The Tax Man Cometh

We earlier talked about Obama’s dependency Americans: people employed by the government or helped by the federal government to stay at home (30%), people outside the workforce or in part-time jobs (45%), people not paying federal income taxes (50%).

Now I’ve learned that House Budget chair Paul Ryan is concerned about “a moral tipping point” reached by Americans becoming increasingly dependent on government services and lulled into a life of complacency. According to Ryan, a remarkable 70% of Americans get more out of federal government services than they contribute in taxes.

70%!!

Let’s be crystal clear about what’s coming, if we award Obama the freedom of a second term. He will raise taxes on all of us. He needs us, not just the rich, to pay for his big government. We should all pay. It’s the fair thing to do; it’s the moral thing.

It’s what they do in Northern Europe.

And don’t you see it coming to the U.S.?

All Obama has to do, once the election is over, to get the tax ball rolling is block any effort to prevent the Bush tax increases planned for January 1, 2013 from going into effect. Bingo. Veto. And all our taxes go up.

Intellectual Bankruptcy: The Signs

"If you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from."

--Barack Obama (2008)

Our national elite is divided into two tribes that speak mostly to themselves. Though there's a possible biological basis for this, our current stand-off shouldn’t last. Life moves on.

I see signs those in power are weakening. After all, top-down rule hasn’t delivered the strong economic growth our nation needs. For those who prefer hope to fear, it’s reassuring to know today’s principal practitioner of scare tactics, our president, once told us (see above) that negative campaigning stems from a bankruptcy of ideas. First bankruptcy, next change.

It’s hopeful that the New York Times, America’s font of liberal wisdom, in the person of politics editor Richard W. Stevenson openly worries about a 2012 Democratic campaign based not on ideas, but on brawling:

Democrats are primed to play rough in 2012. To conservatives, it is all just more evidence that hope and change was never more than bait-and-switch. To some liberals, it is about time the White House showed a willingness to brawl. [emphasis added]

Please note Stevenson refers to “conservatives” on the one hand, and “some liberals” on the other. By doing so, liberal Stevenson revealingly tells us that he’s in the middle, between “some liberals” and “conservatives.” Ah, the view from Manhattan, with its rich diversity of liberals (who combined make up just 20% of the country).

It’s hopeful that the Democratic case for Obama’s re-election is so weak, at least as presented by CalArts teacher Steve Erickson in the progressive journal American Prospect:

the Republican [line] on Obama is that he has no record to run on . . . Obama has a record, and hardly a disreputable one. It encompasses the prevention of an economic Chernobyl by which the world’s entire financial system verged on meltdown, the passage of the first major regulatory reform of Wall Street in 30 years, the salvation of the auto industry and the creation of more jobs in three years than during the previous administration’s eight, the signing of a law codifying equal pay for equal work for women and the passage of the first major health-care reform since Medicare

Let us, if we may, deconstruct Erickson’s argument.

“prevention of an economic Chernobyl”

The Bush 43 administration developed and passed the Troubled Assets Relief Program in October 2008, a bill both Barack Obama and John McCain supported. The chief “preventers” of our 2008 “economic Chernobyl” were Bush, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke. As president, Obama went along with their plan, as would have McCain.

“major regulatory reform of Wall Street”

Dodd-Frank. Says the conservative Weekly Standard:

The best way to understand the Dodd-Frank Act is to think of it as Obamacare for the financial industry. Like its health care counterpart, it leaves the members of the massive financial services industry as privately owned firms, but blankets them with so much regulation that . . . a U.S. industry once so aggressive and innovative that it came to dominate the world’s financial markets will be reduced to a ward of the U.S. government.

“salvation of the auto industry”

Bush 43 authorized emergency loans to GM and Chrysler totaling $18 billion before Obama went through the White House door. The two auto companies could have then proceeded through a normal bankruptcy, restructuring labor contracts and becoming leaner and meaner as did reorganized U.S. Steel and most domestic airlines before them. Instead, Obama pumped another $60 billion into GM and Chrysler, oversaw Chrysler becoming foreign-owned (thus helping it compete with all-American Ford), and restructured both GM and Chrysler to benefit labor unions, improperly placing unions ahead of secured creditors for payouts, and setting a national industries-socialist precedent for future large bankruptcies.

“the creation of more jobs in three years than during the previous administration’s eight”

This statement is flat wrong, disproven by going to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Bush 43 created 1.1 million jobs in 8 years. Obama thus far has lost 740,000 jobs, putting him -1.8 million jobs in the hole to Bush.

“equal pay for equal work for women”

The Lilly Ledbetter Act, signed by President Obama in 2009, only extends the deadline, already in law, during which people victimized by unequal pay may sue to secure back pay due them. The Equal Pay Act became law in 1963, so had existed for 46 years before Obama’s tweek.

“the first major health-care reform since Medicare”

Obamacare is, in the words of Vice President Joe Biden, “a big fucking deal.” We’ll soon learn how much of it will survive constitutional muster, a “BFD” if it does, since it will mean the federal government can force us to buy any product or service it in its wisdom feels is in the national interest for us to have.

One hopes the “brawl” Democrats plan to unleash on Republicans—because they have no record to run on—will backfire. One hopes future campaigns will instead offer contrasting programs for a better U.S. One hopes.

Finally, it’s hopeful that such a good-hearted singer/songwriter as Bono, the unusual liberal who is friends with Bush 43, sees so clearly the bankruptcy of Democratic efforts to build class envy in America. Listen to Bono, who has said, "In America, you look at the mansion on the hill and think, 'One day that will be me.' In Ireland, people say, 'One day, I'm going to get that bastard.' "

I hope America retains the significant difference with Europe that Bono brings to our attention. Bono's Democratic friends are certainly trying their best to do otherwise.

New York and London English

Click to enlarge map.

In very rough terms, the American English world has over 400 million English speakers in the U.S., plus Canada, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Its cultural capital is New York.

The British English world is quite large. At minimum, it has 210 million English speakers in Great Britain, the old (once white) dominions (Australia, South Africa, Ireland, New Zealand), and in the former colonies (especially India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, Jamaica). The British English speakers look to London.

We don’t count so much countries dominated by Pidgin English (led by Nigeria), which may not look to either outside capital.

Americans keep this in mind—the British-speaking world is large, roughly 65% the size of the U.S.

New York and London.

Obama’s Couch Potatoes

Source: Wall Street Journal

“Government's telling them ‘stop dreaming, stop striving, we'll take care of you.’ We're turning into a paternalistic entitlement society. That will not just bankrupt us financially, it will bankrupt us morally. We'll have a bunch of people sitting on a couch waiting for their next government check.”

--Chris Christie, New Jersey governor

We have decried how the national elite—Democrats—no longer agitate for jobs as in Franklin Roosevelt’s time, but agitate instead for “fairness” (“pie recutting”). And we have “viewed with alarm” the shocking discovery that the federal government sends money to 30% of the population.

Still, it comes as a surprise—at a time when women make up 47% of those employed; the workforce long ago made room for 1950s-style (Ozzie and) Harriet stay-at-home moms—to find that only 55% of Americans over 16 work full-time (above chart, adjusted for part-time work [LNS12032194]).

