Topic: Conservatism needs work

[Redeye]

You won't get an argument from me on the idea that a punitive environment for business is generally a bad thing - but who's going to pick up the tab for the Reagan years? Or the Harris years? In particular, in Ontario, it seemed like people were under the impression that the PC government of Harris & Eves had been running a balanced budget, which of course wasn't the case. If they had stayed in power, what would have happened when there were no more crown assets to sell?

Saskatchewan has the same amount of mineral, oil and agricultural resources today as they did in the 1980's when I was posted in Alberta. Alberta was undergoing an oil boom, and everyone who I knew who had connections with the oil business wondered openly why Saskatchewan wasn't getting in the act.

Answer: The Sakatchewan NDP party, whose tax and regulatory policies in government made it much simpler to cross the border and get rich in Alberta.

Today, the Saskatchewan party has enacted user friendly tax and regulatory policies, so the same resource base is now providing a vast explosion in wealth.

The argument is strengthened when plotting the economic history of Ontario; once again the basic resource base has never changed, but the economy dips when unfriendly governments (Peterson  Minority, Rae, McGuinty) are in power, while it boomed under a friendly tax and regulatory regime (Mike Harris). Mobile assets like capital, labour and industry flow to where the highest rate of return is available, under McGuinty they have been flowing out of Ontario...

Students of history can see the same effects going as far back as the Peloponnesian wars, where relatively free polities outperformed much larger ones which had far greater resources but far less freedom. Athens had a much smaller resource base compared to Sparta and her Allies coupled to Persian financial backing, yet could continue to fight for 27 years, including a decade after the flower of her army and fleet was destroyed in Syracuse. Elizabethan England had only a fraction of the manpower and resources of the Spanish Empire, but Elizabeth started with a bankrupt treasury and built England into a major power, while Phillip bankrupted his empire despite the river of silver coming in from the New World. (People who complain that the issue today is not enough revenue should consider that example very closely indeed). The Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta was able to hold off the much larger Ottoman Empire for several centuries for many of the same reasons. The story of the Asian "Tiger" economies is much the same

[PuckChaser]

McGuinity isn't picking up the tab for the Harris years, he's spending us into a have-not province at $16 Billion a year and rising. We're worse off with the Liberals in Ontario than when Bob Rae was running things here, and that's saying something.

[Kirkhill]

Before declaring my own personal Christmas Truce I would like to draw one last tortured analogy:

If the world market of 7,000,000,000 rational bodies is construed as a flowing river - constantly changing course, eddying, flooding, under-cutting its banks, puddling.....

Then your choices open are:

Accept the river as is;
Attempt to control it

If you attempt to control it then your choices are:

Build Dams;
Build Weirs and Canals

Dams attempt to block the river and eventually fail.
Weirs and canals permit the water to flow but impede and direct it to advantage.  They tend to last longer than Dams.

Dirigisme builds Dams.
L(l)iberalism builds weirs and canals.

It is a matter of accepting realities and working with them as opposed to denying realities and working against them.

[GAP]

Oh....now I see....that's where "that D a m n McGuinity" saying comes from.......

[Thucydides]

Foundations:

http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_04.htm

Thucydides taught us more than twenty-four hundred years ago … that all men’s behavior is guided by phobos, kerdos, and doxa, Fear, self-interest, and honor."

Responsible capitalism is self-interest mitigated with honor — in the sense of doing things right and considering also the rights and interests of others. Irresponsible capitalism is unmitigated self-interest – caveat emptor.

Fascism and communism replace self-interest and honor with various degrees of fear, which gets worse, the worse the tyranny, ending with unmitigated fear as the only motivator.

Socialism attempts to replace self-interest without creating fear. That leaves honor — which is probably the laziest of the three drivers — as the only motivator for independence and excellence.

Honor is also the most easily perverted, because it is defined in a cultural context. Suicide bombers are honorable, in their own light … (which is NOT an endorsement of either them, or a system which finds honor instead of horror in such actions).

[Thucydides]

A very interesting pilot project. Reading carefully, we see that highly selective targetting is the key to making this program work, rather than simply spraying money out of a hose, which suggests that this sort of program would be best delivered by local community groups and charities such as churches, rather than central bureaucracies:

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/guess-funds-biggest-project-ever-house-homeless-stephen-201033843.html

Guess who funds biggest project ever to house the homeless? Stephen Harper
The Canadian PressBy Heather Scoffield, The Canadian Press | The Canadian Press – Mon, 26 Dec, 2011

    Email
    Print

Y! Videos
1 - 3 of 12

    On the road for 2012: Greener, leaner carsPlay Video

    On the road for 2012: Greener, …
    Raw Video: Perry tries to regain campaign buzzPlay Video

    Raw Video: Perry tries to regain …
    Spanish police release mafia arrest videoPlay Video

    Spanish police release mafia arrest …

See more videos

TORONTO - The government's response to the Attawapiskat housing crisis may well have underscored Stephen Harper's reputation for his hard line rather than his heart, with his focus on the aboriginal reserve's financial problems, not its social ones.

But in other parts of the country, the prime minister's government is also quietly bankrolling one of the largest social pilot projects ever seen in Canada, paying generously for cutting-edge research that is changing the lives of hundreds of homeless people.

The project may scream out for a new, national social program — the kind that has been anathema to Harper in the past.

But it is producing results that suggest federal involvement in funding homes for the homeless can be smart and save money.

The At Home/Chez Soi pilot project is now half way through its five-year life span, backed by $110 million of federal money channelled through the Mental Health Commission of Canada.

It's the most comprehensive research experiment with homelessness in Canada, if not the world, researchers say.

And it's working.

"We now have enough experience to know this can be done," says Paula Goering, lead researcher for the project.

The pilot project has its origins in the political dust-up of 2006. With Paul Martin's minority Liberal government on life support, NDP leader Jack Layton demanded billions in federal funding for housing and homelessness. The bargain eventually broke down, but left behind a mounting public concern that homelessness had been ignored for too long.

"Somebody needed to do something," recalls Michael Kirby, now the chair of the Mental Health Commission and a former Liberal senator.

