Why Liberals Feel Entitled to Rule

Liberals feel entitled to rule. They are "on the right side of history." Liberals are driven by the "fierce urgency of now." This is the modern-day equivalent of the divine right of kings, without the divine participation. Liberals are absolutely certain that their government experts know how to take care of people better than people can take care of themselves. Liberals think this is so obvious that they can't believe anybody can have any doubts about it. So any opposition is preventing liberal government experts from providing people with superior services. These opponents must have self-serving, evil motives because it is so obvious to liberals that the government experts do a superior job. Liberals' faith in government's ability to solve any and every problem is fanatical in their voter base. Any evidence that government has failed just means that the government didn't spend enough money on the problem. Evidence of fraud, corruption or incompetence is discounted because liberals are metaphysically certain that the fraud, corruption and incompetence would be much worse in the private sector. Even though the same individuals work in the private sector and public sector, moving back and forth through the famous revolving door, the liberal equivalent of transubstantiation consecrates these individuals while they work for the government.

As you can see, liberals go almost immediately to ad hominem attacks because they can see no rational reason anyone would oppose them. They also believe government is the best solution, so obstacles like the law or the Constitution are unimportant compared to the "fierce urgency of now." If the law gets broken or the Constitution gets rewritten by a 5 to 4 "living Constitution" decision in the Supreme Court, it's OK because it puts us "on the right side of history." For liberals, the ends completely justify the means. 

Obamacare Death Spiral is Democrats' Plan

Obamacare passed with no Republican votes. Democrats made all of the false promises. "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your plan, you can keep your plan." There was no way either of those statements could be true under the law that the Democrats passed. Everybody except Nancy Pelosi knew it. She "had to pass it to see what's in it." Democrats made all of the enabling regulatory decisions, like the contraceptive mandate. Democrats own Obamacare.

Obamacare is in a death spiral right now. As rates go up, fewer, sicker, people sign up, then rates go up more. Obamacare was designed to be a huge government health subsidy program, but Democrats claimed that it wouldn't need subsidies. So Marco Rubio made them put it in writing. One of the funding bills says that there will be no insurance subsidies from the government. That's why all of the low ball rates have bankrupted the made-for-Obamacare coop insurance companies.

There is no way an individual insurance market can be sustainable without a prior condition exclusion. Everyone just waits until they are sick to sign up. The penalties for no insurance would have to be almost as high as the cost of the insurance to induce people to buy the insurance.

The program also didn't allow rate differences by age. This was designed to force younger and healthier people to subsidize older, sicker people. Unfortunately, the younger and healthier people are having trouble finding jobs in Obama's crummy economy, so they can't afford the over priced insurance.

The Democrats brag that they have a plan. The Democrats say the Republicans don't have a plan. The problem is that the Democrats' plan is a gigantic failure, so it's not a real, sustainable, alternative. The Republicans want to use free market mechanisms to lower the overall costs of healthcare in the economy. The Democrats say that's not a plan, because the government has no active role. Given how badly the government has messed up healthcare under the Democrats' Obamacare plan, do you really want the government to be more involved in any new plan?

Trump Has What It Takes To Succeed As President

Progressives say that a president needs intellectual curiosity, humility, character and the ability to lead.  Liberals say Obama has these qualities.  They go on to claim that Trump has none of these qualities, so according to them, Trump is unworthy and unqualified to be president.  I think Republican presidential candidates require different skills than Democrats to be successful.

Any Republican president has to be able to deal with an extremely hostile mainstream media. This ability is the main key to success for any Republican presidential nominee. The Republican primary electorate chose Trump over more qualified candidates because they knew that any Republican nominee would be slimed by the Pravda Press in its role as the public relations arm of the Democrat party. Trump's election victory demonstrated his ability to work around the Pravda Press and inform voters directly about the policies he wanted to implement. After the ruinous 2 terms of the Smartest President Ever, voters were willing to try something really outlandish to prevent a continuation of Barry the Brilliant's policies under Hillary the Inevitable. I was skeptical but desperate myself. So far, it's worked better than I expected.

As for liberals’ evaluation of Trump, I think their view uses polarized lenses. The current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue does not possess intellectual curiosity, humility, character or the ability to lead. The President has never wavered from pure socialist ideology and has shown no intellectual curiosity about anything that conflicts with his ideology. He considers himself better at everything than the experts he has chosen to advise him and has said so publicly. Mr. Obama's lack of character allows him to lie outrageously as in, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." Finally, as we have all seen, leading the world from behind has brought the world a lot more chaos, failed states and war than what was happening when Bush left office.

Imposing Regulatory State is Causing the Decline of the West

I think decadence in the West is a result of a gradual change in the goals government pursues and the way government operates.  The basis of Western Civilization, and arguably any civilization, is the rule of law.  Without predictability, economic investments with long term payoffs are impossible to make.  Our current prosperity began with John Locke’s idea, from his 1690 “Two Treatises on Government,” that government required the consent of the governed and that government’s purpose was to secure the life, liberty and property of the people it governed. The way Western "democratic" governments operate today is to have experts make regulatory decisions for people without their consent.  Government makes people follow rules that it thinks are good for them, and redistributes property in the name of social justice, which usually means buying votes with entitlements.

English history from 1600 to 1700 was very important to the Founders who set up the United States.  The Declaration of Independence was the American Colonies’ formal withdrawal of our consent to be governed by King George III.  This was especially important because King George III was King of England by the Act of Settlement passed in 1701, which chose the Hanoverians over the Stuarts to be Kings of England.  In other words, King George II was King of England by consent of the governed.  There were several contemporary claimants to the throne of England with better rights of descent than George III.

The Constitutional requirement that the president see “that the laws be faithfully executed” was a reaction to Charles I (1600-1649) and James II (1633-1701), who ignored parliamentary laws whenever they found the laws inconvenient.  The 2nd Amendment right to bear arms was an attempt to prevent military dictatorship, like the one imposed by Oliver Cromwell from 1653 to 1658.

The economic enlightenment started by Adam Smith (1723-1790), which Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) extended, argued that economic prosperity required minimal government interference beyond a stable legal framework to enforce commercial contracts.  Common practice at the time they wrote was for the government to grant huge monopolies to private companies, like the British East India Company, which was granted India.  Government granted monopolies then are very similar to crony capitalism today.  Smith and Bastiat argued against government granted monopolies. They said the economy would do better without heavy handed government interference.

 

Starting in 1887, with the passage of the law creating the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate rail road freight rates, US government moved away from the rule of law and towards regulatory guidelines which could be micromanaged.  Starting with the New Deal, the US changed the function of government to constraining liberty and redistributing property.  The New Deal era also produced John Maynard Keynes’ idea that government spending stimulates the economy.  Prior to Keynes, governments limited spending and tried to cut taxes during hard times.  Ironically, one of Keynes most famous quotes is that politicians “are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”  Most Western politicians in power today are the slaves of John Maynard Keynes.

Today, Western democratic governments are not really democratic.  The most important decisions are made by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats in regulatory agencies and judges who are changing rather than interpreting the law.  The governing philosophy is that the consent of the governed is no longer needed because the governed are too ignorant to know what’s good for them.  Only government experts can make the best decisions for the people.  Increasingly, governments pay people not to work, not to take initiative and not to even try to take care of themselves.  In responding to the incentives to become dependent on the state, people are contributing to their personal decline and also to the decline and fall of the West.  When a civilization’s bill for bread and circuses, now known as transfer payments, becomes so large that they can no longer afford an army to protect themselves, the decline becomes terminal.

The way to reverse the decline is to remove the power from regulatory agencies and judges to make law without the approval of elected representatives.  We also need to stop paying people to be dependent on the state and encourage them to become independent and think for themselves.  If you give a man a fish, he’s hungry tomorrow.  If you teach a man to fish, he can feed himself by fishing every day.  If you give a man a fish every day, why would he make any effort to learn how to fish?