30% of the population on the federal government dole. 45% of the population not working, or working part-time. 50% of the population paying no federal income tax. Many wish they could work, but there are presumably a number of “couch potatoes” who love Obama’s big government—while it lasts.

As Christie suggests, the morally right thing to do is get off the couch and go to work—at a job a healthy private sector creates.

Not the Economy: Obamacare & Social Issues (II)

"Obamacare was supposed to be the capstone in the arch of a new progressive era. The Dems were going to show us all that government really does work. Smart government by smart people, using modern methods and the latest up to the minute research from carefully peer reviewed articles in well regarded social science journals can solve big social problems. . .

"But even if the Supreme Court doesn’t pull the trigger and kill the law in June, the darn thing won’t fly. The public hates it. . . A legislative body trying to write a health care law for a country like ours is like a neurosurgeon operating, drunk, with one hand holding a chainsaw and the other in a boxing glove. . . Obamacare . . . is a 20th century solution for a 21st century society."

--Walter Russell Mead, American Interest

In Part I, we talked about the central role Obamacare plays in liberal efforts to make politics not about equal opportunity, but rather about government-engineered equality. We quoted Stanford economist Victor Fuchs’ statement that a “most effective” way to build “allegiance to the state is through national health insurance”—as European social democracies have done.

Health care is one way to shift voters’ attention from job creation failure to social issues; ironic because morality is usually associated with conservatives, not liberals. We earlier mentioned Washington Post commentator Robert Samuelson’s realization that portraying issues in moral terms dodges the need, in a bad economy, to pay for solving a problem:

politicians prefer framing issues in moral terms. Global warming is about "saving the planet." Both sides of the abortion and gay marriage debates believe they hold the high ground.

Obama pitches his health care plan in moral terms: health care is a "right;” its opponents less moral. . .Supporters . . . back expanded health care as "the right thing"; it makes them feel good about themselves. They get "psychic benefits," [whereas e]conomic benefits [including expanded health care] cost money. Psychic benefits make them feel morally upright and superior at no monetary cost to politicians! The magic solution. [emphasis added]

Social issues—universal health care, abortion, the right to free morning-after pills/contraception, saving the planet—seem aimed at women, a top liberal target group. Unmarried women already vote Democratic. But David Paul Kuhn, in “RealClearPolitics,” reports on polls that remind us morality doesn't automatically turn women into progressives. According to Kuhn:

more women are social conservatives than men. 57% of white Republican women attend church at least once a week, compared to 42% of white Republican men. . . among whites, women attend services and Bible study at a significantly higher rate than men. . . Republican women are more likely than Republican men to believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.

Job growth cut almost in half.

Today’s employment numbers for March showed jobs grew by only 120,000. That was 90,000 below estimates, 107,000 below the previous month, and the lowest job growth total since November. And while the all-important unemployment rate fell to 8.2%, the decline stemmed entirely from people dropping out of the labor force—a negative development. Furthermore, employers cut back on workers’ hours and on temporary hiring, both signs the job growth rate may fall again next month.

Still, our chart of Obama’s unemployment goals (below) continues showing he is likely to be able to claim net job growth by the October report, out just before the election.

Holy Week Message: President compares his troubles to Christ’s crucifixion.

From the White House: “Remarks by the President at Easter Prayer Breakfast”

like us, Jesus knew doubt. Like us, Jesus knew fear. In the garden of Gethsemane, with attackers closing in around him, Jesus told His disciples, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” He fell to his knees, pleading with His Father, saying, “If it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.” And yet, in the end, He confronted His fear with words of humble surrender, saying, “If it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.”

We all have experiences that shake our faith. There are times where we have questions for God’s plan relative to us -- (laughter) -- but that’s precisely when we should remember Christ’s own doubts and eventually his own triumph.

“I couda been president.”

“There was a time when Obama was the candidate of smart people who wanted real solutions to complex problems. That feels like 100 years ago, doesn’t it? The man who once reminded so many of Martin Luther King Jr. is now in full Lee Atwater mode: Attack, attack, attack — with brief respites to raise millions for more attacks.”

--Michael Graham, Boston Herald

(Asked about concerns that Romney may have tacked too far to the right) “Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.”

-- Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney campaign press spokesman

Aren’t you just excited about the choice we have in November—major league mudslinger v. major league flip-flopper?

Here’s major league political guru Stu Rothenberg, speaking about Romney’s primary campaign performance:

Romney’s great problem in the GOP race, as pretty much everyone has already observed, is that conservatives don’t really believe that he is one of them. Despite all his conservative rhetoric — on taxes, government spending, traditional marriage, immigration, abortion and health care — conservatives aren’t buying it. They believe that Romney is simply pandering to them because he knows that is what he needs to do to lock up the Republican nomination.

despite his conservative rhetoric, moderates and country club conservatives continue to support his candidacy. . . Clearly, establishment Republicans also don’t believe Romney when he talks about his views and his agenda. . . The bottom line, of course, is that nobody — not his critics and not his allies — really believes Mitt Romney.

BIFF! ZAP! POW!

The day after Santorum's March 13 Alabama and Mississippi victories, I noted Romney’s 53% of the total delegates was down from 55% the day before, and if Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich combined could continue cutting into Romney’s share of the total delegates, Mitt might be stopped.

Well, after yesterday’s contests in Wisconsin, Maryland, and D.C., Romney’s share of total delegates is up to 58%. With less than half the delegates selected, Mitt already has 58% of the delegates he needs.

The “ABM” (Anybody but Mitt) strategy I talked about has failed, and ex-Republican Mark McKinnon, writing in the “Daily Beast,” thinks he knows why:

Santorum's problem right now is not Mitt Romney; it's Newt Gingrich. Despite all the fanfare about Santorum needing the contest to become a two-man race, just the opposite is true. The only way for Santorum to make a real play would be for Gingrich to remain viable and attract enough delegates so that between them they can keep Romney from reaching a majority. Alas, the wind has gone out of the gasbag we call Gingrich.

Newt is no help whatsoever to Santorum’s ABM effort. In the 7 contests since Alabama and Mississippi, Gingrich has won just 1 delegate total.

But I haven’t thought since two days after Alabama and Mississippi that Gingrich would be a real asset, or that ABM would help much. On March 15 I concluded, “It’s going to come down to Santorum’s ability or inability to excite the conservative Republican masses.” And in the end, Santorum did himself in, as the Hill’s A.B. Stoddard accurately reported:

Santorum often made the point that nominating Romney . . . would take the issue of healthcare off the table and benefit President Obama, [since] Romney had declared support for mandates to purchase healthcare . . . Santorum also repeated, early on, that [Romney had] supported the Troubled Asset Relief Program as well as cap-and-trade proposals, making [Santorum] the only true conservative in the race.

Santorum blew it. He veered off course, and out of this millennium, enthusiastically bemoaning birth-control pills, free prenatal testing and college education. He insulted Obama, calling him a snob, and President Kennedy. Santorum, a devout Catholic, said Kennedy’s insistence on a strong separation of church and state made him want to throw up.

On the night he lost the Michigan primary to Romney by 3 points, the exit polls told the story. He could have easily made up the votes to win from some of the women Romney won, the Catholics Romney won, the older voters Romney won, the voters earning more than $100,000 whom Romney won, and those voters with college degrees Romney won.

