Lawrence Myers explains the dynamic that makes people become grievance-afflicted members of the crowds demonstrating against the financial industry.

Unhappy people become Liberals. People seek out those that are similar. Birds of a feather flock together. An unhappy person looks around and sees two groups: happy people, and unhappy people. Rather than take a page out of the former group, enter the herd and ask for (and likely receive) help and guidance on how to become happy, the person is more likely to choose the path of least resistance — of instant acceptance. “Come to Mumsy, darling, you’re one of us.” And once in the herd, it becomes very, very difficult to leave it.

The Liberal, of course, will deny this pathology. No, they say, they are only trying to make things fair. Liberals are consumed with fixing the world. By eliminating what is unfair, by eliminating the evil banks and the greedy corporations, all the little people will receive what is rightfully theirs! (Subconsciously, then, nobody will be more successful than they are.) So twisted with hate, and so convinced of their own inefficacy, they cannot even rely on themselves to overthrow The Other. They hand over their own power to a third party — the government — to do their dirty work in the form of the confiscatory process of increased taxation and regulation.

Liberals, however, have got it turned around. They seek to heal the world before healing themselves first. They see this as somehow noble, great sacrifice. Well, it’s easy to make a sacrifice when you regard yourself as valueless. Beyond this, however, every major religion, and the mythology across almost every culture, instructs man to take care of himself first, and then attempt to heal the world.

Should you be attending? Quick diagnostic chart.

Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times:

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people. ...

When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever.

It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.

What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.

Proving, once and for all, that our political opponents are not rational adults.

What we are dealing with is children, Walter-Mitty-role-playing in a fantasy filled with stereotyped images of mustache-twirling villains foreclosing Little Nell’s mortgage and sturdy workers and peasants protesting for land and bread.

What do you do with a Nobel Prize winner in Economics who thinks the American financial industry is “a destructive force?” I’d suggest calling the little men in the white coats to throw a net over the poor zany and carry him away for an extended rest period in the laughing academy.

How can you debate with insanity?

The haute bourgeois American left is so thoroughly invested in imaginary archetypes of injustice and oppression, of class struggle and revolutionary glory, that it looks at ordinary life, at people going to work in offices and doing conventional lawful business, and sees some kind of diabolical conspiratorial wrong-doing going on.

Its members look at their balding, pot-bellied establishment selves, sitting in expensive chairs in offices in some of the best real estate in the land, and they see youthful muscular workers and revolutionists getting ready to storm the Winter Palace.

These people are completely demented.

One fellow gets a degree in finance, writes some papers that make a splash, gets tenure, conducts some seminars, wins some prizes, and writes lots of angry editorials.

Another chap also gets a degree in finance, goes to work for a bank, writes the analyses used in some important deals, rises higher in management, receives some hefty bonuses, and isn’t angry with anybody.

So, the first guy is a righteous fighter for causes greater than himself, and the second guy is a fiend in human form who has climbed to the top over the corpses of the poor? What a crock!

I don’t take a lot of interest in the academic field of Economics. I majored at school in Philosophy. But I gather that, at some point in the past, Mr. Krugman did some worthwhile writing, offering useful explanations for the efficacy and service to humanity of trade and economies of scale. When you read him today, you seriously wonder if somebody has not dropped this poor man on his head.

But Paul Krugman is not alone. My college class is filled with similar upper middle class professionals, well-educated, affluent, and successful, who nonetheless have their heads full of bizarre prejudices against banks, corporations, “the rich” (artfully defined, of course, so as to exclude themselves) and with fantasy images of oppression, class warfare, and political struggle.

All I can say is, our educational system, which filled these whackos’ heads with all this nonsense, has a great deal to answer for.

I sometimes like to fantasize to myself what things would have been like if our colleges and universities and elite culture had been otherwise hijacked, not by the radical left performing its Gramscian long march through the institutions, but by nerds obsessed with Marvel comic books. Paul Krugman, for instance, would be editorializing from the perspective of Ironman or the Silver Surfer, not that of Piotr Kropotkin, hero of the workers’ revolution.

Older and more respectable (i.e. employed) lefties weren’t occupying Wall Street. Instead, they were smiling happily and fantasizing about the Revolution, or at least another great big wave of punitive regulation and taxation, as the young, the dumb, and the Bohemian took to the streets in Lower Manhattan to protest against Wall Street and the bankers.

Somebody gave those protesters the wrong address.

If they want to wave signs and shout slogans at the people really responsible for our economic problems, they ought to be protesting in front of the offices of their own educators, the same people who overcharged them and left them quite commonly without either wisdom or marketable skills, but buried in student loans.

Those protestors are typically college graduates, and there they are on the streets, bearing allegiance to political sentiments and theories alien to their own country’s fundamental values and traditions. They are overloaded with fashionable poses and slogans, but are perfectly innocent of serious political philosophy. They don’t like their own country’s political and economic system, institutions, and history, but they might think very differently if they had ever actually been informed accurately what any of those things are.

If those protestors knew enough of history and economics to associate the material prosperity and technological progress that they are accustomed to with the free economic system that produced them, if they even had been given enough of an adult understanding of the world that they could understand that business corporations, like Wall Street banks, are not, and cannot possibly be, charities, they would not be protesting where they are.

Wall Street did not cause the recession. Government caused the recession (by following the same left-wing philosophy that those protestors and the people who educated them embrace) by inadvertently grossly inflating home real estate prices, as the product of efforts to make long-term mortgage financing ever more widely and easily available. Government has worsened, and prolonged the recession, by dramatically meddling in the economy in the area of health care, by adding to the regulatory burden, and by generally increasing uncertainty. All of the damage was done on the basis of precisely the same ideas and philosophy that those demonstrators are trying to advance.

If all those kids, drop outs, poets, and Bohemians had the benefit of a decent education; if they actually understood history, economics, and political philosophy; if they understood how the world actually works and what banks do; none of them would be where they are doing what they are doing.

Dan Greenfield replies decisively to Elizabeth Warren’s “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.” argument.

“You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did,” Warren says.

This is the stationary bandit theory of government. The problem with it is that it really means you’re paying for government marauding bands who can come and seize everything in your factory. As the CEO of Gibson Guitars found out. ...

Warren’s argument is that no one got rich on their own. True. By her definition, also no one makes breakfast on their own. Or does anything at all. No one writes on their own either, someone had to make the pencil or the typewriter or the computer. Why shouldn’t that collective “we” then have a say in what you write?

Here the sleight of hand assumes that the greater society is equivalent to the state, and that any activity makes the individual obligated to pay back the collective whole somehow embodied by the state.

There are two holes in this. It assumes that the individual is somehow getting a free ride at the expense of the other people in the equation. That whatever benefit they receive from participating in the arrangement is insufficient and exploitative. There’s an obvious whiff of Marx to this, but not much common sense.

And the final hole is that the state stands in place of the society, that it is the legal recipient of the net benefits due to society and can claim them. That when you’re expected to pay it forward to the next kid, that doesn’t mean hiring a kid and giving him a leg up, it means paying higher taxes.

This proposition is at the heart of the broken case against private property. If there is indeed a greater claim on private property by the society, why is an oligarchy of Harvard lawyers and government appointees the one to lay claim to it?

This precise form of argument is made by my liberal classmates all the time: “You received Shakespeare, modern medicine, and all sorts of other social benefits, so you owe the government whatever amount of taxes the left might care to demand.”

Greenfield identifies precisely the false logic. The federal government did not create human culture and society, write Shakespeare’s plays, or develop modern medicine. The state-worshipping left’s continual attempt to place government in the position of claiming ownership of human culture and every form of social interaction and cooperation is a grand-scale form of fraud.

Hat tip to the Barrister.

Some of us always thought that the left’s political philosophy inevitably arrived at cannibalism.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Cincinnati.com:

House Speaker John Boehner made it clear in a speech to small business owners at the University of Cincinnati Monday that he is not in sync with the president’s plan to raise the tax rates of the wealthiest Americans.

“Giving the federal government more money would be like giving a cocaine addict more cocaine,’’ the West Chester Republican told about 100 members of the Goering Center for Family and Private Business at UC’s Alumni Center.

Obama knew perfectly well that the Republican-controlled House would never go along with an any-prospects-of-recovery-killing plan to raise taxes on the only sector of society capable of new investment and new job creation.

What Obama was doing was affirming his commitment to left-wing orthodoxy by embracing class warfare as an attempt to appeal to voters’ worst impulses.
——————————————
Hugh Hewitt named the game:

The president unleashes his inner Alinksy this morning with the release of his proposal for massive tax hikes, mostly on high income earners, accounting tricks and childish rhetoric. It is clear he has decided to run hard left in 2012, with all the tiresome cliches that involves.

The plan is a sham of course, an election year set-up just like the absurd demand in the Joint Session of Congress for Stimulus 2.0. This new, new plan isn’t dead upon arrival; it was dead before sending. And everyone knows it. Politico’s Mike Allen details the massive spin put on the highly partisan plan last night by the president’s tap-dancing and desperate team, but no one is fooled. Everything the president ever said about “working across the aisle” is trashed. The Chicago way is in the saddle. It’s the only way he and his advisors know.

The very good news is that the country knows, even if the MSM doesn’t.

From CBS News: “(CBS/AP) WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders say they are rejecting President Barack Obama’s jobs proposals to rebuild schools and blighted neighborhoods, and help keep state and local employees on the job.”

Oh, come on, CBS, you can do better:

(CBS/AP) WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders say they are rejecting President Barack Obama’s jobs proposals to rebuild schools and blighted neighborhoods, and help keep state and local employees on the job, and cure cancer and help the lame walk again, and find good homes for puppy dogs and kitty cats, and take a sunrise and sprinkle it with dew and cover it with chocolate and a miracle or two, and teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, and grow apple trees and honey bees and snow white turtledoves, and slow the rise of the oceans, and begin to heal our planet.

Anything I left out?

I just finished reading Dick Cheney’s In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir

Dick Cheney is clearly a better memoirist than his one-time boss and both predecessor and successor at the Defense Department Donald Rumsfeld. I still have not finished Rumsfeld’s Known and Unknown which came out last February. I think that Cheney seems somehow more forthcoming, direct, and personally present in his recounting of his life and career in government service.

Most people, I’m sure, have seen reviews elsewhere noting that Dick Cheney did make a point of settling certain scores, noting the disloyalty of Colin Powell and his associates at the State Department toward the president and toward administration policy when the going got tough in Iraq, and highlighting the failure of Powell and his subordinate Richard Armitage to deflect a barrage of accusations of having outed Valerie Plame directed at innocent members of the administration which would have avoided a large-scale investigation and the appointment of a special prosecutor, and ultimately the conviction on a secondary-level charge of Dick Cheney’s own chief of staff, Scooter Libby,when Powell knew perfectly well that Armitage himself was the source of the leak. Cheney describes Powell’s silence in response to press inquiries after a 2003 cabinet meeting with not actually openly phrased, but nonetheless withering, contempt.

He is perhaps even harsher in describing at length Condolezza Rice’s dishonest and ill-advised efforts to obtain some chimerical version of a non-proliferation deal with North Korea, and her discreditably enthusiastic willingness to participate in sham agreements with that nefarious regime at the expense of the safety of the United States and other nations.

Beyond those best known portions of the Cheney memoir, I found a few other interesting details.

On 9/11, Dick Cheney found himself being forcibly propelled out of his office by the Secret Service, which led him hastily to the safer location of the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), deep beneath the White House. Dick Cheney provides an inadvertent testimony to the general competence with the government spends its billions and trillions when he describes the subsequent scene.

While we were managing things from the PEOC, another meeting was under way in the White House Situation Room. The PEOC staff attempted to set up a videoconference to connect the two rooms, and we managed to get images of the Situation Room meeting up on one of our screens, but we couldn’t get any audio of the meeting. We were getting better real-time information from the news reports on TV, but because of a technical glitch, I couldn’t hear those reports when the video of the Sit Room meeting was on display. I told Eric [Feldman, Cheney’s deputy national security advisor] to get on the phone and try to listen to the Sit Room meeting, but after a few minutes he described the audio quality as ‘worse than lisening to Alvin and the Chipmunks at the bottom of a swimming pool.’ I told him to hang up. If something important was happening upstairs, they could send someone down or call us direct.

Visions of the gazillions of dollars spent on custom-built high tech communications equipment and infrastructure for the Presidential Emergency Operations Center and the White House Situation Room swam before my eyes. Clearly, they could have just gone out to Radio Shack and done better.

In describing his early career as congressman from Wyoming and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, Dick Cheney serves up one very provocative little nugget.

In May 1987 I received a call from legendary CIA counterintelligence director James Jesus Angleton. He said that he had something of vital importance to tell me and that it could be conveyed only in person. ...

I called Henry Hyde, the Intel Committee’s ranking Republican and invited him to sit in on the meeting. A few days later, before our scheduled meeting, Jim Angleton died. I never learned what it was he wanted to tell me.

There is the plot of a great spy thriller right there in the story of the unconveyed Angleton secret.

Malcolm Muggeridge, 1903-1990

Malcolm Muggeridge recalls, in the first volume of his autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time: The Green Stick:

On one of my early birthdays I was given a toy printing-set with whose large rubber letters I was able to print off my first composition. It was a story of a train going along very fast and, to the satisfaction of the passengers, racing through the small stations along the track without stopping. Their satisfaction, however, turned to dismay, and then to panic fury, as it dawned on them that it was not going to stop at their stations either when it came to them. They raged and shouted and shook their fists, but all to no avail. The train went roaring on. At the time I had no notion what, if anything, the story signified. It just came into my mind, and the rubber letters dropped into place of themselves. Yet, as I came to see, and see now more clearly than ever, it is the story I have been writing ever since; the story
of our time. The imagination, at however rudimentary a level, reaches into the future. So its works have a prophetic quality. A Dostoevsky foresees just what a revolution will mean in Russia – in a sense, foresees the Soviet regime and Stalin; whereas a historian like Miliukov and his liberal-intellectual friends envisage the coming to pass of an amiable parliamentary democracy. Similarly, a Blake or a Herman Melville sees clearly through the imagination the dread consequences industrial¬ism and technology must have for mankind, whereas, as envisaged in the mind of a Herbert Spencer or an H. G. Wells, they can bring only expanding wealth and lasting well-being. It was not until much later that I came to identify the passengers in my train as Lord Beveridge, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Kingsley Martin, Eleanor Roosevelt, and any number of progressive prelates, mahatmas, millionaires, regius professors and other such eminent persons.

Via Theo.

Norman Podhoretz was moved to respond to a current pattern of left-wing complaint alleging that Barack Obama is too conciliatory to conservatives and is too moderate in his own views.

[W]e villainous conservatives do not see Mr. Obama as conciliatory or as “a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election.” On the contrary, we see him as a president who knows all too well what he believes. Furthermore, what Mr. Westen regards as an opportunistic appeal to the center we interpret as a tactic calculated to obfuscate his unshakable strategic objective, which is to turn this country into a European-style social democracy while diminishing the leading role it has played in the world since the end of World War II. The Democrats have persistently denied that these are Mr. Obama’s goals, but they have only been able to do so by ignoring or dismissing what Mr. Obama himself, in a rare moment of candor, promised at the tail end of his run for the presidency: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

This statement, coming on top of his association with radicals like Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Khalidi, definitively revealed to all who were not wilfully blinding themselves that Mr. Obama was a genuine product of the political culture that had its birth among a marginal group of leftists in the early 1960s and that by the end of the decade had spread metastatically to the universities, the mainstream media, the mainline churches, and the entertainment industry. Like their communist ancestors of the 1930s, the leftist radicals of the ‘60s were convinced that the United States was so rotten that only a revolution could save it.

But whereas the communists had in their delusional vision of the Soviet Union a model of the kind of society that would replace the one they were bent on destroying, the new leftists only knew what they were against: America, or Amerika as they spelled it to suggest its kinship to Nazi Germany. Thanks, however, to the unmasking of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian nightmare, they did not know what they were for. Yet once they had pulled off the incredible feat of taking over the Democratic Party behind the presidential candidacy of George McGovern in 1972, they dropped the vain hope of a revolution, and in the social-democratic system most fully developed in Sweden they found an alternative to American capitalism that had a realistic possibility of being achieved through gradual political reform.

Despite Mr. McGovern’s defeat by Richard Nixon in a landslide, the leftists remained a powerful force within the Democratic Party, but for the next three decades the electoral exigencies within which they had chosen to operate prevented them from getting their own man nominated. Thus, not one of the six Democratic presidential candidates who followed Mr. McGovern came out of the party’s left wing, and when Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton (the only two of the six who won) tried each in his own way to govern in its spirit, their policies were rejected by the American immune system. It was only with the advent of Barack Obama that the leftists at long last succeeded in nominating one of their own.

To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberaldom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass. And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also articulate and elegant and (as he himself had said) “non-threatening,” all of which gave him a fighting chance to become the first black president and thereby to lay the curse of racism to rest?

And so it came about that a faithful scion of the political culture of the ‘60s left is now sitting in the White House and doing everything in his power to effect the fundamental transformation of America to which that culture was dedicated and to which he has pledged his own personal allegiance.

I disagree with those of my fellow conservatives who maintain that Mr. Obama is indifferent to “the best interests of the United States” (Thomas Sowell) and is “purposely” out to harm America (Rush Limbaugh). In my opinion, he imagines that he is helping America to repent of its many sins and to become a different and better country.

But I emphatically agree with Messrs. Limbaugh and Sowell about this president’s attitude toward America as it exists and as the Founding Fathers intended it. That is why my own answer to the question, “What Happened to Obama?” is that nothing happened to him. He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president, and it is this rather than inexperience or incompetence or weakness or stupidity that accounts for the richly deserved failure both at home and abroad of the policies stemming from that reprehensible cast of mind.

Stephen F. Hayes says Rick Perry won last night’s Republican presidential debate in Iowa without even showing up.

They’re happy tonight in Austin.

It’s one of the most predictable and tiresome of the many presidential debate clichés: The candidate who didn’t participate won because the others were so weak. And yet that was the case in the Republican presidential debate here Thursday night. A Republican presidential field often described as weak seemed to confirm that conventional wisdom in a debate that featured many tough questions and many more weak answers. Rick Perry, who will announce his bid for the presidency on Saturday.

Latest example: There are signs when you enter Texas warning the bears not to feed Rick Perry.

The American left is actually kind of lucky that Barack Obama has not been equally ideologically consistent and reliable on foreign policy… (link)

Paul Krugman is bummed.

Conan the Barbarian opined that it was “to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.”

Republicans have not really crushed the democrats, and we may not exactly be seeing them driven before us, but they are certainly currently in retreat and disarray, and we do get to listen to the lamentations of their Krugman.

A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong.

For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status. ...

[T]he reported terms of the deal… amount to an abject surrender on the part of the president. First, there will be big spending cuts, with no increase in revenue. Then a panel will make recommendations for further deficit reduction — and if these recommendations aren’t accepted, there will be more spending cuts.

Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.

It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.

In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question.

Heh!

Michael Walsh explains the president’s game plan in the current negotiations over debt increases. The democrats are simply trying to blame Republicans for risking default, and doing everything possible to get a debt ceiling increase running past next year’s election in order to try to minimize their own vulerabilities on the issues of excessive spending and the deficit.

I liked his metaphorical comparison to the double dealing and intrigue in the Coen Brothers’ gangster movie Miller’s Crossing (1990). I guess the contrived and systematic insincerity must make Obama Bernie Birnbaum.

By now, the Obama “leadership” style should be blindingly apparent: Do nothing, lie in wait, and then counter-attack. Never present a plan if you can possibly help it, but deal exclusively in bromides and platitudes as you stake out the moral “high ground” and get ready to ambush the other guy. ...

Meanwhile, have your media allies, talking parrots, and court lickspittles prepare the ground with standard-issue talking points — “The Tea Party Republicans are terrorists,” for example. ...

Adamantly refuse to be pinned down about the specifics of anything, and have your platoon of Baghdad Bobs continue to insist (as good liberals always do) that up is down, black is white, and wishes are really horses, if not actual unicorns.

So the later Boehner walks into the trap, the quicker Harry Reid trumps him, and the sooner Obama can can declare for the umpteenth time that the time for talk is over, emerge as a hero — and get the debt-ceiling debate safely past the shoals of the next election, which is all he really cares about. Because, in case you hadn’t noticed, running for office is the only thing the Punahou Kid knows how to do.

Lack of money may not be the only reason they’re doomed.

Richard Miniter, in Forbes, notes that we have no choice, we are going to have to stop increasing the beast’s rations. But that is a real problem for democrats, whose entire raison d’etre is the delivery of more federal money in return for support.

The Democratic Party, as we have known it for the past 70 years, is now in its last days.

Yes, the House Republicans may raise the debt ceiling for a mix of spending cuts and revenue raisers. Yes, Barack Obama may win the 2012 presidential contest. Yes, bureaucrats and judges will continue to impose new and costly regulations on the economy.

But it doesn’t matter. The long-term trends are almost all bad news for the left wing of the party.

This week’s fight over raising the federal debt limit exposes a key weakness in the warfare-welfare state that has bestowed power onto the Democratic Party: Without an ever-growing share of the economy, it dies. Every vital element of the Democrats’ coalition — unions, government workers, government contractors, “entitlement” consumers — requires constant increases in payments, grants and consulting contracts. Without those payments, they don’t sign checks to re-elect Democrats.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Scott Drum.