The Conservative government agreed to set up a program through the newly-minted Mental Health Commission, pushed by then-health minister Tony Clement and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. As is Harper's style, it was to be finely-targeted, one-time funding.

But top government officials, in touch with Goering and other researchers on the front lines, argued that homelessness was a growing scourge in every major city. And they saw a new approach in the parts of the United States that seemed to be producing results: dramatic reductions in homelessness, all while saving money on social services, and law enforcement.

The approach, known as "housing first", rejects the traditional method of trying to fix homeless people's underlying problems before guiding them towards affordable housing. Instead, the home comes first — heavily subsidized and with no strings attached. Then, a support team swoops in and bombards the homeless people with services of all kinds, if they want them.

The government was not about to embrace an experimental approach to the homeless wholesale. Instead, taking their cue from Harper, officials decided to zero in on a sub-group: the mentally ill.

Then they narrowed their focus further. In five cities across the country, they targeted a particularly vulnerable sector of the mentally ill homeless population. In Vancouver, it was substance abusers. In Winnipeg, urban aboriginals. In Toronto, visible minorities. In Moncton, migrants from rural areas. And in Montreal, access to social housing was emphasized.

At Home staff and partners in each city scour alleys and sidewalks for homeless people who fit the bill and funnel the willing into the program. They are divided into two groups: a new-approach group and a control group of treatment-as-usual, so the results can be compared.

Khusrow Mahvan was one of those selected and he can hardly believe his luck. The 54-year-old from Iran had been living on the street or in shelters since his business had gone bankrupt in 1997.

Hypersensitive, he purposely isolated himself, cowering in the corners and shying away from the frequent conflict, the noise and the chaos that dominates shelter life.

"I was always thinking I was going to die," he says.

Now, he has a spotless one-bedroom apartment overlooking Lake Ontario in Toronto. He talks at length of the spices and flavours he adds to his food, thoroughly treasuring the ability to cook for himself for the first time in years.

"Until two weeks ago….I couldn't open my eyes," he says, covering his face with his hands.

Still unaccustomed to living in a home, he sleeps on the floor in the living room, and uses the bed and bedroom for storage of his life's belongings, stuffed into countless garbage bags.

"I like the wideness of this place," he says.

In his lucid moments, he talks of developing enough independence to set up a fast-food stand on the street below, hoping to rebuild some savings.

Out in suburban Scarborough, Elizabeth Bennett meticulously organized and hung up a few dozen sketches she has finished, and decorated her tiny new apartment for Christmas. Her Bible and a small backpack are never far from her side, even while relaxing in her home.

She has spent the past few years in and out of shelters and various lodgings, struggling to gain control of her schizophrenia and deal with a former landlord who threatened her family and wanted to "keep" her.

Now, she has privacy, a strong support network, friends in the church nearby, and a sense of home.

"As long as I'm inside, I feel safe," she says. "I feel safe because of my prayer, and because of the security on the door."

A common criticism of the housing-first approach to homelessness is that it can't work in a tight housing market, where landlords can afford to be picky about their tenants.

Core to the idea is to give homeless people a choice in their home, so they can have some control over living conditions. But that's hard if there's not much rental housing available, says York University professor Stephen Gaetz, who heads the Canadian Homelessness Research Network.

"The challenge is that in a tight housing market, if there isn't an adequate supply of housing, how do you get people in?"

But the At Home clients come with ample support and funding attached, as well as a plan to prevent eviction. Often, they're less trouble than regular tenants, says Paula McDougall, the office manager at a building in a gritty part of north Toronto.

The At Home people pay their rent on time, she says, and they are coached on how to live in harmony with their neighbours. McDougall stays in touch with the case workers, and although she has no formal training in dealing with mental illness herself, she has had enough experience to know what to do if someone goes off their meds or causes trouble.

"I'm not *****-footing around them," she says in an interview in the ground floor staff room that doubles as a smoking room.

At Home has been able to place everyone approached so far. As of November, the program was fully subscribed, with 1,030 homeless people now in homes and a control group of 980 people.

"At any time, 70 to 80 per cent of the clients are doing really well," says Aseefa Sarang, executive director of Across Boundaries, a Toronto mental health organization that is heading up implementation of At Home in that city.

That's an astounding success rate for a problem that has been the bane of many a government policy.

Nationally, almost all of those 1,030 people have stayed housed, although about 30 per cent have switched to different homes along the way. Most of them have moved on to the next step, working with professionals to design a support system that will help them cope and teach them to live more independently in the long run, says Goering.

"It makes it easier for people if they're not surrounded by others who have the same problems," she says.

"It's a pioneering and risqué approach that doesn't work for everyone….But in most cases, they are housing people, and they are staying housed."

Organizers have also been able to line up social service partners in every city, successfully setting up the support network that is crucial to making the approach work, she adds.

Researchers are slowly figuring out, in a methodical way, where the housing-first model does not work or needs to be modified, she says. Some homeless people feel too isolated to be living in their own home. And some vulnerable people find their new homes taken over by drug dealers and users because they lack the skills to turn their home into a safe haven.

Goering believes the amounts governments will save on prisons, shelters and emergency room use will offset the subsidies to housing. But the numbers could go the other way, she says, since some of the people who are now receiving an array of social services did not receive much before.

For the case workers, the former homeless people and the landlords who have placed their faith in the program, their concerns lie in the future.

They taste success, but they don't know what will happen when the program winds down in 2013. Some of the clients will only have been housed for two years by then, and for many, that's not enough for a stable life to take hold.

The thought of pulling away support from such a large group of vulnerable people is disturbing, say facilitators.

"We'll move heaven and earth to get the funding continued," says physician-researcher Stephen Hwang of the Centre for Research on Inner-City Health at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto.

A nationwide program that invests big sums of up-front money in housing subsidies in the hopes of dealing with long-term issues of mental illness and homelessness will be a tough sell with the Harper government.

The prime minister consistently resists calls for new national social programs and is poised to shave funding from affordable housing over the coming years.

Proof the approach saves money will be crucial for government support.

"Either directly (or) indirectly, mental illness has a significant impact on Canadians -- in their homes, workplaces and streets. It also costs our economy billions," Flaherty told The Canadian Press.

"We're happy to see the progress of the Commission in tackling these issues."

