Conservatism needs work

[RangerRay]

...I'm fairly certain that BC Liberals are Conservatives...or something...

A better description of the BC Liberal Party since Gordon Campbell became leader would be very neoliberal with crony capitalist tendencies.

But I digress...

 

[a_majoor]

A Canadian provides a reply on Instapundit to a posting that makes for an argument stopping and winning answer to so many lines of attack:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/182312/?show-at-comment=443433#comment-443433

Ed 2
No.

Want to be compassionate to people? Get them jobs. That means hard-nosed Washington budget decisions, and tax cuts. Deep tax cuts.

That's how you care about people. Jobs are 70% of everything. Public health, suicide, crime, the list goes on. Employed people have better outcomes on all of these measures than unemployed people. Want to help someone? Get him a job.

I've stopped a couple of social workers dead in their tracks with this reasoning. What's the number one indicator of health, happiness, etc? It's a job. Most social workers will (sometimes grudgingly) admit this. OK, next step, what creates jobs? Tax cuts. Talk about the Laffer curve.

Leftie-mind-blowing conclusion? Tax cuts are the best public health measure. I've gotten wide-eyed silence from this several times, from dyed-in-the-wool Canadian socialists.

Compassionate conservatism misses all of this. Deep-six it.

 

[pbi]

Leftie-mind-blowing conclusion? Tax cuts are the best public health measure. I've gotten wide-eyed silence from this several times, from dyed-in-the-wool Canadian socialists.

Compassionate conservatism misses all of this. Deep-six it.

Perhaps, if we can bring it about in a way that produces positive change in peoples' lives. Ideally, nobody should be on social assistance who is capable of productive work, and I agree with that as a goal. Social assistance, or UI, or relief, or whatever we want to call it, was always intended as a temporary measure. Unfortunately it has become a way of life with an attendant huge bureaucacy to administer it (and all of its second and third order effects).

I'm not at all convinced that bloody-minded slashing of taxes will achieve this, as ideologically satisfying as that might feel. There would certainly be more money in the pockets of people who already make more anyway (and thus pay more taxes), and eventually in the hands of businesses that would theoretically be encouraged to create more jobs.

Unfortunately, the social assistance programs we are talking about are, as we all know, funded by these same high taxes. I think we would want to proceed carefully.

Whether it would have any other socially or economically useful effect on the "welfare population" in the short term is a good question. It would have to be a coherent, incremental approach to weaning people off what for some has been a generational thing. One of the big challenges would be changing the mentality involved (although I fully realize that not everybody on social assistance is a habitual leech--sudden plant closures can throw otherwise solid middle class families into complete disorder). People would need to want to work, to have the skills to do so, and perhaps more importantly believe that it is worthwhile to do so.

The approach that "they can work or they can starve" is also probably not very useful, although it sounds good in the Mess around a few beers. It assumes that a) there will be a sufficient number of jobs that these people could reasonably be employed to do, as opposed to "Workfare"; and b) that the desperation that might be created by this slash (ie: the "nothing to lose" effect) will translate into pro-social productive behaviour and not a further resort to crime or other antisocial things.

So: jobs, training and community leadership, combined with a gradual and intelligent hand on the cash-flow tap, are IMHO prerequisites before any slash and burn of taxes and the tax-funded social programs.

That said, IMHO a community of people who work, pay reasonable taxes for reasonable govt services, and own things like houses and small businesses is far more likely to be a stable "healthy" community than one based on living on the social assistance dole.

The question is how to get there.

 

[Edward Campbell]

There are a couple of significant economic challenges.

One of them is perceptual: many people (most of them, probably) think, actually believe that "governments create jobs." Sadly even many people in government, including some at high levels, believe that. It is, sadly, again, simply not true. (Before some mentions it: Yes, governments can hire civl servants and soldiers, and those are jobs, but neither are productive jobs, as Europe's experiences have proven.) What governments can do, but usually don't, is to set tax and tariff policies in ways that make it easier for business to create jobs. A good start would be unilaterally lowering, usually eliminating tariffs on a whole host of goods. A better start would be reducing "corporate taxes" to zero. Corporations don't pay "taxes" the way you and I do. They send money to governments, all right, just like you and I do, but then they put that in the expenses column and then they either raise prices or cut the shareholder's income (in effect stealing from the business owner - which is often you, if you have any sort of pension plan) until they have offset that "cost" of doing business. Corporate taxes are just like the HST/GST - you and I pay them in the end - but there is a long, convoluted, wasteful collection process that makes them silly. Most Canadians love corporate taxes ~ but they are silly, too.

Then second problem is structural: a large, too large share of our population in the age 16-60 age group is unfit to work. Too many people lack an elementary education ~ they have have a scrap of paper saying "High School Graduate" or even a university degree (or even two or three) but it is, too often, worthless ~ or they lack basic human skills (self discipline) like the ability to come to work on time, day after day after day. Our educations system fails a too large share of our population.

