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 www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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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

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

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

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

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

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

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

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

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

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

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

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

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