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The Liberal Con
EVERYONE in the political elite knows that "entitlements" are really welfare. So when middle-class voters talk about having "earned" their benefits, well, here's the New York Times:
Anecdotes about citizens’ demanding that government “keep its hands off Medicare” are Exhibit A in the prosecution’s case. In July 2009, for example, President Obama informed an audience that he had received a letter from a woman who wrote, “I don’t want government-run health care, I don’t want socialized medicine, and don’t touch my Medicare.” Such demands, wrote Timothy Noah at Slate, reflect a politics of “infantile denial.”Except, writes William Voegeli, it was the liberals and Democrats that taught Americans to believe that Social Security and Medicare were just like an insurance policy. You put your money in so you can take it out later.
Central to liberalism at high tide was a rhetorical effort to establish the untruth that Americans receiving social-insurance benefits were getting back nothing beyond what they had already paid for...Of course, this was a lie, a liberal "con." Social Security has never been run like an insurance policy. It has always been run like a welfare program. Taxes have been arbitrarily set based on the overall immediate payout needs, and benefits have always been skewed to provide a basic benefit to the low-paid and the contributor that has only paid in for a few years. Medicare is worse, because it is not an actuarial program based on simple mortality, but on the future demand for health care and the demands of the health care practitioners.
Vincent M. Miles, one of the inaugural members of the Social Security board, explained the basis of this right in a 1936 speech: The program’s old-age benefits “are best understood if we compare them to insurance.” The monthly checks from the government are “like the installments on annuities from an insurance company.” And, “like an insurance-company policy, the worker’s old-age benefit from the government must be paid for in advance. Instead of weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly premiums, however, the government collects weekly or monthly payments which are called ‘taxes.’”
Yet now our liberal friends are sneering at the simple-minded people that bought the "con."
Nothing remarkable here. Confidence artists have always regarded their "marks" with disdain, and rightly so. Because you can only get taken in by a confidence man if you want the something-for-nothing that the confidence man offers.
But that doesn't change the fact that liberals lied about their welfare state entitlement programs. They lied because that was the only way that they could get proud and independent Americans to buy into their programs, and get Americans to exchange their birthright for a mess of pottage.
| perm | comment(0) | 
| 05/18/12 1:38 pm ET
Why Obama is "Even Close"
COLUMNIST David Brooks was well chosen to be the gentle voice of conservatism for The New York Times. He's careful to write in a way that makes his ideas at least acceptable to his knee-jerk liberal readers. So when he asks the rhetorical question: why is Obama even close in the presidential opinion polls, he provides comfortable words for the NYT faithful. After backing and filling for 700...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/16/12 12:42 pm ET
Plato's Receptacle
SUPPOSE you are Plato and you've been pushing your concept of the Forms for ages. Everything comes from these perfect ideas that can be comprehended up there in the firmament beyond the rim of heaven. Ordinary things that you and I see, the perceptions and particulars, are not reality but opinion, true belief.
But if you were Plato you might worry a bit about how you get from the perfect Forms to the everyday sensible particulars. So Plato pops behind the curtain and briefs his alter ego Timaeus on a quick and dirty fudge, a half-way house between the Forms and the particulars: The Receptacle.
You can think of this Receptacle as a kind of wetnurse. Or you can think of it like gold: Gold is gold, but you can manipulate it into all kinds of shapes. Or you could think of it as the mother, the receptacle of the father's seed or Form, which incubates the offspring. Or you could think of it as a plastic, impressionable stuff, or you could think of the receptacle as the odorless liquid that is used as the base for a fragrance. You see the point. Plato reckons he needs something more substantial than Forms upon which to hang the everyday impressions of moment to moment sensation.
In our modern science we have a similar concept, for we understand that the sensible particulars we detect with our eyes are in fact the result of electromagnetic radiation emitted from a lattice of atoms and molecules, which don't necessarily have sensible properties by themselves but emit signals to us that we interpret as red and yellow, hard and soft, solid and liquid.
