the "some degree" and tell me more what you mean by "circumstantially-conditioned" and I couldn't agree more! In fact, this is my point and why I don't think conservative or liberal Social Democratic programs will solve "poverty". And I put poverty in scare quotes and I brought up Mexico only to highlight the somewhat surreal nature of the discussion about poverty in this country -- our poor have a home with running water, plenty of food, access to free education and health care, etc. In fact most have cell phones, TVs, kitchen appliances, etc. What they don't have are two parents and what the parents don't have are jobs. They lead dysfunctional lives because they are dysfunctional, not because they suffer from material deprivation.

The reason I think Social Democratic policies are ultimately bad for the country, is that they will do nothing about those two problems (well, I suppose you could give the poor a government job, but isn't that what the post office is for and how's that working out?!) and meanwhile, I also think they will harm the rest of us who want to live in a dynamic country that doesn't resemble a European welfare state. And just for the record, I've been to Europe and I don't think the European welfare state is all that bad -- I just don't think it is sustainable (even without Muslim immigration, although with the Muslims, the day of reckoning is coming quicker) and I don't want it for America -- I'm happy to be unique and different.

I always thought the paleos were the ones who appreciated local differences ;-)

Obviously, the Social Democrats, whether of the conservative or liberal variety disagree and so we remain at an impass.

"If the Republicans reign, they grow richer; if the Democrats reign, they grow both richer and their competition poorer."

Rob, I assume you have data to back up that claim. Would you share?

That wasn't my quote, Al. I just added the O'Rourke gloss.

More welfare for the poor please:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-welfare-20101004,0,5787669.story

I'm sure stories like that make al happy, as he knows all those welfare programs he supports are doing good in California! The solutions is obvious -- more and better programs!

Rob, it appeared you were quoting it with approval. Like much of what he writes its funny and not true. The reality is that under Republicans the top decile does very well and the lower ones not so much. Under the Dem's the top still gains but the lower ones do much better.

P. J. is one of the chattering class that does very well.

some conservatives have never made their peace with our political economy, but most American conservatives are quite happy with capitalism thank you very much -- you can continue to rail against the plutocrats and the corporations from your front porch and fade into irrelevancy like the rest of the paleos

[. . .]

And just for the record, I've been to Europe and I don't think the European welfare state is all that bad -- I just don't think it is sustainable

You think plutocracy is sustainable? Look at how much of our wealth and liberty we have lost due it, Jeff. Several industries were nationalized, including banking and shadow banking; the business of credit has been socialized. The huge, global, and unwieldy are coddled and protected; the little guy starves. It was innovators in business who brought us to this pass; yes, innovators in private enterprise, the enterprise of usury. The State merely said, "sure, we can save you from this doom, only sign your soul on the dotted line."

To neglect the truly and purely free market aspect of the Great Recession is to willfully misunderstand it.

A writer must ultimately concern himself more with truth than relevancy, and the truth is that the Utopia of Usury, like other modern utopias, has failed and its subjects are prostrate.

How is it that a woman can own a rather new Yukon Denali...

I've never disputed the existence of such cases, though sometimes their incidence is exaggerated. Rather, my point is that, if the right is entitled to throw out instances of gross moral hazard, the left is entitled to throw out instances of gross negligence and gratuitous suffering, attributable to austerity programmes, or whatever. If we're going to make policy by anecdote, what goes for one goes for the other. Frankly, I think it much worse when people go hungry, or suffer preventable illnesses, or perhaps even die, than it is for people to exploit the good will of the American people. But that's just me. Others' mileages apparently vary greatly.

They lead dysfunctional lives because they are dysfunctional, not because they suffer from material deprivation.

Have you ever looked at the statistics on food insecurity, or even any of the recent reports of the unemployed lining up at Wal-Mart at midnight, in order to buy food as soon as their benefit accounts are credited? Look, the point about circumstances is simple: it requires more money to acquire, say, a habitable dwelling in America than it does in Mexico, because standards are different; in most locales, we don't tolerate illegal shanty encampments, void of basic amenities. If you'd not mind the American poor to live like third-world poor, be my guest, and avow it openly.

I also think they will harm the rest of us who want to live in a dynamic country that doesn't resemble a European welfare state.

Germany and Scandinavia aren't exactly stagnating like Eastern Bloc Soviet satellites, circa 1975. Then again, Americans aren't exactly like Germans, Danes, or Swedes, and not always in good ways, either.

Seriously: blogging and a thin skin don't mix well.

No, they don't. But I'd not tolerate the invective cast in your direction. And, for the record, as can be seen from a perusal of my archives, I became thin-skinned only after my bitterer interlocutors upped the ante, as it were. Take it personal too many times, any I just lose patience; the threshold lowers.

Paul, I hope your attempted tu quoque (about sustainability) directed towards Jeff Singer isn't a plug for a Social Democrat polity in the United States, because that's how it could be read.

I think that Jeff's "American differences" point is very well-taken and that if people retain a notion of the importance of a distinctively American sense of freedom (which I assume that you do, Paul), they should be careful not to ignore such points. Like it or not, a robust sense of the importance of economic freedom is not unconnected to a robust sense of the importance of other freedoms. Indeed, Europeans will tell you this themselves: America's allegedly "evil individualism" is the reason that Americans not only _don't_ have social democracy but _do_ have much greater freedom than Europeans in areas like self-defense, gun rights, and education for their own children. Europeans think that this is _bad_ and make fun of us for it--all of it. In short, if a Euro-style Social Democrat economy is what you want and if you ignore the way in which this is contrary to the American spirit, be careful what you wish for, lest you get it!

"The out-of-state spending accounts for less than 1% of the $10.8 billion spent by welfare recipients during the period covered, and advocates note that there are legitimate reasons to spend aid money outside of California. From the data provided, it cannot be determined whether any of the expenditures resulted from fraud."

