The View From 1776

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Only liberal-progressives could feel justified in mobilizing a media campaign to incite further rioting, believing that “caring” in the abstract for “victims of oppression” trumps maintenance of law and order for the benefit of all citizens, black and white. 

Only liberal-progressives could ignore the rights of innocent residents whose property was vandalized in Ferguson and elsewhere; after all, in socialist ideology, capitalism and property ownership are evils that must be controlled or eliminated by collectivized government in the name of social justice. 

Only liberal-progressives could attribute to racism the anger of the majority of Americans when they see gangs of people in the nighttime streets looting and burning businesses of people who had nothing whatever to do with the Ferguson incident. 

Only liberal-progressives could dismiss legitimate grievances of citizens alarmed by rampant crime among young black males and the readiness of their elders to blame the white community for conduct that raises fear for the survival of our political society. 

Only liberal-progressives could sneeringly dismiss people with those concerns as racists who “cling to their Bibles and guns.”

In Class Prejudice Resurgent (New York Times, December 1, 2014), columnist David Brooks correctly observes that the Ferguson fulminations are different from civil rights issues.  He doesn’t, however, note that more fundamentally Ferguson represents refusal of liberal-progressives and their black political supporters to accept responsibility for their own actions.  Liberal-progressive hippies and flower children were fond of spiritual concepts such as karma, but failed to understand its substance: you reap what you sow.

Responding to one of liberal-progressives’ gauzy platitudes, Mr. Brooks writes:

It’s often said after events like Ferguson that we need a national conversation on race. That’s a bit true. We all need to improve our capacity for sympathetic understanding, our capacity to imaginatively place ourselves in the minds of other people with experiences different from our own. Conversation can help, though I suspect novels, works of art and books like Claude Brown’s “Manchild in the Promised Land” work better.

But, ultimately, we don’t need a common conversation; we need a common project. If the nation works together to improve social mobility for the poor of all races, through projects like President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative, then social distance will decline, classism will decline and racial prejudice will obliquely decline as well.

In a friendship, people don’t sit around talking about their friendship. They do things together. Through common endeavor people overcome difference to become friends.

Mr. Brooks’s “common endeavor” is a pipe dream. 

As I noted in Ferguson Again, the root cause is President Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s Great Society welfare state, which destroyed the cohesion of so many black families and spawned large numbers of black young men raised in single-parent, welfare-addicted households.  Liberal icon Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted at the time that the result was going to be black neighborhoods terrorized by remorseless, conscienceless young black men.  One of those was Ferguson’s Michael Brown.

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The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution because English experience under sometimes misrule by kings had made them acutely sensitive to the need to protect individuals’ traditional legal and political rights from the abuse of monarchs, mob rule, or majority vote. 

Liberal-progressive sociological theory as the guiding light for political decision has been a disaster.  Turning 180 degrees from individual Constitutional rights, it has embraced collectivization of government’s dictatorial power and fractured society into economic, racial, ethnic, and sexual constituencies.  Absorbing Karl Marx’s doctrine, liberal-progressives have actively fomented class warfare.

President Johnson’s 1960s Great Society produced riots, burning of whole sections of major cities, soaring crime rates, disintegration of education, the highest rates of illegitimacy in world history and the accompanying disintegration of the family unit as the primary educational factor in civilized society.  Along with this, we endured rampant inflation caused by government deficit spending and the Federal Reserve’s excessive creation of fiat money.  Between the mid-1960s and 1982, more than half the value of people’s lifetime savings was wiped out by inflation, while we suffered some of the highest sustained rates of unemployment in our history.

In contrast, before the 1930s, the respect for Judeo-Christian principles and long-established tradition that characterized our unwritten constitution gave us the greatest degree of political liberty and the highest living standards in world history.

Even with the travails of the Depression and the advent of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933, the liberal jihad made few inroads with the general public against the Judeo-Christian morality of the unwritten constitution.

All of that changed decisively in the great social and political turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  A reversion to the 1890s-1920s bombings that killed hundreds of people, an openly confrontational, often violent, phase of the liberal jihad had commenced.  Timeless natural law principles of the Constitution were to be replaced by evolving, evanescent public opinion, manipulated by liberal-progressive social engineers through the compliant mainstream liberal-progressive media.

