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| Society and State | Charles Murray on Education |
by Christopher Chantrill
October 08, 2008 at 10:19 am
ITS pretty obvious by now, at least to conservatives, that the current financial maelstrom is a product of liberal government programs. The best analysis so far has to be Dennis Sewells Clinton Democrats Are To Blame For The Credit Crunch in the British Spectator followed by the Fox News Special Saving Our Economy: What$ Next.
There were two parents of the current mess, according to Sewell. One was Roberta Achtenberg, a feminist activist in the Saul Alinsky tradition. As Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity in the first Clinton Administration she brought several highly publicized suits against the mortgage industry claiming racial disparate impact in the granting of mortgages. And then there were the administrative changes to the Community Reinvestment Act issued in 1995.
Changes were made to the Community Reinvestment Act to establish a system by which banks were rated according to how much lending they did in low-income neighbourhoods. A good CRA rating was necessary if a bank wanted to get regulators to sign off on mergers, expansions, even new branch openings.
The banks knew what was good for them. It all ended up as a textbook demonstration of the folly of expert-led activist politics.
Its an old story. Back in the 19th century the educated young men and women of the upper-middle class wanted to make a difference. They were impatient with the slow minds of ordinary people and the slow pace of change in a tradition-bound society. They wanted to cast off the dead weight of tradition and reform society now with the tools of reason and justice.
So they advocated for and legislated the world we now live in, the world that would make them important, the world of expert-designed and bureaucrat-implemented government programs.
Educated women like lawyer Roberta Achtenberg passionately believed that the nation needed more affordable housing. So they designed and implemented programs to channel mortgage credit to the poor.
Enter the law of unintended consequences. You can expertly sluice money around the economy with your plans and your subsidies, but money is fungible. The long-term effect is to expertly over-build, over-size and over-price Americas housing in a massive boom that one day comes crashing down most particularly upon the unsophisticated people that you were determined to help.
Blogger John Hawkins last week complained about The Death of Common Sense in America, the extinction of truisms that, fifty years ago, everyone believed in. But of course. There is no place for common sense in a nation led by women like Roberta Achtenberg. In a welfare-state society ruled by an educated elite the authority of common sense and the wisdom of ordinary people must be brought into question and decisively marginalized. Perhaps it was possible for ordinary people to run their lives in former, simpler times. But today things are different. The modern world is too complex, too fast-moving to be comprehended by the simpleand often racist, sexist, homophobiccommon sense of ordinary people. Experts are needed.
They are indeed. Ordinary people save for a rainy day. It takes Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his expert brains trust to create a deluge like the Great Depression. Common sense says: Beware of debt. It takes experts and their leveraged financial models to deliver a disaster in mortgage securities.
Todays poster-girl for the culture of common sense is Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK). After her debate performance last week my liberal friends have decided she is not stupid but dangerous. She represents the opposite pole to the progressive expert adtivist. She represents the common sense of the neighborhood mothers. If you want to know how the economy is doing, Palin suggests, go measure the fear quotient among the parents at the kids soccer game.
A few months ago I wrote an article calling for conservatives to reach out to women and create a mommy conservatism, one that provided woman-friendly answers to the mommy fascism of the welfare state and its liberal experts. I now understand that I got the whole thing wrong. We do not need wise conservatives reaching out to women to convince them of our wisdom. We just need more common-sense women like Gov. Palin to take over the conservative movement and make it their own.
This new common-sense movement may not achieve political power in November 2008. It may not achieve it by 2018. But it will come to power, and for a simple reason, a highly sophisticated reason that may only be understandable to experts.
It was only a century ago that women emerged into the public square. They adopted, as they were bound to do, the male-developed public culture that they found already in existence. And they were seduced, as they were bound to be, by honeyed words about a beneficent Oz that cared about women and children and health care and education.
But expert-led hierarchical bureaucracy built on high-falutin theories is not the way of women. It is the way of men.
The culture of women is the culture of common sense.
Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
[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
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
[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
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
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
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
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
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
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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©2007 Christopher Chantrill