Dangerous Dan Thoughts and musings on the world

The Democrats’ current fixation with health care reform and the lengths to which they’ll go in order to obtain it are impressive while utterly wrong and politically suicidal. I also find their behavior, especially their determination to use reconciliation, profoundly undemocratic. The blowback from the maneuver, if used, will be immense. A good number of Democratic representatives and senators will likely lose their seats in the this year’s midterm elections. And they know this will be the case if they keep pushing the issue and in the way they’re pushing it because either or both have become so immensely unpopular with their constituents. But they keep going. We must then ask why they would be so willing to sacrifice themselves, their political capital, and possibly even their party’s Congressional majorities? Obama, Pelosi, and Reid have been framing the reform as a necessary good for which there is some kind of moral imperative. In the face of Democratic Congressional losses, they have advocated that their legislators must have the courage to pass reform even if it means sacrificing themselves and their party’s dominance.

What kind of courage is this? It’s described as some kind of personal courage to risk self-sacrifice. It’s put in terms of consequences to the person and the party. In reality, however, the courage in question is the courage to defy the will of the people. Obama has said in the past that if constituents don’t like their legislators’ decisions, they can fix that at the next election, and that’s certainly true. This kind of vote only fixes a problem that already exists, though. It’s a corrective measure, not a preventative one. Voting, however, is also meant to be preventative. If you are an elected representative and you discover it’s unlikely you will win reelection, then that is an indication your constituents have a problem with you and you have an opportunity to make corrections. If you go against their will and what they desire, then you’re not acting as a representative and you will accordingly be replaced with someone who will behave and vote in line with the constituents’ wills. What is galling, then, is that many of the elected so-called representatives in Congress would continue to pursue health care reform and use certain tactics even though it means they lose reelection since this likely loss indicates that the representative is defying the will of the people.

Certainly, a representative may not perfectly match up with his constituents’ desires on all issues and votes and many voters may not particularly care about many issues. A politician can also tack in different directions, against the constituents’ will in some cases while with it in others and the latter often enough to preserve their favor. In this case, however, this single issue of health care reform is enough to determine voters’ intent at the next election such that nearly no amount of currying their favor will be sufficient to save the politicians’ skins this November. This means their will on this issue is particularly strong and deserves their representatives’ deference.

So the representatives who are at great risk are not being representative at all. I suppose someone could claim they are demonstrating leadership, another position Obama has taken. Good leaders must occasionally defy their followers in order to do what is right, best, or simply necessary (and Obama would likely claim all three are in effect for his reform). But this doesn’t wash. First, leaders must have followers and the people have increasingly shown their unwillingness to follow in this matter. If leaders are going to be effective, they must be able to communicate the rightness, superiority, and necessity of their chosen course of action such that the followers will truly follow. Given that Obama and the Democrats have had a year to accomplish this and have been unsuccessful indicates not that the message has been poorly communicated as Obama claims (indeed, how he is supposed to be both a gifted rhetorician and great communicator and also a man unable to sway majorities to his side after a year of trying is unknown). Instead, it indicates that the message itself and its content have been rejected. Finally, in this leader-follower relationship, the leaders have no authority in their own right. Their right to govern is not absolute, is not handed down from above, nor are they installed in a position of managerial authority over others. It comes from the consent of the governed themselves. This means the leadership abilities of the leaders is stunted. They are not free to defy the will of the people to do what they judge what is right, best, or necessary, especially when it comes to long-term, well considered legislation (as opposed to, say, responses to crises when there is no time to determine the will or passions are inflamed). The majority opposition in public opinion to the Democrats’ reform has been constant for months and any changes only see it grow larger. Indeed, the more people learn about the plan, the less they like it. Our leaders can try to sway public opinion, and in this they have clearly failed. The governed have determined that the proposed reform is not right, best, or necessary and, much like the politicians cannot continue to be representatives when they do not representative the will of their constituents, they cannot be leaders when they pointedly defy those who provide them with the right to lead.

What are we then left with? If the Democratic majorities continue to push their reform in defiance of the people, then they act as elitist paternalistic tyrants who seek not to follow the people’s will, but who seek to force the people into compliance with their will.

And elitist paternalism it is, which disgusts me. Some people need the guidance of those who necessarily know better than them. Moreover, the knowledge, wisdom, morals, and judgment of these people are so deficient that they can easily and almost constantly cause both themselves and others harm without the proper guidance of others. Because these people lack even the basic abilities to properly care for their daily physical well-being or direct their efforts towards what should be their rational self-interest, they often require the attentions and ministrations of their superiors who will provide for them and direct them and they are as a result quite dependent on their superiors. These people exist. These people are called children.