[Once again] he strayed, and lost Ohio by 1 percentage point. Then he strayed again, decrying the dangers of porn, claiming the Obama administration “seems to favor pornographers over children and families” because it has “refused to enforce obscenity laws.” So . . . he lost Illinois by more than 11 points.

Now he’s added Wisconsin to his string of Midwest industrial state defeats. Couda Wouda Shouda.

Just before the Wisconsin vote, Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times was on the receiving end of a testy Santorum response that seemed to encapsulate a lost campaign. According to Zeleny, "I said, ‘Do you think that Mitt Romney is really the worst Republican in the country to run against Obama?’ - which is what he said. And he said, ‘I didn't say that. You guys are distorting what I'm saying.’” Then, Zeleny said, Santorum asked him to “quit distorting my words. It’s bulls-. You don’t care about the truth at all do you? You really don’t. Asking that question tells me you don’t care at all about the truth.”

OK, so it’s Mitt. Rah.

Not the Economy: Obamacare and Social Issues (I)

“Obama's solicitor general . . .is part of a political culture that has never thought seriously about the Constitution, has never thought that our masters in Washington need to beg the people for any permission beyond their vote every two to six years. . . The Washington conventional wisdom has long been rooted in constitutional contempt.”

-- W. James Antle, III, American Spectator

Let me keep it simple. The people want jobs. Business people create jobs. If the election is a battle between the party of business, which creates jobs, and the party of government, which has proven unable to create jobs, then the business party should win.

So Democrats, the government party unable to grow the pie, wish to recut the pie, redistributing wealth. Government can recut the pie, if that’s what voters want. President Obama, with his (inaccurate) 99% v. 1% rhetoric, is focused on redistribution.

Even without proof that government, in the absence of job creation, can provide the country with more pie, redistribution speaks to the Democrats’ natural constituencies—liberals, government workers, unmarried women, minorities, and youth—a potential 60% of voters that embraces government as its friend.

Democrats begin with a majority base, and a belief they are America’s future. Government helps people, people support government, freedom of choice. It’s how democracy works in Europe, under democratic socialism.

I have been struck by the insight liberal Stanford economist Victor Fuchs’ expressed in his 1976 article "From Bismarck to Woodcock: The 'Irrational' Pursuit of National Health Insurance." Fuchs understood that health care leads the way to permanent control of our country:

one of the most effective ways of increasing allegiance to the state is through national health insurance. We live at a time when many of the traditional symbols and institutions that held a nation together have been weakened and fallen into disrepute. A more sophisticated public requires more sophisticated symbols, and national health insurance may fit that role particularly well.

We are less than 90 days from a Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare. At this stage, Obama’s signal achievement is in trouble (see quote above), because of its apparently unconstitutional mandate to buy health insurance. As health care reaches the crucial point along its path toward securing the liberal agenda, it seems Democrats may have avoidably over-reached.

It’s an error Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal alluded to when he said:

Democracies always begin in liberty, but they don't always keep it. [In] The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn [wrote,] "At the Philadelphia convention, with exquisite care and with delicate nuances, they devised a complex constitution that would generate the requisite power but would so distribute its flow and uses that no one body of men and no one institutional center would ever gain a monopoly of force or influence that would dominate the nation." We shall see.

We shall see.

Liberal Guilt, Conservative Hope

“It’s to the Capitol’s advantage to have us divided among ourselves.”
--Attributed to Gale Hawthorne, character in Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games

John Tamny, writing about “Hunger Games” in Forbes, said the story’s lessons included:

Free societies, personally and economically, don’t rely on government. Instead, a natural harmony eventuates as self-interested individuals create what they’re best at so that they can trade their production for that of others. The problem for political types under such a scenario is that people realize . . . they don’t need government.

[A]ssuming a better world where special interest groups didn’t regularly descend on Washington seeking that which natural market forces won’t provide them with, . . . politicians would invent them. Divided societies give politicians [the power to allocate] resources to the politically connected [and to] weaken a society, thus boosting their status as our allegedly benevolent Nanny.

Our previous post looked at likely liberal guilt that stems from elite support of a meritocracy that, in Brave New World fashion, condemns the “intellectually challenged” to lower class status.

There are different ways for our meritocracy to move past this guilt. One is to hold that in a land of equal opportunity, any person has an equal chance to rise to the top. But our brainiacs just know, they know, that brainpower makes a big difference. Here’s elitist Jacob Weisberg of “Slate” speaking the painful liberal truth about an elite based on academics—it brings “an even worse sting than under an aristocratic or hereditary one, because those who are less successful can't blame outcomes on the arbitrariness of the system.” Brains determine outcome, SAT tests are for real.

A far more comfortable way, therefore, for liberals to move past guilt about meritocracy is to focus instead on money. The figurative descendants of the American hierarchy that gave birth to the post-Civil War GOP, the robber barons of the Guilded Age, are still present within our upper class, and liberals are committed to taxing plutocrats heavily on behalf of the victimized masses. Echoing the cry of the French revolution, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” (Liberty, equality, equality, brotherhood), liberals want to move in the direction of equality (though deliberately), redistributing some money to those unlikely to rise in a meritocracy.

Playing Robin Hood provides the justification liberals need to hold overwhelming wealth and power in government hands. This is much to the distress of conservatives:

o George Will, Washington Post

the federal spider has woven a web of dependencies[, t]he political purpose [of which is] to produce growing constituencies of voters disposed to vote Democratic. This . . . entitlement mentality is triggered by making the constituencies constantly apprehensive about the security of their status as wards of government. . . self-indulgent liberal majorities in Congress [have created] a stimulus that confirmed conservatism’s portrayal of liberalism as an undisciplined agglomeration of parochial appetites.

o Walter Russell Mead, American Interest

The impartial administrative state (staffed by trained experts, powerful enough to rein in the base instincts of politicians, honest and public-spirited enough to counterbalance the power of the rich, educated and enlightened enough to guide and uplift the ignorant public) is the Great Engineer who brings progress to a dark polity. For upper middle class progressive ideologues, this kind of state is the summum bonum, the highest possible form of social organization. This kind of state will not and should not disappear overnight, but increasingly it needs to be transformed — and the blue social imagination can only conceive of this change as decline and fall.

o Robert Samuelson, Washington Post

What . . . government does is so vast that it suffocates informed debate and political control. The built-in bias for the status quo reflects the reality that the various parts of government are understood, defended and changed mainly by those who benefit from their existence. However strong the case for revision, it is tempered by political inertia. What's sacrificed is the broader public good. The quagmire is of our own making.

o Janet Daley, The Telegraph (U.K.)

The [1989] failure of communism should have been. . . a turning point in . . . modern thinking about the state and its relationship to the economy, about collectivism vs individualism, and about public vs private power. [Yet] we still seem to be unable to make up our minds about the moral superiority of the free market. We are still ambivalent about the value of competition, which remains a dirty word when applied, for example, to health care. We continue to long for some utopian formula that will rule out the possibility of inequalities of wealth, or even of social advantages such as intelligence and personal confidence.

There is no way of avoiding the need for individual responsibility, which lies with citizens, not governments.

