The New Clarion

Bill Brown sent me an email proposing we do a group blog. I thought about it a few days, then agreed. After that we spent a somewhat agonizing week trying to think up a name for this blog.

I noted that blogs can have quirky names. Little Green Footballs, for instance; the name has nothing to do with the content. But we were not comfortable with a meaningless concrete. We wanted a concrete that has an abstract meaning.

A lot of names were rejected. Western Twilight, for instance, though a beautiful image, did not work because it evokes defeat. It’s too much old school conservative, like Whittaker Chambers, who thought he was on the losing side in the west, or James Burnham, who wrote Suicide of the West. In the long run I think it looks good for the west — although I do have my moments of darkness…

We finally agreed on The New Clarion. Clarion is defined in dictionary.com as:

–adjective

1. clear and shrill: the clarion call of a battle trumpet.

–noun

2. an ancient trumpet with a curved shape.

3. the sound of this instrument.

4. any similar sound.

Clarion evokes a call to arms. It is forward-looking and optimistic. We’re fighting for the future of freedom here. We believe it is important to fight for our values and we believe it is practical. This blog is not an ivory tower exercise, playing games with ideas detached from real life. We understand that ideas have consequences and that by speaking out we can help change the world. This blog is meant to be both idealistic and effective in reality. So clarion evokes the opposite of the defeatism in Western Twilight.

The word new is also important. Objectivism rejects traditional morality. It opposes the altruism of both the socialist left and the religious right and upholds a new morality, rational self-interest. Really, Ayn Rand’s entire philosophy is new and revolutionary, from her theory of concepts to her theory of art.

Capitalism, as Ayn Rand put it in the title of her book on politics, is the unknown ideal. If we ever achieve undiluted laissez-faire capitalism, then it will bring about a new society. An unfettered free market will produce dynamic change at a pace and scale as yet unseen. Everything will be new, in ways we can’t imagine. To be a radical for capitalism is most definitely not to be a conservative or traditionalist.

It is ironic that the socialists have appropriated forward-looking terms such as progressive and liberal. Nothing could be more regressive than state control of the economy. Both socialism and conservatism originated in the 19th century as reactions to the most liberating and revolutionary force in history: capitalism. Even in the partial, fettered forms in which it has been known, capitalism has changed civilization and greatly improved the standard of living throughout the world. Those who long to hamper, regulate or destroy capitalism are the true reactionaries.

The New Clarion, then, is a revolutionary call to arms, a place to fight for the unknown ideal of capitalism. But don’t get me wrong — not every post will be a full-throated cry atop the barricades. There is room for posting funny videos from YouTube. (Like Afro Ninja. About the funniest damn thing I’ve seen.) In general the emphasis will be on politics and culture. This blog is not the place for either personal diary stuff unrelated to a philosophic principle or pure philosophy such as an essay on measurement omission in concept formation. It should be a place for examining events of the world around us in the light of philosophic principle.

I just read Tara Smith’s “The Menace of Pragmatism” in The Objective Standard. (If you don’t subscribe to TOS, you’re missing out.) With her explanation of pragmatism fresh on my mind, this statement by President Bush caught my eye:

“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free market system.”

This might go down as one of the classic pragmatist utterances.

The statement is comparable to a doctor saying, “I’ve abandoned the principles of medicine to save the patient.” How is it possible to do this?

(At moments like this I must be careful. I want to call Bush names and swear a blue streak. Take a deep breath…)

President Bush has no idea what free-market principles are. He has been flouting them for eight years now with his compassionate conservatism and big government.

Moreover, he has not saved the free market system. At best he has put off a crisis for awhile, but there’s is some question as to whether he has done even that much. Instead, Bush has started a dangerous precedent of government intervening in Wall Street that will lead to all-out, explicit fascism. Bush’s intervention will hasten the destruction of the free elements left in our mixed economy and take America further down the road to serfdom.

For a closer look at the pragmatism in Paulson’s bailout plan, here is Rich Lowry.

A few weeks ago, Paulson insisted that troubled U.S. automakers “fall outside” the original purpose of the bailout program, which “was aimed at the financial system.” …

…Last week, the Bush administration all but committed bailout funds to the — in the great economist Joseph Schumpeter’s phrase — “hopelessly maladapted” auto companies….

When Lehman Brothers went down in September, the financial system faced a crisis. Paulson needed the flexibility to adjust to dire and unpredictable circumstances, but in retrospect his conduct verges on bad faith. His $700 billion program is called the Troubled Assets Relief Program for a reason: It was premised on relieving financial institutions of their troubled assets through government purchases of them.

Paulson ended up instead injecting capital directly into banks, an idea he had repeatedly opposed during his TARP testimony. He can certainly change his mind, but Congress deserved a clearer window into his thinking before it handed him hundreds of billions of dollars. Paulson told the Washington Post that his staff was working on an option to inject capital directly even as he was declaring to Congress he wouldn’t do it.

So, what Paulson originally said he would do with the money, he has not done; and what he said he would not do, he has done. At one point he was planning on doing something at the moment he was telling Congress he would not do it.

This utter incoherence is pragmatism in action. There are no principles, no facts of reality, just the words of the moment. If today’s words contradict yesterday’s words, well, today is a whole new circumstance.