"Many recipients travel to other states in an emergency such as a death in the family, investigators say. But with government resources scarce, it's difficult to sort those cases from incidents of abuse."

Perhaps we'll take your outrage seriously when you start noteing frauds and abuses like the carry interest deduction and firms that use off shore entities to avoid taxes. There are going to be abuses in any system but all we know from the story is that the outright fraud involved is something under 1%. Which is too much but the state needs more resources to deal.

"In Los Angeles County, investigators hadn't been checking until a recipient was gone for three months, said Department of Public Social Services Director Philip Browning. The inability to do more was "really just a resource issue," he said."

"An anti-fraud unit in Orange County, which won praise from state officials last year for saving the state millions, has since had to slash its budget and lay off 15 investigators, said Paul Bartlett, commander of the county district attorney's Bureau of Investigation."

"Those cuts saved $900,000 in operating expenses but allowed "an estimated $9.6 million in suspected fraud payments out the door," according to an Orange County Grand Jury report released in May."

A rational budget process might help. The two-thirds rule has rendered the state dysfunctional.

"How is it that a woman can own a rather new Yukon Denali..."

We now have the welfare queen with her Cadillac. Are there no work houses?

Well, I for one am SHOCKED to find Al reappearing, with nary so much as a notice that a bunch of his accusations were answered directly upthread, to drill down with airy fastidiousness on some ancillary point.

I'll try to spell this out one more time. "If the Republicans reign, they grow richer; if the Democrats reign, they grow both richer and their competition poorer." You see, if like the rest of us here, you acknowledge that "poorer" is a word that admits of more meanings than the purely pecuniary, then the demand for some aggregate tally of incomes or domestic product by class, or retained wealth by class, which shows the statistical truth of the claim, looks extraordinarily narrow-minded.

Thus, for instance, one of the ways which which we grow poorer under Democrats is that we are robbed of our self-government on matters of morality. The Democrats (and Republicans too, sometimes) put men and women on the federal bench (the insitution which increasing governs us) whose notion of judicial review includes depriving communities of the ability to write morals legislation. In course of this imposture, the judges pronounce that the Constitution does not allow morals legislation; quite as if we were too stupid to see that their whole work is one of very definite and not a little strident morals legislation. The reason the Left cheers the ruling of the California judge or the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is precisely because of the unrelenting tone of moral pedantry and self-righteousness that pervades it.

To head off one possible objection, Al:

No one is requiring you to read us. I grant that this is a long and at times tiresome thread; I'd even wager some folks around here would confess in weaker moments that they'd rather you stay out with the Deere and deer than return to it. But it is just basic courtesy give a careful read and response to the answers interlocutors supply to accusations you made against them.

Not really, Lydia. I certainly have far less sanguine expectations for liberal Social Democracy than Maximos does.

But our principles and philosophies must submit to facts. And what in my view must be drawn from the facts of the financial crisis is that turning the free market loose without scruple in matters of banking and finance is a really bad idea, because under conditions of globalization and late modernity banking and finance quickly race off in ruinous directions.

So I do not support a liberalization of finance; I support a re-regulation of it, one of considerably more severity than the mostly worthless bill that passed last summer.

Working out a full programme of reform according to my own lights is no easy task, not least because understanding modern usury is no easy task; and I have not yet completed this to a degree of confidence sufficient to articulate the programme in anything other than sketch form.

Paul,

You and I (not to mention Maximos and al) understand the Great Recession differently. I don't think the Great Recession happens without massive government intervention in the supposedly free economy (mostly via the mortgage market and banking, but also via easy money through the Fed). As long as we disagree about these fundamental basics, I don't accept your characterization of a "truly and purely free market aspect" to the Great Recession" or of "innovators in business who brought us to this pass".

So of course I don't think plutocracy is sustainable, nor do I think that word describes America in 2010, despite all our problems. It is the kind of word Obama/Democrats/Leftists use to discredit capitalism -- picture the fat cat, with a mustache, cigar, monocle, top hat, etc. laughing at the plight of the poor factory worker.

I also want to echo Lydia's point about America's unique free identity and once again put in a plug for my guy Jay Richards, who is doing yeoman's work to show the important links between social and economic conservatives:

http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/2010/pdf/Indivisible_RobackMorse.pdf

So, Paul, what connection do you see, if any, between the regulations you might favor on the finance sector itself and what most people think of (e.g., in terms of a comprehensive welfare state, state-funded daycare for all, etc.) when they hear the phrase "Social Democracy" combined with a reference to European states for an example?

Pace Paul, I have had some time for some short replies and I'll get to yours and others but time is short today as well as energy (overdue dog maintenance and I need to pull some RR ties - on sale today - for a fence that has to get in before the rains come).

Jeff -- If John Meriwether and LTCM were not operating in a free market then I'm a donut. And you cannot really understand what happened ten years later unless you understand what happened in 1998. It's pretty much that simple. LTCM was only minimally involved in mortgages. Moreover, its rescue did not require taxpayer capital at all. Not a penny.

I mean seriously, there is no way to understand this mess without realizing that a huge part of it was talented, vigorous men with intense projects for acquisition and expansion, animated by breakthroughs in technology -- mainly computing and mathematical modeling -- but animated above all my human intellect applied to the world of business.

Now, was government intervention involved too? Of course it was. In a wide variety of ways, dating back to institutions founded generations ago. But it is just laziness and a cop out to let the free market off the hook here.

Lydia -- I'm not recommending Social Democracy of the European type. But often any kind of regulation of finance is treated on the Right as Europeanesque folly.

