Canadian Cincinnatus

Grits are right to reject Liberal-NDP merger

According to this Toronto Sun article, some Liberals, like Justin Trudeau, are open to a Liberal-NDP merger. However, Bob Rae is having none of the merger talk – for now. From the Liberal perspective, Bob Rae is right and Justin Trudeau is wrong.

Though it doesn’t seem like it from the afterglow of their greatest electoral triumph ever, the NDP has limited growth potential from here on. In all probability, this will be their high water mark. The NDP ideology is too left wing to be seriously embraced by mainstream Canada, and the party has serious internal divisions between its Quebec and English Canada wings that can only been held together by a charismatic leader. And that charismatic leader is now dead.

It is likely that the new leader will not be as capable as Jack Layton and it is also possible that the party will fracture along federalist-separatist lines. All of which are reasons why a Liberal-NDP merger is the best outcome from the NDP’s perspective. It is their best – really their only – shot at power. The Liberals will bring with them the crucial factor of respectability that the dippers need to form a government.

Though it doesn’t seem like it in the shadow of their greatest electoral catastrophe ever - the Liberals should be able to recover from the debased state that they currently find themselves in. If the story of the federal PC party tells us anything it is that the brand name of an ancient political party can have an amazing resiliency. Tying themselves to explicit socialists will only tarnish the Liberal name further.

From the Conservative perspective, I think Stephen Harper is right to want a two-party system. An NDP-Liberal merger will push right-wing Liberals (and there are more of them than you think) straight into the arms of the Conservatives. And faced with a clear choice between left and right – without the chameleon-like Liberals to muddy the waters - the electorate will much more often pull the conservative lever than the socialist lever, thus making the Conservative Party dominant in a way that the Liberal Party once was.

The six requirements for a presidential candidate

Michael Ledeen lists his six requirements for a presidential candidate:

“Most of the time, we elect either state governors or generals who have won wars.  There are good and obvious reasons: We want leaders who have executive experience making difficult decisions, whether on the political or military battlefield, leaders who know how to manage a large and complex enterprise, leaders who have dealt with internal and external criticism, and who have kept together sometimes-fractious teams of advisers, colleagues and subordinates.”

“Second:  I don’t want someone from business who has no experience in politics or the military; the worlds are too different, and we don’t have time for the next president to learn the basic rules.

Third:  I don’t want a legislator whose career has been almost exclusively in politics. Congressmen and senators only give speeches. If the speech doesn’t work out too well, they give a different one next time, they rarely pay a meaningful price for getting it wrong. And they don’t have management experience, they’ve never been tested as leaders.”

“Fourth: I have a strong preference for someone who has failed, learned from failure, and overcome it. One of my heroes is Thomas Edison, whose search for a workable filament for the first electric light bulb produced thousands of failures. He delighted in them, learning from each one. We are fallible; our presidents are going to make mistakes. I want a president who knows that going in, and who is quick to spot his blunder and will look for a better way.”

“Fifth and closely related to #4:  I don’t want a ditherer, I want a decision-maker. Years ago I asked one of my favorite Americans — a great success in business — how he’d done it. ‘Well it certainly wasn’t brain power,’ he said (he’d had a mediocre college record at a middling school). ‘The most important thing was to keep making decisions. I knew most of them would be wrong, so I watched for them to fail, and then tried something else.’”

“Sixth:  I don’t want someone who is obsessed with doing the ‘right and proper and good thing.’ Sometimes there is no good option and the president will have to choose among various poor, and sometimes even evil, options. It’s a legitimate and urgent choice, and I want a president who will make the best choice available. The president has to make some tough decisions. Sometimes they are terrible decisions. But they have to be made.”

“In tough times like today’s, those who have had to make such decisions are more often than not military leaders, and  I am convinced that the best group of contemporary Americans are those who have been in war. I’m delighted to see veterans winning political office, and we may yet see a presidential candidate emerge from their ranks, either this time around or in the near future.”

I suspect conservatives would be enthusiastic about items 1, 3, 4 and 5, but especially 3. Pure legislators know nothing about leadership and they are often little more than influence peddlers and panderers.

