When Are Those Poor People Going To Give Up?

An old joke about the war on poverty is that we won't win it until those poor people give up.  Given that this war is 50 years old, the joke is getting old.  So are government programs that never achieve their goals but are never abandoned.  Occasionally, it's good to reflect on the decades of fail.

• War on Poverty - 50 years, no end in sight.
• War on Drugs - 42 years, no end in sight.
• War on Terror - 12 years, no end in sight.  (The enabling legislation is still on the books.)

I didn't object to waging war to dislodge the Taliban from Afghanistan, but waging war on something as nebulous as terrorism was always going to be an excuse for never ending appropriations, not to mention a rapacious approach to violating our civil rights.  When politicians want to launch a "war," we should be very afraid.

So how do we think the battle to ensure every American has health insurance is going to turn out?  How much is our government really going to effect global warming?  Will federal action do anything to reduce income inequality? (In fact, it will increase the inequality by lining the pockets of already wealthy K street lobbyists.)

Epic fail after epic fail and the left continues to cling bitterly to the belief that more government will solve more problems.  How leftism can be seen as hip escapes me, is it hip to be a moron? 

What You Should Be Reading

• Professor Perry helpfully points out that all low wage jobs added in the last year were for less than 30 hours a week.  
• Ilya Somin, blogging at Volokh Conspiracy, has a good take on the situation in the Crimea.  I think that some of the hysteria is overblown, but that some retaliation is in order.
• KTCat has an even more succinct summation of the Ukraine's position.

Sunday Sermon: Government Co-opting Religion

One of the reasons that I am such an advocate of limited government is that as government grows it inevitably crowds out activities that were once the province of religion and disenfranchises the role of religion in public life.  We have seen this with the gay marriage debate.  From a logical perspective, if gay intimate relations are not subject to government regulation any more than heterosexual relations, on what basis can gays be denied equal access to due process?  However, government has not always been the arbiter of marriage, that was the role of the church, synagogue or mosque in times past.  In England, I predict that the Anglican Church will soon be legally forced to perform gay marriages.  I would have preferred that marriage remain the sole province of religion, then the free market, not law would have determined what we deem to be marriage.  

More significantly, in terms of impact, the U. S. federal government has been quietly co-opting religious charities by outsourcing the delivery of social services to them.  George Bush gets much of the blame for this. Where is the liberal outrage over lack of separation between church and state in this area?  James Piereson reports in the WSJ that Catholic Charities in the U.S. gets over half of its funding from the feds.  This entanglement leads to a number of negative outcomes for the country and the church.

• Whenever the church is co-opted by government it gradually declines and loses its effectiveness.  This is because it becomes identified with the establishment, especially a failing statist establishment.  This is one reason why the European church is dying.
• The church organizations becomes a lobbying organization for big government, as do all of the other co-opted private organizations.  In the past, the church has served as an effective check on government.  This removes another roadblock against the Road to Serfdom that Obama wants us to travel.  (For those unfamiliar, Hayek shows how the socialist impulse leads to totalitarianism and we end up no better than the serfs of feudal society, both in liberty and wealth.)
• Men feel unneeded by the church and leave, seriously weakening the institution.  Men generally need to have real work to do in order to feel useful.  The modern church gives them little to do, but the good works of charities has heretofore been such a venue.  Now that the work is done by staff paid from federal funds, there is nothing left for men who want to volunteer. Only so many can go to Haiti or Mexico, where there is real need.  A church that loses its men declines, as there is ample research to prove. 
• It undermines the impulse to charitable giving and indeed it undermines the rationale for granting such organizations tax deductible status.  If they are just another government contractor why should we give and why should their donations be tax exempt?  Piereson points this out as well.

Is it too much to ask for some separation of church and state? 

Gay Marriage - NOTA

As in "none of the above." I shy away from the social issues on the theory that the tea party's focus on the ballooning fiscal calamities in all levels of government, federal, state, local and federal reserve is a greater threat to our republic. I making an exception today, because the issue calls for clarity of thought about the role of government.

The issue of gay marriage is framed as a yes or no proposition. But I question why. The answer is that we have ceded to government the role of defining this social relationship. It was not always so. Marriage was once the sole province of the individuals involved or the church. The French Revolution and the German chancellor Bismarck are cited as key influences in the transition of marriage to government regulation; hardly worthy lineage, in my opinion. We would not have this issue if the state was not involved; my none of the above solution. What I resent about the gay marriage movement is the attempt to use the force of government to impose on me a definition of marriage with which I disagree. If the definition is not up to the government, we are free to come to consensus as a society with freedom to disagree. This is the foundation of intellectual pluralism, about which I might blog some other day.

This begs some serious questions about what would society look like without government sanctioned marriage.

• What about income taxes, how will we determine who is in a household? Whoever self declares to be part of the household. Why not? Why don't we abolish income taxes?
• What about divorce? If there is not marriage, what happens when people split up? Ultimately, marriage is a civil contract. We will have to establish a body of contract law for various forms of civil unions. Perhaps, some protections for children need to be established. Certainly the concept of guardianship might still require state sanction, but that is separate from marriage. I think the bigger problem is that we will have common law situations, with no contract at all. But isn't "palimony" an old issue for the courts?
  
• What about incest, like brothers and sisters marrying? Isn't there compelling state interest to prevent such relationships? My answer is that it is not compelling enough. Government doesn't need to solve every problem. Is this a big rampant problem? Not to my knowledge.
• What about polygamy? My answer is that individuals should be allowed to make this choice for themselves. I don't think it is a successful social model, so it isn't going to catch on.
  