See, Paul, I find it a little disturbing to see you responding so sharply to a criticism of "Social Democracy" as unsustainable. What's the issue, here? If you don't favor a European-style cradle-to-grave state setup (which I have always assumed that you do not), why not join in the criticism of it as unsustainable, contrary to much that is good and remains in the American spirit, and not something America should be pursuing, while maintaining your own, *quite independent*, criticisms of what you take to be the problems with the finance sector in the United States? What do the two have to do with one another, anyway? Why should you appear to spring to the defense of "Social Democracy," which many of us take in conversation to be *quite another thing from* some sort of esoteric regulations upon an esoteric finance market?

I'll say this much: If there is some connection here that I have not hitherto suspected, that sure as heck makes me far, far less inclined to want to have anything to do with whatever proposals you end up advocating for the finance sector.

And I would point something else out: The very fact that I'm asking these questions--and doing so in all honesty--should set to rest any implication that we free-marketers always yell "socialism" any time anybody proposes regulating anything. It's precisely because I _don't_ assume that all regulations automatically amount to Euro-style socialism that I'm rather shocked at the notion of a connection.

All individuals have strengths and weaknesses and it is the job of the man exercising charity to know his clients personally so he can tailor his charity accordingly.

Vermont Crank, I have been saying this too. In fact, it isn't really charity if there isn't some kind of knowledge of the recipient, at least imperfectly. And that's one of the problems of government mandated wealth-distribution systems: aside from the long-term effects of creating dependencies (or at least tending to), it inherently voids an act of love of one man specifically for a neighbor, and prevents the act of gratitude of the recipient to the benefactor. These are important spiritual losses to human beings.

Paul,

What Lydia said.

Plus, I think the link between LTCM the Great Recession of 2008 is very, very attenuated.

You've made the case here and over at "The New Ledger" for the problems with "talented, vigorous men with intense projects for acquisition and expansion, animated by breakthroughs in technology" and I remain unconvinced. My case involves government regulations (especially CRA regs and bank capital regs), Democrats and the Bush Administation pushing home ownership schemes on minorities in the oughts, rating agencies in bed with the firms they are supposed to be regulating (i.e. Moodys, Fitch, etc.) You remain unconvinced.

However, despite our disagreements -- we can sometimes agree (even with Maximos) on broad policy goals. For example, I think I've written before I would favor stronger capital requirements for banks.

So getting back to Lydia, let's team up to denounce and decry the welfare state and at the same time try to find common ground on some policy solutions for our financial sector, while recognizing that there are some fundamental differences between us on how we think about that financial sector.

Lydia, I'm not sure I'm on the hook to establish a clear connection between Social Democracy and Usury. Why do you think I am? The context of my defense of Social Democracy was actually the right-wing variety, either Southern Agrarian or English Distributist. I suppose I could note that Social-Democratic Germany has come out of this usury crisis in much better shape than we have, but it's probably too early to say anything conclusively along those lines. (In that context it amuses me that Krugman and the Keynesians have come to so detest Germany.)

The LTCM connection, Jeff, lies in the way in which abstracted capital -- from whatever source, not necessarily housing wealth -- was fused with high-power computing and sophisticated probablistic modeling. There was definitely a feeling in this of the cutting-edge of human mathematical science. It was this frisson of invention and pushing the envelope of financial engineering, which lies at the heart of the crisis; which lies at the heart of AIG's ruin, for instance. These guys were not subprime schemers or government-backed charlatans. They were independent men animated by a sense of challenge and opportunity, which felt to them for all the world like an exciting and lucrative new line of business.

Stronger capital requirements is certainly a good idea. We emphatically agree on that.

The very fact that I'm asking these questions--and doing so in all honesty--should set to rest any implication that we free-marketers always yell "socialism" any time anybody proposes regulating anything. It's precisely because I _don't_ assume that all regulations automatically amount to Euro-style socialism that I'm rather shocked at the notion of a connection.

Well, Lydia, I'm not accusing you of this resort to narrow rhetorical abbreviation. But I have plenty of experience with it in debates with numerous folks on the Right. Most of it is private email and conversation, so I hope you'll take my word for it. Or just look at how virtually every proposed regulation of Wall Street, without differentiation, was opposed stridently by most conservative pundits.

I guess, Paul, I'm trying to get a better handle on what you _mean_ by Social Democracy (that you would defend) insofar as it goes beyond or is something more than whatever regulation of the purely financial sector you might advocate. Does it or doesn't it involve a bigger welfare state than we presently have? Do you think that's a good idea?

I suppose I could note that Social-Democratic Germany has come out of this usury crisis in much better shape than we have, but it's probably too early to say anything conclusively along those lines.

See...You identify Germany as Social-Democrat (given my limited knowledge, that's accurate), and you imply _some_ sort of defense of "right-wing" Social Democracy. I'm trying to figure out if this means you'd like America to be more like Germany, and if so, if that includes respects other than regulation of the financial market, or if that's not the case because you would consider Germany's Social Democracy to be "left-wing" instead, and what difference that makes...I find it all quite confusing, especially since in my mind the phrase "Social Democrat" is usually connected with a much larger welfare state even than the U.S. presently has, which is saying a lot.

How about these statements? -- I cannot favor Mike T's idea of dismantling the whole thing, but I think welfare reform was worthwhile legislation. A more decentralized and morally sound welfare state is what I have in mind. Definitely not larger. The concentration of power in DC is a very serious concern.

I think the New Deal, in its welfare aspect, was much saner than the Great Society. I think that absent the lunacy introduced by the emancipatory revolt of the 1960s, conservatives would by now have a much more mild view of New Deal style "automatic stabilizers" to families thrown out of work or home by economic dislocations.