I, however, like most other citizens of our good republic, am not a child. I am an adult. As such, I possess sufficient knowledge, wisdom, morals, and judgment to operate and preserve myself and others. I can care for myself and my own dependents, can direct my efforts, judge what is in my self-interest, set goals, etc. And where I do not have or cannot do these things, it is at least within reach of my abilities and only I bear the blame for their absence or for accepting the risk of their absence. I need not have others determine for me what I will do as would a parent to a child. I need not have my options restricted, my behavior manipulated, or my hand forced in order that I may do what others have determined it is my best interest to do. Indeed, it is in no other human’s purview to decide what is best for me. Yet this is what paternalism does and worse.

By restricting my options and funneling me down into preset paternalistic notions of what I should do and what I should want, not only is my liberty restricted, but so is my ability to pursue what I consider to be happiness. If I am going to be treated like a child by those who have decided they are my and others’ paternalistic superiors, then I am no longer in a position to determine what should be happiness. Indeed, this is one of the many threats of all the paternalist favors granted by governments. The beneficiaries of the favors are handed a vision of what others decide should be best for them and the favors push them into accepting that vision instead of determining their own happiness. What they want and what makes them happy were determined not by them but by someone else. Those who are compelled to pay for the favors are also restricted since with fewer funds, they have a lessened ability to pursue what makes them happy and are slowly forced to conform to what the paternalistic few determine.

And still it get worse. Paternalism creates a terrible dependency. Children are necessarily dependent on others. Adults, however, are made to be dependent. Among the abuses heaped upon slaves is that they become dependent on their oppressors. They cannot be independent as they are dependent upon the owner for their food, housing, place in society, and for their very survival. Paternalism fares no better. It throws chains on people, only instead of being done with a fist, it’s done with a smile. The newly enslaved are told it’s for their own good and that they need the guidance of others in order to succeed. And the dependent believe them. More damage surely was done by the hard-fisted slave owners of the antebellum South, but the damage wrought by smiling liberals from the 60’s on can’t be too far behind. Only the latter is in some ways more insidious. When somebody abuses and oppresses you, openly restricts your freedom, and creates an obvious and personal dependency even though all the while they may say it’s for your own good and that you need the guidance… it’s easy to know the enemy. But when somebody keeps you down through the myriad machinations of society and government, covertly restricts your freedoms through your own acceptance of its restrictions and creates an anonymous dependency to an anonymous system while being smiled at and being told it’s for your own good and that you need the guidance, and you believe them… the enemy is far less obvious.

Minorities and the poor have suffered most from this smiling paternalism through untold measures that generate dependency on the government and on those who grant the favors, though they’re not alone and its scope is ever expanding. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, minimum wage, affirmative action, the projects and other government housing, food stamps, now health care and any number of other programs which create not independence, but dependence and all by the paternalistic few who have determined what’s best for others. And like some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, the recipients think that’s true, no matter what damage they face, no matter what stagnation they suffer, no matter how they may fail to advance or better their conditions over not just years, but decades. The paternal few implicitly ensure them through word and deed that the unfortunate just aren’t quite qualified enough to achieve on their own or direct themselves. They need the help and guidance of the paternal few. They’ll call it a hand up. The paternalistic few will smile and will grasp hands with the unfortunate many and both sides will tug slightly while never pulling. Instead of pulling them up, they are merely suspended. But don’t worry. A new program will always make sure they get pulled up and always tomorrow.

And still it gets worse. The necessary paternalism set over children has a particular goal, namely its own destruction. The dependency of children is supposed to be temporary and parents raise their children and direct them in such a way that they will one day be sufficiently able to be independent of the parents’ direction, that their paternalism will no longer be necessary. The paternalism over adults, however, seeks not its own destruction, but its own perpetuation. Rather than taking children and turning them into adults, it takes adults and turns them into children. It infantilizes them and makes them more dependent, not less. And, tragically, the more dependent they become where they allow others to make their important decisions and to direct their lives, the less able they are to direct their own lives and make important decisions. Unlike with children where paternalism builds up abilities, the paternalism over adults breaks them down. In the process, the paternalism becomes self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating. In saying that people require the well-intentioned guidance of their so-called superiors and then imposing it, it creates people who then slowly begin to actually require it and then who continue to need it since their ability to operate without it has been destroyed. And so the paternalism will continue to be offered and only enslave more people and more generations.