Our leaders in Washington, D.C. have no clue what they are doing. Their pronouncements amount to magic words that they hope enough people will buy so that a consensus can build that magic has happened. Their wishful thinking and evasions do not make reality go away. Someday, someone will have to pay for all this money they are wasting. I guess they’re hoping that they can put that day off long enough to make it the next guy’s problem.

UPDATE: In “The Menace of Pragmatism,” Tara Smith writes,

Psychologically, I would speculate, the deeper effect of pragmatism is that it fosters an outlook of resignation, a disposition to settle for the “good enough,” an acceptance of the notion that muddling through is the best one can do. Pragmatism erodes aspirations and breeds cynicism — not bitter or hard-edged cynicism (since nothing has sharp edges, under pragmatism’s softening influence), but a hazy, overcast, unspoken hopelessness.

If you want to see an example of what that looks like, watch this short video of President Bush.

American Spectator has its annual list of Christmas book gift suggestions. Among the participants is Joe the Plumber, the sobriquet of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher. To remind you of who JTP is,

On October 12, 2008, three days before the final presidential debate, Obama met residents in Wurzelbacher’s Ohio neighborhood. … As ABC News cameraman Scott Shulman recorded the conversation, Wurzelbacher suggested that Obama’s tax plan would be at odds with “the American dream.” Wurzelbacher said, “I’m getting ready to buy a company that makes 250 to 280 thousand dollars a year. Your new tax plan’s going to tax me more, isn’t it?”

Obama responded with an explanation of how his tax plan would affect a small business in this bracket…. ”It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success, too… and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

It turns out one of Joe’s book suggestions is:

The Theory of Money and Credit by Ludwig von Mises. The book is a 1912 study of monetary theory. It brought monetary theory into the mainstream of economic analysis. It is important reading for these troubled times.

Joe the Plumber has read Mises!

Just think: one plumber who has read Mises rocked the Obama campaign for days. If one educated American can have such an effect, imagine what would happen if just 5% of Americans read good economics and good philosophy. The welfare state would be seriously challenged. It might even be over.

Now we see why our public education system fails. They can’t afford to educate the people. If they did, they’d be teaching themselves out of a job.

To read the outcry over President Bush’s recent changes to the regulations implementing the Endangered Species Act, you’d think that it amounted to a repeal of the Act or even an incitement to hunting. Instead, this is the extent of the changes:

With the regulations finalized today, federal agencies must still follow all existing consultation procedures, except in specific and limited instances where an action is not anticipated to adversely impact any member of a listed species AND that action fulfills one of the following criteria:

1. Where the action has no effect on a listed species or critical habitat, or
2. Where the action is wholly beneficial, or
3. Where the effects of the action can not be measured or detected in a manner that permits meaningful evaluation using the best available science, or
4. Where the effects of the action are the result of global processes and can not be reliably predicted or measured on the scale of species current range, or would result in an insignificant impact to a listed species, or are such that the potential risk of harm to a species is remote.

This rule change applies only to federal agencies and only removes the need for a formal evaluation in the case of one of the situations listed above, each of which is a reasonable test. What do the environmentalists think of the action?

This administration has rejected anything with a whiff of science—so before sulking out the back door, they are going after rules that require Fish and Wildlife Service scientists to prevent harm to our last wild animals and places. Despite today’s feel-good statements, we remain convinced that these changes are illegal. We will look at the final language when it is published tomorrow, but I think we will see them in court.

And:

These rules would be a lasting reminder of all of the disdain for science and political trumping of expertise that have characterized the Bush Administration’s efforts to dismantle fundamental environmental laws. When it comes to protecting wildlife, we should listen to the scientists who spend their lives studying these animals. If they say global warming is the biggest threat to polar bears, then we should do what it takes to eliminate that threat.

Why the fuss over such an insignificant amendment? Two reasons: 1) it injects some consideration other than the animals’ needs and 2) the listing of the polar bear was going to be used to force action on global warming. The latter rationale is pretty self-evident and even acknowledged by both the Commerce Secretary and the environmentalists themselves. But the former source of hostility is far more damning.

Most of the suits taken against individuals, companies, and agencies to block actions are based on hypothetical harms done to endangered species. Building these homes could affect the migratory patterns of the red-crested throaty bimbleboot, constructing that highway might shrink the slinking blue-chested salamander’s habitat, or cutting down those trees that pose a fire hazard may spook hyacinth macaws from mating. The effects on the human population of thwarted projects, unbuilt roads, or unchecked wildlife are irrelevant.

These new rules, however, permit activity when the actual harm is negligible or unknown. It’s a far cry from a proper prioritization, which would put mankind paramount, but it at least seeks to ground endangered species assessments in reality. Which is precisely where environmentalists don’t want them because they view the Endangered Species Act as inviolate, unlimited, and unquestionable. Anything less is to express a “disdain for science” and to question “expertise.”

Environmentalists then fear that this change for federal agencies could prove to be a wedge that allows for broader setting aside of the Act and so they are preparing to dig in their heels for a nasty fight. Despite the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, they will likely win since the next president is not a “longtime advocate of the unfettered free market” like the current one is.

1. Where Have All the Doctors Gone? They’re quitting. Too much paperwork and regulation. As Instapundit notes, Atlas is shrugging.

2. This headline is not from the Onion: Gay penguins expelled from zoo colony for stealing eggs are given their own to look after following animal rights protest.