Propaganda from the liberal-progressive-socialist media fostered the opinion that the United States was engaged in anti-humanitarian atrocities in the Vietnam War.  “Know nothing” students intimidated college and university administrations and seized control of college offices, classrooms, and computer centers.  President Johnson’s Great Society welfare-entitlements programs produced an unprecedented increase in violent crime, riots, and burnings of whole sections of major cities.

Public opinion became radicalized.  What would have been unacceptable conduct even a few years earlier became commonplace and worked to augment the breakdown of decorum and public order.

Media organs – movies, TV, magazines, and major city newspapers – began to abandon traditional editorial self-restraint that prevented publication of foul language and public discussion of certain subjects.  By the late-1970s, editorial standards reflected the hedonistic and iconoclastic attitudes of the younger generation and their mentors, the liberal-progressive intellectuals. The founding generation’s Judeo-Christian moral principles and the constitutional doctrine of natural law were ridiculed by the media and violently rejected by our youth.

Increasingly law came to be, not statutes enacted by elected legislative bodies, but arbitrary judicial rulings conforming to current public opinion projected in the liberal-mainstream media.  Activist court rulings gave the strong impression that liberal judges cared little about insuring people’s safety.  Their principal concern appeared to be protecting those who rebelled against established law and custom of civilized society.  Victims’ rights were reduced to secondary importance.

See David P. Goldman’s How Far Down Do You Define Deviancy in Ferguson?

This attitude was one of the underlying elements in liberal-progressive-socialist doctrine that had originated with French Revolutionary propagandist Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  In his mythology of human reason as the all-powerful regulator of human society, criminals were the victims of a society that protected private property rights.  Under a government driven by the “general will,” Rousseau’s code for totalitarian rule, property would be redistributed, and once again there would be plenty for everyone.  Poverty and crime would cease to exist, because human nature would be transformed to its original benevolent state.  This myth was re-packaged by Lenin after the 1917 Russian Revolution, when he proclaimed future creation of selfless New Soviet Man, shaped by the political state to produce according to ability and take only according to need.

Viewing MSNBC’s line-up of evening commentators this week would lead one to believe that the only newsworthy events were taking place in Ferguson, MO.  And predictably the liberal-progressive overwhelming emphasis on “caring,” as opposed to respect for legal rights and social order, dominated the “news.”  Lost in these commentators’ opinion was any acknowledgement that the real cause of the entire series of Ferguson disasters was the destruction of black families by Lyndon Johnson’s “caring” Great Society.

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Robert Stapler brought to my attention David Stockman’s essay The Fed’s Paint-By-The-Numbers Delusions About The Labor Market.

Mr. Stockman documents the greatly differing kinds of jobs - too many of them part-time - and widely varying incomes associated with those jobs that are rolled into one statistic for new jobs created each month.  Obama administration spokesmen and the main stream media treat all reported new jobs as if they were parts of a homogenous statistic called employment. 

Going back to the 1930s, when Keynes’s ideas first gained a foothold in the United States, we can understand why this simplistic view of employment pervades today’s discussions.  Keynes notoriously promoted the idea that the only economic variable that counted was government spending to employ people.  What those so employed did was, in Keynes’s view, immaterial.  Hire men to dig holes one day, then fill them back up the next day, re-dig them the third day, and so on ad infinitum.  At another time, in the same vein, he suggested burying money in bottles by one crew, then unburying them by the next crew.

In short, the vast complexity of an economy, ranging from mining and lumbering, to producing steel, cooper, and aluminum, to drilling for petroleum and natural gas, to production of manufacturing machinery, to railroads and trucking, to wholesale distribution, to retail stores, to software coding, to restaurants and schools, is looked upon by the Federal Reserve and by Congress and the administration as a single thing that can be controlled simply by the amount of deficit spending by the government and the amount of fiat money created by the Fed to fund deficit spending.

The record, as Mr. Stockman lays it out, shows that meddling by Congress and the Fed during recent decades has failed Keynesian expectations and, instead, made the employment picture steadily worse.

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Nancy Pelosi notoriously said that Congress had to pass enabling legislation in order to find out what was in the bill.  At the time Pelosi and Harry Reid jammed the bill through Congress no one had read all of its 1,200, plus or minus, pages.

