Red Statism

Without actually deserting liberalism, I'm finding more and more to like about libertarianism. This article from the Mises Institute Monthly, Red Statism, nicely sums up what's NOT to like about the Bush administration - especially if you're a fiscal conservative.

Some choice morsels below.

In four years, George W. Bush has nationalized airport security, created the largest bureaucracy in history in the form of Homeland Security, tossed our constitutional protections we used to take for granted, enacted the largest expansion of welfare in three generations with the prescription drug benefit, intruded into local schools as never before with No Child Left Behind, brought many industries under protectionist regulation, hammered corporate upstarts with antitrust law, and undertaken two major wars that have cost hundreds of billions and left only destruction and chaos in their wake. Clinton increased spending 13.4 percent in his first term and 16 percent in his second, but Bush’s first-term spending soared +29.

While I'm also finding less to like about Clinton (he still has far to fall before passing Bush on the scale), this betrayal of the conservative ideal makes it even more bewildering to me that conservatives can support him. Oh, wait - increasingly, they don't. Apparently support for his mindless foreign policy now defines the G.O.P.

This is especially sad because it means the Democrats won't have to do much to win - and like the G.O.P., they need serious reform.

Back to beating the Bush:

The "leave us alone" coalition of the 1990s had been gradually transformed into an anti-Clinton movement by the end of the decade. The right in this country began to define itself not as pro-freedom, as it had in 1994 but simply as anti-leftist, as it does today.

The very people who once proclaimed hatred of government now advocate its use against dissidents of all sorts, especially against those who would dare call for curbs in the totalitarian bureaucracy of the military or suggest that Bush is something less than infallible in his foreign-policy decisions.

The lesson here is that it is always a mistake to advocate government action, for there is no way you can fully anticipate how government will be used. Nor can you ever count on a slice of the population to be moral in its advocacy of the uses of the police power.

I put that last paragraph in to complete their thought; I don't quite agree with it. In any event, Republicans currently seem very comfortable with the notion of Big Government Action, with regard to your freedoms if not your neighborhood capitalists' wallets.

I far prefer someone picking my pocket to locking me up without charges or evidence; one of those is clearly more fundamental to liberty.

If only our Dear Leader didn't have a direct line to the Almighty, he might perhaps be tempted to pick up a book (something he's proud of rarely doing).

There is a clear and present danger to freedom that comes from the right side of the ideological spectrum, those people who are pleased to preserve most of free enterprise but favor top-down management of society, culture, family, and school, and seek to use belligerent nationalism to impose their vision of politics on the world.

And now from The Problem Of Fascism:

It is as important for libertarians to be antisocialist as it is for them to be antifascist. But first we need to recognize that fascism is a reality, not just a smear term. We see it in the economic and political program of the current administration, which seems to be advancing a distinctly right-wing style of central planning: planning in the name of family, faith, and freedom (as versus the left-wing style of planning in the name of equality, liberty, and fraternity).

I don’t think the US has ever had a left-wing president as convinced as the present administration of the ability of government to work miracles.

Perhaps the direct line to god has a 1-800-MIR-ACLE call center?

How did conservative intellectuals and activists go from hating big government in the 1990s to loving it and celebrating it today? There is a bad seed in the ideology of American conservatism that spawns power worship.

Power-worship isn't isolated to Republicans by any means, but the current administration seems intent on projecting that power in all directions, not just in domestic economics.

Bush: No Bill Clinton

From Reason magazine, one of my latest favorites... and it's not even a liberal magazine, but a libertarian one! Conservatives, don't let the title of the magazine, or the Numbers below, frighten you. Heres the link: Bush the Budget Buster. If you're still working hard to maintain the illusion of the Republican party as the champion of small government, keep your eyes closed.

Selected kibbles and bits:

During his five years at the helm of the nation's budget, the president has expanded a wide array of "compassionate" welfare-state, defense, and nondefense programs. When it comes to spending, Bush is no Reagan. Alas, he is also no Clinton and not even Nixon. The recent president he most resembles is in fact fellow Texan and legendary spendthrift Lyndon Baines Johnson—except that Bush is in many ways even more profligate with the public till.

Comparing Bush to his predecessors is instructive. Bush and Reagan both substantially increased defense spending (by 44.5 and 34.8 percent respectively). However, Reagan cut real nondefense discretionary outlays by 11.1 percent while Bush increased them by 27.9 percent. Clinton and Nixon both raised nondefense spending (by 1.9 percent and 23.1 respectively), but they both cut defense spending substantially (by 16.8 and 32.2 percent).

Bush and LBJ alone massively increased defense and nondefense spending. Perhaps not coincidentally, Bush and LBJ also shared control of the federal purse with congressional majorities from their own political parties. Which only makes Bush's performance more troubling. Like a lax parent who can't or won't discipline his self-centered toddler, he has exercised virtually no control whatsoever over Congress.