3. The Kossacks are upset at Senate collegiality. They want Democrat Senators to hate the Republican Senators as much as they do. Trapper John gets hysterical about Senator Corker, who led the fight against the auto bailout:

Bob Corker just led the charge to kill the American auto industry, and with it some 10% of the American economy, because he wasn’t allowed to bust the UAW.  As such, Bob Corker is definitionally one of the most traitorous and despicable human beings ever to track slime across the floors of the Senate. He is attempting to take advantage of the financial crisis to literally dismantle the American middle class. He is beneath the contempt with which partisans regard even their most radical and craven domestic political opponents. 

4. The Kossacks are also angry at Harry Reid because he is ineffective in crushing those traitorous and despicable Republicans. Kos argues Reid is a crappy Senate leader. (Interesting graph in that post.)

But let’s not sniff at partisan bickering. As long as Republicans and Democrats are at one another’s throat, then less will be accomplished by the federal government — and that is the best we can hope for. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of politics!

5. Over at Eschaton Atrios is upset because corporations want to dispose of their property in a way different from how Atrios would do it. It doesn’t take much to make Atrios cuss, and this report did it:

The celebrated openness of the Internet — network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic — is quietly losing powerful defenders.

Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

In the name of “internet openness” the left wants the government to regulate the internet. They would rather the state violate property rights in the name of equality than let greedy capitalists employ their property in the pursuit of profit.

6. These are heady days for the left. Not only is the state expanding faster than Aunt Bessie’s dress size, but now the Madoff crime proves, to the eyes of the left, that all capitalists are crooks. Anne Applebaum believes Madoff will cripple US capitalism — wishful thinking of the left. She says one of our culture’s mistakes is believing that wealthy people “have earned their money.” Every Marxist knows this is not so.

The Sunday 12/14/08 Detroit Free Press editorial section “On Point” gives a good picture of why so many Americans seem to always support statist policies. They never hear of anything else. The theme of this week’s On Point is, the government is going to fix the cities and this is a good thing.

One editorial, “Relief for Detroit as Bush steps up” says in part:

“Another way, though, [to think of this-MN] is to be encouraged that something will yet be done, smaller and more temporary, but better than the alternative, especially for the people and businesses of Michigan.”

In other words, we should be happy the government is going to give us some aspirins to ease the pain so we won’t have to concern ourselves with the pain’s cause.

Still another editorial’s headline says it all:

“Metro Detroit must get its act together or miss out on benefits.
Expected federal programs hold new promise for cities”

Yes, and Detroit doesn’t want to miss out on its share of the loot. This editorial touts the existence of an urban agenda which in turn calls for “regionalism”:

“Without big changes in how southeast Michigan works as a region, history will repeat itself. In the 1970s, the region lost $600 million in federal aid to build a rail system because Detroit and the suburbs couldn’t agree on a plan. Instead of moving forward together, everyone lost.”

Translation: why wait for municipalities to do voluntarily that which a regional dictator could accomplish much faster. Or: city government has failed, State government has failed, so lets try regional government and see how that works! Sheer pragmatism.

The Freep also has the final installment of a year long editorial series on the need for a national agenda for cities. It calls for “Preserve and improve public housing and Section 8 units” and “Raise the Federal minimum wage to a living-wage level” and “Create a public works program to repair and maintain the nation’s infrastructure” just to name three out of 32.

There is still another editorial by Freep writer Jeff Gerritt which extols the benefits of Obama’s promise to fix cities.

But there are no voices telling readers that the size or geographical structure of government is not the solution to our problems, government control over the economy is the problem. “Regionalism” is nothing more than trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. We are still sinking in a sea of statism/collectivism/altruism and the only cure is capitalism/individualism/egoism.

New York’s Governor David Paterson has unveiled his office’s budget proposal to bridge the $15 billion deficit his state faces. Among the litany of “drastic belt-tightening” items is a 15% tax on non-diet sodas. This “fat tax” has long been the final stop on the slippery slope, but it always seemed too far-fetched to believe it could actually happen. Democrats stereotypically want the government to be hands-off when it comes to your body, but it turns out that that policy of laissez-faire applies only to one’s genitalia.

There is a legitimate obesity epidemic, though:

The Paterson administration also announced steps yesterday to expand the state’s social services net, including a 30% increase in welfare payments over three years starting January 2010, increased money for food banks and expanded access to the state’s Family Health Plus program.

Paterson also hopes to make it easier for people to enroll in Medicaid by eliminating face-to-face interviews and fingerprinting requirements.

Government budgets, which are really just a measure of how much the state took from the people, are ever-expanding. Government at all levels need to go on a special diet, one that I like to call The Constitution Diet. It’s quite simple: treat the Constitution as it was intended—an enumeration of powers—and don’t spend any money or exercise any power that isn’t in there. Diets are hard, but this one will make the people of America more fit for the future.

Last night I watched The Dark Knight on DVD. I found it to be entirely loathsome. I won’t bother you with the plot, which did not make much sense to me. The movie is dark and malevolent, a world of nihilism and pain. It had the sense of life of Metallica lyrics or what I imagine the Saw movies are like, though I have not seen one. It’s a horror movie that makes Frankenstein and the Wolfman seem like Anne of Green Gables.

This ghastly sewer is what naturalism has done to the superhero story. It used to be about heroes for children; now it’s a celebration of evil with tormented heroes who are Byronic at best, psychotic beasts at worst.

