We're gonna need a bigger pie!

The new world order that has taken over in Washington has changed the game.

America has classically been about win-win. I get my 10 acres and a mule and so do you. Plenty of land and prosperity was mine (and yours) for the taking. Just apply effort and sacrifice and your children will do better than you. The pie just keeps getting bigger and bigger. As all boats rise in high tide, some measure of prosperity floats even the least productive and ambitious, as those who succeed give charity and a hand up out of a feeling of social connectivity and spirituality. These social goods are often served with a side dish of sympathy and encouragement and also with empathy when bad things have clearly happened to a good person.

In hard times, the tide went out and it seemed that charity and the hand up weren't enough for the poorest of us. The small pie of the economy had to be cut up by Washington, out of necessity, for the many good people who had fallen into hard times.

As the times improved, however, the concept of a redistributing the pie began to take hold. Why should those who earn bigger pieces get to keep them, to use them as they see fit? Aren't we all one nation, one society, one family at the dinner table? The social welfare programs just kept on coming, as government kept trying to find new ways to redistribute wealth. Income could be redistributed by taxation as could overall wealth by estate/death taxes. Land could be redistributed by eminent domain. More recently, we got new redistributions (recovery acts, bank and private enterprise "bailouts") and a new health plan.

In spite of the above, the American economy just kept growing as those people with ideas and drive kept raising the tide.

Now our leaders want to make the pie smaller. Regulations, fines, lawsuits. Taxes that prevent growth. Cap and trade, bans on drilling, and other barriers to economic growth will begin to shrink the pie in a land made fat and lazy with high expectations. People were told they deserved a house even if they couldn't afford it. When the chickens came home to roost, there was not enough money to redistribute to keep everyone in their homes.

There can only be one happy ending: allow the pie to grow by reducing regulations, limiting liability and accepting the downside. This will raise the tide again.

The government appears to be determined to have a win-lose scenario but it actually is creating a lose-lose nation. By redistributing to the poor, it would seem that the poor are winning and the rich are losing, but in reality, as the rich have to deal with the shrinking pie, the poor will have less opportunity, and the tide will continue to fall.

A less happy ending, but still better than the lose-lose scenario currently underway in Washington would be to take smaller pieces from the producers of wealth and give less to those in need. This would create the prisoner's dilemma, with the producers having less than they could have if growth was not fettered by the government and with the entitled getting less than they could have if the government allowed the pie to grow. This would create less loss on both sides than our current direction.

In summary, the poor benefit more from a growing pie than from redistribution. As long as the rich have the opportunity to grow the pie faster than the government can redistribute their wealth, we will move forward as a nation. This basic check and balance was once controlled by the invisible hand of charity and true need, but is now under the heavy hand of the government with taxation and entitlement. Charity tends to fail in the short term, as needs can arise when charity is limited (small pie scenario, economic depression), entitlements fail in the long term, as unlimited ability to take from producers creates a culture of needy entitlement. We have choices: poverty for all with everyone grabbing pieces of a shrinking pie; population contraction with a smaller pie feeding less people reasonably well; or a bigger pie.

The Problems with Liberalism, Part 9

9. A liberal believes that those who abuse the system are exceptions and not the rule.

• This is quite curious. Command and control laws are required to control the dishonest greedy urges of the middle and upper classes to keep their money and the poor are honest. Money corrupts the rich and poverty ennobles the poor.
• Uncorrupted by the vices of money, higher education, and the intelligensia, the poor with their simple values are good people. We should all be so good as those on the public dole! How many people break laws, abuse the system from positions of wealth, fame and power? From Fatty Arbuckle to OJ, look at the mayhem from the famous!
• Here is another take on this from DocBrain. There are so many laws on the books in America that I believe that there is no one in America who has not broken (or severely bent) at least one law. We are a nation of laws and lawbreakers. The laws are too complex and those in power are hell-bent to keep adding and obfuscating. They even are quite open about voting for laws they have not read and do not understand!
• Data shows that the poor who are held down by the system, the man, are exceptions not the rule. So, those who remain in need are often those who have not found their way out. This is an abuse of the system, as much by those who devised and support the system as by those who partake of it. The system is not working. Focusing on those who abuse it (whether many as DocBrain believes or few as a liberal believes) is not the solution. The solution is to replace the system with one that cycles down as it creates opportunity and motivation and people escape the cycle of poverty (which is not ennobling in spite of what a liberal believes).

In summary, the issue is not whether a poor person is abusing the system but the system itself. The system is 50 years old, fat with pork, and has not achieved its goal of ridding our society of the poor. It has created an entitlement subculture that knows the laws far better than the lawmakers who voted for them. Time to get rid of the poor people by making them all at least middle class, not by giving them more, but by allowing them to deserve more through their assimilation into the American Dream. And the biggest surprise is that this could be done with much less government intervention and much less tax money.

The Problems with Liberalism, Part 8

8. A liberal believes that everyone deserves a chance.

• There was once a city-state in ancient Greece that believed that everyone deserved an equal chance to rule the city. They rotated that role among everyone. A true democracy. What happened? The city fell into ruin. My conclusion: everyone can't do everything.
• By everyone deserves a chance, do we mean that everyone deserves a chance to be equal to everyone else or that everyone deserves a chance to be exceptional, to be better than others?
• Everyone deserves as many chances as they want to take. The entire concept of chances is much more complicated than this simple homily. So many factors are involved, some known, others not yet fully conceptualized.
• I will take an example from medicine. Everyone deserves a chance to beat cancer. OK, what if you fail your first chance? Your second? Your third? You are now down to very expensive therapy. Does everyone still deserve that chance? What if the cancer was caused by poor life habits (ie smoking)? What if the person is a prisoner on death row? In Great Britain, everyone gets a chance, but no one gets all the chances.
• If you give a person a chance based upon a poor understanding of how to do it, you really haven't given the person a chance at all, even though you may feel good about having done something. The failure to understand, experiment, prototype and use best practices is the main failing of the Liberal mindset.
• Liberalism was once about science. Now it is a one trick pony, Big Government. Liberalism is now about building progessive Titanics out of fabulous ideas and slick backroom deals.

The Problems with Liberalism, Part 7

7. A liberal believes that letting the mentally ill wander the streets and sleep under a bush is a sick society.

• Why are the mentally ill wandering the streets? The old system, where the mentally ill were institutionalized for their own protection and safety was challenged by the left. Our current system allows only limited placement of those truly dangerous to themselves or others.
• The mentally ill have been given freedom by the courts. Some choose to live in group homes, with family or other options. Some choose to wander the streets.
• Thanks to this fine policy, the mentally ill are living the life of freedom but their freedom costs us all. They accost people on the streets, soil public and private facilities, and are often incapable of taking care of their health issues, leading to increased hospitalizations due to inablility to adhere to good health practices. One of DocBrain's homeless patients, a burly young man, just died a few weeks ago in status epilepticus, continuous seizures that could have been prevented had he agreed to letting family or friends help him.
• The sickness of society is due to the liberals who devised this fine policy of not prototyping it and/or thinking it through before implementing freedom for yet another group of "victims" of society.
• I am curious as to what solution a liberal would have that would restrict the freedom of a victim group. Since the mentally ill do not form a very grateful or reliable voting bloc, I am not surprised that liberals now oppose the freedom they imposed on these people.

In summary, some mentally ill wander the streets (ie, many of the homeless). How happy they are with their lifestyle? Many have options but choose to continue their homeless lifestyle. The solution, if one is needed, could be the typical liberal command and control, but that is what got them into this situation to begin with. The easy answer is the one that the liberals overturned. The harder one is to get the homeless mentally ill to choose a different option. And we haven't even addressed the homeless poor, victims of a society that uses government to decide who is worthy of entitlement rather than the good hearts and charity of the citizens.

The Problems with Liberalism, Part 6

6. A liberal believes that sometimes bad things happen to good people.

• This is a curious statement. DocBrain would say that bad things happen to everyone, good and bad.
• Sometimes the bad things are due to circumstances beyond a person's control. Other times, they are chickens coming home to roost.
• Sometimes a thing is only as it seems: bad to some and good to others, depending upon perspective, hopefulness/hopelessness, and positivity/negativity. I have seen people laid low by the most trivial and others rise to face the most dire. One need not accept a bad thing as being unfair or unremediable.
• Yet, it is true that bad things happen and at those times it is important to have others there to reach out with an open heart. Recent events in Haiti and elsewhere in the world have shown how generous Americans are. Generosity begins at home and the fear that Americans would not be generous to the truly needy and deserving within our borders is not documented with data.
• A safety net of good people donating what they have is more ennobling than a welfare system/state. It is good for people to feel responsible for their neighbors and for neighbors to pay it forward as good things begin to happen for them. A purpose to help trumps a tax to take.
• DocBrain still remembers the charity clinics and city hospitals that cared for the less fortunate. These were phased out as the theory was that the poor would be more likely to take care of themselves if not forced to present themselves for charity. If they felt entitled to care they would be more likely to seek care and adhere to therapy. A reasonable thought. However, when adherence to therapy and seeking of care was measured, it was no better under the entitlement program than under the charity program. And it cost more. So, the logical approach was to. . . of course, increase the entitlement programs and even make it illegal to provide free care to anyone eligible for the entitlement.

In summary, when bad things happen to good people, it is more reassuring to know that other good people are there to lend a hand than to rely on the beneficence of a government that takes forcibly in order to give grudgingly.

The Problems with Liberalism, Definitions

DocBrain has been asked to define Liberalism, not to use the definition of liberals, but to set up his own straw dog. OK, so here goes.

What exactly is liberalism? It is the pursuit of social change by law or rule. While liberalism was initially geared at individual freedom and limited government, it has evolved over time in America to big government that looks for stories that contain weak victims and powerful villains, and sides with the victims regardless of the practicality, truths or individual freedoms that are trampled. Most often, the victims are grouped together by a common characteristic, creating a more identifiable victim that you are either a member, a supporter or an opponent. The common phrase "if you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem" places all who are not actively onboard with the change as villains. These new liberal principles have led to the unnecessary loss of blood and treasure. Not only are the issues often contrived, but the solutions are not properly tested, leading to waste, failure and the need for even more intrusive big government intervention. The cycle repeats. The failure to understand key drivers such as the invisible hand, "black swans", innovation, the internal drivers of human behavior and other key drivers leads to failure on the grand scale that only large government can produce. As the government contaminates the private sector, we get private sector meltdowns that, as you can guess, leads to the liberal belief in the need for even more government. Liberalism focuses on process and not outcomes. When the outcomes are not as expected (as often occurs when outcome is not the measured parameter), more blood and treasure are tossed at the problem. The scientific liberal has become the political doctrinaire, doggedly following a failed social policy in principle without understanding that a fine sounding solution may run counter to reality. If perfection is the goal, then tweaking or spending more blood and treasure on a policy that has been imperfect will not lead to perfection. No matter how many corrections you add to Newtonian Physics it still is not going to explain all the subatomic particles.

Sit straw dog. Bad dog!

The Problems with Liberalism, Part 5

5. A liberal believes he owes other people a certain standard of dignity and decency.

• William J. Clinton is the personification of this lofty goal. He speaks well of individuals although he often criticizes actions. This is the way of the statesman (statesperson): communicating openly and effectively even with those who hold disagreeable positions. Most recent Presidents have had that ability, at least in public. But Clinton did it best. His approach towards his adversaries is worthy of emulation. One wonders, however, if swallowing all the anger to be so diplomatic had any bearing on his subsequent cardiovascular problems. At any rate, some things are worth the sacrifice.
• Would that statement #5 be true! How often over the years has the left been strident in it's criticism, not only of policies and positions, but of individuals whom they disagreed with! Whether it was CSNY's attack on "Southern Man" or "Bush lied" or mocking Dan Quayle or the latest liberal victim Sarah Palin. It is easy to show decency and dignity towards those you love, harder towards those you don't.
• By this standard, there are very few real liberals. The call-outs and put-downs by most liberals towards those with whom they disagree reminds DocBrain of the trash talking in the WWE.

In summary, a decent and dignified approach towards others is nearly always the best approach. This is actually a Conservative value, one that conveys good upbringing. That Liberals would aspire to this as well is encouraging. And as the saying goes, don't fight with a pig, you will both get dirty and only the pig will like it. Rather than raising your voice, raise the skill and support of your argument.

The Problems with Liberalism, Part 4

4. A liberal believes that being able to move up in the world is a basic human right.

• Actually, this is freedom or liberty. Who could not agree with this?
• As typical of propagandists, however, this is only half the story. A person should also be able to move down in the world. That is what life is all about. Making choices, some good, others bad. No person is too small to succeed nor too big to fail. It is the chutes and ladders that makes a society strong by responding to the invisible hand that moves people of ability and passion. The only problem is when the hand is the heavy one of government, lifting the undeserving or pulling down the able.
• DocBrain finds it interesting that the ability to move up and down freely was severely limited in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. And yet, liberals poured out vitriole against Bush and the war. Was he not helping people achieve a basic human right? Just as we want each child to reach her full potential as a human and the members of each race to reach their full potential, could this not also apply to an entire country deprived of the ability to move up in the world? In discussion with liberals, the premise of social stagnation was said to be neither necessary nor sufficient to justify a war, the sacrifice of blood and treasure.
• How does one define a core principle? Is it one worthy of sacrifice or just something nice to say? A purpose or a platitude? Something to be bragged about when you have it and shrugged off when your neighbor does not?

In summary, this is actually a worthy core value. DocBrain thinks liberals look at this as a platitude and as a way of defending the use of the heavy hand of government to move people according to an agenda rather than ability.

End of Part 4