With regard to item 1, I have always felt that one area where American political life is superior to Canada is the Americans preference for making governors presidents. Canadians have never chosen a provincial premier to lead our country. We tend to select leading MPs and – in the long run - are poorer for it.

I also suspect conservatives are less enthusiastic about points 2 and 6, but especially 2. In spite of being a conservative, I nevertheless agree with both points, but most especially #2.

Ledeen is right, business is too different from politics for the experience to translate. In a legal dispute between businessmen, the businessman’s instinct is, that beyond a certain point, it is better to split the difference so that everybody can go back to making money. After all, fighting is bad for business. This is the correct attitude in private life because wealth creation is a positive sum game. Politics is much more zero sum: if I am to win two seats, you must lose two. Not understanding this, businessmen-politicians routinely surrender when they think they are compromising (cf Mitt Romney).

Another thing businessmen don’t get is the central role played by emotions and symbols in politics. You see it all the time when some business type, commenting on politics, fails to see a symbolic victory as a real victory and a symbolic defeat as a real defeat. What the businessman-politician does not understand is what the prize of politics really is - the hearts and minds of the voters. If your voters are hopeful and your opponent’s are dejected, you are winning. If your voters are demoralized, you lose.

 

How Obama is short-changing the middle class and how the GOP could benefit from it, if they were smart

One mistake that free market proponents often make is that they conflate free markets with the capitalists who run the free markets. The two are not the same thing, especially with regard to business leaders at the high end. Plutocrats like Warren Buffet and GE’s Gerry Immelt are almost as political as they are business.

The dirty little secret of big business is that it doesn’t much like free enterprise. Why would they? When you are at the top, competition is bad for business. They can’t rise too much further but they sure have a long way to drop if a leaner, hungrier and smarter competitor comes along. As a result, from the perspective of their self-interest, it is much easier (and safer) for them to use their influence to pass laws that kneecap their competitors more than they kneecap them. If you are smart, you can also get showered with taxpayer money. This is why big business is often in bed with socialist politicians (cf GE and Obama). The baby they produce is called crony capitalism. 

GE doesn’t mind anti-free market legislation like cap and trade because they will get all kinds of perks such as windmill contracts, and a ban on cheap light bulbs (which forces the public to replace them with more expensive substitutes). For Goldman Sachs, things are even better. The Fed loans them money at almost 0% interest, and they turn around and loan it to Tim Geithner for a percent more. No effort, guaranteed results and - because the sums are so huge - so are the profits. And best of all, the government implicitly insures them against failure because they are ‘too big to fail’.

The problem is, as Joel Kotkin points out, that the middle class in the US is really hurting. That is because the anti-business climate Obama has fostered has hit hard the upstart competitors that provide most of the new jobs.

This should be a golden opportunity for Republicans because the interests of the middle class are almost perfectly aligned with the GOP’s free market principles. But only if GOP’s overall theme is insiders vs. outsiders, not government vs. private sector. Such a message would allow them to point out all the cushy connections between the big banks and the Obama administration. And when Obama talks about taxing “millionaires and billionaires” they should point out that this group of people includes not just Paris Hilton but almost every employer. Why is there persistent high unemployment? Answer: because the President is at war with the people who might otherwise be hiring them. When Obama talks about outsourcing jobs overseas, they should point out something Thomas Sowell said: 

President Obama's rhetoric deplores such "outsourcing," but his administration's policies make outsourcing an ever more attractive alternative to investing in the United States and creating American jobs.

In other words, every law and regulation Obama has added has helped push jobs away from America’s shores.

For a concrete example, take the aircraft plant Boeing built in South Carolina that might employ 2,000. Obama’s National Labor Relations Board is burning the midnight oil to make sure those people stay out of work.

The unemployment will continue as long as the populist anti-business bombast continues.

 

How to balance the US budget painlessly

When writing about pressing problems in current events, pundits have a tendency towards the apocalyptic. We see serious issues and assume they will end very badly or that the situation will be resolved by a paradigm-shifting Gotterdammerung that will change everything. 

Normally, what transpires is that a few things change - some for the better and some for the worse – and humanity just muddles on through to the next catastrophe.