If this is the end, I put the beginning of the end in 1969, when Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, two young men with tremendous talent, were given Green Lantern, whose sales were sagging. Green Lantern was paired with the second-rate hero Green Arrow. O’Neil and Adams were given remarkable creative freedom as DC searched for ways to compete with the juggernaut Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were creating over at Marvel.

O’Neil and Adams brought “social conscience” to superhero comic books. As with Zola in serious literature, naturalism in comics began as a sort of stolid, left-liberal propaganda. Their brief run culminated in a story in which Speedy, Green Arrow’s teenage sidekick, gets hooked on heroin.

This series marked the end of the Silver Age of Comic Books and the beginning of the Bronze Age. The age of innocence and sunlit heroism was over. It’s been downhill ever since. From then on comics would be increasingly dark, adult, tormented and violent. Heroes and villains would more likely have an ambiguous “shades of gray” morality instead of clear-cut good and evil.

That a movie such as The Dark Knight and music such as heavy metal can be as popular as they are today gives me pause. This art of nihilism and madness would not have been popular in America in 1969, when the Silver Age died.

Conservatives criticize Obama’s spending plans as impractical. Here’s John Hawkins:

Barack Obama and the Democratic Party seem to have fallen in love with the idea of “make work” jobs. In other words, they’re going to take money from taxpayers and then use it to “create green jobs,” work projects, and other marginally useful government programs. Then, to add insult to injury, these very same politicians who’ve taken the money out of working people’s pockets will pat themselves on their backs for being compassionate enough to put people to work.

What shouldn’t be missed is the other side of the equation: much of the money paid in taxes to the government would otherwise be spent, thereby creating jobs. Furthermore, since the government is less efficient than private industry and because in most cases, people are better able to fill their own needs with their own money than the government can, the “make work” job process is inherently inefficient.

All of this is true and important to remember, but it misses the point of the spending. The left really does not care if government spending creates wealth. In fact, environmentalists would be horrified if it did; they want less production and less prosperity. To statists the expansion of state power is an end in itself.

The left wants to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism. To do so, it must first destroy America’s culture of individualism, its heritage of freedom from the 18th and 19th centuries. Obama knows his “make work” jobs will not produce wealth; that is not their purpose. No, those jobs are meant to produce the socialization of America.

Collectivism is the logical politics of the morality of altruism. If self-interested action, individualism, is bad, then it makes sense to reorganize society so that the individual serves the collective. The only way to get this service is through state power. The state must get people used to the idea of working for the state and the collective. Once the principle of sacrifice to the collective is established and people are used to it, then further expansion toward the total state will be easier.

Remember Ellsworth Toohey’s line from The Fountainhead: “Don’t bother to examine a folly — ask yourself only what it accomplishes.” The people in power know exactly what they are doing. They know what their folly is meant to accomplish. The reasons they give about “creating jobs” and “stimulating the economy” are just lies to cover their power grabs. Don’t be misled because their lies will not work. They were never meant to work.

North Korea has declined to make its oral agreements official, moving diplomatic negotiations to end its nuclear weapons program back to the starting line. So it is now not an official sponsor of terrorism, some of the sanctions against it have been lifted, and it faces an Obama administration that pledges “direct and aggressive diplomacy” but will likely be as conciliatory as the Clinton administration was—though probably not including a basketball signed by Michael Jordan.

Although Kim Jong-Il had a stroke, it still seems like this has been his year. The civilized world continues to treat him as just another world leader while his diplomatic service strings them along with laborious talks that go nowhere. He has been using his nuclear weapon aspirations as a lever to get ever-increasing concessions from the West.

But what should we be doing about North Korea? Diplomacy clearly doesn’t work with Kim Jong-Il as it’s been 14 years since the original effort. We are stretched too thin with Iraq and Afghanistan already to invade North Korea and get rid of his nuclear program completely. I think a targeted air strike like Israel’s back in 1981 would take care of their sole nuclear plant capable of manufacturing plutonium. Our foreign policy should properly address our enlightened self-interest, so to speak, and eliminating the weapons program would suffice to that end.

Longer term, it is clear that Kim Jong-Il and his regime of thugs is a menace to the free world. The United States, with or without United Nations support, should seek to topple the DPRK. We could arm the citizenry, providing air support as necessary, while encouraging South Korea to invade with an eye toward reunification. Technically, we are still at war with North Korea so we could provide troops without complication. Furthermore, this time around North Korea has no friends like China or the Soviet Union to lean on. Countries like France, Russia, and such will squawk but they won’t put up much in the way of opposition. This war is the one that we should have fought instead of the one in Iraq—the DPRK is much more of a threat than Saddam Hussein ever was.

VDH observes,

I was puzzled by Obama’s almost immediate denials that he had been in any way in contact with the Governor’s office. Why? Because for the last month it was simply understood, both by his own admission and by David Axelrod’s interviews, that his own preference for his Senate replacement was probably made known to the Governor. And fittingly so. Of course, there would be nothing wrong about Obama simply saying, “I am surprised as the next person, since I have discussed my replacement as would be natural with a governor of my own party responsible for the appointment, and I never detected anything out of the ordinary on his part.” Why instead the unbelievable denial of any communications that in turn earns the more unbelievable “misspoke” on the part of Axelrod? …I wish Obama well in governing us in times of peril, but I also wish he would just stop the stuttering in ex tempore settings, and come clean the first time.

