Whens It Gonna End - Road to the Middle Class

Things were going so well in the 1990s until Bush and his neocon theocrats came along and ruined it with their global “war on terror.” When’s it gonna end?

But what can you expect from a president who gets his policy direct from God?

You can understand the frustration among our Democratic friends.. If only Bush wasn’t spending all that money on Iraq; if only he hadn’t made blunder after blunder; if only he had stuck to diplomacy and and not given the US such a bad name then we could have all those benefits and we could sit back in the calm knowledge that rational people were in power and all was right with the world.

How wrong can you be?.

It is one of the great errors of the modern age to believe that if only we could apply rational analysis to the world’s problems we could avoid all the blunders, mistakes, and conflicts that so crowd upon each other in human history.

In fact the opposite is true. Mistakes, blunders, and murderous battles are the unavoidable price of progress. Writes physicist Freeman Dyson:

You can’t possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It’s a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked.

If mistakes are a necessary part of developing something as simple as a bicycle, then it is folly to expect that anything more complex could avoid the process of trial and error.

What we need is more chances for people to make mistakes. That’s the only way they’ll learn. And that particularly applies to our Democratic friends, the ones who rail at Bush: his blunders and his faith.

Despite their faith in rationalism, you can tell that the Democrats secretly know that they need to make more mistakes. That’s why, going into the Iowa caucuses, they favor for the office of president three untried candidates with no executive experience in government.

Hillary Clinton has spent a lifetime running campaigns for Bill; Barack Obama is a bright young man who has never been tested; John Edwards is a tort lawyer who wants to be president. All three are presently or once were members of the United States Senate.

Given their lack of experience there is no way that we can tell whether they are up to the job of president. But we can be pretty sure that they will make some stunning mistakes.

The Republican voters are proving their reputation for dullness. Their frontrunners, Giuliani and Romney, are both seasoned executive leaders. What a concept! They might actually be ready to become president.

But I agree with the Democratic voters. It’s time that the Republicans stopped making mistakes and gave the Democrats a chance to make some instead.

And there will never be a better time for the Democrats to get in there and make some mistakes than right now. We had a dress rehearsal last year of what Democratic government would look like with the Keystone Kops Reid-Pelosi Congress. They couldn’t get a bill passed to bring the troops home; they couldn’t get a bill passed to gut the Patriot Act and hobble the government’s ability to monitor terrorist communications. They couldn’t even figure out how to give the Alternative Minimum Tax a decent burial.

Add a President Clinton or a President Obama to the Reid-Pelosi Congress and you are setting the United States up for a perfect storm.

Then it won’t just be partisan Democrats but all Americans pleading: When’s it gonna end?

It may seem defeatist to wish for a Democratic win. But it’s a fact that the only time a political party gets a strong mandate for change is when the voters are heartily fed up with the other guys.

The only way that Republicans will get a mandate to resume the advance in the war on Islamic terrorism is after the voters have seen the Democrats fail. The only way that Republicans will get a mandate to reform the corrupt welfare state is when the voters get fed up, really fed up, with schools that don’t teach and a government run health system that doesn’t deliver health care.

We need an America where Democrat partisans in the intelligence community have decided that it wouldn’t be very smart to leak the administration’s plans to the New York Times. We need a State Department that has given up for the time being on forcing the Israelis into another peace process of unilateral concessions. And we need a public sector worried, not about implementing universal pre-K or chasing the recalcitrant into compulsory health insurance, but where the money will come from to pay their final-salary pensions.

For that to happen, we need a few years of Democratic governance.

But I still can’t make up my mind between Hillary! Obama, or Edwards in the primaries. When’s it gonna end?

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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