Also, I've always had a basically positive view of private sector unions. (Public sector are a different matter entirely.) Yes there has been plenty of corruption and thuggery, but the other side was hardly composed of angels either. Workers should be permitted, even encouraged (not coerced, as some Democrat legislation envisions) to organize.

Does that help

See...You identify Germany as Social-Democrat (given my limited knowledge, that's accurate), and you imply _some_ sort of defense of "right-wing" Social Democracy.

I did not intend such an implication. My apologies. The Germany remark was just an aside, which I probably should have left out.

(By the way, the aspect of German policy that I would actually propose for emulation, to some degree, has nothing to do with welfare or social democracy; it has to do with an emphasis on quality manufacturing and running trade surpluses.)

Yes, that does help. What it seems to amount to is actually a rolling back and decentralizing of the present American welfare state and government programs in a way that Democrats would see as "regressive," but not rolling back and decentralizing to the extent and in all the ways that really strongly libertarian-minded people would favor. About right?

Paul, I am sympathetic to having social constructs that provide some sort of "safety net" for those who (without their own doing) find themselves in need. When you mention New Deal approaches with relative favor, though, I am puzzled: wasn't it precisely the New Deal that took the matter into the Feds hands out of state and local hands, see: Social Security? Seems to me that a much more decentralized system would have been a law that requires all employers to offer a pension, mandate a minimum level of pension coverage, and OFFER a mechanism of pension plan investment that insulates a trust portfolio from some of the stings and arrows of variability (e.g. pension plan insurance).

(True, that approach would not have solved what to do about the THEN existing old people. But all we really did with the pay-as-you-go method is postpone the butcher's bill, pushing it off to about 2025 instead of 1935. Now THAT was really just to future generations.)

It was the New Deal, seems to me, that started Americans down the road of looking to the Feds as the cure-all to what ails Americans in their distress. How is that an improvement?

Lydia, there is no question in my mind that any welfare reform that I could propose, as a framework for legislation, would seem regressive to most Democrats. For example, it might contain a spiritual element of the kind that sends liberals bolting with the deer. But yeah, my ideal social democracy aims to support and uphold the native fellowship of communities, so it would emphatically compass a reduction of bureaucracy wherever that is feasible. And there are such communities in America, amongst middle class and poor alike.

When you mention New Deal approaches with relative favor

"Relative" being the key word, Tony.

How about these statements? -- I cannot favor Mike T's idea of dismantling the whole thing, but I think welfare reform was worthwhile legislation. A more decentralized and morally sound welfare state is what I have in mind. Definitely not larger. The concentration of power in DC is a very serious concern.

This is what I don't get about Al. He knows damn well that if we dismantled the current apparatus, which is almost completely federal, the "blue states" would immediately build their own replacements. They'd also be in a position to rightly demand a massive decrease in federal taxation so that they could raise their own taxes accordingly. For left-wing states like California, this would radically alter their budgetary prospects while leaving states like Arkansas up the creek without a paddle.

The fact is that the current system puts the liberal states in worse conditions than they'd be in if they had the freedom to be what they want to be, which only radical decentralization would allow. I live in Virginia and we'd certainly get hurt on the welfare side. I don't care. I actually agree with California liberals that they send too much of their money out of California to states like ours. California should have the freedom to build whatever welfare state it wants, on whatever terms it wants, without having its money sucked up to fund poorer states.

This doesn't mean that the federal government couldn't respond with some welfare when necessary, like it did with Katrina.

Timely, this. I'm currently reading Peter Stanlis's study of Robert Frost, The Poet as Philosopher and in the chapter on RF's politics he describes Frost as being extremely critical of FDR and the New Deal even though he was a lifelong Democrat. He felt, rightly IMO, that it pushed the country in a socialist direction. Still, he had great concern for the poor, and believed that some of the New Deal's programs were actually helpful, despite his opposition to the thing overall (he called it the New Deil, "de'il" being the Scots pronunciation of "devil").

Stanlis doesn't delineate which particular programs of the New Deal Frost thought successful, but it would be interesting to go back and look at the whole thing program by program, do some number crunching, and attempt to determine which aspects worked and which didn't. It is easy in hindsight for conservatives to damn the entire thing as a whole (as Tony says, it did push the nation towards the dependency mentality) but a more nuanced critique would probably be helpful.

One of the things that I think is getting lost in this discussion is the extent to which the US Constitution actually enables welfare and similar services for the poor at a national level.

The 10th amendment all but castrates the federal government here.

Really, if we ignore the Constitution or downplay it as "just a set of guidelines that can be prudentially ignored when 'necessary,'" we've taken a step toward blatant lawlessness in the name of "justice for the poor." How then can you argue for the civil rights of the poor when the politician who ignores the Constitution to give them relief at the national level wants to censor their speech or disarm them?

You can't without being a blatant hypocrite.

Mike T, I had thought of that very thing. It's very obvious that those of us who really would like to see the country take the 10th Amendment seriously (quaint and turning-back-the-clock as that seems) are _not_ going to be able to hold any brief for FDR. Indeed, he quite deliberately and rather arrogantly presided over the beginning of the gutting of the 10th amendment, and he did so because he believed that the things he wanted to do were so important that the constitutional limitations on federal power shouldn't be allowed to stand in their way.

"This is what I don't get about Al. He knows damn well that if we dismantled the current apparatus, which is almost completely federal, the "blue states" would immediately build their own replacements."

To which I point out, using this item from the Arizona Republic,

"Administrators say the cuts [in Medicaid], which take effect Friday, are necessary to deal with the state's budget crisis and an increase in the number of enrollees during the bad economy."

(In preface let me point out that nothing can help California as long as we have a two-thirds rule in order for the legislature to adopt a budget. Much of inland California is as reactionary as Idaho and Mississippi. This guarantees enough Republicans to bolix things up as the California Republican Party is as crazy as it is conservative.)

In a sense, Greece and Spain are to the Euro as the several states are to the dollar. Canada and Sweden were able to devaluate their currencies when they hit a rough patch and boost exports. Greece, Ireland, California, and Arizona don't have that option. We are tied to the fate of the nation.

As the quote shows, demand for safety net services and the ability of the several states to meet those demands are counter-cyclical. The national government is the only entity capable of acting counter-cyclically. This is intituitive - or should be.

News flash guys, we are one nation. As an American I have no desire to beggar Alabama to advantage California. Your cramped view of the Constitution as well as an apparent inability to recognize that we are no longer living in the Eighteenth century serves you poorly.

Mike, Lydia, Tont, Jeff, this is really simple. Social democracy isn't about welfare queens and keeping the white man down. Its about safety net programs - social insurance - that say that even the lowest paid worker in the meanest situation has a worth that transcends his education and paycheck.

The efficiency of insurance is a function of its base. Proposing that an entity of 300 million + souls, capable of all manner of good things as a result of those numbers, would be better off multiplying similiar programs over smaller entities is ideology at its most destructive.

I'm certainly not against safety nets, Al. But you guys have had allowed them too often to be turned into hammocks.

Conservatives, on the other hand, sometimes have spent so much time trying to cut down the hammocks that they've neglected repairing the real nets.

Rob, you're back in P. J. territory. You need to quantify these claims. What programs, for a start?

Much of inland California is as reactionary as Idaho and Mississippi. This guarantees enough Republicans to bolix things up as the California Republican Party is as crazy as it is conservative. [. . .] Your cramped view of the Constitution as well as an apparent inability to recognize that we are no longer living in the Eighteenth century serves you poorly.

Thank you for all that. How very generous. Why are we having a conversation again?

social democracy isn't about welfare queens and keeping the white man down. Its about safety net programs - social insurance - that say that even the lowest paid worker in the meanest situation has a worth that transcends his education and paycheck.

It doesn't become true because you say so. The unintended consequences of any major legislation are legitimately part of its legacy, no matter what the authors and supporters of it think it is exclusively "about."

The authors of the Great Society never imagined that their work, added to the extraordinary moral disruption of that age, would dissolve the family structure of blacks in the cities, but it happened all the same. And despite what they thought it was "about" they are blameworthy for an unspeakable impoverishment of those people. If your narrow materialist mind cannot see that depriving children of fathers who even acknowledge their existence is an impoverishment, why, that simply discloses again into what madness materialism has led even thoughtful men.

Oh, come on, Al. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Able, well-bodied people being allowed to stay on welfare for years. Methadone programs that pay people to stay on the drug. Teenage inner city girls who can't wait to turn 17 or 18 or whatever so they can get their first check. The Great Society has created a monster and you guys refuse to deal with it. As long as they show up at the ballot box on election day, that's all that matters. They pull the 'D' lever then go back to the hammocks, and you're happy.

al,

This is real simple. A safety net for the "lowest paid worker in the meanest situation" doesn't have to look anything like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. And telling us that a program would be more efficient if we did it at the federal level, despite the fact that it is illegal, is not very compelling. You want to change the Constitution? Then change the Constitution. You are the one who thinks ideologically (like a typical 20th Century Progressive -- you should check out the new issue of the Claremont Review of Books for more on how T.R., Wilson, and F.D.R. led us down our current road to ruin).

Anyway, why do I even get dragged into arguing with you -- and why do you bother with us? We both think of each other as crazy -- so what's the point?

"I'll try to spell this out one more time. "If the Republicans reign, they grow richer; if the Democrats reign, they grow both richer and their competition poorer." You see, if like the rest of us here, you acknowledge that "poorer" is a word that admits of more meanings than the purely pecuniary, then the demand for some aggregate tally of incomes or domestic product by class, or retained wealth by class, which shows the statistical truth of the claim, looks extraordinarily narrow-minded."

"Thus, for instance, one of the ways which which we grow poorer under Democrats is that we are robbed of our self-government on matters of morality."

Outsourced to Florence Reese,

"They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there,
You'll either be a union man or a thug for J. H. Blair.

Which side are you on? Which side are you on?
Which side are you on? Which side are you on? "

That's the first question that should be asked. Stripped of its theological boilerplate, what you propose is simply this:

Working men and women, with children, families who are in the lower quintiles should forgo, nay, acquiesce in the appropriation of tens of thousands of dollars of their income over time so that they might be able paint scarlet A's on the shirtfronts of unwed teenage mothers whilst grinding into the mud with their boots the faces of any gays so bold as to seek the equal protection of the law. Let's see, a better life for my kids and a retirement for me against meddling in the private lives of strangers - well, that a hard decision.

Just a thought. Perhaps some of you, at least, realize that much of conservatism has become about theft and thuggery, hence the wandering off into things like distributism and all the convoluted schemes that rear their heads around these parts. Consider that you might not be getting good information about the economy, social democracy/safety net programs, etc. It's never too late to come into the light.

BTW, no one who has actually seen the projections would claim that Social Security was unsustainable.

Stripped of its theological boilerplate

Okay, al, unless you are quite a bit less intelligent than I thought, you can see as well as I that you have just dodged the entire response I have made to your various truncated arguments. I have given your arguments a fair hearing and tried to answer your demands for specifics and the rest, but you refuse, in great fits of somewhat amusing self-righteousness, to do the same for me.

We can just trade song lyrics or you can actually compose a response to what I've written:

You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody

Al, one of your big problems is that you don't have any idea what you're talking about when it comes to conservatism per se. You mix it all up with something like Randianism and Social Darwinism and the GOP and Lord knows what else. I'd strongly recommend you get a copy of Kirk's The Conservative Mind and give it a good, thorough look-see.

