Road to the Middle Class - by Christopher Chantrill

This week, after cold-cocking the British Labour Party in the local elections and scoring a huge gain in the horse-race opinion polls, Cameron wrote an op-ed for the lefty Independent: “We are the champions of progressive ideals.” He throws down the gauntlet immediately.

A painful reality is dawning on Labour MPs: in its longest unbroken period in office, Labour has done little to advance progressive ideals. A government that promised social justice and economic efficiency has in fact delivered neither, to the dismay of the Labour Party. Instead, it is the Conservative Party that is the champion of progressive ideals in Britain today.

Look, he writes, nobody can deny that income redistribution has done a lot to alleviate poverty. But “those methods have now run their course.”

The returns from big state intervention are not just diminishing, they are disappearing.

In other words it is time for the left to admit that just throwing money at the poor doesn’t help the poor. It is not lack of money that causes deprivation, it is lack of character. Something else is needed, and Conservatives know what it is.

[W]e will use the modern mechanisms of civil society – whether it’s businesses that can really help get people trained and ready for work, social enterprises that get people permanently off drugs, or charities and community groups that can give couples the support they need when relationships come under pressure. For us it’s about the whole public realm, not just the public sector.

As David Cameron has said, time and time again: “There is such a thing as society. It’s just not the same thing as the State.” By forgetting that truth, first enunciated by Edmund Burke over two centuries ago, the progressive dream has guttered out into fumbling darkness. But there is a way out.

If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment – forget about the Labour Party. It has forgotten about you. If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we [the Conservative Party] can achieve real change.

The latest opinion poll has the Conservative Party ahead of the Labour Party by 49% to 23%. Talk about kicking a guy when he’s down.

The Happiness Quotient

FIRST HE discovered that conservative religious people give more, in Who Really Cares? Now Arthur C. Brooks is writing about happiness, according to Maggie Gallagher, and the happiest people are—wait for it—religious conservatives.

Really, this should surprise nobody. We know that the worst thing in the world is to have nothing to do and nothing to contribute. Naturally, unfold

Last Refuge of a Liberal

GREAT NEWS! Hillary Clinton, fighting for the people against the elites, vows to smash OPEC, according to Geoff Elliott.

"We’re going to go right at OPEC," she told supporters in Merrillville, Indiana. "They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re unfold

Now It's the Vast Elite Conspiracy

THAT HILLARY Clinton is some smart girl. It was she, ten years ago, who fearlessly deployed her super-sniffer conspiracy detector during the Clinton impeachment scandal. She found nothing less than a “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” determined to drive her husband out of office.

When you work hard at something, you get to be pretty good at it. This last month, according to David unfold

Changing the Terms of the Debate

AFTER THE Conservative Party’s local election win in Britain last week, Janet Daley asks: what next?

The answer, she writes, involves reframing the debate. Gordon Brown (and liberals here in the US) want to say that the choice before us is

between a party (his) that believes in "doing things" - taking people out of poverty, unlocking talent, etc, etc - and one that would prefer to "walk away" and leave people to get on with it.

No, no, no. Conservatives have got to insist on a different unfold

Employment: Household Survey Up Big Time

HERE WE go again. The Labor Department’s Employment Situation Summary released today shows employment down by 20,000 jobs—if you look at the Establishment Survey, the data obtained from employers.

But if you look at the Household Survey, the survey of people, asking them whether they are employed or not, then you get a different story, a radically different story. In the Household Survey employment is up by a shattering 362,000 jobs. This number comes about unfold

Congress Can't Do Nothin' Right

THANK GOODNESS for one thing. What with the spiraling increase in food prices the leaders of our beloved Congress are going to fight for the people against the powerful on ethanol.

They are going to lower ethanol subsidies, according to Stephen Dinan.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer allowed as how this was a case of “unintended consequences.”

"The view was to look to alternatives and try to become more unfold

| May blogs | April blogs |

OPED

At the Turn of the Cycle

FOR THOSE OF you worried about the start of solar Cycle 24, good news. A small sunspot recently appeared in the sun’s southern hemisphere. So it looks like the next sunspot cycle has well and truly started.

Meanwhile scientist Don J Easterbrook reports that the northern Pacific Decadal Oscillation has flipped, threatening 30 ...

| more | comment | 05/08/08

America, You've Been Had

Liberals are right about the “Right-wing Noise Machine. ...

| more | comment | 04/30/08

The Pope's Challenge to Conservatives

A Century of Tax

Looking Round the Corner

RMC CHAPTER-A-DAY

RMC Contents

Chapter 1: After the Welfare State

Chapter 2: Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn

THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM among western cultural elites is that God is dead and we are well rid of him.... more

Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism

Chapter 4: The Nineteenth Century From the Top Down

Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century From the Bottom Up

RMC BOOKS

RMC Books on Education

Andrew Coulson, Market Education
How universal literacy was achieved before government education

Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic
How we got our education system

James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
How the feminists wrecked education for boys and for girls

James Tooley, Reclaiming Education
How only a market in education will provide opportunity for the poor

E.G. West, Education and the State
How education was doing fine before the government muscled in

RMC Books on Law

Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
How ordinary people in the United States wrote the law during the 19th century

F. A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol 1
How to build a society based upon law

Henry Maine, Ancient Law
How the movement of progressive peoples is from status to contract

John Zane, The Story of Law
How law developed from early times down to the present

RMC Books on Mutual Aid

James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We're In
How the welfare state makes crime, education, families, and health care worse.

David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
How ordinary people built a sturdy social safety net in the 19th century

David Green, Before Beveridge: Welfare Before the Welfare State
How ordinary people built themselves a sturdy safety net before the welfare state

Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy
How the US used to thrive under membership associations and could do again

David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry
How modern freemasonry got started in Scotland

RMC Books on Religion

David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
How Christianity is booming in China

Finke & Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
How the United States grew into a religious nation

Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
How progressives must act fast if they want to save the welfare state

David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish
How Pentecostalism is spreading across the world

Amazon.com Widgets

READINGS

No masks, no daggers, no surprises
life is not as exciting as fiction. More boring: no rabbits, hats, bastard children.

George "Truman" Bush
when he left office, Truman was considered a failure.

Student Tests -- and Teacher Grades
the truth is: "teachers' unions just don't care about kids."

Who Will Stop Hillary
with Hillary saying that she has the broader coalition (white working people, white women) she's splitting the party. Someone must stop her, writes Peggy Noonan. Really? Seems to me they've had this coming for 30 years.

Death of the Alpha Leader
viral loops not manifestos

Take the Test!

THE PROJECT

Work to restore the Road to the Middle Class. Here’s how. Ground it in faith. Grade it with education. Protect it with mutual aid. Defend it with the law. more>>

THE ARGUMENT

The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the king�s peace, the law of contract, and private property.