Were Talent Spotters Right On Obama - Road to the Middle Class

FEDERAL Appeal Court Judge and über-liberal Abner Mikva was an early patron of President-elect Obama, according to Tom Hundley. He “was among the first to spot the potential of the skinny young law school graduate with the odd name.”

"I use a Yiddish expression, yiddishe neshuma, to describe him," explains Mikva. "It means a Jewish soul. It’s an expression my mother used. It means a sensitive, sympathetic personality, someone who understands where you are coming from."

That’s cool, because there’s a national problem right in the cross-hairs of the national radar that needs just that sort of sensitive, sympathetic personality. It’s the Big Three auto mess. Michael Barone rather neatly describes how the mess came to be.

It all started with Taylorism, after the book on “the one best way” by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor’s brilliant idea was to measure worker productivity with time and motion studies and implement the one best way as a mandatory procedure for all workers.

Only one problem, of course. It treats workers like machines rather than people. So it provoked its nemesis, the Wagner Act of 1935, that legislated an adversarial relationship between business and labor. It worked great, for a while, as auto workers and steel workers won themselves fabulous wages and benefits.

Everyone thought that the new unionism was a wonderful idea, in particular liberal writers like John Kenneth Galbraith who made a fortune peddling conventional wisdom to a generation of liberals by telling them that he and they were intelligent iconoclasts that soared above mere “conventional wisdom.”

Well, it wasn’t such a great idea. It wiped out the steel companies a generation ago, and now it’s brought the auto companies to the edge of ruin, and brought the current generation of autoworkers to the edge of humiliation.

If President-elect is the genius that his patrons believe then he will use his yiddishe neshuma to lead the autoworkers and their union and their jobs back from the precipice.

But my guess is that he won’t. My guess is that he’ll choke on the chance to get the auto companies to reorganize and write Finis on the era of Wagner Act unionism.

The sensible thing for liberals to do would be to start a strategic retreat on their welfare state and its privileges, to preserve as long as possible the unsustainable privileges and subsidies they have awarded themselves and their servitors. But I don’t think they will.

My guess is that in the next few years the liberals are going to get themeselves suckered into the political equivalent of the Battle of Kursk. That battle, you will recall, was the last big offensive of the German Army on the eastern front in World War II. It seemed like a good idea to the German generals in early 1943 but by the time that Germans actually started the offensive the Russians were ready for them. So the greatest tank battle ever fought ended in failure. The Russians began a counter-offensive that didn’t stop until it reached Berlin two years later.

After all, Barack Obama didn’t run for president to sort out the labor union problem. He ran to lower the oceans and cure the sick. Much more fun.

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

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[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

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

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”

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

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

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

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

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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