For Kirby, who has dealt with more than his share of large and difficult public policy issues, there are two key questions going forward.

Is the housing-first model the best way to go? Without a doubt, he says.

"The second issue is, who pays for it….It's a real issue. There's only one taxpayer."

When governments, both federal and provincial, see the final results, he is convinced they will see the need to take housing-first to a national scale and someone will step up with funding.

"Once it's finished, we're going to make sure that every government in the country knows we saved them a whole pile of money," he said. "The whole thing is unbelievably uplifting."

[Thucydides]

Jerry Pournelle on defining "conservatism". We have been subjected to lots of psudo conservative movements (neocons, compassionate conservatives, Big Government Conservatives, "crunchy conservatives" [sounds like a brand of ice cream  ] and so on), and various related groupings like Libertarians and Objectivists have been swept up in the net as well. This is a fairly clear way of looking at things:

http://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=4536

What do we mean by Big Government Conservative anyway? It is, after all, a contradiction in terms. It might fairly have been applied to some of the hare brained schemes – mostly compromises and reaching across the aisle to Democrats – from the post-Gingrich days of Republican majorities; to the Americans With Disabilities Act; to No Child Left Behind; indeed to any number of compromise schemes; but on examination it is difficult to find anything Conservative about those schemes.

In the United States, Conservative means a dedication to the original Constitution of 1787; States Rights; transparency and subsidiarity as discussed by Jane Jacobs but those terms have often been usurped; and the general notion that a free people don’t need a nanny state. It also implies conceding a certain degree of local power in social matters. It does not mean anarchy and weak government. No conservative I know favors weak government. We do favor limited government and restriction of the scope of government, but that is nowhere near the same thing. Weak government and anarchy are a curse, and a temptation to tyranny. Good government is a blessing.

Conservatives differ from libertarians in degrees. Unlike most libertarians I would concede to local governments powers that I would not grant to national government, and were it in my power, I would forbid to states. I would concede local governments powers that I would strongly argue against their using anywhere I lived, and which would probably cause me to flee their jurisdiction; which is to say, I believe in the notion that governments derive their just powers from consent of the governed, and the more localized the powers, the more likely it is that those who live under that government consent to it – even if they are consenting to something I don’t care for or consider absurd. My favorite example is the Blue Bellybutton cult, which decrees that all those who go out in public on a Wednesday evening must display their loyalty by exposing their blue-painted belly button. I find that ridiculous, but if there were a town where the local inhabitants elected and installed the cult, I would either stop going out in public on a Wednesday or move to the next township. I admit that is probably an extreme example, and like most hypothetical situations might not accurately reflect what I would really do under the circumstances; still, it illustrates my point. I am prepared to have my books Banned in Boston although I would prefer they were not; I am not prepared to have the Congress ban my books throughout the United States.

On the other hand, there are actions that only government can take. In the past there were institutions that looked ahead for later generations. Monarchies, landed aristocracies, the Church and various holy orders began projects whose fruition their founders did not expect to see. Today the only institutions that can afford to invest for long term payoffs of benefit to all but unlikely of profit are governments. I have discussed this at length in the past. I do not withdraw that opinion.

Conservatives are not anarchists.

[E.R. Campbell]

Here is an interesting "take" on the Libertarian/conservative darling Ron Paul, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/commentary/neil-reynolds/the-dangerous-isolationism-of-ron-paul/article2302229/
my emphasis added

The dangerous isolationism of Ron Paul

NEIL REYNOLDS

From Monday's Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Jan. 16, 2012

On the one hand, Texas congressman Ron Paul, Republican candidate for the presidency, is a zealous champion of limited government, free markets and low taxes. On the other hand, he reportedly thinks the U.S. should not have gone to war against Nazi Germany. What to make of this heresy? In a word, a great deal – for it may define Mr. Paul’s isolationism.

Imagine for a moment that Mr. Paul, not Franklin Roosevelt, served as U.S. president and commander-in-chief in the Second World War. Imagine that the U.S. went to war against only Japan, that Germany won the war in Europe – and that Hitler was able to keep the death camps running through the Age of Aquarius.

Mr. Paul justifies his isolationism on strictly fiscal grounds. Wars cost money. End the wars, end the taxes required to wage them. For some Americans, this seems a reasonable proposition. But this is almost certainly an evasion. Mr. Paul’s isolationism extends beyond fiscal restraint – and reaches implicitly to global surrender.

In his 2011 book Liberty Defined, for example, Mr. Paul cites Israel as a racist state that threatens American freedom. In a Boxing Day blog, former senior aide Eric Dondero – just fired for insubordination after 12 years of service – elaborated: Mr. Paul “most certainly is anti-Israel, and anti-Israeli in general. … His view is that Israel is more trouble than it is worth, specifically to the America taxpayer. He sides with the Palestinians, and supports their calls for the abolition of the Jewish state, and the return of Israel, all of it, to the Arabs.”

The Weekly Standard, a conservative journal, quoted Mr. Dondero further: Mr. Paul “does not believe that the United States had any business getting involved in fighting Hitler. He expressed to me countless times, that ‘saving the Jews’ was absolutely none of our business.” A few days later, Weekly Standard reporter John McCormack asked Mr. Paul four times to respond: Was Mr. Dondero telling the truth? Four times, Mr. McCormack said, he “remained silent.” Mr. Paul’s campaign staff subsequently clarified Mr. Paul’s silence: If Congress had declared war on Germany, Mr. Paul, as commander-in-chief, would have felt constitutionally obliged to wage it. (Germany, in fact, declared war on the U.S. before the U.S. declared war on Germany.)

This apparent reluctance to wage war on Nazi Germany goes beyond Mr. Paul. In his 2008 book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, controversial author Pat Buchanan (who himself once ran for the Republican presidential nomination) documents this dark, enduring niche in American conservatism. Mr. Buchanan blames Churchill, not Hitler, for the Second World War.

In fact, though, Mr. Paul gets even his economic argument wrong. The essential obligation of any state is defence – which doesn’t come free. Mr. Paul would take the U.S. out of NATO; would close American bases around the world; would end American foreign aid. But the U.S. cost of self-defence would inevitably rise, not fall, with each of these retreats into Fortress America. Would the U.S. Navy have use only of American ports? How long would international waterways remain open to unrestricted global commerce? What’s the ultimate financial cost of long-term appeasement?

