Auspundits

PJ O'Rourke: A Post-Mortem

Ugly but characteristically hilarious. Scathing about conservative political strategy:

The "Southern Strategy" was bequeathed to the Republican party by Richard Nixon--not a bad friend of conservatism but no friend at all. The Southern Strategy wasn't needed. Southern whites were on--begging the pardon of the Scopes trial jury--an evolutionary course toward becoming Republican. There's a joke in Arkansas about a candidate hustling votes in the country. The candidate asks a farmer how many children he has.

"I've got six sons," the farmer says.

"Are they all good little Democrats?" the candidate asks.

"Well," the farmer says, "five of 'em are. But my oldest boy, he got to readin'  .  .  .  "

There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie's electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have a laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not make a man a liberal.

Scathing about priorities:

Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters. We impeached Clinton for lying to the government. To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort. Lying to the government: It's called April 15th. And we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven't done yet, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.

Scathing about conservative foreign policy:

Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world's rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we've been doing of that lately.)

Scathing about the conservative response to the financial crisis:

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too.

And writes our epitaph:

Although I must say we're doing good work on our final task--attaching the garden hose to our car's exhaust pipe and running it in through a vent window. Barack and Michelle will be by in a moment with some subsidized ethanol to top up our gas tank. And then we can turn the key.

Scathing about much else. Read it all. His article begins:

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye.

He might find it especially painful.

Here's To President Obama - Leftie Style

Jason Linkins Chief Moonbat at The Huffington Post writes about the Right's response to Obama's victory. Let's call this a prime example of pathological projection. The man's wanting to protect himself from believing that the Right can be civil. We can also be mean:

Jason Linkins seems to approve of what I wrote about social conservatives earlier today, titling his link to LGF: “Hey! Let me make total sense for just a second!” Hey, Jason! Take your approval and shove it. Sideways. No need to get back to me on this.

I second that motion. If the deranged monkeys on the Left cannot understand humility and good will from those ideologically opposed, about their "post-partisan" candidate, then they should graciously bite their tongue. For a more objective analysis of the Right's response, see my post from last night.

Here's To President Elect Obama

So 'Barry O', 'The One', BHO, etc, was elected President of the United States in what will probably end up being a landslide election. Firstly, congratulations to him. He ran a campaign that hit most of the right notes and the U.S. people got him up. We can all have a drink to his success and well-being and good-governance. Of course, we at Auspundits will spend the next four years ensuring that he is being successful and governing well.

However, a few observations I would make. It has been quite obvious to anyone with an eye to see, that lefties have generally been quite nervous about this election. Almost compulsively so. Despite him blistering McCain in the polls and on Intrade. Today, saw all of that being blown away as their man won the keys to the White House.

Eight years ago, and then four years after that, George W. Bush won against Gore and then Kerry. In both circumstances, we had the left go apes**t. "We are moving to Canada or France," they said. Or, "Bush is not MY president". Or "BushMacHitler stole the election". Here's how the right reacted today:

Presidential Diction

P.S. Can you believe the American people elected a president who publicly used words like "equipoise"?

Heh. Bryan Caplan at EconLog. And no, he isn't prognosticating about Obama's inauguration speech.

America's Culture War

* By Lounge Lizard

Who can forget Sarah Palin's speech to the Republican Convention in which she accepted the nomination as John McCain's running mate?

Joe McCain, John McCain's brother, gave an insider's account of the speech in an article in The Australian of September 16 entitled The real barracuda.

In this article, Joe McCain revealed that the joke Palin told about hockey moms who, unlike pit bulls, wear lipstick, wasn't in the script. Indeed, she went so off-base during her speech that eventually the teleprompter operator decided to turn the thing off.

For the speech of her life, that demonstrated enormous self-confidence.

Lounge Lizard watched her as she spoke. He noted that she was a very fit and healthy looking person and that she was totally at ease with herself, her family and with being an American. She betrayed not the slightest hint of nerves.

She's tough.

She not only preaches conservative values but the choices she and her family have taken in life's journey demonstrate to ordinary Americans that she lives by those values.

And that drives the left totally nuts.

Timely Revisionism To US Regulatory History

Roderick T. Long over at the art of the possible blog has posted a challenge to the popularly held notion that the United States of the 19th century was a free market utopia:

Every part of this story is false. To begin with, there never was anything remotely like a period of laissez-faire in American history (at least not if “laissez-faire” means “let the market operate freely” as opposed to “let the rich and powerful help themselves to other people’s property”). The regulatory state was deeply involved from the start, particularly in the banking and currency industries and in the assignment of property titles to land.