The current US debt crisis is such a crisis. We think the US budget will blow up and change everything (just like we thought 9/11 would change everything) but I think people are overreacting. If you look at current budget situation: yes, it is serious; but no, it isn’t world changing. The reason is that the impediments to the solution are almost entirely artificial, i.e. political. In reality, balancing the US budget can be done with these changes, none of which are gut wrenching to the average American:

1. Reduce discretionary spending to 2008 levels. As 2008 was the last year of the George W Bush spending spree, 2008 was hardly a year of frugality. In reality, the budget could cut to 2004 levels with little pain felt on Main Street. But all that needs to be done is to reduce discretionary spending to 2008 levels and keep it there for a decade (i.e. discretionary spending increases kept to below GDP growth). This is not privation, political howls of dooma and gloom notwithstanding.

2. Implement pro-growth tax policies. Much of the current deficit is caused by a combination of a loss of income tax revenue corresponding with an increase in social spending due to the Great Recession. Medicare, AFDC, Section 8 vouchers, food stamps, unemployment insurance: all of these programs have grown by 50% or more in the past 3 years.

As Arthur Laffer once pointed out, you can’t balance the budget on the unemployed. To get the US out of the recession you must stimulate growth. You can do that by cutting income taxes for employers (i.e. the millionaires and billionaires who make more than $250K a year), slashing the corporate tax rate in half, slashing capital gains taxes in half and eliminating the estate tax.

The trick here is to not wimp out with populist anti-rich measures. When the liberals assert that the Bush tax cuts reduced federal revenue, they are half right. The Bush tax cuts to the middle class did indeed reduce revenue. In contrast, the Bush tax cuts to wealth creators was a spectacular revenue generator. Right now, the bottom 50% of Americans pays no income tax. They don’t need a tax cut (in fact, they need to start paying some income tax). It is the employers who need to be unshackled.

Do that and the unemployment rate will drop while tax revenues soar. As a bonus, mandated spending on the aforementioned welfare programs will plummet.

3. Deregulate as much as possible. There are so many counterproductive regulations on the books (Dodd-Frank, Community Reinvestment Act, etc.) that this is really fertile ground. Deregulation cuts government spending (enforcement costs) while simultaneously unshackling the economy. Another win-win.

4. Eliminate Obamacare.

5. To tame social security, take a page from the Paul Ryan plan and increase the retirement age by 1 month every year until the retirement age is 68. This change of 3 years will take 36 years to phase in but it will single-handedly make social security solvent again. How much will a 64 year old suffer if he as to wait an extra month for his first social security cheque. 

Answer: very little.

6. Introduce medical savings accounts, means tests and other market reforms to provide downwards pressure on the cost of medical services.

None of these steps, taken individually or together would cause much pain to the average American. In fact, they will relieve a lot of pain because the unemployment rate will drop. They will not fundamentally change the nature of American government or society, except to close a $1.5 trillion gap in the federal budget.

Not that implementing these things will be simple. It will be anything but simple and it will require an iron will among some of America’s leaders. It is just that the pain inflicted will be largely confined to those of America’s ruling class who rely on pork payoffs to stay in office.

Which is of course why none of these sensible reforms have been enacted yet.

Amy Winehouse and the London riots

On, July 23, 2011 Amy Winehouse died, most probably from a drug overdose. From August 6 to August 10 of this year, London England experienced the worst rioting that city had seen in decades. The two events are not unrelated.

Not too long ago it was considered the duty of the elites to encourage virtuous behaviour in the lower classes. Which is not to say that the elites used to be more virtuous. Often they were anything but. But the price of admission into the elite classes was that you had to present a respectable public image. For instance, Queen Victoria was beloved by the English people precisely because she set a good example for them. They knew what she did and loved her for it. As late as the fifties, Hollywood movie moguls demanded that their stars do the same thing. What they did behind closed doors was one thing, but out in public they had to behave with decorum.

Looking at things this way, the causal link between Amy Winehouse and the British riots is clear.

When alive, she was constantly on TV – drunk, stoned, and acting badly. This was called by the media, “battling with drug addiction”, as if her excesses were somehow morally equivalent to an SAS trooper fighting in Afghanistan. Whenever she stumbled, many were quick to excuse her behaviour by extolling her musical talent, saying, “what a shame it is that somebody this talented is wasting away.”