U.S. defence spending is already at a record low, or very close to it, relative to GDP. U.S. military spending has increased 90 per cent since 9/11, yet remains far below its historical share of GDP. The U.S. spent 40 per cent of its GDP, for three years, to win the Second World War. The U.S. fought the Cold War for 30 years at a GDP cost of 10 per cent a year. By 2000, though, U.S. defence spending was costing only 3.6 per cent of GDP: 3.6 cents per dollar of the national economy.

By 2010, this cost almost doubled – to 6 per cent (all war costs included). But this cost is already falling. The Congressional Budget Office says that, with an end to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the country’s defence cost will fall back to 4.6 per cent within three years.

People who balk at paying four cents on the dollar for a nation’s defence (or, in Canada’s case, 1.5 cents) need to know exactly what wars they would fight and what wars they would skip. The Second World War wasn’t the first absolutely essential moral war in human history – and it won’t be the last.

There is, indeed, a logical "dark side" to American conservatism.

[Redeye]

Here is an interesting "take" on the Libertarian/conservative darling Ron Paul, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/commentary/neil-reynolds/the-dangerous-isolationism-of-ron-paul/article2302229/
my emphasis added

There is, indeed, a logical "dark side" to American conservatism.

While Ron Paul himself doesn't particularly disturb me (or surprise me, at least), the liberals who drift into his camp because a couple of things resonate with him and don't do their homework on him do indeed scare the shinola out of me a little.

[RangerRay]

Being a libertarian, I'm sure that many of Ron Paul's social and foreign policies appeal to many "liberal" voters.  I wonder if they would be so enamored with his strict constitutionalist policies with regards to the role of the state in the economy and regulating business.

[Redeye]

Being a libertarian, I'm sure that many of Ron Paul's social and foreign policies appeal to many "liberal" voters.  I wonder if they would be so enamored with his strict constitutionalist policies with regards to the role of the state in the economy and regulating business.

Actually, most "liberal" voters are pro-choice, so they wouldn't find his social policies particularly appealing. I don't think they'd find his opposition to things like the Civil Rights Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act particularly heartwarming either. That's why I don't get his appeal to them, other than they really like the idea of no more wars and curbing of defence spending perhaps. His other more contentious views (like his views on Israel) I don't think have any sort of "universal" liberal POV so some might like them, others will not.

[Sythen]

http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/straighttalk/archives/2012/01/20120129-113645.html

Capitalism, in its current form, has no place in the world around us.

Those words are not mine. They’re a quote, from a fellow named Klaus Schwab.

For the many who are unlikely to have heard of Klaus Schwab before, rest assured — he’s no socialist rabble-rouser.

He’s a billionaire, in fact, and the founder of something called the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was at Schwab’s Davos gathering last week, as were dozens of other world leaders and billionaires.

More on link.

[Brad Sallows]

Capitalism works fine.  Crony capitalism, which is what all those politicians at Davos live and breathe, sucks ***.  I don't need a thief to tell me my way of life is wrong when the true problem is simply that his way of life happens to be thievery - his viewpoint is too distorted to render a useful evaluation.

[Thucydides]

Governments "crowding out" communities is a long established trend. I think the real question now is two fold:

1. Can community based organizations recover fast enough to pick up the slack as governments are forced to withdraw due to financial pressure, and

2. Are people too habituated to the "Nanny State" to move to self help and local community organizations?

I remain hopeful that the Post Progressive future will see a flowering of communities again (even if they don't quite resemble those of the past i.e. communities of interest based on the Internet and social media), but time will tell:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/douthat-government-and-its-rivals.html?_r=1&smid=fb-share&src=tp&pagewanted=print

Government and Its Rivals
By ROSS DOUTHAT

WHEN liberals are in a philosophical mood, they like to cast debates over the role of government not as a clash between the individual and the state, but as a conflict between the individual and the community. Liberals are for cooperation and joint effort; conservatives are for self-interest and selfishness. Liberals build the Hoover Dam and the interstate highways; conservatives sit home and dog-ear copies of “The Fountainhead.” Liberals know that it takes a village; conservatives pretend that all it takes is John Wayne.

In this worldview, the government is just the natural expression of our national community, and the place where we all join hands to pursue the common good. Or to borrow a line attributed to Representative Barney Frank, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”

Many conservatives would go this far with Frank: Government is one way we choose to work together, and there are certain things we need to do collectively that only government can do.

But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians don’t always like to acknowledge. When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good. Unlike most communal organizations, the government has coercive power — the power to regulate, to mandate and to tax. These advantages make it all too easy for the state to gradually crowd out its rivals. The more things we “do together” as a government, in many cases, the fewer things we’re allowed to do together in other spheres.

Sometimes this crowding out happens gradually, subtly, indirectly. Every tax dollar the government takes is a dollar that can’t go to charities and churches. Every program the government runs, from education to health care to the welfare office, can easily become a kind of taxpayer-backed monopoly.

But sometimes the state goes further. Not content with crowding out alternative forms of common effort, it presents its rivals an impossible choice: Play by our rules, even if it means violating the moral ideals that inspired your efforts in the first place, or get out of the community-building business entirely.

This is exactly the choice that the White House has decided to offer a host of religious institutions — hospitals, schools and charities — in the era of Obamacare. The new health care law requires that all employer-provided insurance plans cover contraception, sterilization and the morning-after (or week-after) pill known as ella, which can work as an abortifacient. A number of religious groups, led by the American Catholic bishops, had requested an exemption for plans purchased by their institutions. Instead, the White House has settled on an exemption that only covers religious institutions that primarily serve members of their own faith. A parish would be exempt from the mandate, in other words, but a Catholic hospital would not.

Ponder that for a moment. In effect, the Department of Health and Human Services is telling religious groups that if they don’t want to pay for practices they consider immoral, they should stick to serving their own co-religionists rather than the wider public. Sectarian self-segregation is O.K., but good Samaritanism is not. The rule suggests a preposterous scenario in which a Catholic hospital avoids paying for sterilizations and the morning-after pill by closing its doors to atheists and Muslims, and hanging out a sign saying “no Protestants need apply.”

