Who Is The Smartest Of Them All - Road to the Middle Class

YOU ALL remember the old German folk tale of Snow White and the Seven Conservatives. Every morning the liberal policy wonk gets up and looks at The New York Times online.

Mirror, Mirror on the wall;
Who is the smartest of them all?

And The New York Times always responds in the same way.

You, my wonk, are smartest of all.

Sometimes our liberal friend can’t get enough of these comfortable words and turns to the op-ed section.

Mirror, mirror on the wall;
Who is the dumbest of them all?

And The New York Times columnists always respond:

Bush is the dumbest of them all;
Reagan is the amiable dunce of them all;
Ford the stumble-bum of them all;
Ike the syntax challenged of them all;
Coolidge the weaniest pickle of them all.

Those Republican presidents! They sure can pick ‘em!

One thing you can say about the Obama Budget Overview. (By the way, you can see the headline charts at usgovernmentspending.com.) It is smart. The critical Table S-6 in the summary section is chock full of administrative smartness. Here are the smart initiatives that will tweak the health-care system into shape. The numbers are the annual savings projected by the time things really settle down in FY 2015.

Hospital quality incentive payments.......... $1.5 billion
Medicare Advantage competitive bidding... $21.6 billion
Medicare efficient acute care................. $1.9 billion
Cost-effective Medicaid drug purchase..... $2.0 billion
Improved Medicare home-health payments. $4.1 billion

All these efficiencies will add up to $40 billion a year by 2015. But the real number to look at is the limitation on itemized deductions of rich people. That’s what is going to fund health-care reform from the revenue side, and it comes in at $37 billion a year by 2015.

Actually this is chump change. The real money is in the “tax cuts” to Democratic voters, a total of $94 billion a year by 2015. The biggest item is the Making Work Pay Tax Credit, at $65.1 billion a year by 2015. That’s a $400 tax credit for each worker or $800 per working family, for now. It works out to about $43 billion in tax cuts a year and $22 billion in checks to people that don’t pay income tax.

Don’t be misled though. If you strip away the emergency spending from President Obama’s budget, the scary $1.75 trillion deficit and the $3.9 trillion outlays for FY 2009, then you are left with a new ratchet upwards in the welfare state, and all the smoke and mirrors that it takes for smart people to persuade themselves that the nation can afford it.

If you strip away all the smartness, President Obama’s budget is just returning to the Clinton program of health-care nationalization. He is going to fix the leaks in the creaking health-care distribution network and hope that the increased pressure doesn’t burst the pipes elsewhere.

If you strip away the smartness, President Obama’s budget is merely extending the reach of government education, both in early childhood and in early adulthood. Judging from the tone of his speech last week to the Joint Session of Congress, he’s planning to increase the degree of compulsion.

And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of... community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option.

You can see what comes next. If the youth of America don’t stop dropping out of school, firmness will be required. But given the dismal record of educational compulsion over the last century, it won’t make any difference.

If you strip away the veneer of smartness President Obama’s energy program is a reprise of the 1970s synfuels program. Only now the magic elixir is not synthetic fuels but renewables like solar and wind.

There’s a problem with this cult of smartness. Smartness just isn’t enough. There’s a host of reasons why. There’s Hayek’s rule that the government in Washington just doesn’t have the bandwidth to run health care, education, and energy. There’s the fact that government can only legislate genuine reform in a government program about once in a generation, while the free market is reforming itself every day. There’s the fact that government programs always end up serving producers, not consumers.

Then there is the other little problem with smartness. There comes a day when the mirror on the wall tells you the awful truth. Or maybe it gets bought out by a Mexican telephone monopolist.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall;
Who is the smartest of them all?

We don’t yet know who Snow White is, or the names of the kindly conservative dwarfs that protect her. But we know one thing. She is not just smart. She is wise.

But, Schneewittchen! (That’s German for Snow White.) Don’t go eating any apples, hon.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

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

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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