But we also see conservatives expressing hope that liberals are nearing the end of their rope. From George Will:

America now is divided between those who find this social churning unnerving and those who find it exhilarating. What Virginia Postrel postulated in 1998 in The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress — the best book for rescuing the country from a ruinous itch for tidiness — is even more true now. Today’s primary political and cultural conflict is, Postrel says, between people, mislabeled “progressives,” who crave social stasis, and those, paradoxically called conservatives, who welcome the perpetual churning of society by dynamism.

And from Walter Russell Mead:

Those who still have something close to lifetime employment – tenured professors and teachers, civil servants and other government employees, postal service workers – feel the unwelcome winds of change.

“The arc of democracy is long, but it bends toward the masses.”

Liberals, Meritocracy, and Hierarchy

“Journalistic convention requires that when there are two identifiable sides to a story, each side gets its say, in neutral fashion, without the writer's thumb on the scale. This rule presents a challenge when one side of a controversy obviously lacks merit. But mainstream journalism has learned to navigate those challenges, choosing evolution over ‘intelligent design,’ for example, and treating climate change naysayers as cranks.”

-- Linda Greenhouse, New York Times

This blog is persuaded, partly by biology and social science experiments, that Americans (people) value consistency, strongly favor those in their tribe, see bias in their opponents, and believe their own judgments to be fact-based. Linda Greenhouse has had 34 years with the New York Times, America’s citadel of liberalism, our country’s strongest liberal voice. No surprise she writes (above) with—to me—transparent bias.

Here’s how conservative Roger Kimball, at the “PJ Media” website, describes the other side:

Liberalism. . . regards its political opinions . . . as reflections of the state of nature: what any right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) person believes. But your opinions, my conservative friend, are regarded not so much as opinions as some form of heresy. Here in a nutshell you have the motor behind political correctness and the staggeringly illiberal attitudes espoused by the elite liberal establishment.

Nicholas Kristof is, like Greenhouse, a New York Times columnist. Refreshingly unlike Greenhouse, however, he openly identifies himself as a liberal. And refreshingly, he recently took a stab at respectfully separating liberal and conservative thought. Kristof’s starting point is The Righteous Mind, a book by Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychology professor. Kristof says Haidt’s book “illuminates the kind of messaging that might connect with voters of all stripes.”

Haidt, according to Kristof, believes that

for liberals, morality is largely a matter of three values: caring for the weak, fairness and liberty. Conservatives share those concerns and add three others: loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity[--]values [that] bind groups together with a shared respect for symbols and institutions such as the flag or the military. Americans speak about values in six languages, from care to sanctity. Conservatives speak all six, but liberals are fluent in only three. And some [Kristof includes himself] mostly use just one, care for victims.

Do you think that having a broad spectrum of values, as conservatives do, is a good thing? Maybe not. Note that Kristof reduces his morality to a single virtue: “care for victims.” Kristof then goes on to say that research shows liberal adults

were said decades earlier by their nursery-school teachers to be curious, verbal novelty seekers but not very neat or obedient[, whereas] conservatives are particularly attuned to threats, with a greater startle reflex when they hear loud noises. . . liberals prefer dogs . . . not subservient, while conservatives seek dogs who are loyal and obedient.

Don’t you see it? Liberals: bright, restless, non-conforming, lovers of frisky dogs, and, best of all, caring. (Recall Rush Limbaugh’s saying "the left doesn't want to be judged on the results of anything they do. They only want to be judged on their good intentions.") Doesn’t Kristof show us the liberal generation that came out of the 1960s civil rights and anti-war struggle to run the nation from their New York-Washington axis? They overcame conservatives inhibited by loud noises, frightened into obedience to the flag, the military, and presumably organized religion, and who prefer loyal and obedient dogs. It’s all so subtle, Kristof’s quiet dig at conservatives within his genuine effort to understand them. He can’t help himself.

Last year, Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan unearthed a profound truth about the young anti-establishment liberals who have become our rulers as adults, when she wrote of supreme court justice Elena Kagan:

Ms. Kagan and her counterparts all started out 30 years ago trying to undo the establishment, and now they are the establishment. If you need any proof of this it is that in their essays and monographs they no longer mention “the establishment.” Ms. Kagan’s nomination has also highlighted America’s . . . meritocracy. Work hard, be smart, rise. The result is an aristocracy of wired brainiacs, of highly focused, well-credentialed careerists.

Liberals are irreverent about authority and about established institutions. They speak out against wealth, Wall Street, those who don’t pay their “fair share,” the top 1%. Yet liberals have become “the establishment,” the aristocracy. They are “America’s meritocracy,” and as we have said, live alongside elite conservatives in America’s “gated country”.

The liberal elite occupy an “inner world” similar to the old U.S.S.R.’s nomenklatura, its “inner party.” The New York Times is its Pravda, cueing liberals on what to say, what to do, how to live. Inside the “inner world,” one can frankly discuss one’s own power and wealth, and reassure each other the meritocracy works, the cream most properly rises to the top. Inside, one can be honest about how an elite minority in a democracy dominated by less fortunate voters holds onto power by practicing Kristof’s “care for victims.” Brains at the top. Government the means. A national majority of dependents the target.

Is there guilt about standing for the oppressed, but living as an elite atop an anti-democratic (it’s based on merit) pyramid? I suspect a great deal, and see it displayed in outbursts like that of Greenhouse against conservative inferiors, efforts to reassure each other that the right people are running the show. I see it in deceptive efforts to keep victims tied to the liberal elite—branding the “tea party” racist, going after governors trying to enforce Federal law requiring deportation of lawbreakers, uniting women against the Catholic church and Catholic Rick Santorum, demanding higher taxes of the rich when such taxes cannot close the deficit, claiming efforts to save Medicare are attempts to destroy it instead.

The liberal focus has to stay on the conservative enemy. Otherwise, the meritocracy may be forced to address the disturbing question of how can a democracy where the people rule also be a hierarchy that permanently consigns a majority to society’s lower rungs, based upon inherited intelligence? “Care for victims” may not be enough. It may not work.

Culture and Conservatives

“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Here is America’s “core culture,” as defined in 1993 by Samuel P. Huntington, who was born the same year as Moynihan (1927), and was a political science colleague of Moynihan’s at Harvard:

the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English language, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music; the American Creed with its principles of liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private property.

One can certainly say that Huntington’s “core culture” definition is dated by current standards, but is one with which conservatives could readily identify. It also seems likely liberals would happily use politics to, in Moynihan’s words, “save” parts of Huntington’s culture “from itself.”

Now here’s a more 21st Century definition of American culture from physicist Mark Mills and engineer Julio Ottino. They describe our culture as “high inertia,” distinguished by “open-mindedness, risk-taking, hard work, playfulness, and, critical for nascent new ideas, a healthy dose of anti-establishment thinking.” Mills and Ottino have fixed on what works in the U.S. economy.

And what about American mass culture, a force that often seems distant from “hard work” and “nascent new ideas,” but indeed shows elements of “risk-taking,” “playfulness,” and “a healthy dose of anti-establishment thinking”? Peggy Noonan was thinking about culture high and low when she wrote that American culture:

is governed and run by the entertainment industry. And the entertainment industry is, and has been since the New Deal, firmly rooted in the Democratic Party. It was invented by the ethnics of the East. . . who joined the Democratic Party as soon as they got here. And they let everyone in America know, and they do it to this day, that the Democratic Party is the cool party, and the Republican Party is the one [not cool], the one that seems like a character flaw to belong to. . . Democrats were, through most of the 20th century, better at propaganda. [emphasis added]

Earlier this year, we relayed Charles Murray’s concern about many left out of the American success story: working-age lower class whites with no education beyond high school—30% of the white population aged 20 to 49. They would seem especially susceptible to the influence of American mass culture.