The regulations are a particularly cruel betrayal of Catholic Democrats, many of whom had defended the health care law as an admirable fulfillment of Catholicism’s emphasis on social justice. Now they find that their government’s communitarianism leaves no room for their church’s communitarianism, and threatens to regulate it out of existence.

Critics of the administration’s policy are framing this as a religious liberty issue, and rightly so. But what’s at stake here is bigger even than religious freedom. The Obama White House’s decision is a threat to any kind of voluntary community that doesn’t share the moral sensibilities of whichever party controls the health care bureaucracy.

The Catholic Church’s position on contraception is not widely appreciated, to put it mildly, and many liberals are inclined to see the White House’s decision as a blow for the progressive cause. They should think again. Once claimed, such powers tend to be used in ways that nobody quite anticipated, and the logic behind these regulations could be applied in equally punitive ways by administrations with very different values from this one.

The more the federal government becomes an instrument of culture war, the greater the incentive for both conservatives and liberals to expand its powers and turn them to ideological ends. It is Catholics hospitals today; it will be someone else tomorrow.

The White House attack on conscience is a vindication of health care reform’s critics, who saw exactly this kind of overreach coming. But it’s also an intimation of a darker American future, in which our voluntary communities wither away and government becomes the only word we have for the things we do together.

[Thucydides]

A very interesting defense of capitalism, from the most unlikely of sources:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit-archive/oldarchives/2002_02_24_instapundit_archive.html#10199471

PUNK ROCKERS FOR CAPITALISM: Reader John Bowman sends this link to a piece from Popshot Magazine on why capitalism, rather than Naderism, is truly punk:

Ralph Nader and the Green Party have gained tremendous support from the punk rock/independent community. The most recent "anti-capitalist" material I read on the web was juxtaposed with a link to Nader's "Fair Trade" web page. . . .

Ralph has been at this for 40 years or so and he doesn't seem to understand economics. He hates capitalism though it's made him a multi-millionaire. Capitalism values the entrepreneur and protects individuals. Ralph's also an *******. I'd like to hear his investment secrets and not his suggestions to raise the minimum wage. . . .

How boldly do I have to make this point? Shouldn't this be obvious?

When I got into punk rock at 15 and 16, it was because I didn't fit into a clique. I wasn't a part of the mainstream. Punk rock, despite the peer pressure to wear black t-shirts and cut and dye my hair all funny, offered an escape for me to be an individual. Sound familiar?

Punk rock also offered a pretty hardcore code of ethics -- like community and equality and responsibility. One of the most enduring moments I've witnessed was when I saw Kurt Cobain stop a show because some meathead in the audience kept groping a girl in the pit. The mainstream meathead must have had no clue that kind of thing could happen. Only last year, I saw Sleater-Kinney eject a guy who was dancing rough in the crowd. The punks police themselves. Punks take initiative.

Entrepreneurial initiative is personified in the punk rock ethic of "DIY." Doing It Yourself is something that is only possible in a capitalist system. Without private and individual ownership of the means of production, independent punk rockers couldn't record songs on a four-track, duplicate them at home and sell them at shows. Imagine trying to get an entire community to agree to let you use the communal recording studio.

Self-regulating. Initiative-taking. Free-exchange and free-association -- the ability to associate and disassociate with whom you want.

What is it? Capitalism.

[Thucydides]

American blogger and conservative media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart died very recently at age 43. Here is one look at his legacy. Expect to see many more people following in his footsteps and an explosion in the conservative/classical liberal/libertarian blogospheres in the years to come as thousands of people apply his principles and put them into action:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/immortality-andrew-breitbart’s-5-gifts-to-generation-y-conservatism/?print=1

Immortality: Andrew Breitbart’s 5 Gifts to Generation Y Conservatism
Posted By Dave Swindle On March 4, 2012 @ 9:34 am In Conservatism 2.0 | 23 Comments

Greg Gutfeld on his friend Andrew Breitbart: [1]

My wife called him the wizard, for he could conjure up anything at any time with limitless energy.

As an enthusiast for pop culture’s fruits, perhaps Big Hollywood’s [2] founder would allow a Harry Potter reference to describe the impact he left on American political culture and the lives of those who knew him.

During the final years of his life Breitbart transformed into the Bad Guy, a political assassin in the vast right-wing conspiracy who could fire lightning bolts to sizzle political careers and collapse Marxist organizations. He became the dark lord Voldemort, the great Boogeyman masterminding the Tea Party New Media Revolution.

And as with the horcrux [3] relics of J.K. Rowling’s fantasy, Breitbart planted pieces of his soul everywhere. Now that he’s gone his spirit will exert greater influence. His seeds will continue to grow and everyone will see his touch from beyond the grave.

What will come? Here are five directives Breitbart imprinted on the next generation of conservatives.

5. Focus on the Right Culture War.

As children growing up during the Clintonian Age, “culture war” meant baby boomers obsessing over sex and fantasy violence: V-Chips for TV, abstinence sex education, Monica’s stained dress, Ellen DeGeneres and Mortal Kombat. With an economy booming and twin towers standing, the maintenance of Millennial innocence dominated parental political priorities. And so the conservative media critique remained for a generation.

With Breitbart’s rise, a new generation began to shift culture war to something else. Not Christian morality vs secularist hedonism, but universal American values vs cultural Marxism.

To see the Breitbart principle in action, consider Big Journalism’s [4] recent fight to hold accountable Keith Olbermann for covering up the sexual violence of Occupy Wall Street. (Minimizing the severity of criminal behavior remains a preferred cultural Marxist tactic in the effort to initiate greater societal destabilization for revolution.)

A practical danger hides within Olbermann’s meme. Bad ideas have real-world consequences. How many future victims will think, “Well if Keith Olbermann says this rape-at-occupy stuff is more crap from this racist Breitbart then we might as well go…”?

That’s why the culture war matters. These ideas destroy lives. They must be stopped. But to do that we need to know their origin. And here too Breitbart led the way.

 [5]  [6]
4. Focus on the Marxists…. And call them Marxists.