The administration’s current plaint that limiting subsidies to citizens of states that enacted their own ObamaCare insurance exchanges was a “typo” is obviously contradicted by the plain and extensive language of the act itself.  If the Supreme Court rules that the law is the law and that a president may not unilaterally change or ignore laws passed by Congress, Obama will have been hoist by his own petard.

Pelosi’s Bad Memory and ObamaCare Lies

As James Taranto wrote, in his November 13, 2014 column in the Wall Street Journal:

This is beginning to take on a man-bites-dog quality. More video has surfaced in which ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber acknowledges the dishonesty that underlies the law. The Washington Examiner reports this one—a 2012 talk at the University of Rhode Island—has to do with the so-called luxury tax on employer-provided medical coverage:

“In America, we have a pernicious feature of our tax code, which says that if MIT pays me in wages, I get taxed,” Gruber, an MIT health economist, said during his address. “But if your employer pays you in health insurance, you do not.”

Gruber explained that most Americans become defensive and object when policymakers try to change this, because they don’t want their health insurance to be taxed. But it wasn’t until Secretary of State John Kerry, another Massachusetts “hero,” came along that he realized how to sell such a plan successfully.
“John Kerry said, ‘No, no. We’re not going to tax your health insurance. We’re going to tax those evil insurance companies. We’re going to impose a tax that if they sell insurance that’s too expensive, we’re going to tax them,’” Gruber said. “And, conveniently, the tax rate will happen to be the marginal tax rate under the income tax code.”

“So, basically, it’s the same thing: We just tax the insurance companies, they pass on higher prices that offsets the tax break we get, it ends up being the same thing,” he added. “It’s a very clever, you know, basically exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.”

And CNN’s Jake Tapper reports on a fourth video, albeit one in which his “language is not as stark”:

“Barack Obama’s not a stupid man, okay?” Gruber said in his remarks at the College of the Holy Cross on March 11, 2010. “He knew when he was running for president that quite frankly the American public doesn’t actually care that much about the uninsured. . . . What the American public cares about is costs. And that’s why even though the bill that they made is 90% health insurance coverage and 10% about cost control, all you ever hear people talk about is cost control. How it’s going to lower the cost of health care, that’s all they talk about. Why? Because that’s what people want to hear about because a majority of American care about health care costs.”

You can tell this stuff is worrying ObamaCare supporters, because they’re anxiously trying to rationalize it away. The New York Times’s Neil Irwin, referring to one of the Gruber videos revealed earlier, writes:

It looks like a shocking instance of a onetime Obama adviser saying that the administration pulled the wool over America’s eyes in advancing major legislation. That is certainly how many conservatives are interpreting it after a video of the remarks started circulating this week.

But here’s the dirty little secret: Mr. Gruber was exposing something sordid yet completely commonplace about how Congress makes policy of all types: Legislators frequently game policy to fit the sometimes arbitrary conventions by which the Congressional Budget Office evaluates laws and the public debates them.

What doesn’t seem to occur to Irwin is that if this is commonplace, that makes Gruber’s candid acknowledgment of what he and other ObamaCare designers were up to all the more shocking.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake has a post titled “Why Jonathan Gruber Won’t Change the Obamacare Debate.” His main argument is true, but somewhat trivial: Gruber cannot turn the public against ObamaCare because the public is already against ObamaCare. But why can’t the opposition become broader, or more intense? Here’s Blake’s answer:

And Gruber’s comments, while damning, aren’t exactly the most fertile political territory. That’s because, while “stupidity of the American voter” is a pretty strong soundbite, Gruber’s connection to the law takes some explaining. And we’re not sure most people—apart from those who already decided the efficacy of the law years ago—are really keen on the latest Obamacare debate a week after the 2014 election.

In other words, the American people are too stupid to figure out who the guy calling them stupid is. But the Hill reports that one of the guy’s chief co-conspirators is pleading ignorance:

The ObamaCare consultant churning headlines this week for questioning voters’ intelligence is a stranger to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader from California said Thursday.

“I don’t know who he is,” Pelosi said of Jonathan Gruber. “He didn’t help write our bill.”

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