Liberals Learning Nothing And Forgetting Nothing - Road to the Middle Class

A LIBERAL acquaintance couldn’t understand why conservatives are impatient with Obama. Didn’t conservatives get enough of a chance with 30 years of Reagan and Bush, he asked?

OK, it’s true that conservatives did get some tax-rate cuts. And we did win the cold war. And we did roll back one social program, welfare, a little, for a while.

But conservatives look on the Obama administration so far and say: Liberals are like the French Bourbons—the royal house of France, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, deposed in the French Revolution.

After the defeat of Napoleon the Bourbon kings were restored in 1814. Talleyrand was disappointed. They have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing, he said.

The whole point of the Reagan era was to demonstrate that government should keep its cotton-picking hands off the economy. Governments and their mega-projects, their subsidies, “backing winners,” “investments,” always end in tears, just like they did in the stagflation of the late 1970s.

But it’s pretty obvious that our Democratic friends have learned nothing from the lessons of the Reagan era, and have forgotten none of their old liberal delusions.

First we got a trillion dollar special-interest giveaway that was called a stimulus package. But unemployment keeps going up, now to 9.5 percent. Then the House of Representatives has passed a cap-and-trade energy bill that’s another special-interest giveaway. Next up is a trillion dollar health reform bill that proposes to lower costs while increasing the number of people covered.

Yet Democrats are honest enough to be ashamed of what they are doing. Why else would they pass their trillion dollar stimulus bill without serious hearings or even a copy of the bill available to read. The same is clearly true of the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House of Representatives, sight unseen, on June 26. As Stephen Spruiell & Kevin Williamson show on NRO Online, the Waxman-Markey bill is nothing more than subsidies, payoffs, corporate welfare and goodies for liberal activists. No wonder it had to be rushed through in the dead of night. It couldn’t stand the light of day.

In the Waxman-Markey bill the grand principle of limiting carbon emissions through auctioned and marketable emission permits gets thrown under the bus in a crude special-interest feeding frenzy. What happened to saving the planet?

And buried in the bill are economic howlers that will freeze up the economy in the years ahead, write Spruill and Williamson:

Naturally, Big Labor gets its piece of the pie, too. Projects receiving grants and financing under Waxman-Markey provisions will be required to implement Davis-Bacon union-wage rules, making it hard for non-union firms to compete — and... Waxman-Markey forces union-wage rules all the way down to the plumbing-repair and light-bulb-changing level.

That will really help to revive the economy.

But President Obama’s budget director had the best argument against the bill, according to a Wall Street Journal editorial:

In March, White House budget director Peter Orszag told Congress that "If you didn’t auction the permit, it would represent the largest corporate welfare program that has ever been enacted in the history of the United States."

The reason that the Democrats threw their grand cap-and-trade principle under the bus is that they didn’t dare try an honest campaign to persuade the American people to back their Big Idea, that we should pay more for energy to prevent global warming.

When President Bush wanted to reform Social Security in 2005 he took his case to the American people. He failed to persuade them, and so he didn’t get his reform. Democrats and President Obama don’t have the guts for that sort of thing.

If only the Democrats were as queasy about the gigantic deficits they are forecasting. If only they were nervous about the rigidities they are introducing into the economy with their plans for forced-march government health care and green-energy subsidies.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the combination of wasteful special-interest spending in the stimulus package, wasteful special-interest spending in the Waxman-Markey bill place a severe cost upon the US economy. Then there is the black hole of possibilities in any government takeover of the health care industry.

In Britain, a month ago, a Conservative Party spokesman admitted that public spending cuts would be needed. Prime Minister Brown thought that allowed him to make political points, one more time, on Labour “investment” versus Tory “cuts.” But then came the news that senior civil servants were drawing up contingency plans for 20 percent cuts in spending, starting after the election next year, in case the Chinese balk at buying British government bonds.

So far, the Obamanites have not realized that there might be a limit to borrowing, spending and subsidy.

That’s because they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

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

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

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

mysql close