In Breitbart’s manifesto Righteous Indignation [7], the sixth chapter “Breakthrough” summarizes the modern progressive movement’s evolution from Rousseau through Marx to the Frankfurt School, Alinsky and our president. In understanding the roots of the political cult dominating the Democratic Party and occupying the White House, we can articulate the real threat. Not Democrats vs. Republicans, Left vs. Right, or Liberals vs. Conservatives.

Those who understand human nature vs the dreamers who do not.

See also Ann Coulter’s Demonic [8] for her variation on this theme in the chapters juxtaposing the American and French Revolutions. Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions [9] develops the analysis to book length. The same arguments that Tea Partiers have with the Occupiers today appeared centuries ago in the essays of rival Enlightenment thinkers.

 [10]
3. Be a Counterculture Conservative.

At the Atlantic Wire, from a story titled [11] “Andrew Breitbart’s Unfinished Quest for a Punk Rock Republican,”

His project was to take that cultural space back for free market conservatives. To make his brand of economic freedom cool. His cultural war may have aligned him with Republicans like Rick Santorum — who joined mainstream Republicans like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Donald Rumsfeld in mouring his death — but it was decidedly not the same battle. “Nothing drives me crazier than seeing an abortion van driving along at a conservative convention showing aborted fetuses,” he told GQ’s Lisa DePaulo [12]. “I think that’s the wrong aesthetic.” Breitbart wore his shirts open-collared and his hair floppy, and he made jokes with swears. “I like to call someone a raving **** every now and then, when it’s appropriate, for effect,” he told The New Yorker. “’You **********.’ I love that kind of language.”

Breitbart lived as the most vocal proponent for a long-neglected conservative mission: taking Cool back from the Marxists. It’s cool to create your own multimedia new empire from nothing, expose corrupt politicians, and taunt empty-headed protesters. Coolest of all, though: father of four.

 [13]
2. Hack the Media.

A few weeks ago I received a copy of media theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s new graphic novel from DC/Vertigo. A.D.D.: Adolescent Demo Division [14]. In the sci-fi thriller a team of professional video gamers lives immersed in a media world filled with intrigue. Using this narrative, Rushkoff constructs a parable exploring the future of a hyper-connected existence. In an interview with Shaun Manning [15], Rushkoff explains the origins of his book,

“Most simply, ‘A.D.D.’ asks, ‘what if Attention Deficit Disorder were not a bug but a feature?’ What if the things that we’re seeing emerge from our very media-connected kids, what if these weren’t illnesses or pathologies but rather adaptations? What if the abilities gained by the Newtype children of manga and anime, what if some of the things we’re considering disorders are actually adaptations or reactions to the media environment in which kids are living?” Rushkoff told CBR. “We sort of asked the question, and then the story grew out of that. Ok, if ADD is a feature and not a bug, it means that someone made it happen, someone put it there. Who would do that, and why? I built a world around that ‘what if’ and wanted to get to the place of asking, ‘what would constitute resistance in a world where corporations are trying to program us into submission?’”

I first hoped to review Rushkoff’s book in the context of the real-world equivalent: Breitbart was the prototype of the ADD-as-New-Media-adaptation phenomenon. The man who lived bombarded by endless tweets, phone calls, videos, and news stories wrote about his attention deficit disorder and the way his temperament fit with the virtual environment of an interlinked world wide web.

Breitbart’s abilities as New Media entrepreneur and effective activist stemmed from harnessing his ADD to develop unusual insights into the future of media and technology. Breitbart could make connections before others. Ancient societies called such people prophets. See this anecdote from one of my favorite writers, The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan V. Last [16]:

Breitbart had a peripatetic mind—lots of ideas, most of them big, some of them very, very good. (I remember one conversation with him, about ten years ago, where he spun out, at length, a concept for a micro-blogging service that I told him was crazy. In nearly every particular, he conceived of Twitter four years before Twitter was invented.)

Knowing how our media system functions, understanding it as a programmed virtual reality made by people, Breitbart could hack it to further his patriotic purposes. He knew which buttons to push, whom to charm, whom to provoke, and how to play the role of showman.

In Rushkoff’s graphic novel the Breitbart/ADD way of looking at the world has a fictional equivalent. The protagonists’ eyes go a hazy blue and they “dekh” new understandings of the biases programmed into the media system.



Breitbart taught us how to see the world this way. The mainstream media is not an unbeatable foe, but a pathetic, predictable creature one can manipulate at will. A recent example, almost performed as tribute in Breitbart’s memory: Rush Limbaugh seizing the media narrative [17] in the contraceptive debate [18].

 [19]
1. Be the Media.

It’s one thing to call yourself a Tea Partier who loves the free market. It’s another to put the principles into practice by becoming an entrepreneur. That’s how to really make the cultural Marxists hate you.

The greatest threat to those who advocate for wealth re-distribution are the entrepreneurs whose lives prove the amount of wealth in this world is infinite.

Alchemy works. You can transform lead into gold. Andrew’s own life stands as more significant evidence than anything he wrote or published. This man went from drunken deadbeat to Hollywood script-runner to self-described “*****” of Matt Drudge to the architect of Huffington Post (the world’s first and last $315 million vanity blog) to CEO of his own internet publishing empire capable of crushing ACORN and dethroning rising progressive star Anthony Weiner.

Thus Breitbart’s death inspires the progressive daily beasts and their no label lackeys [20] living “within the niggling license of Master’s Leash” to display their own self-hatred through tasteless denunciations and lies.

If this slacker beach bum from Brentwood can change political history through midwifing a new species of capitalist activism, then what venture can you create if you tried hard enough [21]? And can you pursue that dream with even half the energy and passion and humor and human empathy as Andrew Breitbart?

Thanks for everything, Andrew, we’ll try and keep moving forward with your plan [22].

Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/immortality-andrew-breitbart%e2%80%99s-5-gifts-to-generation-y-conservatism/

URLs in this post:

[1] Greg Gutfeld on his friend Andrew Breitbart:: http://www.dailygut.com/?i=5176
[2] Big Hollywood’s: http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/
[3] horcrux: http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Horcrux
[4] consider Big Journalism’s: http://bigjournalism.com/lstranahan/2012/02/17/despite-olbermanns-lies-the-fact-and-causes-of-occupy-violence-are-established/
[5] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mTxpFIw-3g
[6] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7ryAedUILg
[7] Righteous Indignation: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0446572829/pjmedia-20
[8] Demonic: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307353486/pjmedia-20
[9] A Conflict of Visions: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465002056/pjmedia-20
[10] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RE3-RUR2-U
[11] a story titled: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/business/2012/03/breitbarts-unfinished-quest-punk-rock-republican/49364/
[12] he told GQ’s Lisa DePaulo: http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/201104/andrew-breitbart-lisa-depaulo
[13] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIJRyJkQXyc
[14] A.D.D.: Adolescent Demo Division: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1401223559/pjmedia-20
[15] In an interview with Shaun Manning: http://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2012/2/2/cbr-shaun-mannings-interview-and-review-of-add.html
[16] The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan V. Last: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/meeting-breitbart-bat-cave_633038.html
[17] seizing the media narrative: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/03/02/i_m_a_danger_to_the_women_of_america
[18] in the contraceptive debate: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/03/03/a_statement_from_rush
[19] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIeByOeERpY
[20] no label lackeys: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/327127.php
[21] if you tried hard enough: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/03/02/the-million-breitbart-project/
[22] moving forward with your plan: http://www.city-journal.org/2012/eon0301ak.html

[E.R. Campbell]

An interesting reflection, with which I, broadly, agree, by Andrew Coyne, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the National Post:

My emphasis added
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/03/10/andrew-coyne-question-isnt-where-conservatism-is-going-but-where-has-it-gone/

Question isn’t where conservatism is going, but where has it gone

Andrew Coyne

Mar 10, 2012

This is from some remarks I’ll be making Saturday morning to the Manning Centre conference, a gathering of conservatives, and Conservatives, in Ottawa.

I confess I’m not particularly interested in defining conservatism. I do not see the point of knowing whether a given idea is or is not conservative, or in asking how a conservative would respond to x or y. This strikes me as an odd way to think about the world: to start with a box and try to make your views fit inside it.

What I believe in are a set of principles having to do with the freedom of the individual, the usefulness but not infallibility of markets, and the legitimate but limited role of the state. There are, in brief, a few things we need government to do, based on well-established criteria on which there is a high degree of expert consensus. The task is simply to get government to stick to those things, rather than waste scarce resources on things that could be done as well or better by other means: that is, government should only do what only government can do.

As I say, these ideas are not novel, or controversial. Indeed, you would find support for them, to a greater or lesser degree, across the political spectrum.

Nevertheless, there was a party, once, that believed in these things, to a somewhat greater extent than the other parties. That party called itself conservative, whether with a small or a large C, so I suppose you could call the things it believed conservatism. But you are no longer that party.

For example, that party favoured balanced budgets. But you are not that party. In fact, you boast of how your decision to add $150-billion to the national debt saved the economy.

That party favoured cutting or at least controlling spending, after the massive spree of the Liberals’ last years. But you are not that party. In fact, you boast of how you have increased spending by 7% per year — $37-billion in one year!

That party favoured a simpler, flatter tax system, that left people free to decide how to spend, save or invest their money for themselves. But you are not that party. In fact, you boast of the many gimmicks and gew-gaws with which you have festooned the tax code.

That party favoured abolishing corporate welfare. But you are not that party. In fact you boast of the handouts you make, often accompanied by ministers or indeed MPs bearing outsized novelty cheques. In some cases, you even put the Conservative logo on them.

That party favoured privatization, deregulation, reform of public services. But you are not that party. Employment insurance, Via Rail, Canada Post, the CBC: you have no plan for reform of any them. Transportation and telecommunications remain as protected and over-regulated as ever, while your support for supply management in agriculture borders on the hysterical. You even boasted, through two elections, of how much more intrusive and heavy-handed your environmental policy was, compared to the market-oriented measures preferred by your opponents. To be fair, you have not actually nationalized anything. Oh, except the auto industry.

That party was for a robust Parliament, with more powerful MPs, free of the party whip. Needless to say you are not that party. That party was for a balanced federation of equal provinces. But you are now the party of asymmetric federalism and nations within nations.

That party was against breaking election promises. That party was against patronage and pork-barreling. And that party was against corruption and political dirty tricks. I don’t know whether you are still that party.

This isn’t a question of incrementalism, but of going in entirely the wrong direction. It isn’t just that you failed to do the things you should have. It is that you did things you should not have. And, what is worse, you did them, not reluctantly or shamefacedly, but enthusiastically. You didn’t just sell out. You bought in.

I don’t want to say it’s been all bad. You fought the last election on cutting corporate tax rates, and have introduced or promised some other useful tax reforms. Your trade policy is tremendously ambitious, and you have made some tentative, if largely unsuccessful, efforts to untangle the mess the provinces have made of our own domestic market.

And now, we are told, we are about to see unveiled a “breath-taking” budget that will finally begin the turn towards smaller government; that, having increased spending by nearly $70-billion since taking office, you might cut as much as $8-billion from it; that the conservatism you largely abandoned over the last eight years can be reconstructed in the course of an afternoon.

Good luck with that. You have spent your time in office educating people in what they should expect from government in general, and your government in particular. You have established the criteria by which they should judge you: as the party that brings home the bacon. They might be forgiven some distress at finding their bacon rations have suddenly been shortened. And they will be disinclined to trust you as you begin to tell them some hard truths, since you have been so little disposed to earn their trust until now.

Perhaps you will succeed, nevertheless. You have your majority, after all. But consider that even if you do, in 2016, after 10 years in power, you will still be spending more, after inflation, adjusting for population growth, than the Liberals you replaced.

So before you ask, where is conservatism going, perhaps it would be better to ask: where has it gone?

Postmedia News

Yep ... Conservatism sure does need work, a lot of it.

[Thucydides]

Andrew Breitbart's media legacy is a celebration of conservative values, especially providing outlets for the voice of the individual rather than simply accepting the "narrative" of the legacy media. I expect that we wil see a flood of would be Breitbarts in the years to come. Canada had aggregators like "The Blogging Tories" and "Liblogs" so we have some place to start.

http://reason.com/archives/2012/03/10/how-andrew-breitbart-changed-the-news

How Andrew Breitbart Changed the News
Love him or hate him, he demonstrated how to build your own media outlet.