Let us take an example: a left shoe. First of all, the left shoe comes into being in a Receptacle, as an instance of the Form of shoe in a process of shaking disordered elements into order, producing the particular instance of left shoe. On the gold analogy, it would be the combination of elements shaped and molded into a shoe. On the mother-father analogy it is the offspring of the Form of a shoe incubated by a lactating mother. On the plastic, impressionable stuff, it is the Form of shoeness impressed upon plastic stuff into the particular of a shoe. Or the receptacle is shaken and stirred, like the pieces in a kaleidoscope into the instance of a shoe from the Form of shoeness. On the reflection metaphor, the left shoe is a projection into a certain space or site of the Form shoenessness.
In part, the Receptacle is meant to represent stuffness, the place where Form is manifested into stuff; in part, according to another interpretation, the Receptacle is the space, the place, the room where an instance of a thing comes into being and then, in time goes out of being.
But what happens when the left shoe moves? Perfectly simple. We have the shaken-and-stirred analogy to account for that. The shoe is shaken from its original position and moved, for the Receptacle is not just stuff but a space, a site of stuff. Or it is gold, moved and remolded into a new shape in the Receptacle. Or it is switched from one breast of the wetnurse to the other.
There is no doubt that, the more specific you get, the more incoherent the analogies become that Plato uses to illustrate his Receptacle concept. But there is no shame in that. Our modern science is barely free from incoherence. We have the action-at-a-distance problem with the notion that a single photon can seem to go through two slits at once and interfere with itself. And what really do we have in a solid lattice of molecules, or a soupy wetland of a liquid? We have our likely story, our true belief about what is going on that is developed by persuasion and we have our understanding, our theories of relativity and quantum mechanics that are communicated to young physicists by years of instruction.
What does it all mean? Ask Plato about that.
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/14/12 11:47 pm ET
Arianna's Greek Fantasy
IF you want a native's eye view of the Greek crisis why not turn to America's favorite Greek, Arianna Huffington. That's what The New York Times did. When I was growing up, my family was a tiny microcosm of the current Greek economy. We were heavily in debt; my father’s repeated attempts to own a newspaper ended in failure and bankruptcy. Eventually, my mother took my sister and me and left ...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/13/12 9:30 pm ET
Marriage: It's For the Next Generation
RIGHT now, I'm reading Mrs. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. This 19th century novel is about broken families and step-parenting. Of course, back in those days you didn't have divorce. But you did have 17-year-old Molly Gibson, who wakes up one day to realize that her widower father is going to remarry. Just like today's children of divorce, Molly is not happy about this. In fact she is ...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/11/12 1:47 pm ET
We're Overseas about "Overseas"
TODAY I'm in Greenwich, Connecticut, for the roll-out of my daughter Beatriz Williams' debut novel, Overseas. There's an event at the Greenwich Library tonight at 7pm EDT, but right now we are listening to an author interview on "The Business of Living" AM1490 WGCH. It's a delight: Beatriz comes across as knowledgeable, confident, articulate, with a good radio voice. Just how you'd want your ...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/10/12 11:02 am ET
A 60-40 Year? |
| 05/09/12 10:33 am ET The Four Causes in Plato
EVERYONE knows that Aristotle invented the Four Causes. In the Metaphysics he lays it out: the Material Cause, the stuff that something is made of; the Formal Cause, the form or pattern, the shape of something; the Efficient Cause, the source of the something, such as the father of a child; and of course the famous Final Cause, the purpose or "end" of something in the world. Today of course, ...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/08/12 1:51 pm ET
Endgame of the Welfare State |
| 05/07/12 12:40 pm ETRasmussen Misses Point on 50-50 Elections |
| 05/04/12 1:28 pm ET What About Atlantis?
WHEN Socrates and his chums gather the day(!) after they discussed The Republic for another chat on important philosophical matters, the first thing they do is rehearse what they agreed to the day before. How everyone should stick to one job, how the guardians were a race apart, how children should be raised in common and how "the bad ones were to be secretly handed on to another city". But ...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/02/12 11:08 pm ET
What I Want From Romney(2) |
| 05/02/12 11:52 am ET Conservatives Are Indeed Social Darwinists
PRESIDENT Obama, deep in his liberal bubble, seemed to think he was hurling the worst insult in the world at Paul Ryan when he described Ryan's budget as "thinly veiled Social Darwinism." He was relying on the notion that, ever since Richard Hofstadter and Social Darwinism in American Thought, "social Darwinism" was an ever-useful pejorative to sling at evil Republicans to send them slinking ...
| perm | comment(0) | | 04/26/12 6:37 pm ET
| May blogs | April blogs |
A New Manifesto
A spectre is haunting the liberal elite—the spectre of conservatism.
