Palin v. Crony Capitalism

I have long believed that the biggest problem we have in this country is that the government and the businesses that have captured the regulatory state have become one seamless monstrosity.

A lot of people have had a hard time getting their heads around this.

Lefties like to think that “business” is evil but that “government” regulates it to protect the people from pollution and defective products, etc.

Righties like to think that “business” = free enterprise, menaced by the evil “government” that is driving it to extinction.

Both are mostly wrong.

The government has turned into an amalgamation of iron triangles — regulators, legislators (or actually their staffs) and industries that are regulated. These work in tandem to their mutual advantage at the expense of the taxpayer and of truly entrepreneurial and innovative businesses. It is in the joint interest of this business/government crony capitalist complex to crush out potential rivals and created government sponsored, protected and subsidized monopolists.

This is precisely the hazard the USA was founded to fight against. The American Revolution was provoked by British monopolists authorized by the Crown — crony capitalism, 18th Century style. The founding generation was acutely aware of this problem. Further the major thinkers influencing 19th Century liberal thought in the USA, Canada and Britain were all focused on this problem: Jefferson, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith. (See the brilliant book The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone by Robert Kelley, which explains this now-forgotten history.)

The greatest threat to our liberty is the uniting of government power and private greed, and that is exactly what we are facing now.

The creation of a regulatory state meant its inevitable capture by the industries it supposedly regulated. I remember having a life-changing intellectual moment when I read The Logic of Collective Action by Mancur Olson as an undergrad at the University of Chicago. (If you have not read this, you must do so. Really.) George Stigler’s analysis of the regulatory state was consistent with this picture. (See, e.g. The Citizen and the State: Essays on Regulation.) Once you see how this works, it is obvious that this process is inevitable.

The political class that services this machine has come to be known in Chicago as The Combine. Both parties service the machine, with no substantial difference between them. The Democrats tend to have more of what our co-blogger Carl from Chicago, in an excellent and prescient post, called stone-cold redistributionists, but neither party has any interest in making any basic changes in these arrangements. Mr. Bush, with the bank bailouts, then Mr. Obama, with Solyndra being just one of many egregious examples from him, has taken this process to a new level.

During the Cold War, people would argue that the United States and the Soviet Union were “converging.” The argument went that the Soviet Union would liberalize and become more humane, while the USA would become more socialistic, and we would all end up looking something like a utopian notion of Sweden. This did not happen. The Soviet Union fell apart. Mr. Fukuyama famously asserted that liberal democracy had “won” and that the ideological struggles of modernity were over, and history had ended.

But what if the final state is not democratic capitalism? What if convergence is right after all? What if Soviet communism fell apart and turned into a mafia state run by an alliance of government and favored businesses, which control the country by corruption and intimidation, a nomenklatura that strips out all the value in the country on behalf of a well-connected elite, immiserating everyone else. This amoral, vicious, greed-driven, undemocratic dystopia is what we are now converging toward. It is an Orwellian future, with an Inner Party of senior politicians and business executives, an Outer Party of government employees and business managers, and a vast, despoiled, proletariat with no opportunities, or assets or future. It sounds like the world Mr. Obama is brazenly pushing us toward. It also sounds like a future that no Republican has so far dared to point to, to name, to denounce and to oppose — because they would prefer to be in on the game than take the risks inherent in opposing it.

So, Fukuyama was right: We are approaching a single form of governance around the world. Unfortunately, it turns out, it’s fascism.

Until Gov. Palin’s speech on September 4, 2011, in Indianola, Iowa.

… there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70% of the jobs in America, it’s you who own these small businesses, you’re the economic engine, but you don’t grease the wheels of government power.

Please listen to this speech, or read it, if you have not done so already.

Today, Instapundit linked to a Facebook post entitled “Crony Capitalism on Steroids.”

She is pounding the same drum.

She is apparently going to make this theme the main focus of a Presidential campaign.

Say what you like about Mrs. Palin. She is the only person in public life who has successfully identified the threat, named it, shone a spotlight on it, denounced it, and begun to threaten it.

This is the first faint flicker of hope I have seen that our political order can be reformed democratically without a massive, system-wide failure happening first. Maybe the other candidates will be forced to respond to these denunciations, maybe there will be a populist response to this challenge raised by Gov. Palin. I hope so.

We do live in interesting times, and they just got a lot more interesting.

UPDATE: Paul Ryan had this excellent speech linked on Instapundit. Here’s an excerpt:

… if we surrender more control over our economy to the governing class then life in America will become defined by a new kind of class warfare: A class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society at the expense of working Americans, entrepreneurs, and the small businesswoman who has the gall to take on the corporate chieftain.

My highlighting. Sounds familiar.

More of this, please. Faster, please.

Norway Overhead Power Lines

When in Norway recently I focused on what any typical traveler would find interesting… their overhead power lines.

We took a ferry in the fjord in the area of Norway west of Bergen, the 2nd largest city in the country. Off in the distance I could see the pylons, and since the fjords are so steep and tall they looked very tiny in perspective.

Since Norway is blessed with immense amounts of hydropower, they have little need for conventional fueled plants. Hydro power is the most significant of the “alternative” generation assets (as opposed to the more “hip” wind or solar power sources), and once built the costs to “run” the site are very low (although the glacial debris does damage the generators; they had an exhibit in their “glacier museum” that showed the impact).

Read more

Some interesting stuff

This is on my Conservative History site where I am beginning to publish other people’s articles. First up was one by David Linden who is a Ph.D. student of history at King’s College, London with special interest in the modern Conservative Party. He had done an M.A. thesis on the Black Papers on education and extracted an article from that.

As if to prove that we have problems with our education system, his article had an incredible number of grammatical and punctuation errors. In fact, it was not till I started editing the Conservative History Journal that I realized how many doctoral students and young academics could not write clear, coherent, correct English.

The Black Papers on Education were a series of publications in the late sixties and early seventies that tried to battle with the prevalent political idea that large comprehensive schools were better for children from a social and educational point of view. Mr Linden over-rates their influence. The sad truth is that, though everything those papers predicted came true (and then some), the warnings and arguments were ignored and, subsequently, forgotten. While it is good to revive interest in them, especially now that some attempts are being made to sort out the mess, this only highlights the tragic developments in our state education system. (Declaration of interest: the Tibor Szamuely, mentioned in the article, who was one of the star contributors to the most widely read Black Paper, the second one, was my father. I am, as I proudly announce, a hereditary trouble-maker.)

The other article that might interest people is a review I wrote of a delightful and elegantly written little tome by Alistair Cooke (now Lord Lexden), the official historian of the Conservative Party and author of several publications related to that subject, on the Primrose League. The League was the largest popular political organization in British history; it was the first organization that had members from all sections of society, getting enormous support from working class participants; it was the first organization in which many women, again from all sections of society, played an important part; it had special sections for children and young people; it had a highly developed welfare support system. All the things the left claim to have started were, in actual fact, begun by the Primrose League.

It gives me no pleasure to say that the Conservative Party seems to have forgotten about the Primrose League and about the Black Papers on education in its rush to “modernize”.

The Barbarians within the Gates

“Scholarship, which is meant to be a bulwark of civilization against barbarism, is ever more frequently turned into an instrument of rebarbarization,” wrote Leo Strauss. Here, drawn from the MLA International Bibliography, are a few recent examples of that well-established trend:

Chaudhri, Amina. “ ‘Straighten up and Fly Right’: HeteroMasculinity in The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 36 (Summer 2011): 147-63.

Holcombe, Heather E.   “Faulkner on Feminine Hygiene, or, How Margaret Sanger Sold Dewey Dell a Bad Abortion.” Modern Fiction Studies 57 (Summer 2011): 203-29.

O’Bryan, C. Jill. “Ontology and Autobiographical Performance: Joanna Frueh’s Aesthetics of Orgasm.” Drama Review 55 (Summer 2011): 126-36.

Stobie, Cheryl. “Indecent Theology, Trans-Theology, and the Transgendered Madonna in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of the Flames.” Research in African Literatures 42 (Summer 2011): 170-83.

Cole, Lucinda, et al. “Speciesism, Identity Politics, and Ecocriticism: A Conversation with Humanists and Posthumanists,” in “Animal, All Too Animal,” special issue, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 52 (Spring 2011): 87-106.

Christ, Carol P.   “The Last Dualism: Life and Death in Goddess  Feminist Thealogy [sic].”   Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 27 (Spring 2011): 129-45.

Schuyler, Michael T. “He ‘coulda been a contender’ for Miss America: Feminizing Brando in On the Waterfront.” Canadian Review of American Studies 41 (Mar. 2011): 97-113.

Bradshaw, G.A. “An Ape among Many: Co-Authorship and Trans-Species Epistemic Authority,” in “Ecocriticism and Biology,” special issue, Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 18 (Winter 2010): 15-30.

Kim, Kwang Soon. “Queering Narrative, Desire, and Body: Reading of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body as a Queer Text.” Journal of English Language and Literature  56 (Winter 2010): 1281-94.

Maxwell, Anne. “Postcolonial Criticism, Ecocriticism and Climate Change: A Tale of Melbourne under Water in 2035.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45 (Mar. 2009): 15-26.

And finally, hegemonic, white, masculine speech in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina apparently has emerged as a sub-specialization of victimology:

Macomber, Kris, Christine Mallinson, and Elizabeth Searle. “ ‘Katrina That Bitch!’: Hegemonic Representations of Women’s Sexuality on Hurricane Katrina Souvenir T-Shirts.” Journal of Popular Culture 44 (June 2011): 525-44.

Harris, Kate Lockwood. “ ‘Compassion’ and Katrina: Reasserting Violent White Masculinity after the Storm.” Women and Language  34 (Spring 2011): 11-27.

I would welcome additional submissions.

Into the Wilderness – Part Two: The Platte, Fort Hall & the Desert Sink

(The continuation of the essay from 2005 which eventually became my first historical novel – To Truckee’s Trail.   The print version is going to a second edition, but it is currently available as an e-book. Along about 2006 I began to be overcome with a belief that we had to reclaim our American history, to remember who we were and where we came from, to know that the American experiment was a grand and optimistic one, and that our forebearers were for the largest part, decent, courageous and honorable people. So, I turned to writing rattling good adventure yarns in an attempt to educate readers painlessly. We can’t let scum like Howard Zinn and Michael Moore have it all to themselves, can we?)

Fifteen miles a day, more or less; the inexorable calculus of the overland trails. The wagon trains can only move out in late May, when the prairie grass is grown tall enough to feed the draft animals. And they must be over the last palisade of the high Sierra Nevada before the way is blocked by the winter snow. And they must do so before their food supplies run out. Any one of a hundred miscalculations, missteps or misfortunes can upset that careful arithmetic and bring disaster upon all. Is the water in that creek running fast and high? Can it be forded, or should the wagons carefully and laboriously be ferried over. An accident to a wagon, the loss of any of the supplies, an ox-team felled by disease or accident may be compounded later on. Balance taking a day to cross a high-water creek, against a day six months in the future and an early snow fall in the Sierras. Balance sparing a day camping by a pleasant spring of clear water, and the men going to hunt for meat which  when dried over the fire and stored away,  may mean the difference between a nourishing meal by an ice-water lake half a continent away, and starvation in that place instead.

Read more