Were Talent Spotters Right On Obama - Road to the Middle Class

FEDERAL Appeal Court Judge and über-liberal Abner Mikva was an early patron of President-elect Obama, according to Tom Hundley. He “was among the first to spot the potential of the skinny young law school graduate with the odd name.”

"I use a Yiddish expression, yiddishe neshuma, to describe him," explains Mikva. "It means a Jewish soul. It’s an expression my mother used. It means a sensitive, sympathetic personality, someone who understands where you are coming from."

That’s cool, because there’s a national problem right in the cross-hairs of the national radar that needs just that sort of sensitive, sympathetic personality. It’s the Big Three auto mess. Michael Barone rather neatly describes how the mess came to be.

It all started with Taylorism, after the book on “the one best way” by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor’s brilliant idea was to measure worker productivity with time and motion studies and implement the one best way as a mandatory procedure for all workers.

Only one problem, of course. It treats workers like machines rather than people. So it provoked its nemesis, the Wagner Act of 1935, that legislated an adversarial relationship between business and labor. It worked great, for a while, as auto workers and steel workers won themselves fabulous wages and benefits.

Everyone thought that the new unionism was a wonderful idea, in particular liberal writers like John Kenneth Galbraith who made a fortune peddling conventional wisdom to a generation of liberals by telling them that he and they were intelligent iconoclasts that soared above mere “conventional wisdom.”

Well, it wasn’t such a great idea. It wiped out the steel companies a generation ago, and now it’s brought the auto companies to the edge of ruin, and brought the current generation of autoworkers to the edge of humiliation.

If President-elect is the genius that his patrons believe then he will use his yiddishe neshuma to lead the autoworkers and their union and their jobs back from the precipice.

But my guess is that he won’t. My guess is that he’ll choke on the chance to get the auto companies to reorganize and write Finis on the era of Wagner Act unionism.

The sensible thing for liberals to do would be to start a strategic retreat on their welfare state and its privileges, to preserve as long as possible the unsustainable privileges and subsidies they have awarded themselves and their servitors. But I don’t think they will.

My guess is that in the next few years the liberals are going to get themeselves suckered into the political equivalent of the Battle of Kursk. That battle, you will recall, was the last big offensive of the German Army on the eastern front in World War II. It seemed like a good idea to the German generals in early 1943 but by the time that Germans actually started the offensive the Russians were ready for them. So the greatest tank battle ever fought ended in failure. The Russians began a counter-offensive that didn’t stop until it reached Berlin two years later.

After all, Barack Obama didn’t run for president to sort out the labor union problem. He ran to lower the oceans and cure the sick. Much more fun.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

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David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

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Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

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Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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