Read the whole thing. But in essence, the article argues that far from opposing regulation, business - particularly big business - have been strong proponents of regulation. The rather cogent argument presented by Long is that an unregulated monopoly/oligopoly is likely at attract greater competition due to the premiums it can demand from the market. This extra competition drive prices down as the monopolist/oligopolist loses their pricing power. That is why business prefer legal monopolies/oligopolies. Industries and sectors that can lobby for government regulation that keeps competition out, will entrench existing businesses' pricing power.

Long argues that these same businesses publicly rail against government intervention to maintain a thin veneer of protest and to give politicians the cover needed to enact these regulations.

That this should be so is not terribly surprising; wealthy, concentrated interests are inevitably going to have a greater impact on the political process than poorer and more dispersed ones. (Contrary to popular wisdom, which has the contrast gong the other way, it is only on the market, where the price system aggregates the preferences of the poorer and more dispersed, that the latter can systematically trounce the influence of business power.) What is more surprising is that such blatantly and thoroughgoingly pro-business legislation should have been perceived as anti-business. [emphasis mine]

However, I would dispute Long's account of business' duplicity with regards to regulation - at least as evidenced contemporaneously. Take business and their response to the pressure that has been building up over the last decade to enact a (global) carbon tax. For some time, earlier in the 1990s, business strenuously argued against it (profits would fall, jobs lost, capital investments mothballed, etc). Recently their tune has changed - even within the industries most affected. Consider the mining industry. Most mining companies are now not putting up a fight against the idea of a carbon tax. In fact, their annual reports and TV advertisements gloat about how environmentally friendly their operations are and the extent to which environmental risk mitigation strategies are incorporated into their business models. When the government is willing to shower business with free money, subsidies, I don't blame them.

It was only this week, that the Federal government announced a $A100m research centre that will fund research into carbon, capture and storage in league with the major energy companies. And only a few months after the Federal government handed out another $A35m to Toyota to research and build a green car in Australia which they were going to build here anyway. These regulations and subsidies increase the barriers to entry for new participants, or more pertinently, the production of complementary goods and services, maintain oligopolies' market power.

And if ever there were a clearer example of government supporting the anti-competitive practice of business, then it is the US Treasury's bail out of financial powerhouses drunk on their recent success not noticing the cliff that lay ahead. The Treasury Secretary was the former head of Goldman Sachs. He had brought over quite a few of his old IB mates to the Treasury. It should therefore not surprise observers that Paulson argued a catastrophe was facing financial markets were he not to receive carte blanche powers to distribute $US800bn + to ailing IBs and financial institutions. Part of me doesn't doubt the truthfulness of Paulson's argument - markets are manic and no trust is in the system. However, the cynic in me isn't satisfied. Arnold Kling fuels the cynic's fire.

H/T: Squirrel

Re: Drums In The Deep

* Lounge Lizard responds to Moose, revealing the inspiration of his nom de plume.

Moose,

As usual, you make some good points.

I agree with you that there seems to be a decline in rationality, which can perhaps be put down to the rise in importance of the semi-educated, such as the so called 'doctors' wives'. Perhaps 40% of young people now go to university and therefore think they must be clever, but the truth is that only about 10% of the population are really capable of university-level thought, or what was once considered university-level thought - and that eliminates many current academics!

Re: Drums In The Deep

* Moose responds to Lounge Lizard.

Lounge Lizard, some very good arguments. My responses below, inline.

Lounge Lizard wrote:

I think that Western leaders have to take into account the fact that their own people are also not always rational, and this impacts on what is considered to be in the national interest. In short, and especially when you have a democracy, you cannot divorce the perceived national interest from a people's culture and as [has been] remarked, culture will out.

I think that we are in a strange transitional phase where what you say holds. I do not however consider this phase to be stable or sustainable. The ability of the West to act as a rational society is deteriorating. On the other hand, the West is the one society, or family of societies where rationality was a bedrock of culture, and informed national interest. One thing we may agree on is that the West ain't what it used to be, and that this view holds with increasing velocity. The culture of the West is changing rapidly, and the Westerner of today has precious little in common with their grandparents.