I believe Obama does not "come clean the first time" because what other people think is more important to him than the facts of reality. Such an orientation — social metaphysics, as Ayn Rand calls it — would make one likely to lie. Truth or falsehood are beside the point if what matters most is what people think the truth is.

It turns out that Obama’s statement that he had no contact with Governor Blagojevich is not true, as a photograph shows him shaking the Governor’s hand one week before Obama made that statement.

Obama’s initial reactions are often wrong. His initial response to the flaps about Reverend Wright and William Ayers was to lie. It took him a week on vacation in Hawaii to condemn the Russian invasion of Georgia.

And don’t forget this odd gaffe:

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) – Barack Obama, caught up in the fervor of a campaign speech Tuesday, drastically overstated the Kansas tornadoes death toll, saying 10,000 had died.

The death toll was 12.

Obama’s first reaction to the Blagojevich scandal was that he was "saddened." Now, I ask the reader: did you feel sad when the story broke earlier this week? I think most people felt emotions such as anger, disgust and contempt. Who would feel sadness?

There is an inauthenticity central to Obama’s character that bears watching in the years ahead. I hope that someone close to Obama who is in touch with reality makes it his job to tell the President how he should react to events. It has become obvious that Obama has trouble at first getting it right himself. Obama is not psychotically detached from reality. He can be persuaded of the truth; it just seems to take him some time figure it out. And yes, it is a little unnerving to think that a man who is even slightly out of touch with reality is the man in charge of the nuclear football.

The MSM refuse to examine Obama’s shaky relationship with the truth. Ed Morrissey noted on his internet show, if that’s what it’s called, that no president has been under such an ethical cloud before he even took office. The media are determined to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, the opposite of how they treated President Bush. I hold George W. Bush in low esteem — I believe his compassionate conservatism has done tremendous damage to freedom in America — but I do think he is an honest man, (at least for a politician). Far from being corrupt, he is a devout Christian, and that’s his problem: he has been too faithful to his morality. For eight years now the media have assumed the worst of Bush, trying to catch him in scandals from Enron and Halliburton to supposed torture and wiretapping and the trumped up Plame affair.

It is stunning to watch a free press in a free country act like Pravda in the old Soviet Union and produce propaganda that supports the regime in power rather than investigate the facts. However, we can take heart in this: A is A. Politicians and the press can ignore the facts of reality, but that does not make them go away. We will see this in the coming years as this era of massive new interventions into the economy fails to make anything better.

Anyone who doubts the coming inflation need only look at the graph below, reproduced from a research document by the St. Louis Federal Reserve:

The only unknown in this is how long it will take for the inflated money supply to wreak its havoc on the economy.

Over 300 Chinese intellectuals have signed what’s called Charter 08, a manifesto calling for Western-style democracy to be instituted in China. Two of its authors have already been arrested. The document, as you might expect, is more Universal Declaration of Human Rights than Declaration of Independence but it’s still a wonderful start and contains a number of surprising gems:

1. A New Constitution. We should recast our present constitution, rescinding its provisions that contradict the principle that sovereignty resides with the people and turning it into a document that genuinely guarantees human rights, authorizes the exercise of public power, and serves as the legal underpinning of China’s democratization. The constitution must be the highest law in the land, beyond violation by any individual, group, or political party.

14. Protection of Private Property. We should establish and protect the right to private property and promote an economic system of free and fair markets. We should do away with government monopolies in commerce and industry and guarantee the freedom to start new enterprises. We should establish a Committee on State-Owned Property, reporting to the national legislature, that will monitor the transfer of state-owned enterprises to private ownership in a fair, competitive, and orderly manner. We should institute a land reform that promotes private ownership of land, guarantees the right to buy and sell land, and allows the true value of private property to be adequately reflected in the market.

As well as some not-so-surprising turds:

16. Social Security. We should establish a fair and adequate social security system that covers all citizens and ensures basic access to education, health care, retirement security, and employment.

17. Protection of the Environment. We need to protect the natural environment and to promote development in a way that is sustainable and responsible to our descendents and to the rest of humanity. This means insisting that the state and its officials at all levels not only do what they must do to achieve these goals, but also accept the supervision and participation of non-governmental organizations.

It’s a courageous step, far better in its understanding of the proper role of government than I had thought. Will it catch hold as a rallying point? Can the rule of law ever come to China? At least we now know where to keep our attention focused.

Here comes the payoff of the bailout: it can be used as an entrée into whatever company “accepts” money from it for whatever purpose. First it was limits on executive compensation, now it’s being used to second-guess routine business practices:

Showing solidarity and stressing the importance of protecting workers’ rights, Governor Rod R. Blagojevich today met with laid-off employees at the shuttered Republic Windows & Doors in Chicago. Governor Blagojevich told workers, who have been peacefully protesting at the plant since it closed on Friday, that the State would suspend business with Republic Windows & Doors and Bank of America, its lender, and the Illinois Department of Labor would file a complaint if negotiations are not quickly concluded.

(As an aside, one wonders if there are other—more “direct”—negotiations going on between Blagojevich and Bank of America.)