Murray is disturbed that 52% of the lower class population he studied are unmarried, 44% are single parents, 32% of the males are unemployed or in part-time work, 59% of the men and women are non-religious, and they collectively live in communities with a crime rate nearly five times above that in 1960. Murray calls the lower class problems cultural. He blames them on 1960s-era liberals who made it economically more feasible for women to have a child without a husband, for men to get along without a job, and safer for people to commit crimes without suffering.

Murray’s remedy would be to reverse the 1960s-onward cultural deterioration by restoring the religious values and morality, the emphasis on hard work, that supported marriage, two-parent families, and men who provide for their families and stay away from crime. Murray strongly rejects the “nonjudgmentalism” of our current upper class toward lower class (mis)behavior. In short, Murray seems to advocate a lower class return to Huntington’s “core culture” values (he believes the upper class is already there).

Robert Samuelson, in the Washington Post, took direct exception to Murray’s pessimistic view of where American culture currently stands with our masses. To Samuelson

There is such a thing as the American character and. . . it is durable. In 2011, only 36% of Americans believed that "success in life is determined by outside forces" [Pew Global Attitudes survey]. In France and Germany, the responses were 57% and 72%, respectively. America is different, even exceptional.

While Samuelson rejects Murray’s pessimism, his “American character”--taking responsibility for one's own actions--is in line with both Huntington’s “core culture” and the values Murray supports.

John Podhoretz, writing in Commentary following the death of James Q. Wilson (the criminologist who developed the famous “broken window” theory), chose to highlight Wilson’s following endorsement of morality:

I wish to argue for an older view of human nature, one that assumes that people are naturally endowed with certain moral sentiments. We have a peculiar, fragile, but persistent disposition to make moral judgments, and we generally regard people who lack this disposition to be less than human. Despite our wars, crimes, envies, snobberies, fanaticisms, and persecutions, there is to be found a desire not only for praise but for praiseworthiness, for fair dealings as well as for good deals, for honor as well as for advantage.

Wilson held values that, again, are close to those of Huntington’s “core culture.”

And the same can be said for Victor Davis Hanson, the Stanford Hoover Institution conservative who, in reaction the “politics of blame” in Obama’s state of the union speech, emphasized virtue over tribal loyalty when he wrote:

The content of our character alone matters; those who are not so confident in their own, usually demand that their tribal affiliations be essential and not incidental to their personas. Most accept that culture, not race matters, but it matters still more not to say that.

Except that culture does matter, and it does matter that we speak of it. Culture can lay the foundation for productive work, for economic progress. Or it can undermine both.

Resurrect the Xth Amendment. Seriously!

"are the two political parties so heavily controlled by interest groups and voting blocs demanding total fealty to their issues that there is little room for candidates who espouse a middle ground, or even an inclusive approach to governance?"

--Carl M. Cannon, “RealClearPolitics”

Pollster Scott Rasmussen warns us of

the real entitlement mentality that threatens to bankrupt the nation: a political class that feels entitled to rule over the rest of us. [This mentality affects] leaders of both parties. . . It’s not just our habits of dependency that need to be broken. The habits of control and penchant for feeding dependency on the part of our political leaders also need to be curbed. . .

While most voters view excessive government spending as the problem, those who feel entitled to rule over the rest of us see the voters as the problem. And that’s the real entitlement crisis facing the nation today. The political class wants to govern like it’s 1775, a time when kings were kings and consent of the governed didn’t matter.

Jonah Goldberg shares Rassmussen’s hostility toward the “leaders of both parties,” and pointedly disagrees with Cannon’s plea for “a middle ground.” The National Review columnist writes:

We’re constantly told that the way to fix the country is to dethrone the Left and the Right and empower the middle. . .But what if the real compromise isn’t in forcing the Left and the Right to heel? What if instead the solution is to disempower the national elites who think they’ve got the answers to everything?

Goldberg’s answer is to endorse federalism, sending power down to the states and the people, as we are supposed to do under the Constitution’s Xth Amendment. Says Goldberg:

Federalism is simply the best political system ever conceived of for maximizing human happiness. A one-size-fits-all policy imposed at the national level has the potential to make very large numbers of citizens unhappy, even if it was arrived at democratically. . . Pushing government decisions down to the lowest democratic level possible — while protecting basic civil rights — guarantees that more people will have a say in how they live their lives. Not only does that mean more people will be happy, but the moral legitimacy of political decisions will be greater.

Such talk is old hat for conservatives. But here’s Goldberg’s new twist. He realizes that whenever conservative and libertarians preach federalism, the other side hears “states’ rights”. So he has simply jumped all over a new essay in the spring issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas by Yale law professor Heather K. Gerken (see picture), entitled “A New Progressive Federalism.” Goldberg:

Gerken’s chief concern is how to empower “minorities and dissenters”[, defined] in almost purely left-wing terms of race and sexual orientation. Still, she makes the very compelling point that the current understanding of diversity — having minority members as tokens of inclusion — pretty much guarantees that racial minorities will always be political minorities as well.

Quoting Gerken directly:

While the diversity paradigm guarantees racial minorities a vote or voice on every decision-making body, it also ensures that they will be the political losers on any issue on which people divide along racial lines. Racial minorities are thus destined to be the junior partner or dissenting gadfly in the democratic process. Allowing local majorities to have their way turns the tables. It allows the usual winners to lose and the usual losers to win. It gives racial minorities the chance to shed the role of influencer or gadfly and stand in the shoes of the majority.

Can both sides come together not on a national “middle ground,” but rather on devolving power to the states and people? Goldberg concludes, “A Left-Right federalist compromise would make America a happier, freer, more prosperous and interesting country[, while dethroning] those in both parties who think they know what’s best.” [emphasis added.]

Our economic future: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good. The Dow rose for the seventh session Thursday. closing at 13,253. and the S&P climbed above 1,400 (to 1,403) for the first time since June 2008. Thursday was the first time in history that together the Dow has been above 13,000, S&P above 1,400, and Nasdaq above 3,000 (it closed at 3,056). Our FOX Index, which watches such movements (it marks the distance above or below a “healthy market” of 12,000 Dow, 1,300 S&P 500, and a NASDAQ of 2,500) was at its all-time high Thursday of +1,912 (see chart; the Index dropped 20 points Friday).

Jobless claims fell by 14,000 Thursday, providing further evidence that the US economy is on the rebound.

The Bad. Amity Shlaes, writing at Bloomberg, believes the next economic “black swan” (she doesn’t use the term) we face is inflation. She mounts a century-long case to show inflation comes suddenly, repeatedly, and with devastating force. Yes, but such a “black swan” event cannot be predicted; inflation may remain contained.