And still it gets worse. The dependent will want more of it and even begin to demand it as they thrust out their hands for the chains. And more people who did not previously benefit will want to be included as well. Because there is a strange freeing aspect in not having to worry about things or having to make the big decisions. Indeed, many liberals argue for government paternalism on the grounds that its positive action is necessary for people to truly achieve their potential, possible freedom, potential, fulfillment, etc. If people are free from want, they are free to do more with their lives. But this freedom of being protected from decisions, from self-determination, from hardship, from effort, from risk, from responsibility, from blame, from duty, from obligation is not the freedom of men and women, it is the freedom of boys and girls; of children. The inherent freedom of humans is the freedom to choose for oneself without undue restriction or guidance resulting from compulsion. It’s to make decisions and choices. It’s not the freedom to achieve, it’s the freedom to try to achieve while sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing.

I suppose I could be accused of being paternalistic myself in that I seem to be arguing that I know what’s best for others. But I advocate that’s what’s best for anyone is that they have the freedom to decide what’s best for themselves. I seek not to guide anyone but to let them guide themselves; not to treat them like children, but to treat them like adults.

We need to strip away the manifestations of paternalism, not add more.

Notes (possibly unrelated):
– I’m advocating from a position of natural rights and negative rights. That means your freedoms still aren’t unlimited, e.g. you’re not free to assault and murder. You’re not free to do things, even those that make you happy, that fail to fulfill others’ negative rights.

– I don’t know that there’s a hierarchy of freedoms necessarily, but perhaps at least those of differing levels of importance. Many on the left, for example, are obsessed with expanding sexual freedoms. While perhaps unwise, I’m not against this in and of itself, especially when it entails expanding legal freedoms, i.e. less paternalism on the part of government in determining how people should behave. But far less import is often given to other freedoms and/or they are restricted. Campus speech codes, fairness doctrine, pushing back religion in public entities, guns, etc. All these other freedoms, however, are uniquely human while sexual freedoms are not. Nearly all animals engage in sex. Only humans, though, engage in speech, religion, press, freedom to assemble, et al. In other words, the freedom the left pushes most is bestial while they are willing to sacrifice human freedoms. While I’d prefer to push forward all freedoms, if I have to prioritize them, I’ll go for human freedoms over bestial ones and I will oppose those who try for the reverse.

Ah, my poor besotted and neglected blog.  Lots to do and not much time for this one.  But I’ll post when I can.

Periodically, proposals are raised for some kind of international taxes that are supposed to be justified by threats to the environment and by mythical global warming concerns.  Several years ago, for example, ideas were floated for imposing special taxes on international flights, the revenue of which would go to saving nature.  The very latest idea is levying a tax on oil, which will raise $740 billion that will go to… yes… saving nature.  In tune with the current fetishizing of FDR, it’s being called a Green New Deal.

So, the problems:  This is to be done somehow through the UN.  The article was skimpy on details for just how this tax is to be imposed, collected, and under whose authority, but I take it it’s through the UN.  The United Nations is not a taxing authority and it has neither the legal authority to do so nor the political justification.  A sovereign people would be fools to allow a tax to be put on them by some extralegal entity over which they have no control.  My political representation in the UN is tangential at best and the bulk of the members and the bulk of bureaucracy do not have my nation’s interests at heart.  Any kind of international tax like this sets a precedent by which the UN can slowly exert greater powers while not being answerable to any population.  It would be the creation of a sovereign without even the benefit of a social contract.  What’s galling – and frightening – is that there exist people who see no problems with such plans and actually think them good.  Throw into this mix the UN’s proficiency at corruption, e.g. Oil for Food, and there’s no telling where or in whose pockets much of this money would wind up being depositied.

As if these international technocrats weren’t bad enough, we have our own in the U.S.  NASA’s James Hansen recently complained that the democratic process just isn’t working for him.

The democratic process doesn’t quite seem to be working.  … The first action that people should take is to use the democratic process. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.  The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I’m not surprised that people are getting frustrated. I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we’re running out of time.

Absolutely amazing.  The implication here, even if Hansen is coy about drawing it out, is that sticking to democracy is likely to doom the world.  Presumably, the solution is ditching democracy, at least temporarily, in order to fix the environment (like China and its environmental successes, I suppose).  This illustrates the threat of crises that so many don’t want to waste in order to further their own agendas.  The White House wants to exploit the economic crisis to institute sweeping liberal policies and many of the green lobbies are determined to exploit a non-existent crisis in order to increase their own power and those of fellow technocrats.  The rest of us will be forced to be free and to go along with what our more intelligent superiors dictate.  And our liberties will be sacrificed in the process.