This whole episode leaves me queasy. First, Bank of America closed off Republic Windows and Doors’ line of credit since it was “overcollateralized”. It became that way due to falling sales from the housing downturn but also because it was mismanaged and running at a loss for the last five years. Next, the company announced that it was shutting down last Friday. This brought the unionized workers out to Bank of America’s headquarters to protest the closure, which apparently ran counter to Illinois law requiring a 60-day notice to workers before any layoffs. Finally, the workers occupied the factory and refused to leave, allowing only Jesse Jackson and other politicians to enter.

It would just be yet another reprehensible incident in labor history were it not for Barack Obama’s statement of support and Blagojevich’s browbeating, which quickly resulted in Bank of America’s capitulation.

Given that Bank of America’s “acceptance” of bailout money was at the point of a gun (CEO Ken Lewis is noted to have “pushed back” even though he later called taking the money “patriotic”), this is real-deal fascism. The “investment” the bailout money represents is just a legitimizing cover for outright control. Bank of America had no responsibility for a borrower’s compliance with state laws, yet it is now being coerced into lending money to a company it deems unfit (and has for nearly a year).

As the bailout expands into new territories, these intrusions will become less unprecedented and more prevalent. Those who say we’re not socialist yet because the means of production aren’t publicly owned might want to re-appraise that notion: the federal government is buying stakes in public companies and exercising considerable control through that ownership.

People are stunned at the corruption of Rod Blagojevich, Governor of Illinois. Yesterday Keith Olbermann asked if Blagojevich is the dumbest SOB in America or the craziest. Neither, Keith. He’s just your average politician. A dime a dozen.

This [pdf] is how politicians spend taxpayers’ money in the real world:

63. According to Individual A, after Individual B left the meeting on October 6, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH told Individual A that he was going to make an upcoming announcement concerning a $1.8 billion project involving the Tollway Authority. ROD BLAGOJEVICH told Individual A that Lobbyist 1 was going to approach Highway Contractor 1 to ask for $500,000 for Friends of Blagojevich. ROD BLAGOJEVICH told Individual A that, “I could have made a larger announcement but wanted to see how they perform by the end of the year. If they don’t perform, fuck ‘em.” According to Individual A, he/she believed that ROD BLAGOJEVICH was telling Individual A that ROD BLAGOJEVICH expected Highway Contractor 1 to raise $500,000 in contributions to Friends of Blagojevich and that ROD BLAGOJEVICH is willing to commit additional state money to the Tollway project but is waiting to see how much money Highway Contractor 1 raises for Friends of Blagojevich.

And:

65. According to Individual A, on October 8, 2008, during a discussion of fundraising from various individuals and entities, the discussion turned to Children’s Memorial Hospital, and ROD BLAGOJEVICH told Individual A words to the effect of “I’m going to do $8 million for them. I want to get [Hospital Executive 1] for 50.” Individual A understood this to be a reference to a desire to obtain a $50,000 campaign contribution from Hospital Executive 1, the Chief Executive Officer of Children’s Memorial Hospital.

Do you think deals like that do not go on every day, thousands of times all across America? I’ll bet many politicians reacted to the Blagojevich arrest thinking, “There, but for the fact that I’m careful enough to speak circumspectly, go I.”

As Mises explains in Bureaucracy, politicians do not pursue a profit — at least, not an honest one on the free market — so they have no standard by which to calculate how to allocate funds. They end up using quid pro quo contributions or under-the-table kickbacks and gifts as a crude kind of barter guide.

I like this passage:

77. …ROD BLAGOJEVICH told HARRIS to tell Tribune Financial Advisor that “everything is lined up, but before we go to the next level we need to have a discussion about what you guys are going to do about that newspaper.” HARRIS stated that he “won’t be so direct.” ROD BLAGOJEVICH told HARRIS “yeah, you know what you got to say.”

All politicians know what they got to say. That’s the bilge we hear every day in the media. That’s not being “so direct.” All we’re hearing in these wiretapped conversations is an average politician being direct.

This is how politicians speak when they think they’re in private:

90. …During the call, ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated, “unless I get something real good for [Senate Candidate 1], shit, I’ll just send myself, you know what I’m saying.” ROD BLAGOJEVICH later stated, “I’m going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain. You hear what I’m saying. And if I don’t get what I want and I’m not satisfied with it, then I’ll just take the Senate seat myself.” Later, ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that the Senate seat “is a fucking valuable thing, you just don’t give it away for nothing.”

96. …In regards to the Senate seat, ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated “I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there.”

101. …ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that the consultants (Advisor B and another consultant are believed to be on the call at that time) are telling him that he has to “suck it up” for two years and do nothing and give this “motherfucker [the President-elect] his senator. Fuck him. For nothing? Fuck him.” ROD BLAGOJEVICH states that he will put 64 “[Senate Candidate 4]” in the Senate “before I just give fucking [Senate Candidate 1] a fucking Senate seat and I don’t get anything.”

It’s no coincidence that Rod Blagojevich talks like a gangster in a second-rate Hollywood movie. Gangsters and politicians are about the same thing: power. The lust for power attracts the same kind of people to both professions. The way Blagojevich talks is the way power acts.

Why do the worst get on top, as Hayek put it in The Road to Serfdom? Because state power is about wielding force, not persuading with reason. The more statist a political system is, the more bullies, con artists and sociopathic thugs would find the political profession irresistible.

Think of it this way. Taxation is theft. Who would want to be in charge of confiscating money from those who produce it and redistributing it? Someone with the soul of a thief. Blagojevich.

