Conrad Black on Obama

I am not too sure that many of my audience know much about Conrad Black, beyond perhaps the rather obvious point that he outstayed his welcome in the newspaper publishing business. At least he avoided steering through the rough contraction now taking place by been first. He has also emerged as a skilled writer of political biography and history and I am sure we will hear much from him. So his views are well worth heeding on the current political dispensation.

What finally strikes home for me on reading this article of the presidential progress is that Barrack Obama is presently a lightweight on a steep learning curve, with a devoted staff of similar minded folk aiding and abetting. In most of the examples quoted, his silence might have been better. It is as if he has never read some of the basic texts or is simply not a scholar by any inclination. His is a carefully crafted political persona that lapses too glibly back on old fashioned socialist stump speeches. I really hate to say this but he is so far very similar to Jimmy Carter.

Fortunately he still has time to get a grip on his duties. Shaky as this first quarter of his presidency is, it can easily be overcome.

In the event, the Us Government is about to face sharply falling revenues and no one has even clued into this at all. How Obama’s brain trust will handle all this is not presently apparent either. Like Conrad, I find it hard to see much good arising from a weak presidency humbled by financial woes limiting his options to respond. Right now, my instincts tell me that he needs a better mix of talent around him, but that may not be possible

George bush did assemble excellent talent but became their captive. This smells more like a case of excessive congeniality without balance. Clinton had the same problem and that only resolved itself in his second term.

And yes he needs to speak up as a patriot for his country and denounce the nonsense been gratuitously thrown his way. These guys are speaking to their home crowd and he needs to do the same thing. Praising Lula and chastising Hugo is a good start. That aligns the US with majority opinion in South America, while ending the trifling.

Conrad Black: Disparaging America from the Oval office

Posted: May 02, 2009, 11:07 AM by NP Editor

It must be said that Barack Obama tosses out apparently feckless suggestions about important matters rather flippantly. He wants to share the wealth; told a pre-election questioner that he would raise capital gains taxes even if it reduced government revenues, out of “fairness”; and has transformed the foreign visit into an itinerant, vicarious, confessional, where he seeks expiation for his country and his own predecessors, interspersed with the exchange of unlikely gifts — an iPod to the British and Commonwealth monarch of 57 years, and the “Idiot’s Bible” of Latin American socialism from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

We will have to wait for his specific medical-care and energy proposals to be sure of what he intends, but as of now he is still proposing health care “competition,” which is a euphemism for the federal government eliminating private plans, and a movement to renewable energy sources that will be unsustainably expensive. He is still describing his proposed cash handouts to low income people as “refundable tax credits” and “tax cuts” (to people who do not pay taxes). It’s in the same category of Newspeak as that favoured by the late mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau, who called his city’s public lottery a “voluntary tax.”

In his foreign tours, Obama utters and endures abuse of his country, sometimes, as in an addicts’ meeting, leading the expression of opprobrium against past U.S. policy. In particular, he implicitly states that his predecessor was nasty and unreasonable.

Admittedly, few will deny that George W. Bush was a public relations disaster. It is as difficult to imagine Roosevelt or Reagan with their mouths full of food greeting Churchill or Thatcher, as Bush did Tony Blair, “Yo Blair!,” as it is to imagine anyone throwing shoes at Eisenhower, Kennedy or Nixon. But Obama could safely allow the contrast with his predecessor to be appreciated spontaneously.

President Obama’s comparative suavity and fluency are assets for his country, and deploying them is useful. But disapproving of the use of the atomic bomb by one of his party’s most admired presidents, Harry S Truman, was an astonishing (and unjust) open goal to offer to America’s enemies.

It is not clear what possessed him to refer to America’s economic performance, which carried much of the world on its back for the last 25 years, with apology if not shame on his visit to Europe last month, while praising Europe for its social democracy. Europe’s economic torpor is one of the chief ingredients of current economic problems. Economic growth and job creation are not subjects for embarrassment, and if he conducts the United States to a replication of Europe’s sluggish to stagnant growth figures, his will be a failed presidency.

It is difficult to discern what he was doing at the Americas conference in Trinidad two weeks ago. Apart from referring to political prisoners in Cuba, he sat as mute as a suet pudding while Venezuela’s Chavez, Bolivia’s Morales, Cuba’s Raul Castro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, (stuck as if in aspic in Ronald Reagan’s description of him as “the little colonel in the green fatigues” 25 years ago), flayed the United States as the source of all Latin America’s problems.