Our liberties are always under constant threat from someone or some group or another.  I’ve been somewhat surprised at the number of threats that have been jumping recently and I’m near quaking at the possibilities that any of them could succeed.  I’ll go down the list in the subsequent posts.

I’ve finally started reading Atlas Shrugged.  It’s been on my reading list for one or two years now, but, with all the Ayn Rand talk recently, I decided to get to it.  I’m only 200 pages in, which leaves me 800 more to go.  I find the prose to be a little overbaked at times, and the book is probably longer than it needs to be.  The characters are also odd and anything to do with sexuality is downright… strange – as if it’s begging for Freudian analysis.  But all of that doesn’t bother me much.  Though I’m not to it yet, I know the general idea of what the society’s producers wind up doing and who John Galt is supposed to be.  This has given rise to the going Galt call among many in our current economic and political climate, advising people to scale back and contribute as little as possible to a looting society.

Wandering around the blogosphere, I’ve seen interesting comments about Rand and going Galt.  Many criticize her writing and characters or call her books the equivalent of pulp sci-fi.  They mean this last one derogatorily, but I don’t see the problem with it.  Science fiction isn’t meant to be real or even necessarily realistic; it’s an often allegorical story exploring social issues.  I certainly don’t think there’s going to be a free-wheeling Captain Kirk out exploring the galaxy someday who has to broker a peace between two alien races whose only difference is which half of their bodies is white and which is black.  But that wasn’t the frickin’ point now, was it?  The point was the racial issue the story was addressing.  Similarly, it’s seems silly to dismiss all of Rand’s points just because the characters are too ubermenschish or unrealistic or some such or that what the producers do wouldn’t really happen.  Well, that’s not the frickin’ point now, is it?  She’s using a story to illustrate an overall point, philosophy, and argument.  That requires intellectual honesty in taking her position at its strongest and examining that.

As for the going Galt, many criticize it that it will make no difference and trolls love to dare people to actually go Galt and see what it does for them or the effect it will have on society.  That dare is usually accompanied with some kind of insult, epithet, or abbreviations standing in for laughter.  But I don’t think the criticism being offered here is fair either.  Below is what I wrote about the topic for the comment section of this Denver Post article.  If you look at the comments (the later comments), you can see the back and forth between me and several other people.  I eventually stopped replying because I had other things to do and it seemed to get to the point where nothing new was going to be added by either side, which makes the debate tiresomely repetitive.  Though I do hate leaving a debate like that because it gives the appearance of surrender, something I don’t do lightly (or much at all).

Anyway, the comment:

I keep seeing a rather curious misunderstanding of the going Galt phenomenon. While the book posits it as captains and titans of industry punishing the looter society by removing from it their own productivity, the real life version is more subtle. It’s not that people will purposely remove themselves or drastically scale back in order to punish “looters.” They will merely scale back in smaller ways due to simple incentives. If there is no incentive to excel or produce more, then why should anyone do so? If there is actually a disincentive to produce more and if success even seems to be punished, then why excel?

Let’s say a dentist makes $300,000 a year, but realizes that after federal, state, local, and social security taxes, he’ll get to keep only 40-50% of the last $50K he makes. He’s likely to reason it’s better to scale back his business. He’ll have more time to himself, work less, but not lose much financially if he cuts back to, say, $250-275K. Sure, he may miss out on $20-$25K, but he’ll figure that’s better than putting in $50K worth of work and still lose as much. So he’ll scale back. But by doing so, he’ll hire fewer employees, cut back on hours for current employees (or even lay off a few), contribute less in taxes, and provide less of a service to his community. He’s not consciously going Galt and he may not even care about politics at all. He’s merely pursuing his own financial interests, which are affected by society’s incentive structure.

Now imagine many, many more people like this dentist doing the same thing with all sorts of producers and employers merely following financial self-interest and scaling back. This is the going Galt problem that exists and the effects will cascade throughout the economy and government. People need to have an incentive to work harder and produce more and that incentive is that doing so will earn them more money. Take that away and their behavior will change.

In the Communist countries, it was “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,” only because the government forced them to work certain jobs. Here, it will simply be, “We work less because we can’t get paid more.”

For whatever reason, I wandered onto the site for the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, aka North Korea.  I started reading the biography for Kim Jong Il and it’s… interesting.  Some excerpts:

From his early years Comrade Kim Jong Il possessed the power of keen observation, the power of clear analysis and extraordinary perspicacity with regard to things and phenomena.  he had a faculty for creative thinking, regarding every problem with an innovative eye.

Courageous and ambitious, Comrade Kim John Il did everything in a big way; he had a strong and daring character which enabled him to carry any difficult task to completion with his own efforts, once he started it.

Possessed of warm human love and broadmindedness, he was always generous, unceremonius and warm-hearted among people.

His unusual natural disposition was nurtured, so developing the traits and quality of a future revolutionary and leader, thanks to the exceptional education he received from his parents.

It then talks about his education, which was wide and “profound.”  Most of it deals with how he studied everything possible and how he advanced the party and the revolution.  I did like this part:

During his practice at the Pyongyang Textile machinery Factory he aroused the workers of the factory to launch a movement for  model machines in maintenance and operation, personally handling lathe No. 26.  This movement became the inception of the “model machine movement of loyalty for emulating lathe No. 26”, which is now conducted as a mass movement.

“Dude, what movement are you part of?”   “The model machine movement of loyalty for emulating lathe No. 26.  It’s totally sweet.”

He’s a great author too:

In his treatise On Reexamining the Question of the Unification of the Three Kingdoms, Comrade Kim John Il comprehensively analysed and criticised the “Theory of the Unification of the Three Kingdoms by Silla”, and the “Theory of Sila’s Orthodoxy”, and put forward his view on the need of newly systematizing from a Juche-orientated stand the Korean history which had been distorted by flunkey historians.  As it turned out, this was a great scientific discovery.

I didn’t bother reading beyond that.  I can only take so much comedy and so many lies at once.

Like the title says.

As noted a couple of days ago, the federal bailout is becoming a ridiculous satire as all sorts of companies jockey for federal money.  The intent of the bailout was to shore up the major banks and investment firms that were hit hard by the sub-prime crisis.  Not surprisingly, any companies that can claim a business slowdown that was somewhat, kind sorta, tangentially, barely related to the overall economic problems resulting from the subprime crisis are also making a play for bailouts.

The congressional bailout law gave the Treasury broad authority to decide how to spend the $700 billion. Under the terms of the $250 billion capital purchase program announced last month, cash infusions are available to “qualifying U.S. banks, savings associations, and certain bank and savings and loan holding companies, engaged only in financial activities.”

That definition has grown to include private banks and insurers like Allstate and MetLife, which own savings and loans. It may also encompass industrial lenders like GE Capital and GMAC, the financing arm of General Motors, provided they win approval to reclassify themselves as a bank or savings and loan holding company.

American Express is officially requesting $3.5 billion.  Its business is slowing down generally, but it’s also having trouble selling its securitized credit card debt.

GM, of course, still wants some, but as CNBC says:

Many economists are against the idea, saying an auto maker bailout would open the door to a taxpayer rescue of virtually any major company with cash problems.

“Where do you stop?” says Bill Isaac, former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp and now managing director at the LECG global consulting firm in Vienna, Va. “Circuit City’s going down. Do we help them? What do you do if Starbucks gets in trouble? Do you help them?”

The notion of bailing out Starbucks seems pretty absurd, but it’s not that far away:

As the automakers have pushed for U.S. government help, the trade groups for car dealerships and even boat dealerships are pressing their own cases. They argue that showrooms are feeling a squeeze between higher borrowing costs to finance their inventory and slowing consumer sales to move it out the door.

“We have been encouraged by reports that Secretary Paulson is looking to broaden the program,” said Mathew Dunn, head of government relations for the National Marine Manufacturers Association.

On Friday, the automobile dealers sent Paulson a letter urging him to keep them in mind.

“A well-capitalized, financially sound dealer network is essential to the success of every automobile manufacturer,” wrote Annette Sykora, a car dealer in Slaton, Texas, and the chairwoman of the National Automobile Dealers Association. “Any government intervention should include provisions to preserve the viability of dealers.”

Ah, yes, we better keep those boat dealers’ showrooms stocked with boats.  I recall that being somewhere in the Constitution’s second article.  You even have people going after contracts that are indirectly related to the bailout:

The Treasury Department is under siege by an army of hired guns for banks, savings and loan associations and insurers — as well as for improbable candidates like a Hispanic business group representing plumbing and home-heating specialists. That last group wants the Treasury to hire its members as contractors to take care of houses that the government may end up owning through buying distressed mortgages.

This is becoming a farce and will do long term damage to the economy and the free market, while merely possibly avoiding short term problems.  As I said, once it was made permissible for the government to start using federal funds to bail out private companies, there was no longer any good reason for many companies not to be bailed out.  All they have to do is convince the right people.  The toothpaste is out of the tube and it goin’ back in.  Way to screw things up Congress.