Regulation is dictation. Who would want to be in charge of dictating to producers what they can and cannot do with their own property? Someone with the soul of a dictator. Blagojevich.

And people are shocked that a politician is corrupt?

UPDATE: Revised.

According to Paul Boutin we just made a mistake starting this blog:

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

I have no idea what Flickr or Twitter are. I’m so 2007! I don’t like being told, just after we got this blog going, that we made a mistake.

Boutin makes another point:

Scroll down Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs and you’ll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can’t keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.

Although this blog will never have pro writers cranking out 30 posts a day, it is a group blog. Maybe we would get Boutin’s seal of approval for that. So far we have Bill Brown, Dismuke and me; we intend to get many more bloggers. The idea is to create lots of content that will increase traffic more than an individual blogger could do. We’d like to get enough participants so that no one blogger feels pressure to produce content. Over at Myrhaf I  was getting over 200 hits a day; this blog should blow past that number pretty fast. I hope.

Boutin seems to think that blogging puts one in competition with huge blogs like Huffington Post. I don’t think of this blog as being in competition with anyone. It’s a place for a group of Objectivists to sound off on politics and culture. As Dr. Peikoff said about his radio show, it’s nice to have to platform from which to speak out on current events. No one has to read this blog, but if people do, then great.

I’m old enough to be still astonished by the internet. My greatest traffic day over at Myrhaf was when I was linked to by Michelle Malkin and I drew around 1,000 visits. Before the internet I had not expressed my ideas to 1,000 people in my life. You had to be a professional to communicate to that many people. The internet has opened up possibilities for the non-professional.

I was surprised to hear Yaron Brook in “Cultural Movements: Creating Change” be less than enthusiastic about the internet. He notes that people are not reading Atlas Shrugged on the internet. While this is true, I would blame short attention spans on modern education more than anything.

Objectivists have criticized online forums as a bad place to learn Objectivism. This is true, and the same can be said for blogs. The only way to learn any philosophy is to read the philosopher’s works, and that will certainly be more demanding than posts fired off on a blog. The internet in its forms must be kept in its place. Sturgeon’s Law says that 90% of everything is crap, and as blogs have no professional editors weeding out the awful, that number is probably higher for them.

I must also point out that as we live more and more of our lives before a computer screen, we should remember to get away from the computer. Go outside and take a walk. Breathe some fresh air.

Boutin ends his not-entirely-serious piece with an example of the prose people use at Twitter, whatever that is:

@WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won’t find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook?

If that is the future, count me out. I promise you, we will write the old-fashioned way here at The New Clarion. We might make mistakes, but we will strive to write prose that would make Strunk and White happy.

In yesterday’s post I argued that increased government spending, including Obama’s plan to create government jobs that will “stimulate” the economy, will lead to inflation. Daniel J. Mitchell shows that government cannot create jobs – it can only take resources that would have been used more efficiently by the private sector.

President-elect Obama has announced that he wants a big “stimulus” package to create 2.5 million jobs by 2011. Many of the details are unclear, including how much new government spending he will propose and how he is measuring job creation. Press reports suggest the incoming administration is looking at $400 billion-$500 billion over the next two years, but the Washington Post reports that Democrats are talking about as much as $700 billion during that time period.

Not surprisingly, the prospect of all this new spending (above and beyond the record spending increases during the past eight years) has triggered a feeding frenzy among special interests. Home builders, auto companies, road builders, state and local governments, the education establishment, the food stamp lobby, the green lobby, and alternative energy companies are among the groups fighting for a place at the public trough.

$400 billion, $500 billion, $700  billion — it will be an easy trillion by the time politicians have put all their pet pressure groups on the gravy train. The line attributed to Senator Dirksen, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” will have to be updated to trillions someday.

If that money stays in the private sector, it will create jobs as capitalists use it to make a profit. Individuals pursuing a profit spend the money with great efficiency; it’s not hard to use the system of prices to figure out where money will do the most good.

Politicians, on the other hand, do not pursue a profit. They have to choose between many pressure groups clamoring for a piece of the pie. How do they choose? Do you think the donations each politician gets from various groups might enter into his calculations? How could it not?

The economist Greg Mankiw estimates that each job will cost $280,000. That’s $280,000 that would have been used more efficiently to produce wealth — and ultimately to produce jobs — than any government spending.

In the end, Obama’s stimulus plan will destroy wealth that would have been used by the private sector to produce wealth. However, the money will have been taken from individuals pursuing their greedy self-interest and spent altruistically by our noble philosopher-kings in Washington, D.C. That makes it a good deal to the statists.

Speaking from the non-existent Office of the President-Elect (complete with a prop desk at which no work is done), Barack Obama announced plans for the biggest public works program since FDR’s New Deal.

President-elect Barack Obama added sweep and meat to his economic agenda on Saturday, pledging the largest new investment in roads and bridges since President Dwight D. Eisenhower built the Interstate system in the late 1950s, and tying his key initiatives – education, energy, health care –back to jobs in a package that has the makings of a smaller and modern version of FDR’s New Deal marriage of job creation with infrastructure upgrades.

The president-elect also said for the first time that he will “launch the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen.”

“We will repair broken schools, make them energy-efficient, and put new computers in our classrooms,” he said in the address.