This change is not guaranteed to lead to a sustainable, secure society. Further, I am of the opinion that the state space of possible societies contains precious few stable, free, secure, prosperous societies. So any runaway trajectory is not likely to take you to a good place. Kind of like sailing in a random direction and hoping to find Moby Dick. So, either we will develop radically new instituations, tools and legislation, or the West will go the way of the dinosaurs.

Re: Re: Re: Drums In The Deep

* Lounge Lizard enters the fray. Comments on part 1, part 2 and part 3. This was all in response to Richard's "Drums In The Deep" post.

I think that Western leaders have to take into account the fact that their own people are also not always rational, and this impacts on what is considered to be in the national interest.

In short, and especially when you have a democracy, you cannot divorce the perceived national interest from a people's culture and as the author of part 2 has remarked, culture will out.

Here are just a few examples where it could be argued that sheer cold brutal expediency didn't, in the final result, determine policy:

• "Poor Little Belgium is being raped by the Huns" - one of the reasons the British Empire entered the First World War so enthusiastically.
• Retaining the Falkland Islands. The costs of recovering and retaining these islands far exceed any economic benefits. The few people who live on them are of no importance in the great scheme of things.
• Support for Israel. If this was obviously in the national interest, both Israel and domestic Jewish lobbies wouldn't have to worry constantly about Western support.
• Support for East Timor. The East Timorese display little capability and this failed micro state will be a constant drain on Australian resources for the foreseeable future. Objectively, it would have been far preferable for it to have remained a province of Indonesia. Indonesia would have borne all the costs and Australia would have been able to negotiate a better deal over the Timor Gap. However, a religious faith shared with many in Australia together with memories of support for our soldiers during WW2 helped generate a less expedient approach.

Given our culture, nothing will stop what might be called Western Interfering Missionary Programs (or WIMPS for short). They are a product of a free society and an economic prosperity that gives people time and resources to display their moral superiority, carefully sugared with a coating of pseudo-humanitarian blather. Some WIMPS we may not dislike, others we may deplore, but whatever kind, the world will have to put up with them. I particularly dislike certain NGOs such as Greenpeace and I deplore ego-driven bureaucratic arrogant do-gooder world government monstrosities such as the International Criminal Court. But these things are here to stay. They are like the Left, of which Richard Fernandez once remarked:

The Left is the Mr. Hyde of Western civilization, and as such probably ineradicable for as long as the civilization itself exists. As a practical matter, it has to be treated as a golf handicap. There’s no use railing against it. All that anyone can do is make allowances for their inevitable input.

Moose may deplore the Orange Revolution, but you have as much chance of stopping the promotion of this kind of thing as you have of stopping the spread of the common cold. The key is that it's more a matter of culture rather than of calculation. Sometimes there will be successes, perhaps temporary, as with the Ukraine; other times, hopeless and perpetual failure, as with Tibet. Bad experiences may slow and defeats reverse the changes sought, but like war itself, which they will help promote, WIMPS will continue to the end of time, or at least to the end of Western Civilisation as we currently know it.

Re: Re: Drums In The Deep

Moose enters the "Drums In The Deep" fray. See part 1 and part 2.

Russian leaders are seldom guided by much more than sheer cold brutal expediency. They do however have to work with political support from a less than rational people.

The same is true of the Pakis.

And far less true of the Norks.

As for the Russians not making sense:

• In geopolitics pride and anger are justifications, almost never core reasons for action.
• Russia's core strategic assets are being threatened and key agreements made in the early Yeltsin years are trampled on. Russia's sovereignty, security, ethnic groups abroad and key economic assets are all under threat as of the Orange Mistake of 2005.
• The significance of Georgia, and particularly the Ukraine to key Russian interests should not be underestimated. To take Russia to task for having these interests is to take the Euroweenie pacifist "end of history" perspective, which is paradoxically what the West has been doing these past few weeks. It is also to ignore that the US has the Monroe Doctrine, and Australia has its own "near abroad" in the Pacific Islands, where we play Big Daddy, and rightly so. And not always with the poor little fuzzy wuzzy's interests at heart, as in the case of Timor Sea oil negotiations. And rightly so again.

Now one may still say that there is reason to pressure or cripple Russia, either for a better deal on other geopolitical matters, or for the endgame of depriving them of their nukes. But even then it serves us little to pretend that Russia does not have serious interests driving its actions.