If, somehow - magically, we enabled a great bust of "job creation" we would need to import workers. There is a desirable level of unemployment ~ 4% many economist say ~ which is an essential byproduct of and precondition for "creative destruction" (one industry dying and two or three new ones being born): there needs to be a pool of workers for the "new" enterprises to hire. But, my guess is that now, in Canada, our desirable unemployment level is around 2%, only half what it should be. The other 5% is structural, the employment equivalent of a rubbish heap. Just as we toss what we can no longer use into the landfill, so do we toss people onto the "welfare" rolls. We have, correctly in my opinion, decided that we will not leave people to starve in the streets; at the very least it's unsanitary. So we pay them to live in something approaching decent conditions - and we pay generations to subsist in modest (very modest) comfort. (One person who is intimately familiar with the business told me about four generations of women living under one roof, infant, mother, grandmother and great grandmother ~ and the great grandmother was not yet 60 years old! Children having children; babies having babies. Not one of the three mothers was married; no man paid any support ...)

The hardest jobs to create are the ones which the people on our welfare rolls need: low skill, decent paying jobs. Such jobs exist ... in Indonesia and the Philippines. We cannot have those jobs in Canada (or Australia, Britain and New Zealand) because a Canadian (or American) cannot live on the terribly low salaries that such jobs are 'worth," and no business could survive by overpaying, by an order of magnitude, for labour. The jobs we can create are the ones for which we already have too few workers: e.g. carpenters, electricians, front-end loader operators, robot technicians, accountants, software designers, mechanical engineers, physicians and mathematicians.

< /rant >

 

[a_majoor]

Agree on most of the points by ERC and PBI, but there is always a "but"...

Many jobs like carpentry, plumbing, bricklaying and so on exist on several levels. There is the entry or "low skill" level, I am not terribly handy with tools but manage to do small house repairs up to tearing out drywall to get at plumbing, fixing it, putting in insulation and then putting up new drywall; basic constrution skills. Naturally a person or persons in the building trades could do it faster and the end result wold look a bit better, but I think everyone gets what I mean. Lower taxes and more money in your and my pocket would translate into more of those kinds of jobs as people looked to do updates, repairs and renovations of homes and business (one reason that I end up doing stuff like this myself is I really can't afford to hire a contractor; with more money in my pocket the equation changes). Lots of other basic "housekeeping" types of jobs exist in many industries, and of course we have the bizzare situation where we import workers from around the world to work in agriculture, fish canning plants and other basic jobs while millions of Canadians collect EI.

The other reason that ideas like deep tax cuts or other sharp changes are desirable is they upset the status quo. Ending old programs forces thousands or even millions of people out of their comfort zones to try new things, true a lot won't succeed but some will, these are the new business models and ideas that can absorb some of the unemployed. Deep tax cuts do the forcing of change, and provide the seed monies for millions of Canadians to save and invest to create these new industries and jobs, or buy their products. Don't forget the average Canadian family of 4 pays 40% or more of their income to the various levels of government in the form of taxes and fees, even getting that down to 30% would be a huge boost. While a gradual change as outlined above might be the "ideal", institutional inertia, resistance to changing the status quo and perverse incentives built into the "system" (all the second and third order effects) would probably result in some fiddling around the margins without any real, lasting changes.

Would such a regime make a lot of people uncomfortable? Yes. Will it help everyone? No. You have the same answers to the current system anyway, and a large block of failed outcomes (such as the 4 generationa welfare family), as well as the inevitable financial failure of the entire social model built on borrowed monies for current spending, so I say there is actully very little to lose by going that route.

 

[pbi]

  and of course we have the bizzare situation where we import workers from around the world to work in agriculture, fish canning plants and other basic jobs while millions of Canadians collect EI...

This is the bit I have never understood. Granted, I lack the depth of understanding of economics of many of the posters here, but I can't grasp why we have this phenomenon, and in fact we've had it in Southern Ontario for nigh on 50 years now.

Is it that these jobs are so poorly paid that Canadians won't do them? Too hard? (Maybe..I picked apples once, very briefly...it was a lot harder than I thought)

But, never mind these low skilled jobs. Why are we importing foreign workers into other more skilled fields like IT, finance and clerical? Don't tell me we don't have thousands of Canadians qualified in these fields.

Don't mistake this for a rant against immigrants: it isn't. I married into a family of hard working immigrants, who took any job they could get when they got here in the 1960's, sometimes two jobs. They all "got up and got on" and most of them now live better than I do.

It's a more fundamental question than that: I doubt it can be answered by populist bumper-sticker level thinking. That said, is there some merit to restricting immigrant inflow?

 

[Edward Campbell]

This is the bit I have never understood. Granted, I lack the depth of understanding of economics of many of the posters here, but I can't grasp why we have this phenomenon, and in fact we've had it in Southern Ontario for nigh on 50 years now.

Is it that these jobs are so poorly paid that Canadians won't do them? Too hard? (Maybe..I picked apples once, very briefly...it was a lot harder than I thought)

But, never mind these low skilled jobs. Why are we importing foreign workers into other more skilled fields like IT, finance and clerical? Don't tell me we don't have thousands of Canadians qualified in these fields.

Don't mistake this for a rant against immigrants: it isn't. I married into a family of hard working immigrants, who took any job they could get when they got here in the 1960's, sometimes two jobs. They all "got up and got on" and most of them now live better than I do.

It's a more fundamental question than that: I doubt it can be answered by populist bumper-sticker level thinking. That said, is there some merit to restricting immigrant inflow?