The Crisis of the Administrative State
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Beyond Mere Blame
What led our liberal friends into the blind alley of the administrative welfare state?
Government and the Technology of Power
If you scratch a social reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government.
Business and the Web of Trust
Business is all about trust and relationship.
The Bonds of Faith
No society known to anthropology or history lacked religion.
All of the Above
Society is differentiated into three sectors.
Springtime for Freeloaders
The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.
The Curse of Compulsion
The larger the government, the smaller the society.
The Real Meaning of Society
Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”
The Greater Separation of Powers
If you want to limit power then you must limit power.
AAM Book of the Day
Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform
AAM Books on Education
Andrew Coulson, Market Education
How universal literacy was achieved before government education
Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic
How we got our education system
James Tooley, Reclaiming Education
How only a market in education will provide opportunity for the poor
James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
How the feminists wrecked education for boys and for girls
E.G. West, Education and the State
How education was doing fine before the government muscled in
AAM Books on Law
Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
How ordinary people in the United States wrote the law during the 19th century
F. A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol 1
How to build a society based upon law
Henry Maine, Ancient Law
How the movement of progressive peoples is from status to contract
John Zane, The Story of Law
How law developed from early times down to the present
AAM Books on Mutual Aid
James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We're In
How the welfare state makes crime, education, families, and health care worse.
David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
How ordinary people built a sturdy social safety net in the 19th century
David Green, Before Beveridge: Welfare Before the Welfare State
How ordinary people built themselves a sturdy safety net before the welfare state
Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy
How the US used to thrive under membership associations and could do again
David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry
How modern freemasonry got started in Scotland
AAM Books on Religion
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
How Christianity is booming in China
Finke & Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
How the United States grew into a religious nation
Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
How progressives must act fast if they want to save the welfare state
David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish
How Pentecostalism is spreading across the world
Economics of Relationships
reference to Fiske's relational models theory: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, market pricing.
Greek Tragedy
but Argentina's meltdown was OK, writes Ariana Huffington.
Obama Channels Romney
"I still believe in the American people," he tells George Clooney.
Western Civilization Faces the Big Test
or are mean-spirited Nazi rich to blame for big government crisis?
First, Make the Moral Case for Free Enterprise
never mind the practical, the moral case rules, says Arthur Brooks.
> archive
cruel . corrupt . wasteful unjust . deluded
After a year of President Obama most Americans understand that the nation is on the wrong track. But how do we find the right track? Americans knew thirty years ago that liberalism was a busted flush. Yet Reaganism and Bushism seemed to be less than the best answer.
But where can we turn? Where are the thinkers and activists of the old days? Where do we find the best ideas? And how do we persuade our present ruling class to loosen its grip on power so that we can move the locomotive of state back onto the right track?
With all of our problems it seems like the worst of times.
In fact, this is the best of times. Under the radar a generation of great thinkers have been figuring out what went wrong and conjuring up visions of a better future. This book, "An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism" is an introduction to their ideas, and to the great future that awaits an America willing to respond to their call.
Although this book is addressed to all Americans, conservative, moderate, and liberal, and looks to a nation that transcends our present partisan divide, I must tell you that liberals will have the most difficulty with the book. The reason is simple. I am asking liberals to give up a lot of the power they have amassed in the last century. But we are all Americans, and we must all give up something for the sake of the greater good.
I am Christopher Chantrill and I am writing this book in full view. I'll be blogging on the process and the ideas, and I'll be asking you, dear readers, to help. Read the blog. Read the articles as they come out on American Thinker and ponder over the draft chapters here on this site.
Then send me your reactions, your thoughts, and your comments. You will help more than you know.
Faith & Purpose
“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
Education
“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State
Living Under Law
Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
Knowledge
Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its
characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then,
once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities
Chappies
“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”
—Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison