And They Said Bush Was Clueless

But the previous week the administration blew off the Rule of Law in the Chrysler bankruptcy. It stiffed the senior secured creditors in favor of a junior creditor, a labor union. That’s probably unconstitutional, because the US Constitution calls for “uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States.” You can see why the founding fathers might think uniform bankruptcy laws were a good thing. It would provide protection for creditors, never the most popular people in society, against a politically favored special interest like a labor union.

If you are not going to favor secured creditors over a politically powerful interest, why bother having laws, or a Rule of Law at all? Just let the unpopular people go to the wall. Tell them to hire a politician next time.

There seem to be two ways of looking at the Rule of Law. For liberals the Rule of Law is all about the protection of brave liberals fighting against racism and sexism. But if you read the history of law in the Anglo-Saxon world, you find out that law is mostly about deciding what to do when things go wrong in day-to-day living and commerce. For instance, there is the law of bailments. It’s nothing special, but it covers the case of the restaurant valet that damages your car, and it has existed at least since Babylonian times.

Anyway, it seems that President Obama’s devotion to the Rule of Law is only rhetorical. He is going to keep the Bush policies on terrorism, but will keep making speeches to entrance liberals like James Fallows at The Atlantic with “the quality of [his] thought.”

The neutering of bankruptcy law in the Chrysler case is not rhetorical; it is real. And, to echo Talleyrand, it is worse than a crime, it is a blunder. For consistent bankruptcy law is as important to a smashed-up corporation as a well-run trauma center to an accident victim.

Capitalism is a social technology in the same way that the a trauma center is social technology. You can let the technicians organize and run it, subject to law, or you can stick your political nose in and order the professionals around. Just to show who’s boss, you can mix in a special deal for a powerful interest.

Time and time again in the last century, liberals have insisted that only political power can deliver the right kind of service from business. First we had to have a Federal Reserve System because you couldn’t trust the Money Trust. That worked out well. The dollar is now worth 2.5 cents.

Then they decided that America’s corporations had to have strong unions—in 1935 right in the middle of a Great Depression. That worked out well. It plunged America into a second depression in 1937.

They decided that senior citizens had to have subsidized health care. So now health care for seniors is eating the budget alive, and that’s before the $40 trillion that’s promised but not funded.

They wanted everyone to have “affordable housing.” Well, now they have their wish. Pity they had to blow up the banking system to get there.

And these are the people that called President Bush clueless!

There is another way. We could let capitalism get on with its job of delivering products and services that people are willing to pay for. Then we could start to figure out how to deliver health care that people could afford.

Against the clunking fist of the liberal administrative state we conservatives must call for a conservative sociable state. Social animals, humans are at our best when living in a world of reciprocal sociability; we are at our worst when issuing administrative orders to people that can’t answer back.

Marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher recently showed how reciprocal sociability works. While watching a lesbian and an evangelical in a focus group discussing gay marriage, her associate was appalled at the way that the participants would compromise. They had no principles, he complained.

"No," I said. "They are trying to figure out a way in which everybody can be OK. It’s really great to live in a country where people are like that."

It’s the difference between liberal world and conservative world. In liberal world highly evolved elites get to decide on the issues and force everyone else to get with the program. In the conservative world of families, churches, and associations we are just trying to figure out a way in which everyone can be OK.

Yet conservatives insist that we believe in permanent principles that cannot be changed, and liberals insist that everything they do is based on empathy and compassion for other people. What is going on here?

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

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
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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