That's part of it ... a big part. Temporary foreign workers can be paid below (15% below, I think) minimum wage and they can be charged for room and board, often at inflated rates. The end result is that

    1. Employers get workers at the low economic value of the job; and

    2. The foreign workers still gets more than (s)he can make in Indonesia, Philippines, Latin America or even parts of China.

We DON'T have thousands of qualified Canadians for those jobs ~ not at least who are willing to work for entry level wages, or more to take a job, or work in another official language. (There are good, French speaking IT and commerce graduates in Quebec, but the good jobs are in Toronto and Calgary and they require one to work in English.)

White, Euro-Canadians, the children of the "settlers" of past centuries, don't like taking math in school ... it is quite probably that the children of recent Asian immigrants don't like math any better, but they DO take it and they work damned hard at it because "family values" ~ real family values, not the rubbish the religious right preaches ~ are strong in Asian communities and kids want to succeed, to make Mom and Dad and Grandma and Grandpa proud. That's why the maths, physics, chemistry and engineering departments in most North American universities are disproportionately full of Asian kids: they are working their little butts off to qualify themselves for the top jobs and they will relocate (maybe back to China!) to get those jobs.

 

[Remius]

@pbi:


  I'm guessing so take it for what it is worth.  I would think that some examples as to why some people are on EI when there are other jobs has to do (in part) with geography.  So yeah, one could pick apples in Ontario but that doesn't help the fisherman in Newfoundland.

  Companies are also bringing in foreign workers because it is likely cheaper, not because no one wants the jobs.  Look at the whole Royal Bank fiasco where they outsourced to some indian staffing company and wanted the staff they were going to fire train them.  These people HAD jobs with that organisation and clearly did not want to leave.

I can't see restricting immigration.  It would severely hamper our growth.  Immigrants already have to jump through hoops and provide proof of income skills etc etc.  Refugees and asylum seekers are another issue and in some instances have seen measures put in place.

But I will say this, most EI claimants I know or have known are born and bred Canadians.  In many cases reservists on Class B or annuitants.  Where my cottage is located, it is WASP territory and almost all of the people that live there year round are EI or welfare types.  Most of the immigrants I have known (I was married into an immigrant family as well) either worked crap jobs and crap hours or banded as families to make thing work with little or no government aid.  Most because of where they came from and that's how they learned to cope and deal with life's hardship. 

 

[pbi]

@pbi:
But I will say this, most EI claimants I know or have known are born and bred Canadians.  In many cases reservists on Class B or annuitants.  Where my cottage is located, it is WASP territory and almost all of the people that live there year round are EI or welfare types.  Most of the immigrants I have known (I was married into an immigrant family as well) either worked crap jobs and crap hours or banded as families to make thing work with little or no government aid.  Most because of where they came from and that's how they learned to cope and deal with life's hardship.

I have to say, based on living in a few different spots in this country, that this is probably true. I think that it is a stereotype that the welfare rolls are filled with "lazy" immigrants, although in certain specific locations they might be over-represented (but I'm open to correction on that).

My impression (reinforced very strongly by where I live right now in Kingston) is that the great majority of our hard core, generational welfare folks are not "visible minority" types at all, but more likely to be of  British/Franco descent, or as ERC calls them "settlers".  Rural communities and smaller former manufacturing cities seem to be full of them. On several occasions during my military career, I've lived in neighborhoods populated by these types. They are usually marked by an enduring anti-everything bitterness and what is sometimes called the "blame/entitlement mentality".

If you have the energy and drive to pull up stakes, travel half way around the world and try to start life in a strange and different place, chances are you probably have enough humility and moxy to take whatever you can get, and stay off social assistance.

 

[a_majoor]

WRT the "pulling up stakes" argument, I recall that the Mayor of Windsor once suggested that planes be chartered to bring workers back and forth to Alberta. Workers could continue to own relatively affordable houses in Windsor, and money would continue to flow in the local Windsor economy as wages were remitted to families back home. While I'm not sure whatever happened to that particular idea, flying people to areas where there are labour shortages (perhaps with the gaining companies picking up some of the slack for housing) might be an expediant solution for some areas.

Who pays for the flights is probably going to be a sticking point (If companies want workers so badly, they should be willing to pay), but if cities like Windsor want to gain the benefits of workers and families with a good cash flow, maybe they should chip in as well. A government run airlift (paid for out of EI funds) would probably be about as efficient as Canada Post and as fun to ride as Air Canada.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Remember that every job has a real, measurable, economic value. If the cost of a worker exceeds his value then the employer will, sooner or later, either a) go broke, or b) find a cheaper way to get the job done ~ perhaps through automation (which creates new jobs for the people who design, build, install and maintain the automated systems - creative destruction, again) or by using cheaper labour (having governments allow temporary foreign worker programmes which allow employers to pay the correct value for the work rather than what, say, trade unions or politicians (who write minimum wage laws) demand).

 

[Brad Sallows]

>Is it that these jobs are so poorly paid that Canadians won't do them? Too hard?

It is that the consequences of not working are not severe enough.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Don Johnston was both a lawyer of some renown and a minister in both the Trudeau and (short lived) Turner cabinets in the 1980s but he split with the Liberal Party over both Meech Lake (he opposed it) and Free Trade with the USA (he supported it). As you can probably guess I agreed with him on both counts. Prime Minister Mulroney nominated him to be the first even non-European to head the OECD. He was elected and reelected for a second mandate. In this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Toronto Star he, a pretty conservative/capitalist sort of chap,* warns that one of the bastions of conservatism ~ however one brands it ~ is under attack and is doing a poor job of defending itself:

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2014/01/16/for_capitalism_the_enemy_is_us.html

For capitalism, the enemy is us
A former head of the OECD says free market capitalism is heading towards self-destruction if reforms are not undertaken quickly.

By: Donald J. Johnston

Published on Thu Jan 16 2014

From the comic strip Pogo there was sometimes much wisdom. One cartoon from 1971 contained a famous example, with its immortal line: “We have meet the enemy and he is us.”

I am an ardent defender of and promoter of capitalism, operating as it should in fair transparent open markets. That is the essence of the role of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which I had the privilege of leading for 10 years.

Open market economies have brought enormous and undeniable wealth and benefits to the world in which we live.

However, I see it on the point of self-destruction. It will not happen tomorrow nor probably within my lifetime. But it will happen unless the “animal spirits” offered to us by Keynes are channelled to the creation of better societies where no individuals are left behind, and not just towards the insatiable greed of the privileged few.

By no means does this point to socialism or egalitarianism, but it does demand a recalibration of the capitalistic model with which we now live and which is destined to self-destruct.

The same forces that shaped the French Revolution are with us today, but within a democratic system. A social evolution seems inevitable if we continue down this short-sighted “I’m alright Jack” path.
Hopefully it will be bloodless by respecting a democratic changing of the guard, but its negative impact on the future of free market-oriented societies will be profound.

A paradox is that those who have realized enormous wealth (the poster children being Wall Street bankers), seem captured by “unfettered greed” without limits, and have manipulated the levers available to them to perpetuate the decline in the respect for capitalism through obvious excesses in personal remuneration. An example of such manipulation is stacking the board of director remuneration committees with friendly CEOs who look to reciprocity in generosity at shareholder expense. How else could the ratio of CEO pay to that of the average worker reach unacceptable limits (in some cases over 300:1) and continue on this upward trajectory?

For most of them it seems that the short term is what counts, and if future generations suffer as a result, so be it. We witness the same philosophy preventing the implementation of measures to prevent global warming and climate change.

Instead of being in the front lines defending the market system by promoting public policies that would support its unprecedented successes, control its excesses, and ensure that everyone benefits from its capacity to create wealth, they prefer to grab as much of that wealth as quickly as possible by whatever means legally (if not morally) available for self-enrichment. The recent and continuing financial crisis flowing from peddling “derivatives” secured on financial garbage to uninformed, naïve individuals is a good example.

These unconscionable activities recently proved costly to JP Morgan with fines of some $13.5 billion. But never mind, such financial settlements will not change the mentality. After all, it was other peoples’ money.

Through individual greed, these self-proclaimed believers in capitalism have become its worst enemies. They should recognize that… THEY HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND IT IS THEM.

But do they care? Some do. More probably do not. (After all, as Keynes declared, “In the long run, we are all dead.”)

But for those who believe that the open market, free enterprise capitalistic system must survive and be enhanced, it is necessary to take appropriate action. There will be a continuing public outcry for tougher regulation.

But regulatory overkill is also a serious threat, and the Dodd Frank Act in the U.S. may be the first step on that perilous path.

There are many options to pursue beyond the scope of this brief commentary, most of which would imply better corporate governance and, as part of that, responsible and accountable boards of directors.

Donald J. Johnston is a former federal cabinet minister who served as secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development from 1996 to 2006.

It is interesting that Mr Johnston mentioned JP Morgan because, as far as I am concerned, the enemy who is "us" is exemplified by Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan's buccaneering CEO. Dimon is why we have Dodd-Frank, which is a horrid, shambling wreck of legislation that will do real, measurable, harm to the global economy because it was drafted by a pair of nitwits (think of Smoot–Hawley, named for two other idiotic US legislators which also did global damage ~ Dodd-Frank is just as bad.). We cannot undo Dodd-Frank, but we can prevent re-occurances by cleaning up Wall Street, and The City and Bay Street, too, so that buffoons like Senator Chris Dodd and Representative Barney Frank don't have an excuse to inflict their lunacy on an unsuspecting world.


_____
* There were a couple of level headed conservative/capitalists in Trudeau's government: Johnston and Donald (Thumper) Macdonald, the latter was, in many respects, the author of Mulroney's Free Trade deal thanks to a voluminous report he (Macdonald) prepared for Pierre Trudeau ... irony of ironies.

 

Donald Johnston          Donald Macdonald

 

[Edward Campbell]

As if it were coordinated, the New York Times publishes a review, reproduced, below, under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from that journal, on a new book which looks at the issue from a broad, US, perspective:

(I haven't read the book yet, it's on order ~ therefore I will not comment further.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/books/the-unwinding-by-george-packer.html?pagewanted=all&_r=3&

A Nation, Its Seams Fraying
‘The Unwinding,’ by George Packer

By DWIGHT GARNER

Published: May 28, 2013 (But I just saw it today)

If you were to take apart George Packer’s ambitious new book, “The Unwinding,” as if it were a car’s engine, and spread the parts across your garage, you’d essentially be looking at 5 large pieces and 10 small ones — the nuts and bolts and cotter pins.