David Rosenberg, in the Financial Times (U.K.), provides a less dramatic picture of trouble ahead. He first notes signs that stocks could continue to rise:

• corporate earnings have more than doubled off the 2009 depressed lows. This is truly an incredible run-up over such a short time frame.

• the compression in corporate bond spreads has help expand the price/earnings multiple and keep the fair-value line trending up.

But Rosenberg thinks the broader market is now close to its ceiling. He wants us to know the world has not suddenly been “fixed;” that our almost-uninterrupted equity market rally lacks conviction:

• The rally’s volume has been weak with institutional players absent from the market, and with very little participation from retail investors. US equity-based mutual funds have recorded 10 months of net outflows, with another $5.4bn in 2012. In fact, there have been no net inflows since 2005 as clients use interim rallies to sell.

• Corporate insiders have been huge sellers of their own stock, exceeding $6bn last month (with the ratio of selling to buying hitting the astronomical 13-to-1 mark).

• The initial public offering market was in a slump during the October-February rally, with merger and acquisition activity sinking to 2008 levels.

• Recent market gains seem linked to the more than €1tn injected into the European financial system.

• Other recent positive economic numbers reflect the warmest North American winter in 50 years, artificially boosting home sales, retail sales, manufacturing, transportation and consumer confidence.

The Ugly. There is mounting evidence that China, the world’s current economic engine, is in trouble.

The Chinese power struggle is now very much in the open. Jamil Anderlini, also writing in the Financial Times, called Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai’s Thursday sacking “the most significant end to a political career in China for more than two decades.” Bo, as Anderlini wrote, is “China’s most charismatic and polarizing Communist official.” Bo’s purge proves there is division at the top.

Established leaders saw Bo as a real threat to their power. Anderlini reports that Xi Jinping, scheduled to be China’s next leader, wrote a strongly worded editorial in the party magazine Seeking Truth that anticipated Bo’s departure. Xi said the party must:

firmly oppose all actions that harm and split the party . . . firmly excise decayed and corrupted people who deviate from the party constitution, who jeopardize the undertaking of the party and who have lost the credentials to be a party member

And the day before Bo’s fall, Premier Wen Jiabao gave a rare, nearly three-hour press conference to conclude this year’s National People’s Congress. In the course of answering press questions, Wen warned:

Reforms have reached a critical stage. Without the success of political reforms, economic reforms cannot be carried out. The results of what we have achieved may be lost. A historical tragedy like the Cultural Revolution may occur again. Each party member and cadre should feel a sense of urgency.

Openly commenting on Wang Lijun, Bo’s top cop until Bo fired him who then fled to Bo’s enemies in Beijing and help trigger Bo’s fall, Wen added China has “taken detours” and has “learned hard lessons.”

China’s leaders prefer to fight behind closed doors, to present China and the world a unified front. Xi, Wen and the other party leaders know their power rests on successful, sustained economic development. Signs of opposition from Bo Xilai and other proto Maoists most likely reflect rising worry at the top that China’s economy is headed downward.

That’s certainly the view of Gwynne Dyer, writing in the Japan Times. Dyer tells us:

• more than half of the 124 skyscrapers currently under construction in the world are being built in China. . . a frenzy of skyscraper-building is also the most reliable historical indicator of an impending financial crash.

• the West wants to believe that China's economy will go on growing fast . . . Twenty years of 10%-plus annual growth have made China the engine of the world economy. . . But the engine is fuelled by cheap credit, and most of that cheap money, as usual, has gone into real estate.

• [Wuhan,] in addition to a skyscraper half again as high as the Empire State Building, is currently building a subway system that will cost $45 billion, two new airports, a whole new financial district, and hundreds of thousands of new housing units. . . Last year Wuhan municipality spent $22 billion on infrastructure and housing projects although its tax revenues were only one-fifth of that amount. . .

• Land in Wuhan has tripled in price during the property boom, and could quickly fall . . . if confidence in the city's future were to falter. [Yet] Wuhan's housing stock is already so overbuilt that it would take eight years to clear even the existing overhang of unsold apartments . . . never mind all the new stuff. Multiply the Wuhan example by hundreds . . .

• Beijing knows that the property bubble is dangerous and is trying to switch spending to consumption. . . there just isn't enough time. . . China is heading for a classic "hard landing", and when it comes, it will slow the whole global economy to stall speed.

• the Communist regime is clearly frightened.

We should be frightened as well. Our economy needs China's to be strong. The ugly.

Will Santorum + Gingrich block Romney?

"there’s a big difference between [Romney] thinking that this election is fundamentally about reversing a few years of sluggish economic growth, and [Santorum/Gingrich] thinking that it’s fundamentally about reaffirming (or rejecting) the commitment to limited government and liberty that has defined America across two glorious centuries."

--Jeffrey Anderson, Weekly Standard

RealClearPolitics correspondent Scott Conroy has discussed in greater detail my point yesterday that only Romney is gripped with the charge to secure the 1,144 delegates needed to win the Republican presidential nomination. Conroy states that if Mitt fails to nail down a delegate majority, “all bets may be off.” Conroy adds it seems to be Romney, not Santorum, who has “the most to gain” from any Gingrich exit from the field.

Gingrich originally pitched this argument in his Tuesday “concession” (he didn’t really concede anything) speech after losing in Alabama and Mississippi. Now analysts are climbing on board, including Conroy’s RealClearPolitics colleague Sean Trende, who said:

People are assuming if Newt gets out, it helps Santorum because it sets up a one-on-one contest against Romney. But by Newt staying in, he’s actually gobbling up some of Romney’s delegates. And that’s the name of the game at this point: keeping Romney below 1,144. So I think Newt staying in actually helps Santorum.

In the end, it’s not going to be the math. It’s going to come down to Santorum’s ability or inability to excite the conservative Republican masses, now that he has real visibility and several wins under his belt. But Gingrich could maybe help a little.

Big news: Santorum wins Alabama and Mississippi.

"Romney . . . has won the two, two important things: people who think the economy is the most important thing, and that want to beat Obama. And so I think that voters across the country, whether they buy, whether they’re watching the day to day big picture, they think that . . . and I think that’s why he’s competitive in the South when a lot of people thought that he wouldn’t even be able to show up there, people if you ask those two questions tend to think that Romney would be the best nominee."

--Dana Perino, “Fox News Sunday” 3.11.12
(direct from recording; transcript not available)

Well, after placing third in both Mississippi and Alabama, maybe Romney’s not so “competitive in the South” after all. The East Coast-based GOP establishment is desperate to close out the Republican nomination, as the above remarks last Sunday by Bush 43’s press secretary suggest. But what does “competitive” mean anyway when in advance of the two Southern contests, two-thirds of the votes are already expected to go against your yankee?

Establishment Washington D.C. detested loser Goldwater in 1964, regretted the damage Reagan did to President Ford in 1976 (who lost), and resented Pat Buchanan’s divisive primary battle against President George H.W. Bush in 1992, including Buchanan’s “culture war” convention speech (Bush then lost). They forget Reagan won twice in spite of them, and that establishment favorites Bob Dole (1996) and John McCain (2008) turned out to be dogs.

The establishment want Romney, and they want him now. Here’s the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, writing in a column titled “Math matters: Romney widening his lead”:

By winning 9 delegates in American Samoa and 45% of the vote in Hawaii, Romney wiped out Rick Santorum’s narrow wins in the Deep South . . . Santorum’s task to get to 1,114 [sic] delegates is that much harder. . . The nominating process is about the delegates. Math, like gravity, can’t be ignored.

Romney did sweep through Hawaii and Samoa yesterday. Overall, he bested Santorum 43 to 36 delegates, even after Santorum’s headline, surprising wins in the “heart of Dixie.” But contrary to what Romney shill Jennifer Rubin asserts, the math isn’t widening Mitt’s lead. Romney’s goal is get to 1,144 delegates, ½ + 1. That means he must win 50% of the available delegates. Yesterday, he won 43% of the available (and thus far assigned) delegates, and “ABM” (anybody but Mitt) won 57%.

Before yesterday, Romney had 55% of the total delegates. Now—Rubin take note—his percentage is down to 53%. Where will that percentage be March 25, after the Missouri, Puerto Rico, Illinois, and Louisiana contests; after almost half the delegates are assigned? Still dropping toward 50%? Is Romney winning or losing to “ABM”?

Meanwhile, Santorum is picking up support within the Republican establishment. The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger recently said,

Rick Santorum should stay in the race, repeating from now till summer the perverse link between the ObamaCare mandate and the American idea of freedom. It looks like the best argument the GOP nominee will have for a win in November.

And Jonah Goldberg, in the Los Angeles Times, pivoted off Santorum when he wrote:

Because many liberals believe there's no valid limiting principle on government's ability to do "good," they assume that conservatives believe there's no valid limiting principle [on government's ability] to do "bad." Rick Santorum . . . explained the flaw in this thinking: "Here's the difference between me and the left, and they don't get this: Just because I'm talking about it doesn't mean I want a government program to fix it. That's what they do. That's not what we do."

To sum up, we now have a two-person race between Romney and Santorum. But the current dynamics are Romney v. “ABM.” Romney must win half the delegates. Santorum only needs to deny Romney that goal, a lesser challenge.

Establishment pundits often refer to how McCain had his nomination wrapped up after February's "Super Tuesday" in 2008, when Romney graciously pulled out. Why can't conservatives offer Romney the courtesy in 2012 that Romney offered four years ago?

The difference is that Romney's weakness worked for a pullout then, and now works against leaving the field to Romney today. In 2008, weak challenger Romney had no real prospect of stopping McCain. Now in 2012, Romney is the weak front runner, and conservatives, after Santorum wins in Alabama and Mississippi yesterday and Kansas last Saturday, are increasingly hopeful Romney will be stopped. ABM.

Foxes, not Hedgehogs

We are learning from NPR’s recent examination of how tribal loyalty and love of consistency interfere with an unbiased pursuit of truth.

Philip Tetlock, at Pennsylvania's Wharton School, is a psychologist who's studied what voters can expect when they get consistent leaders. He uses the Greek analogy of the fox and the hedgehog. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. The hedgehog has one goal: don't get eaten. Foxes, on the other hand, have lots of strategies to catch a hedgehog.

Tetlock thinks consistent leaders simplify a complex world into a few big ideas. They're hedgehogs. Leaders who are foxes don't have a single agenda. They have lots of contradictory goals. They compromise. Foxes are less likely to be on the extreme left or the extreme right.

Since consistent hedgehogs and inconsistent foxes both claim great results, Tetlock tested them. He asked a large number of hedgehogs and foxes to make specific predictions about events. Over 20 years, he's collected more than 28,000 predictions about issues in 60 countries. The results are in: foxes make the right calls more often than hedgehogs. If you want to know where the economy is headed, ask a fox.

But hedgehogs have an upside: when they're right, they're spectacularly right. Think of Winston Churchill, who saw before everyone else the threat Hitler posed. But hedgehogs are also more likely to be spectacularly wrong. After all, Churchill also fervently believed in the British Empire--in keeping India British--and very incorrectly compared Gandhi to Hitler.

Tetlock's work shows inconsistent leaders—foxes—do better in office. But because voters so value consistency, hedgehogs do better in election campaigns.

Tetlock’s proofs came well after the great political philosopher Isaiah Berlin published his work The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953). Berlin is a hero of this blog for his insight into the difference between “positive” and “negative liberty;” between government helping others to succeed and government modestly honoring the individual freedom to fail. Berlin believed a hedgehog is an author who has a unified vision which he follows in his writing, while a fox has no central vision nor organizing principle; his writings are varied, even contradictory.

Berlin concentrated his analysis on Leo Tolstoy, whom Berlin argued was a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog. Tolstoy longed for a central idea to organize around, but so distrusted human ability to find such an idea that he ended up knocking down what he saw as faulty. In War and Peace, Tolstoy used chaos, in Berlin’s words, to dispel a "great illusion" that “individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control the course of events." Tolstoy perceived a "central tragedy" of human life to be man’s failure to

learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world

Consistency, then, equates with outlandish arrogance. We should be modest, foxes not hedgehogs, especially in our desires to control others (“negative" over "positive liberty”). We may want the dopamine surge that comes from the correct prediction. It’s human biology at work. But as Nassim Nicholas Taleb taught us in the Black Swan, we cannot foresee the monumental events (“black swans”) that shape history, so we are better off with foxes “with an open mind” than with hedgehogs “so blinded by one single outcome [they] cannot imagine others.”

Science Finds Humans Resist New Patterns, Outsiders

Science provides evidence that humans are biased against those 1) who are inconsistent and 2) who operate outside our tribe. NPR’s “Morning Edition” recently reported on both findings.

Scientists say we want consistency. David Linden, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, says our brains don't like inconsistency. The brain has lots of circuits making predictions about all kinds of things, every second of every day. And Linden says the brain pays special attention to other people, watching out for the veracity, predictability, group spirit and motivations of those around us.

After thousands of years living in groups trying to stay alive, we need to know if the person who helped yesterday might hurt tomorrow. Prediction is so important our brains give us pleasure-inducing dopamine when we guess well. Get it wrong and dopamine drops. So imagine what happens when someone we trust becomes inconsistent. We feel deeply betrayed, and experience hurt similar to physical pain.

That means we want consistent politicians, not those forcing us into painful re-evaluations. And especially not those from the “other side.”

Jamie Barden at Howard University developed a way to test how people make judgments about inconsistent political behavior. He gathered a group of students—both Democrats and Republicans—and told them that their job was to evaluate the behavior of a hypothetical “Mike.”

Students learned that during a political fundraiser Mike had organized, he'd drank too much, drove home, and crashed his fender into a telephone pole. In short, Mike drove drunk. The students then learned that a month later, Mike on the radio delivered a screed about the dangers of drunk driving, saying, “I'm not going to drive drunk and no one else should either.”

The two possible interpretations for Mike's behavior are that a) Mike is a hypocrite or b) Mike has sincerely changed. Barden's study found the preferred interpretation is based on tribe rather than on the facts. Half the time Mike was described to the students as a Republican and half the time he was described as a Democrat. When participants judged a Mike from their party, only 16% called him a hypocrite. Whereas when Mike was from an opposing party, 40% judged him a hypocrite.

Thus tribe clouds our judgments about what is and is not true. And other research shows that though we see bias in our opponents, we believe our judgments to be fact-based. No wonder it’s so hard to bring the two parties together. We are biologically primed to ignore opposing viewpoints and to hold fast to our tribe.