The president-elect is bringing new elements of his domestic agenda into his economic recovery plan, committing to a path toward giving every American access to an electronic medical record as part of an “economic recovery plan … that won’t just save jobs, it will save lives.”

Joe Conason says that’s not enough.

His first priority should be immediate, substantial financial aid to the states and cities that are now laying off thousands of public employees and preparing to fire thousands more. Rapid, generous assistance to localities would not only keep hundreds of thousands of workers employed, but would simultaneously advance national priorities in health, education, infrastructure, and energy efficiency.

Where will the state get the money to pay for all this and the rest of our escalating federal budget? It looks like we’re in for a vast increase in deficit spending.

In the old days before Reagan the Democrats were the party of deficit spending and the Republicans were the green eyeshade party that clucked about balancing the budget. Then the Republicans discovered the Laffer Curve, which holds that a tax cut allows the economy to be more productive, which ends up bringing in more tax revenue that the higher tax rate would have. As tax cuts cause deficits, the Democrats became the anti-deficit party in order to protest Republican tax cuts.

Now that both parties seem to have decided it’s time for a spending binge, nobody cares about the deficit anymore. Perhaps the Republicans will make an issue of the deficit if they ever figure out what they stand for now.

Why is deficit spending bad? Is Wikipedia puts it,

…deficit spending may create inflation — or encourage existing inflation to persist. (In the United States, this is seen most clearly when Vietnam-war era deficits encouraged inflation.)

I don’t see how the government can avoid inflation. Even if they passed a tax increase, I doubt it would be big enough to cover the huge increase in spending coming our way.

Galileo Blogs might be right that we’re probably about to see a replay of the 1970′s. Are we ready for high inflation rates and high interest rates?

Inflation is the politicians’ favorite tax increase because people don’t understand that it comes from the government printing more dollars and thus devaluing the dollar. People see greedy corporations raise prices for their products and blame them for inflation. Politicians then exploit the anger of the populace against capitalists. Men like Henry Waxman will hector corporations for daring to raise prices when America’s workers face tough times.

I’m no economist, but I’ll give you my guess as to what is coming. I think we’re in for inflation far greater than the 1970′s. What we are about to see will be unprecedented in American history, although it has been seen in other countries such the Weimar Republic.

As someone (I forget who) recently quipped, invest in wheelbarrows.

UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson writes,

I don’t think we are near a Great Depression by any metric—GDP performance, unemployment, or bank collapses. But at some time in the near future, the enormous bailouts, reprieves on debt, spiraling federal debt and borrowing from overseas, expansion of the money supply, envisioned near zero-interest loans, and trillion-dollar plus savings in gas and energy prices will, in the manner of a perfect storm, begin to create a great inflation. When capital invested in stock, cash, bonds, or real estate brings no interest or profit, then indebtedness has less of a down side, and inflation starts to roar.

In my 51 years of life I don’t think the left has ever been as successful as it is now. The left controls the agenda. The state is expanding without opposition on a number of fronts — probably in more ways than we know. Huge power grabs, such as Bush signing an executive order authorizing state control of CO2 emissions, go almost unnoticed. Johnson’s Great Society might have seen comparable advances in state power; I don’t know, I was more interested in Batman comic books at the time.

No new theoretical ideas have revitalized the left. Naomi Klein has become a leading figure among leftist intellectuals with The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, a book with the bizarre premise that Milton Friedman is the evil mastermind behind the right’s conspiracy to create shocking world events that force people to… to what? To turn against socialism? To be free? (The New Yorker has a long piece on Klein. Ron Radosh and Jonathan Chait review her book.) The only remarkable thing about this book, which I won’t waste time reading, is that jury-rigged nonsense is enough to propel a leftist to intellectual superstardom. They must be starving for ideas on the portside.

The left is materialist. Although they have learned to shriek at any suggestion that they are communist, they certainly do hold some of Marx’s ideas, especially his theory of wages. As materialists they believe that muscles have metaphysical importance; the mind is secondary if at all. Workers laboring for capitalists are therefore being exploited. The role of the mind in the creation of wealth — of entrepreneurs who plan, save and innovate — is not understood by the left. This leads the left to support minimum wage and redistribution of wealth. As Obama told Joe the Plumber, it’s good to spread the wealth around.

In the left’s view there are two alternatives: political power or economic power. The state can control the economy for altruist ends or capitalists can control people for their own selfish gain. In such a view, state control of the economy is the only moral system. The left’s morality compels them to strive ever for more and more control of the economy.

None of this is new; it goes back to Marx in the 19th century. If new ideas are not energizing the left, what is? The collapse of the right. We are seeing the left fill the vacuum of conservatism’s failure. The collapse began in 1995, one year after the vaunted Republican Revolution and the Contract for America. During the government shutdown the media paraded sob stories of government workers not getting paid because Republicans are so mean-spirited — and the right folded like a cheap lawn chair. Then Bush came along with Compassionate Conservatism, implying that regular conservatism was not altruist enough, and the right was dead. To paraphrase Nixon, we’re all Marxists now.

Capitalism can only be defended with the morality of rational self-interest. More fundamentally, freedom needs a defense of the mind against the left’s materialism. The role of reason must be understood. As religionists, conservatives could not embrace and defend egoism and reason.

All we are seeing now is the quest for power, as the mystics of muscle fill the void left by the collapse of the mystics of spirit.

From the Emanuel-Rahm-is-Fred-Kinnan department:

“Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”