The large pieces are profiles: portraits of a Reagan Republican turned biodiesel entrepreneur; a thoughtful and disappointed longtime Joe Biden staffer; a female factory worker in Youngstown, Ohio, who becomes a community organizer; Peter Thiel, the libertarian Silicon Valley venture capitalist; and, finally, the City of Tampa in Florida, which had problems before the foreclosure crisis and seems like hell on earth now.

The small pieces are critical riffs, often acidic, on especially influential Americans of the past few decades. I’ll list them here in reverse order of Mr. Packer’s esteem for what each has brought to the commonweal: Sam Walton, Newt Gingrich, Robert E. Rubin, Andrew Breitbart, Colin L. Powell, Jay-Z, Oprah Winfrey, Alice Waters, Raymond Carver and Elizabeth Warren.

Some of the large pieces, which are chopped up and welded onto the rest in roughly 20-page blocks, began as articles in The New Yorker, where Mr. Packer is a staff writer. Other material is new.

It is Mr. Packer’s achievement in “The Unwinding” that these pieces, freshly shuffled and assembled, have speed and power to burn. This book hums — with sorrow, with outrage and with compassion for those who are caught in the gears of America’s increasingly complicated (and increasingly poorly calibrated) financial machinery.

“The Unwinding” begins like a horror novel, which in some regards it is. “No one can say when the unwinding began,” Mr. Packer writes, “when the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way.”

If you were born after 1960, Mr. Packer suggests, you have spent much of your life watching structures long in place collapsing — things like farms, factories, subdivisions and public schools on the one hand, and “ways and means in Washington caucus rooms, taboos on New York trading desks” and “manners and morals everywhere” on the other.

What has replaced them, he says, is organized money, as well as a society in which “winners win bigger than ever, floating away like bloated dirigibles, and losers have a long way to fall before they hit bottom, and sometimes they never do.”

If a solitary fact can stand in for Mr. Packer’s arguments in “The Unwinding,” it is probably this one, about the heirs to Walton’s Walmart fortune: “Eventually six of the surviving Waltons,” the author writes, “would have as much money as the bottom 30 percent of Americans.”

It was only after Walton’s death, Mr. Packer says, “that the country began to understand what his company had done.” He writes: “Over the years, America had become more like Walmart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs, and more part-time jobs as store greeters.” He adds: “The hollowing out of the heartland was good for the company’s bottom line.”

“The Unwinding” contains many sweeping, wide-angle views of American life. Its portraits of Youngstown, Ohio; Tampa; Silicon Valley; Washington; and Wall Street are rich, complex and interlocking. Mr. Packer’s gifts are Steinbeckian in the best sense of that term.

Amid this narrative push are many small, memorable moments. The assessment of Mr. Biden is complicated and sometimes positive, but it includes these sentences, from one Biden insider to another: “Jeff, don’t take this personally. Biden disappoints everyone. He’s an equal-opportunity disappointer.”

Mr. Packer, whose previous books include “The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq” (2005), describes how Mr. Gingrich’s rhetoric, when he came to power in the late 1980s, forever changed the way elected leaders spoke to one another: “He gave them mustard gas, and they used it on every conceivable enemy, including him.”

He has a few complimentary things to say about Ms. Winfrey, but his section about her amounts to a comprehensive takedown. About her audience he maintains: “They had things that she didn’t — children, debts, spare time. They consumed the products that she advertised but would never buy — Maybelline, Jenny Craig, Little Caesars, Ikea. As their financial troubles grew, she would thrill them by selecting one of them and wiping out her debts on the air.”

He goes on: “Being instructed in Oprah’s magical thinking (vaccinations cause autism; positive thoughts lead to wealth, love, and success), and watching Oprah always doing more, owning more, not all her viewers began to live their best life.” It gets harsher from there.

Barack Obama’s presidency hovers at the margins of this book, largely as a somewhat disappointing work in progress. We do hear from a man who shakes the president’s hand and thinks: “It was the softest of any man he’d ever shaken hands with. It told him that Obama had never done a lick of physical work in his life.”

“The Unwinding” is a painful book to read. It made me feel ill, as if I’d contracted a three-day flu. Perhaps Mr. Packer put this thought in my mind. He frequently refers to what’s happening to America in medical terms — as an illness, a new virus, a plague, a bacterial infection.

Among this book’s few heroes is Ms. Warren, the former Harvard Law School professor and bankruptcy expert who is now the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts. “The Unwinding” is largely about how banks have become unchecked and unholy forces in American life, and part of what Mr. Packer likes about Ms. Warren, a Democrat, is that banks fear her.

His book specializes in plain talk, and in Ms. Warren he spies a rare politician with a gift for the same quality. Mr. Packer describes one of her appearances about banking this way:

“She seemed to have walked into the hearing room and taken her seat at the dais out of the past, from the era when the American prairie raised angry and eloquent champions of the common people, William Jennings Bryan and Robert La Follette, George Norris and Hubert Humphrey. Her very presence made insiders uneasy because it reminded them of the cozy corruption that had become the normal way of doing business around Capitol Hill. And that was unforgivable.”

At one point in “The Unwinding” we meet a talented reporter in Florida who is writing about the foreclosure mess. This reporter, we read, “believed that there were two kinds of journalists — the ones who told stories, and the ones who uncovered wrongdoing.”

Mr. Packer is both, and he’s written something close to a nonfiction masterpiece.

(No comment until I've read the book.)

 

[Brad Sallows]

The part of capitalism that needs to unwind is crony capitalism.

The only way to unwind crony capitalism is to reduce the power of government to foster crony capitalism.

There is no path to "equality" through bigger government.  The bigger the government, the more privileged and deeply rooted the governing class.  It doesn't matter whether they are called robber baron fatcats or nomenklatura.

 

[a_majoor]

Although I occasionally detect a hint of skepticism about the TEA Party movement in these fora  , it is interesting to see how they deploy the tools of modern communications media to bring their causes to the forefront, and of course to achieve electoral success (63 seats in the 2010 mid terms and 30 Governorships and State Legislatures).

Canadian Conservatives, Classical Liberals and Libertarians are well advised to learn the use of these tools simply because they are operating at a much greater disadvantage in terms of numbers (ERC reminds us that the 60/40 split of voters is NOT in our favour), as well as against the entrenched organs of the Progressive project in our society and the various classes of people who benefit from the current situation and will fight to the last taxpayer to resist change. While this example is education, you can susbstitute any other motivating cause:

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/01/20/how-parents-are-winning-the-common-core-debate/?singlepage=true

How Parents Are Winning the Common Core Debate
George Will: A burgeoning movement is responding: "No. Period."

by
PAULA BOLYARD
Bio
January 20, 2014 - 2:00 pm

George Will gave a good accounting of many of the objections to the Common Core Standards Initiative in his Washington Post column on Wednesday, pointing out that the standards spring from a top-down, big government approach to education that threatens to live on in perpetuity because the Common Core is tied to generous federal bribes — and threats that the bribes will go away if states don’t fall in line with Common Core.

But ontological and ideological arguments aside, Will does a fine job of explaining the organic rise of opposition to Common Core — an emerging pattern we’ve seen in recent years as the conservative movement has matured and learned to bypass traditional methods of influence. Will gives examples of “three healthy aspects of today’s politics” which, if applied correctly and used consistently, can lead to the defeat of the Common Core standards. Below are three strategies Will says are making a difference:

1. “New communication skills and technologies enable energized minorities to force new topics onto the political agenda.”

It used to be that activists had to rely on phone chains and mailing lists — snail mail — to get word out about their causes. It took a dreadfully long time to organize a resistance of any consequence, and there was often little hope of rousing entrenched politicians who answered mainly to lobbyists and big donors.

But now, with social media, camera-equipped cell phones, talk radio and the 24-hour news cycle, virtually everyone can be an instant political activist. As a result, powerful news organizations and politicians no longer have complete control over the “narratives.” Activists now have effective and efficient (and often free) tools at their disposal to help level the playing field.

Soccer moms with cell phones can assemble a hundred parents at the statehouse with a handful of tweets or shut down the phone systems for a week with a single Facebook post that instantly reaches thousands of activists. Legislators can only ignore such efforts for so long because, as the great philosopher of our age Kelly Clarkson said, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Ignoring highly dedicated activists merely forces them to redouble their efforts and find new pathways to success.

2. “This uprising of local communities against state capitals, the nation’s capital and various muscular organizations (e.g., the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, teachers unions, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) demonstrates that although the public agenda is malleable, a sturdy portion of the public is not.”

Common Core was pushed through state legislatures quickly, largely as a result of lots of money — federal money, union money, and money from testing companies and massive foundations that in the past were able to drown out the voices of citizens. As a result, most state legislatures want Common Core to go away. Certainly, they want the standards — and the money — to stay, but they don’t want the debate to continue.

As parents see the new standards coming home in their children’s backpacks, they’re telling their legislators that this debate is not over. No matter how many times their legislators and the education “experts” say “trust us, we know what we’re doing,” parents are not convinced — they do not want Common Core in their schools and their voices are growing louder. As we recently saw in Ohio when parents stopped (in less than a week) a proposed law to give social workers veto power over homeschooling and when a community rose up against thuggish teachers unions during a strike last year, grassroots activism is beginning to break through the entrenched political intransigence.

3. “Political dishonesty has swift, radiating and condign consequences. Opposition to the Common Core is surging because Washington, hoping to mollify opponents, is saying, in effect: ‘If you like your local control of education, you can keep it. Period.’ To which a burgeoning movement is responding: ‘No. Period.’”

There is a Wizard of Oz quality to all of this. It is no longer 1939 or even the 1980s when parents trusted that the professional educators — and the educrats — knew what was best for their children. What happens when the Great and Terrible Oz — or a Common Core proponent — shouts, “Do you presume to criticize the Great Oz, you ungrateful creatures?” Parents, as Dorothy did, pull back the curtain and expose the man spinning the wheels and pulling the levers who tells them to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. The Great Oz has spoken. I am the great and powerful Wizard of…Oz.”

Recall that Dorothy, in her innocent wisdom, tells the exposed Wizard, “You are a very bad man!..If you were really great and powerful you would keep your promises!”

Parents are tired of big-government solutions to the problems in education. The promises of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have resulted in a race to the bottom. The federal government and the bureaucrats are notorious for their grand visions, but like the Wizard of Oz, they rarely keep their promises. As Will said so succinctly, parents are saying: “No. Period.”

Will is correct that the Common Core debate will soon become an issue of significant national debate. But much like with the climate change debate, many would like to relegate Common Core to the dustbin of “settled law” or “settled science” so they can move along to the next grand scheme to reform our children. However, despite the best efforts of the debate deniers, many parents have only just begun to speak and they won’t go away until they have their say — and until they get some answers from the Wizard.

And of course the takeaway is people are far more energized by what they correctly see as the dishonesty of the political class, and will take action to fight against it. Sometimes they align with the Rob Fords of the world because they don't see any other viable alternative, but they do mostly get it right so long as they stay focused on the particular issue. One reason for the success of the TEA Party movement is it is very focused on a small number of issues (generally small vs big government, low taxes and spending and, following Constitutional laws and precidents being the most obvious ones). Paring down the Conservative movement to focus on liberty, property rights and the Rule of Law (and how the Big Three are the foundation that affects and informs everything else) may well be one way to go.

 

[Edward Campbell]

At last! Some rational thinking/commentary about Canadian conservatism (from Jeffrey Simpson, of all people) in this column which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/margaret-thatchers-children-have-their-hands-full/article17158629/#dashboard/follows/

Margaret Thatcher’s children have their hands full

JEFFREY SIMPSON
Melbourne — The Globe and Mail

Published Saturday, Mar. 01 2014

Were she still alive, Margaret Thatcher would be rather pleased with today’s governments in what used to be called the countries of the “white Commonwealth” and are still occasionally known as the Anglosphere.

Mrs. Thatcher’s children, intellectually speaking, are prime ministers in four countries: Tony Abbott in Australia, Stephen Harper in Canada, David Cameron in Britain and John Key in New Zealand.

They are obviously not carbon copies of the Iron Lady, as their respective countries’ different political and economic circumstances require different approaches. But these conservative prime ministers are Thatcherites at heart. They see the state more as an impediment to growth and social progress than an asset, they think tax rates are too high and they believe the private sector can run most things most efficiently.

Mr. Abbott is the latest proponent of the foundational belief that the state runs many things more poorly than the private sector does. In a country where major public assets have already been sold off – from ports to power distribution networks – Mr. Abbott speaks about finding upward of $100-billion in additional assets to put on the block. In Britain, Mr. Cameron’s government recently privatized the Royal Mail – a step too far for Mr. Harper, who authorized the shrinking of Canada Post, including the end of home mail delivery, but did not espouse privatization.

In Britain, Canada and New Zealand, large cuts have been made to the civil service, a Thatcherite recipe. So, too, the remuneration and pensions of public servants have come under assault. Similar policies are about to unfold in Australia, where Mr. Abbott is promising huge public servant cuts. The government has no more money, Finance Minister Joe Hockey – he should be a Canadian with a name like that – has declared, a statement more founded in ideology than fact.

Economic policy in these countries reflects a much broader and deeper shift in conservative thinking that is also apparent in the Republican Party of the United States. Moderate conservatives Mrs. Thatcher once scorned – “High Tories” with a sense of noblesse oblige about the less fortunate, weak-kneed worriers about social unrest, politicians who saw something called society instead of an agglomeration of individuals – have all but disappeared from today’s conservative parties.

In Australia, if one goes back a few conservative leaders, one recalls Malcolm Fraser and Robert Menzies. Canada had Robert Stanfield, Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney. In the United States, there were the northeastern “Rockefeller” Republicans. And in Britain, there were Mrs. Thatcher’s “wets,” who she replaced, banished or marginalized – men such as Edward Heath, Michael Heseltine and Francis Pym.

Today, the conservative Anglosphere world is a deeply populist one, suspicious of government and people who work for it, angry at secular elites, not particularly partial to big business, convinced that the main objective of overall policy should be to balance budgets, reduce taxes and alleviate burdens on the loosely defined middle class.

The flip side of this approach is an aversion to any kind of “vision” for society, because vision usually means mobilizing the resources of the state for some collective purpose, and populist conservatives don’t believe there’s much the state can get right.

The irony of this drift (an irony not exclusive to conservatives) is that it often promises more than it delivers. In Canada, for example, the civil service swelled and government spending went up way above the inflation rate under Mr. Harper’s government before the recession of 2008. In the United States, president Ronald Reagan produced only federal deficits, as did George W. Bush.

Australia’s Mr. Abbott pledges to balance his budget without raising taxes – a standard conservative approach. He’s already killed a carbon tax and promises lower taxes on corporations and businesses.

But he faces another problem similar to those of the other countries. The last Australian auto makers, General Motors and Toyota, have just announced that they’re closing shop. Australia has already lost thousands of manufacturing jobs, like Canada, Britain and the United States. Qantas, the money-losing Australian airline, has just announced 5,000 job cuts.

With parts of the economy hollowing out, public employment shrinking and global economic growth still fragile, these conservative governments have their hands full boosting their economies.