The resulting message to the spoiled children of today’s England is that it is possible to live a life of debauchery and be successful. If Amy Winehouse could do it, so could I. And Amy Winehouse was able to do it… for a while.

The trouble is, most can’t. For every thousand people who try to live the rock-star life, disaster – or at least mediocrity and cirrhosis of the liver – is the result for nine hundred and ninety-nine of them. People like Amy Winehouse and Keith Richards are the outliers. But because they are always on the TV and their countless failed emulators never are, a distorted impression of reality is given.

The end result is a significant number of ‘youths’ who are too incompetent, incapable and undisciplined to make anything of themselves. One commentator recently called these people the lumpenbourgeoisie. Has there ever been a group of people more pathetic in all history?

For their problem is not a lack of material wealth. It is also not a lack of opportunity, for today’s England has opportunity the way England of a 100 years ago had class structure. Their problems are entirely due to their own moral failings. If they had solid middle-class, bourgeois shopkeeper values, the streets of London would be peaceful because the would-be rioters would be busy making something of themselves.

So why aren’t they? The answer, at least partly, is because the dominant culture surrounding them ridicules the Englishman with the bowler hat and the brolly who symbolized English reserve only 50 years ago, while it sensationalizes hedonistic excess.

No doubt if she was alive, Any Winehouse would object to all of this, most especially of any requirement on her part to ‘keep up appearances.’ I suspect she would say something like, “I am a free spirit. I am an example of somebody who succeeded in liberating themselves from the shackles of middle-class hang-ups in order to experience nirvana.” Such reasoning is of course bogus, and belied by the fact that she lived a life of abject misery, even though she enjoyed almost perfect individual freedom.

That is an individual tragedy. The example she gave is a national tragedy.

What President Calvin Coolidge and the current Prime Minister of Sweden have in common

Walter Russell Mead relays a heartwarming story about youth then and now:

The son of Sweden’s prime minister will soon be flipping burgers at the local McDonald’s. “A little work will be fun! Feels really good,” tweeted burgermeister Gustaf about the new gig. 

In the not too distant past, rich and powerful Americans went out of their way to make sure their offspring put in some summer time on hard and dirty jobs. ... Increasingly, though, ‘summer job’ means air-conditioned internship at some prestigious institute, media company or investment bank.  And if Daddy has been exceptionally generous to the right politicians, a summertime stint in Washington beckons.

I think of Calvin Coolidge, a man Gustaf would have understood pretty well. One summer while Coolidge was president, he made his son take a job on a tobacco farm. As they broiled under the sun, one of the other workers asked young Coolidge what his father did for a living.

“He’s president of the United States,” said the boy.

“Lord,” said the other guy. “If my father was the president, I wouldn’t be working in some tobacco field!”

“If your father was my father you would,” came the answer.

This country won’t be on the right track until the Calvin Coolidge school of child rearing makes a comeback. In the meantime, hats off to Sweden.

 

Call for right to bear arms in UK after riots

This comment from the Telegraph’s Nile Gardiner:

“During the Los Angeles riots in 1992, many store owners in the south central part of the city defended their property against marauding gangs with their own weapons... And across the country, Americans admired their bravery, thankful for the Second Amendment to the US Constitution which protects their right to keep and bear arms, and thereby defend themselves, their families and their property. In contrast in London in 2011, shopkeepers were left at the mercy of feral, brutal thugs acting with impunity across whole swathes of the capital as the police were overwhelmed. If they had the right to bear arms and defend their stores with force, it would have been a very different story, and brutal looters would have met firm resistance.

Britain’s gun laws are among the most draconian in the world, yet the nation has some of the highest levels of violent crime and burglary in the West, and there is no shortage of gun crime in major cities such as London and Manchester. While criminal gangs are often able to acquire firearms on the black market, ordinary law-abiding British citizens are barred from owning guns for self-defence.” 

Remember, the right to keep and bear arms has little to do with punching holes in paper targets or shooting ducks. It is about the most basic human right of all: the right to defend yourself, your family and your property.

At stake is whether you are a free man or a pawn.

