There Is Still Hope

IN A WEEK when the Obama campaign started working on the transition and the important work of picking a cabinet, the Wall Street Journal helpfully warned us this week in “A Liberal Supermajority” about the one-two combination of an Obama presidency and a liberal supermajority in Congress. It will mean “card-check” union elections, prescription drug price controls, a “tax-and-regulation scheme in the name of climate change,” and Medicare for all.

If liberals get a majority in Congress like 1933 and 1965 they will likely pass expensive welfare-state legislation that can never be taken away. It will be one more turn of the ratchet, and once again Republican voters will be the ones forced to pay.

During the Bush administration, during the “cold-cock” era, Republicans offered reform after reform, from education to Social Security. Every time Republicans suggested a reform the Democrats cold-cocked it.

In particular Republicans offered again and again to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government sponsored mortgage giants. Again and again, Democrats cold-cocked the Republicans. Richard Baker is the former Republican congressman from Louisiana who “spent nearly a decade crying in the wilderness... er, Congress... that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were ticking time bombs.” Writes William McGurn in The Wall Street Journal:

"Everyone writes as though there were just one hearing or one piece of legislation," says Mr. Baker. "I think I must have had eight bills and maybe 40 hearings going back to 1996.

Came the day that drunken Fannie fell down in the kitchen and broke a hip. It was the same day that Freddie crashed the family car and nearly killed himself driving home drunk from the town tavern. Now that Fannie and Freddie’s medical bills have swept away the global financial system, now Democrats are ready to talk reform.

Of course, they are not ready to accept responsibility. Oh no. Anyway, they are having far too much fun saving the nation’s savings.

In recent days some people have resurrected the H.L. Mencken chestnut from his “In Defense of Women.” “[T]he whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” But this is to present the degenerate case of politics as the representative case.

Politics is the means of protecting society from enemies foreign and domestic. The job of politicians is to keep us safe. It is a noble calling.

Unfortunately most of the time there is no need to mobilize society against enemies, and during those times there is really nothing for political leaders to do. That is why politicians invent stuff to do and why H.L. Mencken’s quote is so apt. That is also the reason why political philosophers invented the idea of limited government and its separation of powers. They understood the need to stop idle politicians from inventing spurious reasons to lead us to safety.

But if politicians are so anxious to solve crises, how come they didn’t turn the hobgoblin of Fannie-and-Freddie into the moral equivalent of war? It is because there is one thing more important to a politician than fighting enemies and leading the people to safety. It is getting elected. Fannie-and-Freddie is one of the reasons that 90 percent of African Americans vote Democratic. Fannie-and-Freddie is one reason that President Clinton was declared American’s first black president and the reason why Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) was able in a couple of years to become the second ranking recipient of political contributions from Fannie-and-Freddie, right after Senate Banking Committee chairman Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT).

Democrats know that Social Security is headed for trouble and Medicare is headed for worse. They just don’t care, not while those programs are getting them elected. Democrats know that the education system stinks, but they just don’t care, not while government teachers and government professors are voting for them. And they’ll keep cold-cocking reform until they get cold-cocked by the steering wheel on the day their cruel and unjust patronage machine run off the road into the ditch.

On that day the American people will be allowed to listen once again to the idea of limited government embedded in the system of democratic capitalism. Here is Michael Novak explaining it all in The Spirit of 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... [P]olitical democracy is compatible in practice only with a market economy. In turn, both systems nourish and are best nourished by a pluralist liberal culture. It is important to give attention to all three systems.

I call Novak’s idea “The Greater Separation of Powers.” It’s a beautiful idea, a glorious vision of hope. For one day, and that day may be sooner than we think, the American people will ask its leaders to make the ideal of the greater separation of powers into a reality.

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

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There is Still Hope

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