Job Growth Best Since 2006

The U.S. created 227,000 jobs in February, exceeding the pre-report consensus estimate of 213,000. The jobs increase, reported yesterday, topped 200,000 for the third straight month. The past three months of full-time job growth—the fastest since the end of the 2007-2009 recession—marks the best jobs growth since early 2006.

Job gains for January were revised up to 284,000 from 243,000, making January the best month of job growth in six years. Net hiring in December was also revised up, from 203,000 to 223,000. These upward revisions suggest momentum; the economy’s growth is likely to continue.

The unemployment rate was unchanged at 8.3%, but the rate’s failure to fall is a good sign. 476,000 people re-entered the labor force looking for work, meaning they now believe jobs are available.

Obama has an excellent shot at having the total number of jobs on election day exceed the total when he was inaugurated in January 2009. The U.S. economy only needs to generate 123,400 jobs a month—just half the current rate—to reach that target (see chart below).

On the conservative FOX News show “Journal Editorial Report,” the Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel warned Republicans to stay away from a simple 2012 “referendum on numbers.” She said they should instead argue GOP growth policies will outperform the president’s. Strassel’s comments indirectly confirm how much the basic job numbers are moving Obama’s way.

Watching China: Finding Economic, Political Weakness

How can you predict a crisis for China? A nation-civilization that moved from one disaster to another for 14 decades, 1839 to 1979, has since then strung together the three-plus most spectacular decades of economic growth in world history. You want now to find Chinese progress in jeopardy? Not me.

Still, China may now be looking at two big problems, one economic and one political.

1. Economy: too much government.

Listen to Michael Schuman, writing in TIME:

it is very difficult to tell what’s really going on in the Chinese economy. Data is sparse or unreliable. And China is in certain ways unique in economic terms — has history ever witnessed a giant of such massive proportions ascend so quickly in the global economy? . . But the more time I spend in China, the more convinced I am that its current economic system is unsustainable. . .

China has adopted a form of the Asian development model, invented by Japan. . . the pieces of a crisis [are] misguided investment, including a giant property boom, propelled on by debt and the decisions of government bureaucrats. . . The economy needs to rebalance away from investment and exports to a more consumption-driven growth model with a primary focus on quality of growth, not high rates at any cost. That’s not happening. . . the World Bank [has] issued a report. . . warning that China could face an economic crisis if it doesn’t reform.

And hear from Yao Yang, Director of Peking University’s China Center for Economic Research:

government must face the problems created by its pervasive role in the economy. A new World Bank report singles out lack of reform of state-owned enterprises as the most important impediment to the country’s economic growth. But that is only a symptom of a deeper problem: the government’s dominant role in economic affairs. . . In recent years, more than one-third of total bank lending has gone to infrastructure, most of which has been built by government entities. . .

government over-investment [continues] in numerous industrial parks and high-tech zones. . . China’s investment frenzy reminds many people of Japan in the 1980’s. . . Infrastructure investment [runs] up against the law of diminishing marginal returns, but consumption growth does not have a limit. Suppressing consumption thus suffocates future growth, and the share of household consumption in GDP has declined from 67% in the mid-1990’s to below 50% in recent years, with most of the decline reflecting . . . government policies.

Schuman, Yao, and the World Bank seem to agree that China is following Japan’s development path—price distortions resulting from government over-emphasis on investment at the expense of free market consumption. “Big foot” government instead of where China should be going: “customer as queen.” Politicians and their friends prevailing over the consumer.

2. Politics: evidence of struggle.

What are the possibilities for political change that benefits the consumer? We have the strongest evidence since the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre of real dissension among China’s top leadership. To me, struggle is good, for struggle could mean at least one faction reaches for wider popular support.

John Garnaut, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, has the fix on China’s leftist opposition, conservatives who want to reach back toward the Maoist era. They are the “Children of Yenan,” the largest and most organized group of revolutionary hero children. They are using their hereditary privileges to sound the alarm about what they see as a party crisis.

In February, they convened 1,200 high cadre children at Beijing's Heaven and Earth Theater, where they heard a speech from Hu Muying, the daughter of Hu Qiaomu, Mao’s secretary who was an outspoken opponent of the reformists crushed at Tiananmen. Hu told her fellow “princelings” that China’s

brilliant achievements were followed by class polarization, rampant corruption, a public spiritual vacuum, chaotic thinking, moral decline, prostitution, drugs, triads and so on. . . We expect the new leadership can recognize the crisis and correct the wayward course. Without this there will be no future. We, the children of veteran party members, keep thinking: “Is this the New China our fathers sacrificed their blood to fight for and establish?”

How come those who have been overthrown and exterminated have returned today?

Heavy stuff. And Hu even drew support from Hu Dehua, the son of late party chief Hu Yaobang, who stood on the opposite side from Hu’s father Hu Qiaomu in the late 1980s. Hu Dehua liked Hu Muying's diagnosis of China's crisis, though he is more liberal-democratic. Politics creates strange bedfellows.

Hu’s indirect criticism of China’s current leadership especially stands out in the aftermath of the crisis that has befallen Chongqing special municipality boss Bo Xilai. After Bo announced the sacking of his right-hand man, the city's police chief Wang Lijun, on February 2, Wang fled Chongqing and spectacularly took refuge in the US consulate in Chengdu. From there, he was spirited away to Beijing, where he is likely spilling to Bo’s opponents all he knows about the Chongqing leader.

Last year, Bo was China’s “great red hope,” poised for promotion onto the Chinese politburo's standing committee as part of this year's wholesale leadership change. As Garnaut writes, Bo had “captivated and polarized the nation by waging war against corruption and breathing new life into the spirit of Mao.” And, as Rosemary Righter, associate editor at The Times (London) informs us, under Bo Chongqing not only posted some of China’s highest growth rates, but also made massive provision of housing and health care for workers in a country where social safety nets barely exist.

Yet Bo’s police chief Wang, Righter writes, had himself become “China’s most celebrated cop, a folk hero for his no-holds-barred campaign against organized criminals and their alleged protectors.” This Bo-Wang mess, involving two heroes, seems evidence of real trouble at the top.

On one side, then, we have Hu Muying, the “Children of Yenan,” and the allies of Bo Xilai. Righter calls the opposing camp the party’s "modernizers." They are led by Wang Yang, party secretary of Guangdong, China's next-to-Hong Kong industrial powerhouse. Wang advocates “free thinking and mind liberation,” relaxation of bureaucratic and party controls that hinder development, strengthening the rule of law, and addressing the causes of swelling discontent in Chinese society. Intervening after a violent uprising against land-grabbing public officials, Wang promoted the leader of the protests and—in what Righter calls a “practically unprecedented move”—ordered villagers be allowed to choose their own representatives in free elections.

China’s future boss Xi Jinping has yet to line up with the modernizers even though his father, Xi Zhongxun, personified “reform and opening up” as Deng Xiaoping’s man in the 1979 Guangdong test lab of Shenzhen. In any battle between Guangdong reformers on one side and Beijing-Chongqing Maoists on the other, it’s Shanghai (where Xi was once party boss) that’s likely to come out on top.

As for the people. . .