Remember November but Analyze in April

by NeoLibertarian.Com on April 26, 2010

The Republican Governors Association has a new video out that is slick, and that’s big progress for them. It’s a huge tactical improvement but when you look a little closer it’s the same strategic failure that is hobbling Conservatives in general.

The tactic is energizing the base. The method is a slick video called Remember November and this video is pretty slick. That’s a huge step forward for Republicans, whose general creative and technological failures have been legion. So this is progress; tactical progress.

I was impressed the first time I saw the video. Then I watched it again, asking a simple question: what is the vision this video supports? What strategy is there, i.e. what are the people who made this video for? I don’t know.

The video is all about what they are against and there is value in being against bad things, but being against things is an inherently weak vision. The mobilization it inspires is based on anger or fear, not the desire to make things better. This makes it fundamentally weaker than the positive visions it opposes. Compare the vision of “Good affordable healthcare for everybody!” to the tactic of “The Healthcare bill sucks, we’re going to repeal it.” A good vision (even with very bad execution) will beat a negative tactic every time.

The video also ignites a pet peeve of mine, the Obama is a socialist mantra. This bugs me on a couple levels:

  1. Obama is not a socialist, he’s a radical egalitarian and there’s a difference.
  2. The elements of genuine socialism in the United States today are 100% the fault of George Bush and his RINO idiot buddies who panicked when the economy went south and started buying companies with government money. Until the Republicans recognize and apologize for their own part in the collectivist mess we’re drifting into they will have no credibility in their hypocritical attacks on Obama for policies far less socialist.

So the video is worth seeing and the tactical progress it shows should be applauded, but also shows that the Republican Party is still not a meaningful source of conservative thinking nor a competent spokesman for conservative ideas.

What should they have done? How about a video proposing a bill that vastly increases competition for private health insurance? It is very powerful to compare and contrast the free market in auto insurance with the closed market for health insurance. Almost everyone will grasp the argument intuitively, since they have, or have had, both auto and health insurance.

A video proposing smashing anti-competitive laws and granting tax breaks that would make getting your own health insurance as easy, and independent of your employer, as car insurance would be simple, powerful, and would portray Republicans as working against health insurance lobbyists to fulfill one of Obama’s own promises: increased competition for better health insurance at lower cost.

How much tougher is to demagogue against this than to just repeat over and over “Obstructionist Republicans want to take away guaranteed coverage for your kids and sick people.” How much harder would it be for Democrats to turn around and defend the oligopolies of big insurance companies against competition after just having finished vilifying them?

The problem with this approach is that this would require a real commitment to free market principles and solutions, not just mouthing the words and then doing the opposite.

The video is not embeddable, but you can see it at the Remember November web site.

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Inconvenient Truth: Now in Aerosol Form

by NeoLibertarian.Com on April 21, 2010

Here’s an interesting thought experiment: what if global climate doesn’t turn out to be so simple a two year old can understand it? Let’s examine some evidence about this shocking possibility.

Global warming theory as it is usually argued follows one of two bumper sticker ready paths:

  1. All Climate Change is man made by greenhouse gases
  2. No Climate Change is man made

I paraphrase here, but I’m close. In the facts are pesky things tradition, however, aerosols continue to rear their ugly little heads.

Remember the big flap about the IPCC being off about how long it would take the Himalayan glaciers to melt? The IPCC said 2035 and defended the date as solid and then it turned out that the date was something like 2350 and it was based on flimsy, non-peer reviewed “science”

Those who believed Option 1 said it was just a little typo which should not distract us from all the other evidence. Option 2 believers called shenanigans and there was a great kerfuffle.

A follow up report should be very interesting to both sides but has attracted comparatively little attention.

. . . says Menon, a physicist and staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division. “Most of the change in snow and ice cover — about 90 percent — is from aerosols. Black carbon alone contributes at least 30 percent of this sum.”

Aerosols are “dust from Asian deserts, salts that swell up moisture, particles from incomplete burning of organic material from forest and cooking fires, and all manner of nasties emitted by automobile tailpipes, factory smokestacks and power plants” according to AP.

You can see why both sides want to ignore this interesting analysis. It shows greenhouse gasses as a minor issue, so it is anathema to the climatistas . . .

. . . but it also shows a man made impact, primarily caused by coal burning power plants and the use of inefficient fires for warmth and cooking in much of the China / India / Pakistan area. Thus it makes an argument for the importance of cheap clean energy development. This is not exactly a cause celebre for those arguing that green house gasses generate more political hot air than actual temperature increases.

The plot thickens when one considers that economic growth could replace a lot of the inefficient fires with, for instance, electrical appliances but that those electrical appliances would probably be powered by new coal fired plants.

As my buddies at the Breakthrough Institute have pointed out, coal is only dirty compared to what has come after it, not compared to the wood burning it replaced.

Long time followers will note that this is not the first time that aerosols have shown up during greater analysis of a melting issue. I blogged about aerosols being pegged as a cause of the wildly hyped arctic ice melt we saw a few years ago.

Try asking the next twenty people you talk to what caused the big Arctic melt and I bet almost every answer is either greenhouse gas caused global warming or just natural cycles. See how many people say aerosols.

As with the Himalayan example, neither politically strident faction appears ready to wrap its head around the idea that world wide climate might be a complex stew of both natural and man made elements. After all, how would you fit that on a bumper sticker?

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Unpacking the Rhetorical Baggage on the Right to Vacation

by NeoLibertarian.Com on April 20, 2010

Free Speech and summer vacation in Greece: these are the fundamental rights every human should have. The EU has now declared that vacations are a right so it is nice to know that we can stop debating the issue and worrying about costs or anything because it’s like a right, you know?

This is yet another in an unending stream of positive rights that are being espoused. Some pretty noble, like the right to healthcare, and some pretty absurd on their face, like the right to a vacation, which may be the silliest one seriously proposed, at least so far . . .

There are three keys to understanding what is really going on with any pronouncement like this. The first is to recognize that positive rights are being falsely equated with negative rights. The second is to recognize this as a strategy for expanding and solidifying the power and control of the political class that proposes it. The third is to recognize the synergy between disguising desirable benefits as rights and Alinsky style politics.

Positive and Negative Rights

The classic negative right is free speech. It is negative in the sense that it is the right not to have your speech interfered with. One key characteristic of negative rights is that the do not confer any obligations on others. Giving one person free speech has no cost, giving more people free speech has no cost, your free speech is not diminished when other people get free speech, and a theoretical dirt poor society could have free speech for all its members. Thus free speech can be an inalienable right because it is not constrained by economics.

The economics part is key. All ‘rights’ discussions in the US invoke the US Bill of Rights, whether directly or not, and the concept of inalienable rights that are due all citizens and can not, for instance, be separated from the individual because of poverty at the individual or societal level. Note that all the rights in the US Bill of Rights could easily be given to all of their citizens by even the poorest of countries (I’m looking at you North Korea and Zimbabwe).

Any positive right, on the other hand, is a right to something and therefore a right to take that by force if necessary even if this conflicts with the other rights or even the same right for other people. So let’s look at the right of a vacation. Giving this right to even one person has a cost, giving it to ten people costs ten times as much as giving it to one person and this right simply cannot be given by our theoretical dirt poor society because it takes money. Thus it is clearly an ‘alienable’ right, one which not only can be taken away by societal poverty but which must be taken away by societal poverty.

Also consider a two man society with one poor man and one rich man. For the poor man to have this right, he must take money from the rich man, but if the rich man has less money his own vacation plans may be diminished.

This extreme example seems comical, but think about how ‘the right to health care’ led to the tax on Cadillac health care plans: here we see how some people’s right to healthcare can only be provided for by directly decreasing other people’s access to healthcare. Then there’s the issues of property rights: how much property rights do people lose when each added positive right means they must sacrifice more property to pay for it? I could go on about the pursuit of happiness but you get the idea.

So we see that negative and positive rights are fundamentally different, though both are certainly desirable. The failure to distinguish between the two types of rights is deliberate on the left: by invoking the idea of Rights enshrined by negative rights that are fundamental and inalienable they put a false flag of importance and inalienability on positive rights.

How This Expands and Solidifies The Power of Politicians

What is this right to a vacation really? It is just a program to tax the middle and upper classes so that the lower classes can get free vacation money. This is designed to buy the votes of the lower class now (free vacation!) and keep them forever (it doesn’t matter how bad these guys are, we can’t vote for the other guys or we will lose our villa time in Tuscany!). Years of experience and loss aversion theory have shown us, people will fight much harder, and sacrifice general well being, much more to save something they already have than to get the same thing in the first place. Once free vacations are in place, good luck getting rid of them.

. . . but wait, why don’t the people who are going to pay for this fight it?

And this is where Alinsky comes in. What kind of bastard fights against giving people their rights? Evil people on the side of the devil do. Who fights to give people their rights? Wonderful people on the side of the angels do. By avoiding the truth (we will tax the middle and upper classes to give the lower classes something for free) and stating the myth (we are fighting for the people’s rights) the left proposing the positive right gains the rhetorical upper hand.

“One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.”
- Saul Alinsky

The goal is to use the respectibility and desireability of hard fought negative rights, like free speech, to cover the obvious power and money grabs inherent in positive rights. It is much harder to argue against a right than a privilege, hence the left reframes privilege’s that can be granted by a wealthy society as rights that must be provided by all societies.

So this means free vacations are obviously wrong?

Nope. There is nothing wrong with a wealthy society deciding to tax itself to give lower income people free vacations, though free market types like me will argue the poor would be much better off with the cash and should be allowed to make their own decisions on whether to spend it on vacations. Again, vacations is the silly example we are talking about, but as I have alluded to, these same issues come up with other, more important positive rights as well.

I regard the right to a vacation as laughable and cannot even entertain the idea that it is anything other than a money and power grab with some rights lipstick on a pork barrel pig. Other positive rights, however, ran a gamut from at least not laughable (the right to internet access) to major societal issues (the right to healthcare).

Wealthy societies have to make complex decisions about the ideas behind positive rights on important issues like affordable housing and healthcare, but they need to do it realistically and with an honest discussion of what is going on. These are tax and spend decisions, not rights, and need to framed, justified, and debated as such.

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San Francisco Tea Party

by NeoLibertarian.Com on April 15, 2010

Having heard all the Tea Party frenzy and, frankly, seeing them as a possible target market, I decided to drop by their big protest in San Francisco’s Union Square. Here’s a few impressions:

Mostly White but Not All White

The tea party was mostly white, but then again almost everything in San Francisco is. It was, however, conspicuously not all white.

Not All White (1 of 2)

Not all white (2 of 2)

Kind of a Happy, Friendly Protest

In some ways it felt like wandering into a Christian BBQ or something. People were very polite, very friendly . . . everyone seemed glad to see everyone else. The contrast between the open, happy crowd and some of the “we’re not going to take it” rhetoric was pretty jarring. I’m still not quite sure what to make of that. More on it later.

Looks Like A Christian BBQ


When Old White People Protest, They Have To Sit Down

Reaganista

The Dreaded Infiltrating Counter-Protesters

After all the web hyperbole about infiltrating the tea parties and the constant drumbeat of media hysteria about the tea parties in general, the counter-protest was even more underwhelming than the tea party. Here’s a couple of counter-protesters.

Same Counter Protesters, Different Spot

They held up their signs but weren’t rude or abusive. One girl, who seemed to think that politics consisted of using the F word as many times as possible to people who didn’t agree with her, was rude but left early and was gone well before I took this picture.

It was pretty much them and an old Chinese guy with a sign that said he was for taxes but against Big Agriculture, Big Banks, and a list of other ‘Big’ stuff. Evidently he was unaware that the taxes he likes so much financed and/or bailed out pretty much everything he was against.

Couple Interesting Bits of Political Theatre

A libertarian candidate for city council went up and spoke. He started off with some interesting points about the Tea Party not being a conservative movement or Republican movement but rather a liberty movement.

Then he emphasized the constitution, which went over well initially, actually continued to go over OK when he talked about how the War On Drugs was a constitutional nightmare, but then got fierce pushback when he pushed for open borders. He quickly moved on to an anti-tax finish.

There was also a quick speech by one of the Republicans seeking to run against Nancy Pelosi, John Dennis. He scored big points with me by emphasizing that the Tea Party was not a “party of no” but rather a “party of yes. Yes to the constitution, yes to personal liberty . . . ” and so forth.

This is the kind of simple, but powerful vision statement that the Republican Party, with all its consultants and experience and lesbian strip club visits, could not seem to come up with so it is left to some quixotic local guy to finally advance a positive message.

I don’t know how good he is overall, but it was fun to actually see an articulate Republican candidate for a change. I’ll have to keep an eye on him.

Call the Whaaaaaambulance

There was also the big ceremonial moment where everybody put tape over their mouths to protest being ’silenced.’

Call the Whaaaaaambulance

I’m pretty sympathetic to the Tea Party movement, but this is just whining. Conservatives are losing because we can’t articulate our ideas and because we tolerate the idiot RINOs who led us into disaster and any kind of victim mentality just keeps us from dealing with that.

Bonus: during the taped mouth interval when of course no one could speak, they played Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence over the PA.

The Rachel Maddow Rule In Full Effect

Rachel Maddow observed that as “as the time a liberal candidate is believed to be winning an election or argument increases, the probability that they will be labeled communist or socialist approaches one.”

Please conservatives, repeat after me: “If the government does not own the means of production, then it’s not socialism. It may be stupid and wrong, but it’s not socialism.”

Political Science was not a strongpoint

Sorry, but I’m a stickler for correct political labeling and as I have gone on (and on, and on) about before, however misguided Obama may be, he is not a socialist.

Cool, Hunh, and WTF

The Tea Party Lady who seemed to be running things from the stage was interesting to say the least.

Best line when describing the Obama administration: “This is not limited government, this is limiting government.”

“Hunh?” line: One of the themes of the day was “Are you better off?” echoing the old Reagan line. She was building up momentum about were you better off, was your company better off (or something) and then she went to, I kid you not, “Are your cats and dogs better off?” Hunh?

In the WTF moment, she was on a roll in a speech and, perhaps inadvertently, but nevertheless clearly said something about getting your bullets for the second American revolution. Yes she defintitely said “bullets” and “revolution” in the same sentence. Not metaphorical bullets of righteous speech, bullet bullets.

This was pretty alarming on a couple levels. One level is, Holy Crap! Armed Revolution!?!? I’m about as pro-second amendment as you get and I’m sympathetic to the Tea Party movement but this was a really frightening thing to hear for me.

There didn’t seem to be any real hate behind it, nor was there any of the general and racial hating that Keith Olberman imagines but that she said this and didn’t try to walk it back was literally frightening.

The second level was, of course, what a stupid thing to say out loud even if you are thinking it. It is tough to imagine a better sound bite for the people out to smear you.

So Where Is This All Going?

I don’t know and I don’t think they do either. It is a grass roots movement with crude home made signs and amateur organizers that is a striking contrast to the semi-professional left wing “activists” and cause de jour protesters that call San Francisco home.

What’s important, I think is the genuine concern for the constitution and for individual liberty that has been missing from the Republicans since Reagan and which has been lost from most mainstream politics.

Two things are a little worrisome. One is that the general deterioration in conservative thinking that the RINOs have spearheaded for years has left conservatives in general, and the Tea Party in particular, with little ability to define and articulate goals, policies, and even a coherent vision of the ‘current state’ of American politics.

People seem to know things are wrong and getting worse and to their great credit they are getting up and doing something about it that is more public and powerful than writing just another angry blog (ahem) but the clarity of language that can help them debate both amongst themselves and with their opponents is missing.

The other is the occasional foray into victim-hood by the Tea Party. Conservatives have been railing against the left playing victim cards for years, and rightfully so. The Tea Party playing the same card is just as annoying and just as wrong. HTFU Tea Party!

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Are These People Too Media Savvy To Be Conservatives?

by NeoLibertarian.Com on March 4, 2010

Doing it right: the Dallas Tea Party answers Keith Olbermann’s charges of racism with reason, civility, media savvy and snark.

No yelling, no getting upset, no name calling: the Dallas Tea Party is too smart too play the Alinsky game. Are they going to win over Keith Olbermann with this? No, of course not, but that’s not the point. The point is that moderates and independents see a positive depiction of the Tea Party addressing Keith’s accusations with calm and a sense of humor.

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The Alinsky Fox In The Media Henhouse

October 22, 2009

Obama’s assault on Fox news is the ruthless use of Alinsky tactics, not just a think skinned response to criticism.

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Health Care Transmogrification Will Prevail

October 21, 2009

The Republicans dropped the Health Care reform ball under Bush so now they are just trying to make Obama fumble. They are not smart, they are not conservative: they are the Republicans.

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They Say They Want A Revolution, Well You Know . . .

October 19, 2009

Given the choice between revolution and hard work, they will take revolution.

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The Nobel Scapegoat

October 9, 2009

I don’t know what the Nobel Prize committee was thinking and frankly I don’t care what they are thinking anymore. Let’s talk about free market health care reforms.

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Capitalism, A Love Story. Michael Moore, Not So Much

September 24, 2009

Capitalism has made Michael Moore rich and there’s more money for him to make, and keep for himself, by attacking capitalism and greed in his new movie.

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