This doesn't solve every societal problem with regards to marriage, none are. Better to leave these questions to be resolved by citizens and our chosen institutions outside of government control.

For the record, I believe that gay people (defined as those with a sexual attraction to the same gender) are not inherently evil, nor even sinful. I believe the correct interpretation of the Bible is that gays should live celibate lives. But I strongly desire a government that does not interfere in these personal matters, because a government with the power to investigate our personal lives is one that can invade our privacy for all sorts of ill ends.

Are We Pro-Business?

The Wall Street Journal and others have properly excoriated the Obama administration for their extreme anti-business bias, which accrues to Obama's intellectual upbringing in the leftist halls of academe. But are those in the Tea Party therefor pro-business? This is certainly a meme on the left. Or at least they believe that Tea Party activists, like the religious right are used by the business wing of the Republican party for their own ends. See Thomas Frank, What's Wrong with Kansas.

However, our position is pro-market, which is distinct from pro-business. The problems with businesses colluding and using government to further their own ends have been known since the birth of the study of economics. Adam Smith himself is widely quoted as saying:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

In fact, we see business interests arrayed against the public good in any number of ways. Look at how many pharmaceutical companies and insurers, at least initially, supported Obamacare when it looked like they had something to gain from it. The Tea Party platform, to the extent that one exists, opposes all manner of government support of business, especially at the expense of the public. Crony capitalism is as corrupting in America as it is in Latin America.

The left sees Big Government allied to Big Labor as the sole counterweight to a tyranny of Big Business. They assume that our opposition is because of a love of big business, it is not. We believe that competition and markets and the rule of law tame business far better than government. In addition to the practical problems of substituting the wisdom of bureaucracies for the wisdom of markets, the regulatory regime is subject to capture. We end up worse off than we started, because there is an assumption that we are being protected by regulation, even among the regulated, so correct precautions are overlooked.

Bottom line, free markets are our best defense against the rapaciousness of big business. The trick is to prevent big business from capturing government and skewing the rules in its favor.

Obama Blames Bush - And I Agree

In his election post-mortem following the Democrat debacle in Massachusetts, President Obama had this to say:

"Here's my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts but the mood around the country: The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office," the president said in an exclusive interview with ABC News's George Stephanopoulos. "People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years but what's happened over the last eight years."

At first I wanted to laugh at Obama as being fully delusional, which Pops believes. But the always thought-provoking W.C. Varones had this to say in a different context that got me thinking, maybe Obama is right, but not in the sense he believes. (W.C. is commenting on Senator Boxer's reversal of support for Bernanke.)

See Babs, the thing is that the population voted in change over a year ago. What the Democrats did was not change but continue the policies of the previous administration times 3. In the process the economy has gotten worse, the middle class is still earning less, unemployment keeps rising and yet, yet the folks who cheated the worst on Wall Street also happen to be paying out massive bonuses financed by the taxpayer.

Exactly. Obama is in fact delusional in that he thinks he is a break from the "failed Bush policies," but in fact he has continued almost everything that the public has come to loathe about the Bush presidency. Not the least of which is the incessant growth of both the size of government spending and the size of the national debt. Dean has commented extensively on the continuity from Bush to Obama (and that is an indictment of Bush, not an exoneration of Obama.) So yes, Mr. President, why don't you try reversing course, ending cozy relationships with various industries, pharma and banking, for example and start reducing the size of government. You might even have a chance for a second term if you did that. Of course you might not win the Democrat nomination either, but that's your problem.

Obama Was Warned

A month ago, an AP story appeared about how Bush was warned of the impending mortgage crisis, by some obscure lender named Paris Welch in a letter to regulators. At the time I thought, "Are you kidding me, that constitutes a warning?" So in response, I telepathically warned Barack Obama that appointing so many ex-Clintonites with all that swag Washington was throwing at businesses, even one's that don't seem to want it, would inevitably result in a scandal during his Presidency. But I was wrong, scandal seems to be arriving early, as Bill Richardson withdrew his name for Commerce secretary as a federal grand jury probes "goings on" in New Mexico, dating back to 2004. Amazingly, Obama is sticking with his "No Clintonite Left Behind" strategy and is reportedly going to appoint Leon Panetta as DCI, (that's Director of Central Intelligence for those who haven't read some of the great novels of the twentieth century.) Anyway, Obama was warned.

But the sarcasm belies a deeper point; what the heck is wrong with our political class? Why does the world's second oldest profession have lower moral standing than the first? The scandals of the last few years are mind boggling. Blago is not so amazing as he is prototypical.

As one with a little training in economics, I believe incentives matter. There is just so much money in play, and it is often spent at the whim of the powerful, that bad actors are constantly tempting politicians with goodies. For example, years ago, domestic sugar producers spent $4 million lobbying to protect their "industry" from cheap Caribbean imports of sugar cane. Congress, realizing the national security implications, rallied to their defense and preserved tariffs on sugar cane imports that were worth about $4 billion a year at the time. Their wasn't even a bribe, or at least no indictments. So who wouldn't spend that kind of cash for 1000 to 1 return on investment, in the first year alone. (Although this doesn't explain the Larry Craig's of the world, I'll admit.)

The solution is for we the people to demand limits on government and how much discretion it has to spend our money. We need to realize, to get really educated, on the harm done to our economy and and to our freedom when government becomes Big Brother to business. And that's the real danger of this bail out. Not that it will fail and we all go broke, but that it will appear to succeed and set a dangerous precedent, much as the New Deal did.