When confronted by its spendthrift ways, the Bush administration argues that much of the increase in nondefense spending stems from higher homeland security spending. It's true that most homeland security spending is tallied under nondefense discretionary spending. Yet when homeland security spending is separated out, the increase in discretionary spending is still huge: 36 percent on Bush's watch.

To be sure, Congress shares the blame for runaway spending in the past five years. Yet Bush has not vetoed a single spending bill during his tenure in office. To the contrary, he has signed every bill crossing his desk, including huge education, farm subsidy, and transportation bills. He has made only the most feeble efforts to rein in pork-barrel spending or offset new programs with cuts in existing ones.

It seems incontestable that we should conclude that the country's purse is worse off when Republicans are in power.

A time for heresy

From Bill Moyers, always a good read: A Time For Heresy. My attempt at a summary of the main points:

Bill Clinton is a Baptist. So is Pat Robertson. Jesse Jackson is a Baptist. So is Jesse Helms. Al Gore is a Baptist. So is Jerry Falwell. No wonder Baptists have been compared to jalapeno peppers: one or two make for a tasty dish, but a whole bunch together will bring tears to your eyes.

Many Baptists are fundamentalists; they believe in the absolute inerrancy of the Bible and the divine right of preachers to tell you what it means.

The Bible advocates violence like the Quran (burning witches, stoning adulteresses, endless massacres by Joshua and family, etc.), but with a higher illiteracy rate, Muslims hear Islam perverted by local preachers. For the literate, the only excuse for following preachers (and politicians), rather than the facts, is laziness.

They also believe in the separation of church and state only if they cannot control both. The only way to cooperate with fundamentalists, it has been said, is to obey them.

Baptists helped ... America’s great contribution to political science and practical politics – the independence of church and state... No religion was to become the official religion; you couldn’t be taxed to pay for my exercise of faith.

Said James Dunn: "The Supreme Court can’t ban prayer in school. Real prayer is always free." When the fundamentalists and their obliging politicians claimed that God had been expelled from the classroom, Dunn answered: "The god whom I worship and serve has a perfect attendance record and has never been tardy."

Unless your goal is to impress others with the amount of time you spend praying, talking about praying, and otherwise making your relationship with God as visible to your peers as possible. Not quite the goal, as I understand it.

Pain comes with freedom – it’s just the deal. The little gods don’t want you to grow, learn, think for yourself. But you have to test their truth claims against your own life’s experience – against your own faith and reason.

This is a time for heresy. American democracy is threatened by perversions of money, power, and religion. Money has bought our elections right out from under us. Power has turned government "of, by, and for the people" into the patron of privilege. And Christianity and Islam have been hijacked by fundamentalists who have made religion the language of power, the excuse for violence, and the alibi for empire.

In all countries, religious symbolism and rhetoric is power over those too lazy or igorant to try to understand the religion on their own, and to follow its implications. And as in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, patriotism (or "nationalism" if you're referring to any country but your own) can be inflated to religious proportions and distortions.

We were not supposed to be a country where the winners take all. The great progressive struggles in our history were waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich, share in the benefits of a free society. Today, however, the majority of Americans may support such broad social goals as affordable medical coverage for all, decent wages for working people, safe working conditions, a good education for every child, and clean air and water, but there’s no government "of, by, and for the people" to deliver on those aspirations.

How did this happen? By design. For a quarter of a century now a ferocious campaign has been conducted to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual, cultural, and religious frameworks that sustained America’s social contract.

For more details, use your favorite search engine on any of the organizations referenced in this article: Funding the Right.

Their economic strategy was to cut workforces and wages, scour the globe for even cheaper labor, and relieve investors of any responsibility for the cost of society.

And companies, of course: recent legislation on lawsuit "reform" restricts the options for American citizens, but not those of corporations, which file 75% of civil lawsuits.

Their political strategy was to neutralize the independent media, create their own propaganda machine with a partisan press, and flood their coffers with rivers of money from those who stand to benefit from the transfer of public resources to elite control. Along the way they would burden the nation with structural deficits that will last until our children’s children are ready to retire, systematically stripping government of its capacity, over time, to do little more than wage war and reward privilege.

This strategy is known as "starving the beast": cut taxes and raise national debt, all the while refusing to reduce spending. As debt increases, the only politically viable solution is to cut social programs (since money thrown at defense budgets is beyond criticism) - the goal all along.

Their religious strategy was to fuse ideology and theology into a worldview freed of the impurities of compromise, claim for America the status of God’s favored among nations (and therefore beyond political critique or challenge), and demonize their opponents as ungodly and immoral.

At the intersection of these three strategies was money: Big Money.

That money isn’t going to come from regular folks – less than one half of one percent of all Americans made a contribution of $200 or more to a federal candidate in 2004. No, the men and women who have mastered the money game have taken advantage of this fundamental weakness in our system – the high cost of campaigns – to sell democracy to the highest bidder.