"Thank you for all that. How very generous. Why are we having a conversation again?"

Coming from the guy who wanted to dehydrate the heretic SOB?

Rob, all you are giving us are partisan talking points. Go to the story Jeff linked to a bit upstream. Less then 1% was facially problematic. Take out the family emergencies, theft of cards and de minimus items and we are well under 1%. What you are in effect is demanding perfection or nothing which seems unrealistic. Quantification means numbers not talking points.

"I'd strongly recommend you get a copy of Kirk's The Conservative Mind and give it a good, thorough look-see."

Today's American Conservatism has nothing to do with Kirk. He is an outlier as you appear to be. I have no problem with that. My problem is that too many of you wind up taking reasonable ideas to the ballot box and vote for thugs.

Paul, that's my point exactly. What you want is unattainable. Much of your brand of conservatism is yearning for that which never really was. I'm not unsympathetic but in the world in which we actually live, the net effect of trying to achieve what you want will be what I describe.

The U.S. needs a non-ideological conservatism that understands that, like it or not, we are a developed nation with a modern economy. I went to the Front Porch folks and clicked at random. I got an article on Bhutan being the best. Now Bhutan is a fine place if you are a Bhutanese or an eco-tourist but its a boutique operation. Would the U.S. be better off if we all became Mahayana Buddhists? Quite likely but I'm not holding my breath.

Where we are right now is a serious as a heart attack. We don't have the luxury of re-fighting the 1960s.

Except that I favor laws to forbid the dehydrating of anyone, and made that remark in order to highlight the capricious power we are giving over to bureaucrats.

In any case, that's three or four dodges and refusals to reply in good faith. You made the demands that I come up with specifics, that I translate my ideas for your examination. That has been done and ignored. I'm going to now assume that the main, oft-reiterated points I set down in response to your queries will not be answered, either because they cannot be or because you just don't have the time and would rather play a heckler's game. Therefore, from here on out I reserve the right to redact or delete further instances of it.

My problem is that too many of you wind up taking reasonable ideas to the ballot box and vote for thugs.

Pot, kettle, black.

What you want is unattainable.

Says who?

Much of your brand of conservatism is yearning for that which never really was.

Much of your brand of liberalism is yearning for that which will never be. Conservatism is not necessarily a yearning for a golden age that may or may not have existed. Like progressivism, it tilts at an ideal. I make this point all the time in the debate about same sex marriage: It's not that in the past we once got marriage and family life "right"; it's that we didn't explicitly adopt institutions that worked counter to the ideal.

Where we are right now is a serious as a heart attack. We don't have the luxury of re-fighting the 1960s.

Back to Chesterton, via Sobran:

"It is rather shocking that we have to treat a normal nation as something exceptional, like a house on fire or a shipwreck."

Viva la revolucion.

Much of your brand of conservatism is yearning for that which never really was. I'm not unsympathetic but in the world in which we actually live, the net effect of trying to achieve what you want will be what I describe.

You are profoundly unsympathetic -- too unsympathetic even to read what people write.

It "never was" that families were intact, that sons and daughters could be raised by fathers and mothers together as a legal and spiritual unit? It never was that children grew up with cousins and uncles all around them, that communities stuck together, maintaining social capital endured even if little financial capital was available?

This is supposed to be persuasive?

Dear Al. Mr. Sobran asked an interesting question you might like to take a shot at answering.

In what kind of society would you want to preserve the social order? Is there a contemporary or past civilization that comes close to your ideal?

"Rob, all you are giving us are partisan talking points"

Dude, I told you. I taught in an inner city school for 8 years and lived a stone's throw from the 'hood for 5. 'Ve seen it w' m' own een.

"Today's American Conservatism has nothing to do with Kirk. He is an outlier as you appear to be."

Exactly my point! Stop judging all conservatism throughout the space/time continuum by only today's most visible variety! Do you judge all cinema by this year's Oscar winners?

"I got an article on Bhutan being the best. Now Bhutan is a fine place..."

Your satire detector needs new batteries, apparently.

Relevant to the discussion about custodial rights... http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=213149

CPS agencies are not exactly known for their prudence...

"It "never was" that families were intact, that sons and daughters could be raised by fathers and mothers together as a legal and spiritual unit?

Yes, and for the most part that is still what's happening. Financial pressures are destructive of family life. We are wealthy enough to ensure a decent life, in material terms, for everyone who works. Folks need to be individually responsible, for the most part, for their internal lives.

"It never was that children grew up with cousins and uncles all around them, that communities stuck together, maintaining social capital endured even if little financial capital was available?"

Yes and no. I know a few families that grew up in such an environment. It worked - sort of - for a few years but is simply unsustainable and isn't always all that happy. I have a detailed record of several branches of my family in this country dating back to 1732. The pattern you are suggesting is a snapshot for most folks. If one starts out in Philadelphia and less then one hundred years later there are families in Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio (not to mention Oregon a bit later and the cousin who went missing in Texas in the 1840s) lots of relatives are going to be left behind on a regular basis.

Like Bhutan, the situation you describe is a boutique sort of thing. It's organic; it happens when it happens and when it works, that's great but it can neither be arbitrarily created nor sustained by force of will and it doesn't really fit the nation we've become. We are neo-local and highly mobile and have been for a long time.

"In any case, that's three or four dodges and refusals to reply in good faith. You made the demands that I come up with specifics, that I translate my ideas for your examination."

Apologies if I missed something but I'm on the wonky, liberal left. I read legislation and policy papers for fun. I don't resonate to generalities. If one favors unions and truggers, how goes one justify supporting conservatism in the U. S. of A. ? If, as seems the case, a devotion to public morality trumps all and that requires fellow traveling with a conservatism that has always and will always favor privilege and the few, then what's the point of the rest?

