US Elections - theusaelections.com - US Elections

Is McCainâ€™s bio tour working?

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:14:58 +0000

CNN.com
While Sen. John McCain’s campaign is remarkably happy with the way his “Service to America” biography tour has gone this week, some Republicans say they are not so sure he’s using his time wisely. [...]

Full article: Is McCainâ€™s bio tour working?

The Merit and Future Scope of Nuclear Energy

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:13:31 +0000

With the melodramatic history of nuclear energy in America, it’s no wonder people look at it with skepticism. But while industry management was lacking, the technology has not disappointed. New concepts now in development will not only help us through the current energy/environmental crisis, they will answer long held concerns about nuclear energy.

Nuclear power is a highly efficient and dense source of energy with no green house emissions and an abundant supply of fuel. But the industry has been plagued by poor management and a communication strategy of tech-babble. There are some valid concerns about safety associated with nuclear energy, but many of the most popular ones are not justified.

Many people are concerned about the radiation risks of living near a nuclear reactor. Thankfully, these risks are overstated. The amount of radiation you get from walking past an X-ray room in a hospital would not be acceptable for workers at a nuclear plant.

What if someone crashes a plane into the reactor? That would be terrible, but not because of radiation leaks. All nuclear plants in America have been retrofitted with redundant safety systems, including ones that make them passively safe. This means even if everybody at the plant is asleep when something terrible happens, natural forces will cause the reaction to shut down.

What about the Three Mile Island accident in 1979? In the worse nuclear reactor â€œdisasterâ€ in our nation’s history, the physical plant failure released no radiation thanks to redundant safety systems, but the communication failure was catastrophic. Authorities did little to explain to the public what had happened. And the resulting safety measures put in place in all reactors were largely ignored. This incident was the beginning of the end of open discussion about nuclear energy.

Periodic stupid decisions by plant operators about how to deal with low-level waste have also damaged the credibility of the entire nuclear industry.

The concerns about high-level waste in Yucca Mountain are valid. We can’t say what is going to happen in a thousand years. And with current technology, all we can do is sit on it. But that’s not to say we don’t have a plan.

The Generation IV International Forum (GIF) comprises scientists from 10 nations cooperating on development of advanced nuclear reactors. These concept reactors were designed with several goals in mind including proliferation resistance, improved safety, elimination of high-level waste, and sustainability.

Several of the Gen IV concepts are called fast reactors. These reactors will eliminate the production of high-level waste by using it as fuel. Fast reactors, such as the Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (SFR), will be able to consume spent fuel from other reactors, and conceivably the waste now stored in Yucca Mountain. The resulting low-level waste will completely decay in much more manageable time frames.

Another Gen IV concept reactor is called the Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR). The high temperatures in this reactor will allow it to excel at applications other sources of energy would be ineffective at, such as high volume production of hydrogen to be used in vehicles and home heating, and manufacturing steel and aluminum.

These concepts include built-in redundant active and passive safety systems. The life cycle of nuclear fuel will ensure that weapons grade material will never be isolated to minimize proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Gen IV reactors could be ready for commercial use as early as 2030, depending on funding of research. Intermediate designs can be implemented before that. Fortunately, these concepts have received vigorous international support so far.

Nuclear energy will be most effective as part of a broad portfolio of energy sources. Wind and solar energy have the potential to be very affordable and portable solutions. Nuclear can meet needs other sources would be poorly suited to, such as efficiently producing hydrogen, metallurgy, and efficient production of electricity on large scales.

Full article: The Merit and Future Scope of Nuclear Energy

The Definition of Arrogance

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:13:10 +0000

After a heated debate over the last few days on the rule of law, it seems well to take a step back. Why do we conservatives talk about this so much?

Is it because we conservatives are favored over liberals by the rule of law? Given that when we get into contests of jailbird badminton we seem neither favored nor disadvantaged. Both sides can pull out criminals from the other side in reams.

Is it because conservatives have an inherently superior claim to logic in arguments over the advantage of a less flexible, more rigorously wordy rule of law rather than a more flexible, more academically trusting bowing to the wisdom of the courts? Where the people entrusted with enforcing law and interpreting law are perfectly honorable the answer is no.

In those two answers, though, lies the rationale of conservative ideas on the rule of law. Liberals are not better people, but liberalism makes the assumption that they must inherently be so. Take, for example this exchange between myself and Stephen Daugherty on the role of the courts. I begin with the following- Your admonitions of trust in what are really potential tyrants, regardless of how well founded they may be in theories of institutional complexity, can give no comfort to people who have seen over and over the lessons of well-meaning consessions to calls for irrevocable power.Conservatives make bedfellows with bad people. Prove to me Liberals do not do the same! Power-grabbers see our grievances as a resource. For today they will reserve the violence they do do those whom they find most expedient. For today your power-grabbers expediently avoid promising to hurt you. If you do not found your protections of rights in WRITTEN LAW and protect that law jealously at the ballot box, when expediency expands the bounds of those the powerful see fit to hurt to include you you will sound as foolish in your complaints to the sheep around you as we sound now to you.Stephen, when the Constitution, the founding law of the land, can be fundamentally changed by the mere interpretation of five people there is no law.Stephen answers-The rule of law is dependent on the law being the final word for everybody, not some personâ€™s opinions about what our pre-existing rights are. The law, the decisions of the court, and other elements of what the Judiciary deals with are documented, available to the people. The whims of those carrying on about pre-existing rights are not so accountable. Either the law as provided to everybody is supreme, or weâ€™re working off the whims of whoever happens to be in charge. History tells us that government by the whims of the powerful alone nearly always ends in corruption, if not disaster.
The problem with this argument:Stephen, when the Constitution, the founding law of the land, can be fundamentally changed by the mere interpretation of five people there is no law.is that at its heart, it is an attack on the legitimacy of the very courts empowered by the constitution to decide what the law means. Essentially, you are saying that you consider those decisions illegitimate. Essentially, you are saying that unless they follow your intepretation, and discard well over a century of applicable jurisprudence on many subjects, then there is no legitimacy to the law at all.
God, man, do you realize what a radical position you have taken? Right or Wrong, most Americans acknowledge the courts as the final authority on the law. But to discount their decisions on political grounds as being inapplicable? Do you know how arrogant, how outside the pale you have taken yourself?
Where I have italicised Stephen’s answer above he is correct (though I can tell you from personal experience it is tremendously difficult for a non-lawyer to access the minutiae of all but a few court decisions). But look at what he actually says. If the law is supposed to be the same for everybody and not “some person’s opinions or whims…” why should the opinion or whim of one person who happens to be the swing vote in a Supreme Court have any more sway than the opinion or whim I may have myself? Stephen’s own argument defeats itself!

As a practical matter the argument is made that the legitimacy of the ruling of the court rises from the standing of the court. While this may sound logical it flies in the face of the very legitimacy of American government itself, something Stephen accentuates with an earlier attack on one of my assertions of the origins of rights in American government- Take this response to my comment about the constitution being meant to be the basis of a system of derived laws. Flat out wrong?
Mister, the Declaration of Independence is one of the most important documents in American History. Legally, though, it means nothing. We are Constitutional Democratic Republic, not a Declarational Democracy. The Declaration is a list of grievances, a manifesto meant to reject a monarchy across an ocean.In fact, the Declaration of Independence is a legal document, not merely a manifesto, because without it the legal separation of this nation from that legal structure under which all previous formal governmental legitimacy was founded would be void. If Stephen is right on this point all of American government is illegitimate!

Secondly, while the court is present to make interpretive decisions about the law the people are the real source of governmental legitimacy. The people must recognize a rational connection between the interpretations of the court and the words of the laws they are interpreting. Decisions like the abominable Kelo v. New London, in which the Pre-Roberts Court decided that the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause allowing for emminent domain seizures of private property for “public use” could place that property in the hands of a for-profit private company, undermine the legitimacy of the court in the eyes of that source of its authority. People all over America recognized the inherent threat to personal private property rights that came by the swing of one person’s opinion. So am I really “beyond the pale” and “arrogant” to state that the real arrogance is to fly in the face of the nation’s owners on the authority of one man’s opinion?

Finally, since the people really are the source of legitimacy in American government, as the Constitution itself states, and since the Constitution reserves for the people to make the vast majority of their most difficult value decisons for themselves through state legislatures and through the Federal Congress, and since this even encompasses the power to amend the Constitution itself so it will actually say what the law needs to say to remain relevant as a national founding modern law, what are the people to make of decisions of the court, like Roe v. Wade, that simply foreclose the peoples’ right to decide on a crucial value choice? Here’ is what Stephen says-As far as Roe v. Wade goes, birth has been the traditional beginning of oneâ€™s status as a person. Even the bible recommends a lighter punishment for somebody who causes a woman to miscarry than for homicide in its terms. Medical privacy was also a pre-existing right. There is legitimate question as to the quality of the argument, but itâ€™s been settled law for quite some time.My answer to this was as follows:On Roe v. Wade , 410 U.S. 113 (1973) you simply avoid the real point. It is irrelevant when some vague â€œtheyâ€ of court history regarded human life to start. Up until 1973 the states could make the value decision for when a human became human based on their local value structure with their own legally authorized representatives, who they could then toss from office if a majority of voters substantially disagreed.The Court, by an elitist, unaccountable ruling of a tiny group of people seized from the public the right to make the most crucial choice any human being can participate in- when we become people in the eyes of the law. If their choice had been unanimous, and it was not, it would (still) have been the most arrogant judgement in American Judicial history.

This is why conservatives talk so much about the rule of law. In our understanding of government the most important aspect of this idea is that the legitimacy of all of government is derived from the people’s participation, understanding, consideration, and consent. The phrase “We the People” is more important than all the other thousands of words in the Constitution of the United States combined. Liberal commenters are apalled at my assertions of the illegitimacy of court decisions when, in fact, those decisions fly in the face of the peoples’ ownership of property, of political power, and even of the right to determine their own validity in the eyes of the law!

I would humbly assert that such reaches for raw power are the very definition of arrogance.

Full article: The Definition of Arrogance

Gifts and Loans

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:12:58 +0000

The NYTimes editorial page (which endorsed the $700 billion bailout one month ago) now bemoans the behavior of recipient banks.

Now, lo and behold, with $250 billion in bailout funds committed to dozens of large and regional banks, it turns out that many of the recipients of this investment from taxpayers are not all that interested in making loansShockingly, the banks are not using the government’s gift to extend loans, but to… wait for it…. buy up smaller, more profitable banks. That way, if JP Morgan Chase fails, an even bigger chunk of the banking industry goes down with her. Banking executives naturally want to protect their own futures, and ensure that everybody in the industry keeps getting a paycheck. Getting a big fat check from Uncle Sam is not going to turn them into philanthropists.

As I wrote to my Congresswoman last month,

Remember, what brought on this crisis was exuberant lending. No amount of bailing out is going to make bad loans look good to bankers now. An unsound business model is still going to be unsound, even if a government handout allows it to be solvent for a few extra weeks or months.

Banks behavior is perfectly rational. And perhaps politicians’ behavior is also rational: they want to protect their jobs and benefit those who donate to their campaigns.

Will voters be rational next Tuesday, and throw out da bums? Here’s a clarion call to voters of both parties: if the incumbents in your district and state voted for the bailout, vote against them on Tuesday. Let them know that we disapprove in real polls, not just the ones pollsters conduct.

Full article: Gifts and Loans

The High Board

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:12:54 +0000

Many of you will remember the first time you went up to the high board and looked down at the pool from more than twelve feet up. It was terrifying. I actually took a few trips up there before I took the plunge. Economics and its intersection with history provides similar terrors.

Stephen Daugherty writes an interesting article on a comparison of the “spice” of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels and our modern, similarly addictive, oil. In a comment to the same article ohrealy confirms Daugherty’s point that spice, oil, and even the largely Arabic terms in Dune were purposefully connected. In the economy of Dune as in our oil economy this key ingredient is the talisman of the world order, and a vital addiction. Overcoming that addiction frees the world to new paths. The “High Board” of our title is met in taking on the challenge of real, radical, change in the face of just such addicting objects.

In the previous three national cataclysms the people of this country were forced into facing the challenge of making a break with systemic addictions like that we now have with oil. The first was in breaking with England and the age-old governing tradition of monarchy. The second was in overcoming the nation’s addiction to the use of slaves as a form of capital which formed a substantial percentage of the market capitalization for banking purposes, not merely of the Old South, but of the nation as a whole. The third was a revolution in economic foundations from a largely agrarian/rural/subsistence economy to a largely industrial/urban/consumerist economy. In each case the vast majority of people could not see the way from one world to the next, if they could imagine the next world at all. In each case a great war threw the old world into shambles and made it untenable. In each case visionaries had attempted to give an indication of the shape of the world to come prior to the great upheaval.

We are in such times as those today. It is possible, but not probable, we can make the coming transition without a worldwide conflagration. Oil is, indeed, our “spice” and addictions are seldom broken without a painful withdrawal.

Why do I break with conservative convention on oil? Because liberty is a higher principle than prosperity, and as long as we are addicted to anything we must depend on others to provide we are not free. It is time to free ourselves from addiction, to take the fearful plunge from the comfort of a high platform.

Live free, or die.

Full article: The High Board

Conservative Debaters are Missing the Boat on Climate Change

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:12:15 +0000

Climate change has become one of the most important issues of this decade. The Democrats have moved to deal with the problem while many Republicans have argued about whether we did it or not. To my fellow conservatives I would say this question misses the point. And while we’ve been debating, the Democrats have owned the issue.

Is global warming real? How much is human caused? For those of us who haven’t been keeping a journal of the changes in the polar ice caps, â€œI don’t knowâ€ is the correct answer. We can either trust the preponderance of the scientific community or we can become experts on climate change. If you feel you need to argue about the science go to realclimate.org and read what the scientists are finding in all its technical glory.

Still, I find arguing about the reality of climate change ridiculous because it doesn’t matter for most purposes. There are plenty of reasons to change our energy structure: National security, pollution, economic volatility. I don’t need Al Gore to tell me why I should care about the environment.

It’s not realistic to change our entire energy infrastructure in a few years, but we’ve been unbearably shortsighted.

Detroit auto executives pumped money into huge gas guzzling SUVs even as fuel costs were sky rocketing and debate was raging about how to reduce carbon emissions. Now these SUVs are sitting on dealers’ lots because no one will buy them, and these auto makers are in Washington looking for another bail-out.

John McCain, who has been one of the most forward thinkers on climate change, made his energy campaign slogan â€œdrill baby, drill.â€ Domestic oil may solve some problems, but it sounds archaic as a battle cry. Why didn’t he make nuclear energy the centerpiece of his energy policy? That is one area we are miles ahead of the Democrats on but we are afraid to talk about it. I don’t understand why. Nuclear energy is an essential part of our energy portfolio for the future.

Clean energy technology is an area America should be leading in, but right now we are just trying to keep up. That’s costing us dollars and respect all over the world.

It’s juvenile to ignore the possibility of hidden costs from our energy policy just to say â€œhell no!â€ to liberals. In 20 years if we find out humans don’t have anything to do with global warming then were our efforts to change our energy policies wasted? Of course not. We’ve left a cleaner world and a more sustainable economy for our children. But in 20 years I don’t want to see Al Gore looked back on as the savior of the environment because conservatives ignored the signs there might be a problem.

Full article: Conservative Debaters are Missing the Boat on Climate Change

Thank You Vets

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:11:29 +0000

The true cost of war is what vets bring back with them. The money and diplomatic capital are comparatively light. We will all have to bear them, but not in a way that fundamentally changes how we experience life. But the burden vets carry changes them for the rest of their lives.

War should be all of our burden. But we as a society have been ineffective at helping our soldiers when they come home. I say I support the troops, but I can’t honestly say I have adequately tried to share their burden. This realization came to me recently while watching a PBS documentary called Reserved to Fight. It follows several vets from one of the first companies to fight and return from Iraq.

If any of you vets have had similar experiences, or different ones, I would like to hear about them.

Whether someone agrees with the Iraq War doesn’t matter. We all have opinions, but that doesn’t mean we live with the reality of war. Vets do every day.

They’ve spent months or years in life or death struggle. They’ve had to reconcile killing other human beings. The reasons the war was started don’t tell us why they fight. They’ve fought regardless of their political views because the most important things to them are the people they love at home and the friends fighting next to them. For most of them, I believe their motivation is to make the world a better place.

Then they come back to the land they fought for. There might be a parade at their homecoming, and after that it’s back to living a â€œnormalâ€ life. But normal seems pointless. No one wants to talk about the war except on a political level. The America these soldiers have idealized now seems petty compared to what they used to worry about. Many of them long for battle because at least there they felt like they belonged.

PTSD afflicts many of our vets and they may not even know it. They might see corpses when they close their eyes, so they can’t sleep. They tend to be nervous in large groups of people, so they withdraw. They often have trouble maintaining relationships. And they don’t know how to talk about what they are going through. Many self medicate with drugs and alcohol. Many marriages fail. Many end up on the street or in jail.

I believe our soldiers, overwhelmingly, are honorable men and women who have sacrificed more than I can imagine, believing it was for something worth dying for. Many of those who didn’t die will never completely leave that hell behind. I haven’t yet figured out how to help ease the burden you carry. So, for now I will just say thank you.

Full article: Thank You Vets

When You REALLY Want Change…

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:11:10 +0000

The people made their choice: CHANGE. Now, voila, we have the second Clinton administration. It remains to be seen whether this will be something vaguely different or one of a variety of possible redux scenarios (Wilson, F.D.R. term 1, Carter, or Clinton). Regardless, it will not get us significant change, because we have not addressed our most important structural problem.

That problem is in the nature of Congress. People who are supposed to represent us, whether we are liberal, independent-minded, or conservative, are shipped off to Washington D.C. to be constantly lobbied, jawboned, cajoled, and seduced by both the ministrations of K Street and our employees in the Federal Government. Even good people like my own representative, Kevin Brady, who makes a point of coming home to his district every weekend, spend far more time in the grips of those wishing to influence him than they spend under the thumb of those he represents.

This situation gives rise to two great perversities. First, by this construction of government we make it easier for those wishing to lobby our representatives away from our supervision to concentrate and coordinate their resources economically. A government teacher once told me that our system of government was really a wise substitution of nonviolent warfare for the violent sort. He was right, and as Sam Houston learned from the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (only to fail to convince Travis at the Alamo years later) one should never “fort up” one’s resources where they are easily set under siege by a determined enemy. In fact, this is exactly what we have done, placing our representational army in “Fort D.C.” where they are under constant assault from all sides for our resources.

The second perversity is a byproduct of the first. By the fact that we have concentrated our representational army in very limited and narrow confines they, rather than we, have become the focus of government power. Like ambassadors sent overseas in the days of sail our communications with our representatives on a fog of subjects are spotty and picayune at best. At worst they sneak things, like the abominable Freedom of Choice Act in under our radar entirely. Those wishing to influence policy do not come to us to get what they want, so that we will influence our representatives, instead they bypass us entirely. This encourages us to be ignorant of the processes of government, and to fail to understand the public’s crucial role in good public policy.

Do you want real change? Obama, the second (fill in the blank) clearly will not give it to you. He can’t. The real power is in the Congress, and we have forted Congress up in a place under seige by people who want what we have.

The real solution will be to amend the Constitution to bring Congresspersons home to their individual districts, only ALLOW them to go to Washington on special occasions. They will hold meetings and hearings electronically. Lobbyists who wish to influence them can go to Fort Smith, and Reno, etc., etc. to see them personally. Naturally we will be told this is impossible, because our reps don’t want to be told they work for us, and because those who have them in their grips don’t want to have their access to our pockets routed through Shreveport, Jackson, Tyler, Rapid City, and Provo.

The fact of the matter is this is not a conservative point. It is simply what we must eventually do if we want to have a government that represents and empowers us, conservative, liberal, or whatever, rather than the various lobbies storming the ramparts of our government every day.

Full article: When You REALLY Want Change…

Corrosive Cynicism

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:10:51 +0000

An Associated Press article this morning speaks to one of the real dangers facing western society today, creeping dishonesty and the cynicism that makes it seem a proper behavior.

The article was based on a survey by the Josephson Institute of more than 29,000 students at 100 randomly chosen high schools across the country. Among the findings of the survey were that 30% of students surveyed admitted having stolen from someone over the last year, and that more than 60% admitted having cheated on schoolwork in the same period.

Michael Josephson, the institute’s founder, commenting on the survey said-”What is the social cost of that â€” not to mention the implication for the next generation of mortgage brokers?” Josephson remarked in an interview. “In a society drenched with cynicism, young people can look at it and say ‘Why shouldn’t we? Everyone else does it.’”

Among the things children see these days is that there seems to be little real cost to such forms of theft as plagiarism. Vice president-elect Joe Biden, for example famously plagiarized not only in law school but also in speeches after the beginning of his political career. Such indiscretions clearly have cost him little. Doris Kearns Goodwin, a fixture on PBS, also plagiarized the work of others but, a precious few mea culpas later, she goes on strong.

In the A.P.article much is made of the “pressures” placed on students to achieve today. That has nothing to do with common thievery. Such cynicism is ultimately a sign that young people believe they are not capable of fending honorably for themselves. Our accommodation of thieves in public life only reinforces their fear. If someone with a Pulitzer Prize can’t get by without stealing why should a teenager in high school think they can?

Finally, who is standing up for the value of honor in our society? Certainly not our mass media. Take, for example, this report on last night’s 60 Minutes article on internet gambling and its ethical problems. To the people at CBS it seems a scandal that online gambling sites would cheat their clients. Never mind that it is ILLEGAL to gamble online in the United States. CBS want there “to be a law”, as it were, about the owners of gambling sites and the quality control they practice, though there is in fact a law about the practice itself they don’t mind you ignoring.

An honorable society is one that reinforces the belief that one can prosper by one’s own efforts without cheating or stealing. A society so built benefits everyone. A cynical society (Remember the old Soviet addage? “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”) eats away at its own capacity to provide for everyone because its people will seek to grab the resource they see before they will risk the effort to produce more resources.

Whatever side of the political aisle you are on you benefit from a society that has faith in honesty.

Full article: Corrosive Cynicism

Obamanageability, Fun Times, and Tea Leaves

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:09:41 +0000

As President-elect Obama made his first stumble-bumbling steps toward introducing himself to international leaders it seemed time to take a look at other problems he has closer to home. I wrote a note to a liberal friend the other day analyzing what I see as the challenges we all face, regardless of party. I’ll share parts of it with you.

On Obama’s win, my disappointment is muted. This was not unexpected given the damage the Bush presidency and its associated national Republican repudiation of conservatism has done to the Republican Party. Harry Truman said it half a century ago from the other side of the fence when he told Democrats that, given a choice between Republicans and Democrats who act like Republicans the American people will choose real Republicans every time. It’s hard to vote for a party that treats you like you have to drag your knuckles into the voting booth, so Republican turnout was the lowest in twenty years.

I think a lot of Republicans who voted for an Obama, and moderate Democrat candidates, who tacked strongly right in the waning weeks of the campaign also felt that this was a choice they could un-make with new, less disdainful Republicans two years from now if the Democrats turned out to be the wild-eyed commie sympathizers the far-right tried to make them out to be. I’ve been watching the internals of as many polls as I could get my hands on and the people still self-report themselves as a center-right population. Liberals may be strongly in power in the Democratic Party, but if they get what they claim to want over the next two years they will be screwing the oaken stake into their own majority. Card-check, for instance, would kill them stone cold dead in 2010.

There are other structural problems that bode very badly for Democrats. Social Security has been a key Democrat issue for generations. Insolvency, however, is looming and the promises the party has made over its corpse can’t be honored without enslaving generations of people who had no vote on the matter. In that program, in Medicare, and in Medicaid “the full faith and credit” of the United States is nothing more than a promise to confiscatorily tax the American people. (By this I mean there is no mechanism, such as increasing capital capacity, or expansion of production-based profitabilty, that provides real growth for the payment of interest charges for which the public is liable.) Whether it is done directly with payroll taxes or indirectly with corporate taxes that are then shuffled to the people in higher prices for everything (and enormous losses of jobs and capital to countries less burdened with unfulfillable promises) those promises can only be kept at the direct expense of the public.

We will be due a REAL crisis in about 2020 as people here, and worldwide, realize the social promises of prior generations in the Western democracies were just Ponzi schemes. What happens in the following four years will be the greatest test of the capacity of this government and people to survive a complete national reexamination since the Civil War- assuming it doesn’t lead to civil war itself.

These things are just part of the natural cycle of things. We would have had to deal with them even if Republicans had won.

In my own writing what I’ve tried to do is redirect the rhetoric of policy debates away from useless concepts like “jobs”, which are really lite forms of camoflaged Marxism, and toward the concept of production. Everything about Obama’s message was directed at monetary fixes for economic problems (Republicans this go around were very little better). Such discussions ignore the flight of productivity from the U.S. economy. If we don’t produce we will soon have nothing to make our currency worth something. Every man will have a job, and will be a millionaire, unable to feed, house, or clothe a family. No amount of spending, paper-shuffling, or make-work job invention can solve economic problems that result from productivity flight.

On the other hand, if we do substantially grow productivity through capital reinvestment and technological advances it will be possible to produce what the economy must have to take care of our swelling ranks of mature and elderly people without forcing the young into servitude. If Government seeks to sieze the assets of the private economy to fulfill the egalitarian fantasies born of generations of bad economic education it will be unable to make the hard and painful choices an economy must make to become more efficient, more productive.

If that is what underlies Obamism we’re all in trouble. If it’s not, judging by what I saw among his supporters and in his campaign, he has a hell of an education project ahead of him.

History serves up tests of character for nations. It really doesn’t matter who is in charge for the moment. The character being tested is OURS, not his, and it is time for a generation of final exams.

Full article: Obamanageability, Fun Times, and Tea Leaves