The number of lobbyists registered to do business in Washington has more than doubled in the last five years. That’s 16,342 lobbyists in 2000 to 34,785 last year. Sixty-five lobbyists for every member of Congress.

The total spent per month by special interests wining, dining, and seducing federal officials is now nearly $200 million. Per month.

While the lobbyists are privately employed, it's a hard to take "small government" seriously when industry is spending such money sending more and more people to Washington. Given the span of their influence, this is evidently the situation Republicans want.

But it’s a small investment on the return. Just look at the most important legislation passed by Congress in the last decade.

There was the energy bill that gave oil companies huge tax breaks at the same time that Exxon Mobil just posted $36 billion in profits in 2005, while our gasoline and home heating bills are at an all-time high.

There was the bankruptcy “reform” bill written by credit card companies to make it harder for poor debtors to escape the burdens of divorce or medical catastrophe.

Note that the bill places no additional restrictions on corporate bankruptcies - only the much smaller bankruptcies of private citizens.

There was the deregulation of the banking, securities, and insurance sectors, which led to rampant corporate malfeasance and greed and the destruction of the retirement plans of millions of small investors.

There was the deregulation of the telecommunications sector which led to cable industry price-gouging and the abandonment of news coverage by the big media companies.

There was the blocking of even the mildest attempt to prevent American corporations from dodging an estimated $50 billion in annual taxes by opening a P.O. box in an off-shore tax haven like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands.

And in every case, the religious right was cheering for the winners.

There are no victimless crimes in politics. The cost of corruption is passed on to the people.

These charlatans and demagogues know that by controlling a society’s most emotionally-laden symbols, they can control America, too. Davidson Loehr reminds us that holding preachers and politicians to a higher standard than they want to serve has marked the entire history of both religion and politics. It is the conflict between the religion of the priests – ancient and modern – and the religion of the prophets.

It is the vast difference between the religion about Jesus and the religion of Jesus.

For the greatest heretic of all is Jesus of Nazareth, who drove the money changers from the temple in Jerusalem as we must now drive the money changers from the temples of democracy.

Faith-based security

From the "what the f***?" department, for your (in)digestion: Executive Order: Responsibilities of the Department of Homeland Security with Respect to Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. No, this is not a joke, at least not an intentional one. Some of the lowlights of this directive:

The Secretary of Homeland Security (Secretary) shall establish within the Department of Homeland Security (Department) a Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (Center).

The purpose of the Center shall be to coordinate agency efforts to eliminate regulatory, contracting, and other programmatic obstacles to the participation of faith-based and other community organizations in the provision of social and community services.

... coordinate a comprehensive departmental effort to incorporate faith-based and other community organizations in Department programs and initiatives to the greatest extent possible...

That's right - faith-based homeland security! Good for the entire family! If I were more cynical I'd take this as the administration finally admitting that prayer is about the only option left, in lieu of smart policies and fiscal decisions which could fund reasonable security recommendations.

Puritans

An interesting and relevant bit of religious history from George Monbiot - the complete article is at Religion of the Rich. The basic notion is that Puritanism (as it really unfolded, not as we imagine it) is easily seen as an "intellectual" ancestor to the recent crops of Republicans in orifice office. In lieu of commentary, I've highlighted some of the most interesting (and contrary to what I regard as real Christian teachings), but I recommend the complete article.

Puritanism was primarily the religion of the new commercial classes. It attracted traders, money lenders, bankers and industrialists. Calvin had given them what the old order could not: a theological justification of commerce. Capitalism, in his teachings, was not unchristian, but could be used for the glorification of God.

By the mid-17th Century, most English Puritans saw in poverty "not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion … but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will."

"Next to the saving of his soul," the preacher Richard Steele wrote in 1684, the tradesman’s "care and business is to serve God in his calling, and to drive it as far as it will go." Success in business became a sign of spiritual grace: providing proof to the entrepreneur, in Steele’s words, that "God has blessed his trade".

Tawney describes the Puritans as early converts to "administrative nihilism": the doctrine we now call the minimal state. "Business affairs," they believed, "should be left to be settled by business men, unhampered by the intrusions of an antiquated morality". They owed nothing to anyone. Indeed, they formulated a radical new theory of social obligation, which maintained that helping the poor created idleness and spiritual dissolution, divorcing them from God.

Of course, the Puritans differed from Bush’s people in that they worshipped production but not consumption. But this is just a different symptom of the same disease.

There were some, such as the Levellers and the Diggers, who remained true to the original spirit of the Reformation, but they were violently suppressed. The pursuit of adulterers and sodomites provided an ideal distraction for the increasingly impoverished lower classes.

So why has this ideology resurfaced in 2004? Because it has to. The enrichment of the elite and impoverishment of the lower classes requires a justifying ideology if it is to be sustained. In the United States this ideology has to be a religious one. Bush’s government is forced back to the doctrines of Puritanism as an historical necessity. If we are to understand what it’s up to, we must look not to the 1930s, but to the 1630s.