First, a quibble: Mr Simpson is not talking about conservatism. Mrs Thatcher was not a conservative (a Conservative, yes, a conservative, no). So let's call it Thatcherism because the word conservative was co-opted by a bunch of terminally stupid and illiterate Americans led by e.g. Russel Kirk and William F Buckley Jr. They appropriated the good word, liberal as a pejorative for the soft, semi-socialism of the 1950s North-East, and adopted the word conservative for something it never meant.

But Jeffrey Simpson gets the basics right. Prime Ministers Abbott, Cameron, Harper and Key, he suggests, believe that:
[o] the state more is an impediment to growth and social progress than an asset;
[o] tax rates are too high; and
[o]the private sector can run most things most efficiently.
I share all those beliefs. As I have said before, I want a smaller, less intrusive, into fundamental rights,* more efficient (cost effective) and better focused government.

Look at this list. Can anyone suggest that all these departments and agencies are actually doing useful, productive work for Canada? I suggest that at least ⅓ of them could be scrubbed ~ every last person fired ~ and the Government of Canada would function better. But I recognize that each department and agency has a cheering section and I accept that politicians are, generally, cowards: unable and unwilling to offend any of those constituencies (cheering sections).

We need a strong, professional, vigorous public sector. But it should be well focused on the (relatively) few things that governments must do or can do better than the private sector (economies of scale, usually).

_____
*Those fundamental rights are: life, liberty and property, as defined by John Locke, and privacy as defined by Brandeis and Warren in the USA over 100 years ago.

 

[a_majoor]

If striking while the iron is hot can induce people to look outside their bubbles, then now is the time to evangelicize the Conservative/Classical Liberal/Libertarian viewpoints. (It worked for me. Listening to the economics teacher discussing how we could "trade Inflation for employment" when we had just gone trough a period of Stagflation and witnessing the start of the Reagan Revolution, both events which were considered and even taught to be impossible using the economic tools of Keynesian Economics demonstrated the disconnect between theory and practice, and steered me away from Progressivism in all its forms).

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/teachable-moment_808496.html?nopager=1#

A Teachable Moment

Oct 13, 2014, Vol. 20, No. 05• By WILLIAM KRISTOL

How to introduce students to conservative thought? It’s hard. The colleges and universities aren’t interested. The media and popular culture are hostile. What if young Americans nonetheless become aware of the existence of such a thing as conservative thought? How to convey its varieties and complexities? Even tougher. You can write articles and put things online, but there’s an awful lot competing for young people’s attention these days.

But there’s good news nonetheless. Help has arrived. Its name? President Barack Obama.

The decomposition of the Obama presidency has created what Obama might call a teachable moment. This is, needless to say, a loathsome phrase, reeking as it does of liberal sanctimoniousness and professorial condescension. Still, who can resist appropriating it, if only for this one occasion? Because it is, really, a moment. It’s a moment when minds can be opened to conservative truths, ears can be induced to hear conservative insights, eyes can be fitted with contact lenses so as better to see conservative arguments.

Are the young struck by the dashed hopes of Obamacare? Give them a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit. They can’t believe the Secret Service farce? Introduce them to James Q. Wilson on bureaucracy. They’re befuddled by the exploitation of an unfortunate incident in Ferguson? Have them read Edward C. Banfield’s The Unheavenly City (especially the chapter he titled “Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit”). Liberalism’s domestic policies aren’t working quite the way they were supposed to? Acquaint them with Irving Kristol: “I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.”

Are they horrified by the results of Obama’s foreign policy? Let them study Churchill: “For five years I have talked to the House on these matters—not with very great success. I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet.” Do they wonder what happened to the virtue of courage? They can ponder Solzhenitsyn: “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.”

Does it sometimes seem no one is saying what is obviously true? Read Orwell: “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Does it sometimes seem no one is doing what is obviously right? Consider C. S. Lewis: “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise.”

So seize the day. Grasp the moment. Don’t let the collapse of the Obama presidency go to waste.

 

[Cloud Cover]

Look at this list. Can anyone suggest that all these departments and agencies are actually doing useful, productive work for Canada? I suggest that at least ⅓ of them could be scrubbed ~ every last person fired ~ and the Government of Canada would function better. But I recognize that each department and agency has a cheering section and I accept that politicians are, generally, cowards: unable and unwilling to offend any of those constituencies (cheering sections).

Challenge accepted. Note that I nuked the entire Canadian Forces and DND, along with all the other ineffective government agencies and departments. By the word "ineffective" I mean either not really necessary, or not up to the task, or just simply stupid in principle [if there was really a demand for museums, someone will set them up and operate them privately]. The vacuum created by vacating many federal government functions of today would be assumed by the private sector if the services are really that much in demand but not completely essential to what is required for today and tomorrow. I realize deleting the CAF is contentious, but the fact is for the 20 billion cost, we remain essentially undefended, apparently our international contributions are now marginal at best, and in any case, we are defended by a 3rd party.   

What is left is government that is organized around managing, extracting, trading and importing natural resources, protecting intellectual property and the business that surround it, collecting taxes, keeping a financial system in place, keeping a safe transportation system in place, enforcing the criminal code, plus some odds and sods.       


EDIT: Fixed quote box

 

[Kirkhill]

Drinking buttermilk through the week, Whiskey on a Sunday

op: