Understanding Obamas Budget - Road to the Middle Class

Moving towards universal health care.
Increasing government education both at the college level and early-childhood period.
Following through on the notion of a global warming crisis caused by carbon dioxide emissions.

All these actions are perfectly consistent with the liberal world view. In the first place, liberals believe that people should be freed from the burdens and responsibilities of ordinary life in order to enjoy a richer, nuanced experience. The ideal is a creative life as an artist, a writer, or an activist.

Cult author Joseph Campbell rather neatly encapsulated this philosophy with his injunction: “Follow Your Bliss.”

There’s one problem with this notion. It doesn’t work. Most people—nearly everyone—must work. Because underneath the vision of creativity is the reality of creation. We humans are animals that must eat every day and regenerate ourselves in our children.

So if you are going to live a life of creativity, someone else is going to have to do the dirty work of getting and making so that you can do the creating and the spending.

It may seem very harmless, but in practice it comes down to the freeloader problem. Or as Charles Hurt puts it:

Obama’s budget schemes to drain staggering amounts of money from people who worked for it and steer it to people who didn’t.

This isn’t the free market. It’s the freeloader market.

Up in the higher reaches of the educated elilte, people can afford to spend their lives as creative artists following their bliss. Maybe they have a trust fund. Maybe their parents can kick in some Economic Outpatient Care to keep them going. Maybe they have the talent or connections to find a cosy academic sinecure or a berth in a liberal foundation.

But unless you have a strong work ethic, the follow-your-bliss ethic descends quickly into pathology. It ends up as the “freeloader problem.”

There are a lot of people in any society who will game the system so that they can coast along without contributing to society. Mankind has come up with a way of dealing with them. It is called Shame and Guilt, and is usually institutionalized in religion.

But our liberal friends have carefully dismantled the social controls of shame and guilt and have declared war on organized religion. That is because they want to do things that are shameful. They want to have various sexual liaisons. They want to have their health care prepaid. They want to be able to go to school indefinitely. They want to end up, if possible, in some cosy academic sinecure “doing research.” In other words, they don’t want to have to put their shoulders to the wheel and contribute. They want other people to put their shoulders to the wheel.

The huge social consequence of this is only beginning to show up. The consequence is not hard to predict. People have a choice. They can put their life energy into the world or they can take energy out. People that takers will find themselves withering away, condemning themselves to irrelevance.

When President Obama presents a budget that encourages the freeloaders, he is setting on a course that can only end in tears.

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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

US Life in 1842

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
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

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

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

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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