A Kendallian analysis will never convince me that my eyes are lying - the Senate IS dysfunctional. Suggesting that working people should be content to trade real income for a nebulous "public morality" is offensive. Read what you wrote and explain how that wouldn't, in the context of what we actually have, be the net result.

I'm always concerned with how one gets from here to there. You are a distributist. How does one with your views (this applies to the Kirkites also) get to your desired ends with this American conservatism and this Republican Party?

You like the triggers but did your Congressman support extending unemployment benefits and help to localities? It would be great for the economy and localities (as well as those forced onto medicaid by the recession) for the Feds to take over all Medicaid funding during economic downturns. How about that? Would the guys you voted to send to the Congress support that?

You mentioned qualms about QE, which is specific. We are sort of in uncharted territory here. I note that the inflation spread has widened on anticipation of more QE which is good but we are a trillion short and a year late. Re-appointing BB to the Fed was a huge mistake on Obama's part. We really need another stimulus which is impossible

BTW, Eichengreen has an interesting article out,

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/06/financial_shock_and_awe?page=0,1

You favor an infrastructure bank, I asked you once before and I will ask you again, how do we get that with the current American Conservatism and the present Republican Party?

Some of the comments in this thread are really mind blowing so again apologies for any negligence on my part. Feel free to reference anything I've missed.

Oh, and yes homelessness is one of those things best handled at the local level and faith based entities are good vehicles and should be funded accordingly.

"Exactly my point! Stop judging all conservatism throughout the space/time continuum by only today's most visible variety! Do you judge all cinema by this year's Oscar winners?"

No, but the analogy is totally off point. American conservatism as a "movement" and political force has never been about anything other than favoring the few at the expense of the many. Aldrich to Melon to Cheney nothing has changed (except that the former two at least were corrupt plurocrats and not also war criminals).

On the other hand there are, from time to time, good films.

Everyone i've known who taught inner city found it stressful and frustrating but that has nothing to do with social insurance.

"In what kind of society would you want to preserve the social order? Is there a contemporary or past civilization that comes close to your ideal?"

Cultures are largely superstructure and evolve to fit changes in the modes of production (couldn't resist). Anyway, agriculture allowed social parasites to thrive. it has been a long march back to the relatively egalitarian social environment in which we evolved.

Al. Everyone can read that you did not answer the question.

I won't waste my time on you again.

I thought I did. Oh well, no need to be touchy now.

Social orders are going to evolve and respond to changing circumstances. Techno-economic and techno-environmental factors are going to be prime movers in this evolution. Change is inevitable. A society that is structured to accept change will persist. Others deserve what happens. I'm more or less a social libertarian so this isn't the burning issue with moi as it seems to be with some of you all.

For your second question I went back to our hunter-gatherer past. Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution have great for a few generations; for most of the folks in most of the societies since ~10,000 BCE it was a sucky deal. Would anyone really want to be a serf?

Sorry, Al, but I give up. You are simply not listening, neither to me nor to practically anyone else here. You may not "resonate to generalities" (although you certainly are able to come up with some broad, sweeping ones of your own) but you don't resonate to nuance either. You constantly revert to fallacious either/or's and refuse to admit gray areas in many of these matters. I'm done wasting my time.

Gosh Rob, sorry you've given up but I don't blame you. You assert Kirk and I point out that discussing an outlier who is and always will be irrelevant to American conservatism as a political force is sort of pointless and your response is anger instead of letting us all in on why he is relevant.

Maximos' post was about American conservatism and the broader topic of Social Democracy. The conversation kept veering to race and the inner city. You may have taught in inner city schools and lived close for years but I've likely known inner-city teachers since before you were born and lived in and near the "hood" for decades (my current rural idyll is a reward). All of that is irrelevant, of course, as the very real problems of the inner-city have nothing to do with the far broader topic of social democracy. You want nuance; I point out a category error and your only response is, again, anger.

It is suggested that the many should consider some unspecified thing called "public morality" just compensation for their looted incomes. I point out the truly appalling nature of that notion and we have silence. In the end, all we had was a quite general invocation of American Exceptionalism followed by repeated pleadings for a generalized denunciation of European social democracy without even a nod towards Konrad Adenauer and the Christian Democrats. Lots of nuance there.

You all have a right to support Social Darwinism while distracting yourselves with Kirk and Chesterton but if it upsets you have it pointed out that that is what you are doing, well, a little reflection might be in order.


al says,

"Consider that you might not be getting good information about the economy, social democracy/safety net programs, etc. It's never too late to come into the light."

and

"I'm on the wonky, liberal left. I read legislation and policy papers for fun. I don't resonate to generalities."

But then he says stuff like this:

"BTW, no one who has actually seen the projections would claim that Social Security was unsustainable."

and

"Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution have great for a few generations; for most of the folks in most of the societies since ~10,000 BCE it was a sucky deal. Would anyone really want to be a serf?"

With regard to the second confused and ridiculous statement, I suggest al pick up a copy of Greg Clark's A Farewell to Alms (hint to al -- agriculture and the industrial revolution and two separate and distinct phenomenon).

With regard to the first confused and ridiculous statement, I suggest you read this 'wonky' blog post for fun and then get back to us with your thoughts:

http://keithhennessey.com/2010/08/05/billy-social-security/

wow. just spent a couple of hours of my life reading through this whole thread.

All I can say is that Maximos and I seem to be living on different planets.

On planet Maximos, "social democracy" has never really been tried, and never had anything much to do with the present-day state of Europe.

On planet Maximos, the good old U. S. of A. is not, itself, the most lavish "social democracy" of all time. There's no serious subsidization of unwed motherhood, to be seen, here - and we haven't been breaking historical records for per-capita public spending on "healthcare," long before the advent of "Obamacare."