 

The right of Canadians to self-defence under attack again by our legal system

Peter Worthington relays another tale of outrage perpetrated by the Canadian legal system on an honest citizen:

The Chen case pales before the most recent incident in Toronto, where a guy escorting his girlfriend to her home at night, found signs of a break-end-enter, and checked out the house.

He found a burglar hiding, and in the ensuing fight the interloper was stabbed several times and ran away. He was admitted to hospital, but was not charged.

When the police eventually arrived, the guy who fought with the burglar was charged with “aggravated assault” — using unreasonable force by stabbing the guy.

If found guilty — as unlikely is this case — he could get 14 years. 

This is nuts.

This is nuts. And it is indicative of the contempt that the ruling classes have for the average citizen.

If asked why they are so hostile to the right of self defence, doubtlessly the cops and lawyers inhabiting our legal system would cite a fear of vigilantism, ‘street justice’ and kangaroo courts.

This is contrary to the experience in the US where the only measurable result when “castle laws” are introduced is that the crime rate drops. It seems that criminals are opportunists who discount the future heavily. They are looking for an easy buck and the prospect of facing physical resistance right now weighs much more heavily on their minds than the possible prospect of a prison sentence a year or so from now.

In contrast, the motivation of the legal system apparatchiks is a combination of paternalistic arrogance (“we know what’s best for you”), fear of job security (“hey! that’s my job, not yours”) and an ambient socialist pose that is so omnipresent that it is not even acknowledged by those afflicted by it.

In reality, the right to self-defence is our most basic right, even more basic than freedom of speech (and I am a big proponent of freedom of speech). If we aren’t allowed to even defend ourselves, what in blazes have we allowed ourselves to become?

 

Helicopter shootdown in Afghanistan: revenge for Osama bin Laden’s death?

Twenty of the casualties in the Chinook shot down in Afghanistan over the weekend were from SEAL Tem 6, the same unit that assassinated Osama bin Laden. Perhaps, the man who killed bin Laden was among the dead (though the Pentagon denies it at this point).

While it is impossible to say at this point if Taliban intelligence is good enough that they had the ability to target a specific CH-47 with specific troops on board (I have my doubts about their capabilities) or whether it was just a wartime coincidence, it is worth noting that it is standard procedure - or at least it was standard procedure until the bin Laden raid - to withhold the details of all special operations missions until much later. This policy dates back to the British government in the 1970’s, who withheld the identities of SAS operators in order to prevent the IRA from going after their families.

This leads naturally enough to speculate that perhaps, if the Obama administration hadn’t preened so much about the bin Laden raid and been so free with operational details to paint a vivid picture for the public, that Chinook would not have been shot down – as the public in general, and the Taliban in particular, would have remained ignorant of the men who pulled off the bin Laden hit.

What a reckless, selfish President.

 

Of downed helicopters: the Afghan War in perspective

Over the weekend, a US CH-47 Chinook helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. The loss of 30 US soldiers and 8 Afghans made this the deadliest helicopter crash of the war.

A news item from Strategy Page, about a helicopter shootdown from a couple of weeks ago, provides some much needed perspective on this weekend’s incident:

In a rare incident, an American Ch-47 helicopter was hit by an RPG rocket and forced to crash land near a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan. Two of the twenty people on board were slightly wounded (by RPG fragments). The RPG is a rocket launcher, and the rockets are unguided. Hitting anything as large as a helicopter, at more than a hundred meters, is mainly a matter of luck.

This is the 17th helicopter to be brought down by hostile fire in the last ten years in Afghanistan. Another 84 have crashed for non-combat reasons. In Iraq, 46 helicopters were brought down by enemy fire (in addition to 76 that crashed for non-combat reasons) during seven years of much heavier combat.

That’s a grand total of 224 lost choppers for both Afghanistan and Iraq (from all causes, and most not by enemy action). In contrast, the total US helicopter losses in Vietnam were 5,498. That’s right; the US lost more than 20 times the number of helicopters in Vietnam – that’s more than an order of magnitude more.

So when people excitedly exclaim that Afghanistan is America’s longest war (at 10+ years), understand why the US has been able to maintain the pace of operations there for so long: it’s because - at least when compared to other American wars - Afghanistan is just not that intense.