Big Government

America 3.0 [bumped]

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James C. Bennett, author of The Anglosphere Challenge (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), and Michael J. Lotus (who blogs at Chicagoboyz.net as “Lexington Green”), are proud to announce the signing of a contract with Encounter Books of New York to publish their forthcoming book America 3.0.

America 3.0 gives readers the real historical foundations of our liberty, free enterprise, and family life.  Based on a new understanding of our past, and on little known modern scholarship, America 3.0 offers long-term strategies to restore and strengthen American liberty, prosperity and security in the years ahead.

America 3.0 shows that our country was founded as a decentralized federation of communities, dominated by landowner-farmers, and based on a unique type of Anglo-American nuclear family.  This was America 1.0, as the Founders established it.  The Industrial Revolution brought progress, opportunity and undreamed-of mobility.  But, it also pushed the majority of American families into a new, urban, industrial life along with millions of unassimilated immigrants. After the Civil War, new problems of public health, crime, public order, and labor unrest, on top of the issues of Reconstruction, taxed the old Constitution.  Americans looked for new solutions to new problems, giving rise to Progressivism, the ancestor of modern liberalism.

America 3.0 shows that liberal-progressive solutions to the challenges of America 2.0 relieved some problems, and kicked others down the road.   But they also led to an overly powerful state and to an overly intrusive bureaucracy.   This was the beginning of America 2.0, the America we grew up with, which dominated the Twentieth Century.

America 3.0 argues that the liberal-progressive or “Blue State” social model has reached its natural limits.   Even as it continues to try to expand, it is now dying out before our eyes.   We are   now living in the closing years of the 20th Century “legacy state.”  Even so, it has taken the shock of the current Great Recession to make people see the need for change.  As a result, more and more Americans are calling for a return to our founding principles.  Freedom and individualism are on the rise after a century-long detour.

America 3.0 shows that our current problems can be and must be transcended with a transition to a new America 3.0, based on modern technology, decentralized communities, and self-reliant families, and a reassertion of fiscal responsibility, Constitutionally limited government and free market economics.   Ironically the future America 3.0 will in many ways be closer to the original vision of the Founders than the fading America 2.0.

America 3.0 gives readers an accurate, and hopeful, assessment of our current crisis.   It also spotlights the powerful forces arrayed in opposition to the needed reform.  These groups include ideological leftists in media and the academy, politically connected businesses, and the public employees unions.  However, as powerful as these groups are, they have become vulnerable as the external conditions change.   A correct understanding of our history and culture, which America 3.0 provides, shows their opposition will be futile.  The new, pro-freedom, mass political movement, which is aligned with the true needs and desires of Americans, is going to succeed.

America 3.0 provides readers a program of specific “maximalist” proposals to reform our government and liberate our economy.  America 3.0 shows readers that these reforms are consistent with our fundamental culture, and with our Constitution, and will make Americans freer and more prosperous in the years ahead.

America 3.0 provides a “software upgrade” for the Tea Party and for all activists on the Conservative and Libertarian Right.  It provides readers with historical evidence and intellectual coherence, to channel the energy and enthusiasm of the rising mass political movement to renew America.

America 3.0 shows that our capacity for regeneration is greater than most people realize.  Predictions of our doom are deeply mistaken.   We are now living just before the dawn of America’s greatest days.  Within a generation, positive changes beyond what we can currently imagine will have taken place.   That is the America 3.0 we are going to build together.

(Cross-posted from the America 3.0 blog.)

Virginity of global warming activist questioned.

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During all the argument about global warming that has gone on over the past decade, warming activists have questioned the motives of defenders of traditional energy sources, implying they are all funded by fossil fuel companies. The motives of those warning of the risks of global warming have rarely been questioned, implying they are only worried about the planet and nothing so crass as accepting money for their efforts.

Now, it seems, they had normal acquisitive instincts, as well. And some of them have done quite well, I might add.

NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA.

This does not include six-figure income over that period in travel expenses to fly around the world to receive money from outside interests. As specifically detailed below, Hansen failed to report tens of thousands of dollars in global travel provided to him by outside parties — including to London, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Tokyo, the Austrian Alps, Bilbao, California, Australia and elsewhere, often business or first-class and also often paying for his wife as well — to receive honoraria to speak about the topic of his taxpayer-funded employment, or get cash awards for his activism and even for his past testimony and other work for NASA.

Oh, Oh. Normal instincts after all. This will set the sainthood movement back a few years. We already know about Al Gore, of course.

The Creeping End Game of Government Bureaucracy

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In today’s Wall Street Journal there are two articles that seem to be completely disconnected but are really linked at the core. One is titled “Health System Reflects Greece’s Ills” which summarizes Greece’s public sector health policy:

Like nearly all Greeks, Mr. Gianakouras was covered by a state social security fund, which provided $13,6000 for the hospital bill. There was just one more thing: Mr. Gianakouras said he gave his surgeon “black money” – $5000 Euros in cash – to perform the operation.

‘If you don’t pay’, he said, ‘you don’t get anything done’.

While we might be surprised by this type of situation in the United States and a few other western countries, it is the way the world operates elsewhere when the government or constitution gives “rights” to citizens without the means to pay nor proper incentives to get work done in an organized and systematic (market-based) fashion. This system was brought to a fine art in the former Soviet Bloc countries where the free-market was squeezed almost entirely into niches; a vast, parallel system of bribes, favors, and illicit goods and services ran alongside the “official” system which got little or nothing done.

Alongside the uselessness of utilizing the official channels is the general impunity of the government workers that run the sham system. Periodically there are calls to remove “corruption” but that implies that corruption is a deviation from the system when in fact corruption is the system itself. There is little or no motivation for the government workers to follow rules and bribes and favors are commonplace, so what is the point in going after them in the first place for participating in a system that can’t work?

A different article discusses the “penalty” faced by SEC workers for their failure to spot the Bernie Madoff fraud, titled “SEC Discipline over Madoff” which can be easily summarized in the first paragraph:

The SEC admitted Friday that it has disciplined eight employees over their handling of the $50 billion Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme without firing any of the workers.

In one of the most obvious cases of gross governmental negligence (there are entire documentaries about individuals that tried to bring Madoff’s scam to light and were ignored by the SEC employees so I won’t summarize them here), there is NO CONSEQUENCE for these workers for their failures.

The core concepts of moving away from the free-market to a governmental run system are 1) bribes , corruption and favors being built in to the system to make it work 2) general impunity of workers for participating in this sham “rights based’ process.

My advice is to befriend governmental workers and medical care professionals in the future as our system moves more towards the “Greek” model of over-promising care to everyone and under-funding and not incenting the hard work necessary for quality care to occur. And be prepared for a wall of government workers who can rule with impunity based on arcane processes and standards not tied to the free market or any sort of accountability based system as our “investment” in government increases; the first thing these workers will do is build a system where they are put “first” before the mission that they are trying to accomplish.

I never thought that my classes on “command economies” would ever come in so useful, but it shows the long-term arc of our creeping end game in the West.

Cross posted at LITGM

You Must Love Whittaker Chambers, But You Must Not Drink Too Deeply Of His Perfumed Pessimism; Or, Be Happy For The Struggle Will Be Dire But The Victory Will Be Sweet

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I had a chat with a friend today. He mentioned Whittaker Chambers, and that he sometimes thinks that Chambers was right, that we were on the losing side of history, and the fight itself is the only reward.

I mentioned something I believed Chambers had said, that all we could do was to preserve the “fingers bones of the saints” through the coming Dark Age. I wrote to him after I’d had a few minutes to mull our conversation, and to noodle a little on the Internet. Below, lightly edited, is what I sent.

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I recalled the Chambers quote incorrectly.  He did not say “finger bones of the saints” as I have been misquoting him for years now.

Here is the passage which I remembered erroneously:

That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.

(From William F. Buckley’s memoir of Chambers, here.)

Damn, that is beautiful.

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