On planet Maximos, the U.S.A. today is some sort of insufficiently-fettered Randian/Hayekian capitalist playground where Hank Reardon & Francisco d'Anconia stomp all over the faces of the proles, forever.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, on planet Steve, the U.S.A. today is a pretty typical modern welfare state, differing only very slightly, here and there, from European models, and very unlikely to depart from those models, in any very interesting way, short of some sort of surprising event that none of us can foresee.

Apologies if I missed something but I'm on the wonky, liberal left. I read legislation and policy papers for fun. I don't resonate to generalities.

What does it say about the Willy Wonka's Liberal Left when its star professor can't manage the courtesy of reading responses to questions he repeatedly posed?

It is suggested that the many should consider some unspecified thing called "public morality" just compensation for their looted incomes. I point out the truly appalling nature of that notion and we have silence.

Aside from the three or four comments I posted on that very subject.

But it's all in a neat little phrase, somewhere upthread -- "Stripped of its theological boilerplate": by this presupposition you get to conveniently disregard all the matters that most concern us and that as a fact are at the heart of our country's crisis. Everything is always a great deal easier to analyze when man is reduced to a mere creature of appetites, which can be mechanistically met by good policies, thus achieving happiness. Things are in the saddle. It becomes a world perfectly fit for a wonk.

You all have a right to support Social Darwinism while distracting yourselves with Kirk and Chesterton but if it upsets you have it pointed out that that is what you are doing, well, a little reflection might be in order.

I suppose it's more amusing than upsetting, but there is some real bewilderment in this spectacle of a smart man with a lot of experience being basically unable to read with care.

Jeff, I read the article and once again I would point out that it is wise to not take seriously anyone who attempts to define critical policy options in the economy of a G-7 nation that controls its own currency by drawing analogies with folks like us sitting around the kitchen table.

The shortfall for SS, at around 1.5% of GDP - similar to the recent increase in defense spending, is manageable. We should also keep in mind that baby boomers accepted a payroll tax increase. Your team decided to use a significant part of that increase in tax cuts for the wealthy, war, and unfunded entitlements. The bill is coming due.

" Since 1983, the money from all payroll taxpayers has been building up the Social Security surplus, swelling the trust fund. What's happened to the money? It's been borrowed by the federal government and spent on federal programs — housing, stimulus, war and a big income tax cut for the richest Americans, enacted under President George W. Bush in 2001. In other words, money from the taxpayers at the lower end of the income scale has been spent to help out those at the higher end. That transfer — that loan, to characterize it accurately — is represented by the Treasury bonds held by the trust fund."

"The interest on those bonds, and the eventual redemption of the principal, should have to be paid for by income taxpayers, who reaped the direct benefits from borrowing the money. So all the whining you hear about how redeeming the trust fund will require a tax hike we can't afford is simply the sound of wealthy taxpayers trying to skip out on a bill about to come due. The next time someone tells you the trust fund is full of worthless IOUs, try to guess what tax bracket he's in. ..."

"The trust fund may not last forever, but reports of its demise are certainly premature. The trustees say it will be drawn down to zero in 2037, at which point the program will only have enough money coming in from taxes to pay 78% of the benefits... So sometime in the next quarter-century — but by no means right now — does anything have to be fixed...?"

"That 2037 deadline ... is a moving target. It's based on long-term projections, which become more uncertain the further out you look. ... It has held steady at 2037 for two years despite the downturn, but that's still better than the projection in 1998, which was for exhaustion in 2032."

Medicare is a real problem but one that is a subset of health care in general.

http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Spending-vs-GDP.jpg

Your side, as a review of previous posts and comments on this blog will demonstrate, has hardly acquitted itself with honor in this matter. Where was your concern with Medicare when attempts to cut it were demagogued? Which gets us to this,

"On planet Maximos, the good old U. S. of A. is not, itself, the most lavish "social democracy" of all time. There's no serious subsidization of unwed motherhood, to be seen, here - and we haven't been breaking historical records for per-capita public spending on "healthcare," long before the advent of "Obamacare."

Ignore for now the return to the welfare queen and consider the rest of the statement. Go to the graph I referenced and ponder just what Steve's comment has to do with planet anywhere. The growth in public and private health care spending is a function of our fractured, totally irrational system. We aren't going to get a handle on the growth in health care spending until we do what every other industrialized nation has done and create a national system. HCR is a start and you all's contribution has largely been to pass on lies about the effort (before the sputtering starts, go back the read the death panel and mandate nonsense that was on here).

I realize that agriculture and the IR were separate. So what? Explain how agriculture wasn't a bad deal for the bulk of humanity until recently. Agriculture allowed for more people to exist in an exploited and degraded state relative to our hunter gatherer ancestors. IR 1.0 with its enclosures, child labor, etc. was not fun. Until relatively recently it has not been good to not be the king.

"What does it say about the Willy Wonka's Liberal Left when its star professor can't manage the courtesy of reading responses to questions he repeatedly posed?"

All right, all right. I'm backtracking and will seek things out.

I also put up a whole new post, with the matter restated in another way.

If "fiscal conservatives" spent as much time complaining about corporate welfare as social programs, I'd take them more seriously.

Post a comment


Bold Italic Underline Quote

Note: In order to limit duplicate comments, please submit a comment only once. A comment may take a few minutes to appear beneath the article.

Although this site does not actively hold comments for moderation, some comments are automatically held by the blog system. For best results, limit the number of links (including links in your signature line to your own website) to under 3 per comment as all comments with a large number of links will be automatically held. If your comment is held for any reason, please be patient and an author or administrator will approve it. Do not resubmit the same comment as subsequent submissions of the same comment will be held as well.