This was long the specialty of the continent’s absurdly bemedalled, Ruritanian junta-leaders as they pillaged their countries, and of the left-wing demagogues they regularly overthrew. But good government, both from the centre-left (Brazil and Chile) and the centre-right (Colombia and Mexico), is in vogue and the practice of blaming everything on the United States is now confined to the far left. Moderate Latin American regimes have been rather cowardly about attacking the human rights records of Castro, Chavez and others. This meeting was Obama’s chance to hold their feet to the fire and shake the branches for Latin American democrats, but he let the opportunity pass.

For all America’s excesses and presumptions, there are limits to how much abuse the United States has to accept from left-wing South American regimes. Washington assisted the Latin American countries in gaining and retaining their independence, liberated Cuba from Spanish oppression, gave it the best government it has had and then gave it independence. It would have been better for everyone if it had taken Cuba in as a U.S. state a hundred years ago. The day when U.S. Latin American policy was unduly influenced by exploitative corporations ended decades ago.

Obama’s relaxation of travel and some financial restrictions is a reasonable first step in reforming America’s Cuban policy. Cuba and the other leftist states in the hemisphere are no particular threat or nuisance to the United States now. They can’t export revolution, are no longer agents for intercontinental mischief as Cuba and Nicaragua were in the piping days of the Soviet Union and Cuba is desperately short of cash. When Raul Castro replied to Obama’s conciliatory gestures by saying that everything was “on the table,” he was batted down in an Internet posting by big brother Fidel. The palsied Castro despotism has been reduced to this charade of governance. It can’t fester and infect Cuba much longer, but appears to be trying to cash in on Obama’s born-again, open-pocketed notions of good neighbourliness. There is no reason, unilaterally, to end the embargo of Cuba, though a relaxation of it, in exchange for almost anything, could be justified.

So far, while in Europe, President Obama has indicted his country and his predecessors for arrogance, dismissiveness, genocide, torture and insufficient respect for the Muslim world. Does the poor old USA really deserve this, and deserve the message to be delivered by its leader in the continent that gave the world totalitarian Communism, Nazism, Robespierre’s Reign of Terror and all the pogroms and massacres of Russia, Armenia and Bulgaria? All of these have occurred in the time that the United States has been continuously constitutionally governed by 43 elected presidents and 110 elected congresses.

Obama even disparaged the era when it was “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy” deciding the fate of nations. They were the world’s greatest statesmen, at least since Lincoln, and they saved civilization from the Nazis and Japanese imperialists while Europe was governed by Hitler and Stalin, Japan by militarist gangsters and Latin America by implausibly uniformed crooks.

Many wonder where these mad discursions will end, and what their purpose is. If Obama is confusing America’s enemies and tuning up the atmospherics as only a non-white president could do, flying trial balloons and reconnoitring, it is eccentric, but not necessarily bad, statesmanship.

If what we see and hear is what we are going to get — unilateral disarmament, preemptive concessions, socialized medicine, tax increases, windmills and solar panels from sea to sea, the auto industry run by the UAW and the wholesale prosecution of Republicans on torture charges, it is indeed time for the tea parties of protest that are taking place all over America, and for the prayerful singing of patriotic anthems, in the encircling gloom, to remind Americans of what their country once was.

Jerry Pournelle on Wealth Allocation

Jerry Pournelle has given us this essay which I am sharing with you. Clear thinking on this subject is rare and always welcome. I personally had a full university educaton under my belt before I investigated what exactly a stock was or even begin to think how the economy worked. I am not too sure it is that different today.

I have jerry’s link in my link list and I recommend it strongly. He has built up a good group of correspondents over the many years that he has run his site – blog and a lot of good stuff pops up.

Distributism vs. Redistributism

Obama and the Democrats propose a redistribution of incomes though the "earned income tax credit". This is often confused with the distributist views of Belloc and Chesterton, The differences are profound.

Belloc and Chesterton were both conservative capitalists, and very much opposed to Socialism (which is the best single-word description of Obama and the left wing Democrats). They did not believe the State would or could be fair in implementing its policies. They did believe that using the State to distribute incomes would inevitably lead to corruption.

They also saw truth in Marx's observation that unrestrained capitalism led to capitalists devouring each other, with more and more of the wealth and means of production concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Marx saw that as leading to revolution, with the elimination of social classes entirely. Government would shrink to nothing, and a man might be a worker in the morning and an artist in the afternoon.

Management would not be for maximum profit, but merely for maintenance. The resulting stability -- some would call it stasis -- would be the end of history.

Fascism accepted Marx's principal observation that history was the history of class warfare, but solved the problem of class warfare by erecting a State superior to all the social classes and institutions that would force everyone to work together, not for the benefit of any particular class or institution, but for the good of all. Mussolini began as a Socialist and said he remained a Socialist to the day he died; his Socialism was intended to be progressive. He built airports and not only made the trains run on time but built many of the railroads.

Socialism is sometimes described as Marxism with a human face. Hilaire Belloc presciently said that the result would be "The Servile State" in which subjects begged state bureaucrats for favors, and nothing was allowed without a permit. A man might not erect a chicken coop in his back yard without permission -- indeed, it wasn't his back yard. It belonged to the state which graciously allowed him to live there. One may judge the success of this approach by the fate of Pruit-Igoe in St. Louis, or any Chicago or New York public housing project. Proponents of public collective projects have various fixes which they say will take care of the problems if applied. The fixes do not usually include giving actual ownership to anyone but the state.

The distributist approach would be to give actual title to the property to the occupants. Chesterton argued for peasant ownership of the land even as he understood that English yeomen would not care to be called peasants. At the time he was writing, about 90% of the land in England belonged to a few hundred families who rented out farmland to those who worked it. At that time agriculture was a significant part of the British economy, and factory management, though more complex than Marx believed, was still considerably simpler that it is today. From the distributist view, if peasant ownership of farms was a proper solution in agriculture, worker-owned factories would likely be the proper solution to industry.

Both Chesterton and Belloc were concerned by the trend of increasing consolidation of industry into large conglomerates and trusts, in theory responsible to stockholders but in practice responsible to no one but the managers. James Burnham, formerly an anti-Stalinist Communist and at one time a leader in Trotsky's Socialist Workers Party, took up this argument in The Managerial Revolution (1941) and Suicide of the West. He later broke with the left and became one of the founding editors of National Review; he was a major influence on the late Samuel Francis, the populist paleo-conservative.

Most of these socio-economic views have one major concern: the increasing concentration of control over society into the hands of fewer and fewer people. This is not quite the same as increased concentration of wealth: wealth itself is no great threat to the social order although it can be used for that purpose. Socialism would tax wealth in order to set up bureaucracies that would fairly redistribute the wealth. At one time Socialism demanded the nationalization of the means of production, but experience showed this didn't work very well, either in the Soviet Union, or in the Scandinavian welfare states, or in England. Bureaucratic management "for the public good" is neither efficient in production nor particularly effective at pleasing its public clients (who are usually very much treated as clients; see the Roman origin of the word).

Distributists claim to be a third alternative to ruthless capitalism and bureaucratic socialism. The distributist view can be summarized fairly in Chesterton's statement "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." They believed in transparency and subsidiarity -- local control of most resources coupled with maximum freedom. (Note that the late Jane Jacobs thought those principles the only way to avoid a coming Dark Age.) One means of distributism would be through death taxes : the money would not go to the state, but be instantly and irrevocably divided.

Distribution of ownership of the means of production might lead to Jeffersonian Democracy in a largely agricultural country, but it's much more difficult in industrial states. Worker owned companies are sometimes both efficient and successful, but they often succumb to ruthless competition from manager-controlled companies and cartels.

There are plenty of Socialists who seek to redistribute the wealth through government action (which always means creating a bureaucracy). The neo-conservatives generally favor unregulated capitalism, which generally leads to concentration of wealth. There are few distributists in the modern political picture. Yet many of us can agree that "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists."

I suppose that the free lance programmer who owns his own computers is the best modern example of what Chesterton and Belloc sought. I would also suppose that more vigorous enforcement of the anti-trust laws, even if that led to some inefficiencies, would meet their approval. To the charge that this would destroy local industries through ruthless international competition, they would probably answer by raising tariffs.

Incidentally, the Regulatory State seems determined to restrict America to two kinds of companies: those with fewer than 50 employees, and giant corporations with thousands of employees. No one in his right mind would expand a company -- particularly in California but Federal Law is making this universal -- from 49 to 51 employees. The instant one gets to 50 (or 51 depending on the state) a huge panoply of regulations kick in, so many that even if one can afford to comply with them all, one will also need a compliance staff of several employees to make sure one is in compliance. This means that up to 10% of one's work force does nothing productive except keep the owners out of jail. This makes the company singularly uncompetitive when faced with companies that don't have to devote so many resources to complying with regulations. This is probably not what distributists had in mind.