Nick Gillespie | March 10, 2012

Note: This piece originally ran at CNN.com on March 2, 2012. Read it there.

(CNN) -- To get a sense of just how polarizing a figure new media innovator Andrew Breitbart was, get a load of this tweet from Slate's Matt Yglesias that went out mere hours after the news of Breitbart's unexpected death at age 43 broke: "The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBrietbart dead."

Breitbart would relish that sort of venomous barb, not least because it meant that liberals with an uncomplicated mainstream media perspective were taking notice of him and his point of view. That such a churlish and distasteful comment reflects poorly on its author, an establishment blogger with impeccable left of center bona fides, and his Washington Post-owned platform, would simply be icing on the cake.

As the creator of the controversial suite of "Big" sites (including Big Government, Big Journalism, Big Hollywood, and Big Peace), the man who helped put the nonprofit ACORN in the crosshairs of angry lawmakers who ultimately defunded the organization, and the reason former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner's crotch shot went viral, Breitbart didn't simply risk the ire of indignant liberals. He insisted on it, even as he was no straight-up social conservative: At the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference, he protested the banning of the gay-friendly group GOProud by hosting a dance party featuring lesbian singer Sophie B. Hawkins. (Full disclosure: I have blogged in the past for Big Hollywood and Reason.tv posts some of our videos at Big Government.)

Anyone who tries to reduce his importance to that of a fire-breathing, ax-wielding right-wing hatchet man -- a sort of Sean Hannity Jr. - is going to miss entirely his enduring legacy to the current and future mediascape.

For years, his job was to be "Matt Drudge's *****" (his term, which he used in a 2007 Reason interview), to prowl the Web for links both banal and profound and edit the site that more than any other showed how the Internet could be used to route around information bottlenecks imposed by official spokesmen and legacy news outlets.

From Drudge, he went on to help launch the Huffington Postof all things, named for the foreign-born, heavily accented woman who once campaigned for California's ugly, anti-immigrant Proposition 187 before embracing the gospel according to Howard Zinn, Van Jones, and Bill Maher. Widely misunderstood in its embryonic phase as the worst sort of vanity project -- Arianna Huffington's celebrity friends lecture the world about livable wages while dropping green-energy manifestos from their private jets -- the Huffington Post is in fact a marvel of open-sourced news gathering and content creation.

Though Huffington would later challenge some of Breitbart's claims about how much of her site sprung fully formed from his brow, she never stinted on the fact that he was intensely interested in creating a new way of conversing about everything that matters to people: "He was extremely interested in how to have a conversation online — how to bring together all these interesting voices," Huffington told Wired's Noah Shachtman. "Now it's, like, so obvious. But at the time, it had never been done."

He pulled off the same stunt with his increasingly influential "Big" sites -- and in a way that was more suited to his ideological leanings, which tilted not so much toward the right as they did against what he saw as inescapable and underappreciated bias and smugness in the mainstream media. As my colleague Matt Welch, a longtime friend of Breitbart, writes, "He didn't actually have strong philosophical/policy beliefs -- at all -- and he was always perfectly comfortable and perfectly welcome in ideologically and culturally diverse settings."

From the dozen or so occasions in which I interacted with him, I can attest to the truth of that statement. He had opinions as big as all outdoors and loved to argue about everything -- and on nothing more than the innate superiority of the National League to the American League in baseball (on this, as on many other topics, he was surely wrong). But the point is that he loved to argue, not to surround himself with people who thought exactly like him.

His legacy has nothing to do with whether the Republican party picked up Anthony Weiner's congressional seat or whether ACORN has been able to renew its funding. It has to do with the ways in which he created new places and spaces to talk about whatever any of us want to talk about. He told Reason in 2004 that after feeling ignored by existing outlets, "We decided to go out and create our media."

It doesn't matter who we is, kemo sabe. It's the conservatives at Drudge, the liberals at HuffPo, the leftists at DailyKos, the libertarians at Reason. It's all of us and Breitbart helped create and grow a series of do-it-yourself demonstration projects through which we can all speak more loudly and more fully.

Breitbart is dead, but the conversation pits he built will live on for a long, long time. A lot of people theorize about democratizing the public square and bringing new voices and sources into conversations about politics and culture. Breitbart actually did it. It wasn't always perfect and it wasn't always pretty (ask Shirley Sherrod, the former Department of Agriculture official who sued him for defamation), but he blazed a path that surely leads to a far richer and more interesting mediascape than the one we all grew up with.

Nick Gillespie is editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason.tv and co-author with Matt Welch of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America.

[RangerRay]

An interesting reflection, with which I, broadly, agree, by Andrew Coyne, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the National Post:

My emphasis added
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/03/10/andrew-coyne-question-isnt-where-conservatism-is-going-but-where-has-it-gone/

Yep ... Conservatism sure does need work, a lot of it.

The fact that BC premier Christy Clark was invited to speak at this event also suggests that conservatism sure does need A LOT of work.

[RangerRay]

Recently, there has been a lot of talk in the media in BC about how "conservative" Premier Christy Clark is.  From getting Tory staffers, the support of ex-Tory MP's, and her recent welcoming by Preston Manning at the Manning Institute meeting a few days ago, the press are calling her a "conservative".

However, below are many reasons why BC Premier Christy Clark, though leading the free-enterprise coalition BC Liberals (for now), is NOT a conservative.

http://alexgtsakumis.com/2012/03/13/christy-clark-was-not-ever-is-not-now-nor-will-ever-be-a-conservative-nevermind-what-the-presto-of-the-dunce-tank-thinks-clark-is-canadas-plastic-dodo-bird/

Christy Clark Was Not Ever, Is Not Now, Nor Will Ever Be a Conservative! Nevermind What the Presto! of the Dunce Tank Thinks, Clark is Canada’s Plastic Dodo Bird!!!


‘Iron Snowbird’ my derriere. Let’s do a little Christy retrospective:

(1) Grew up in staunchly Liberal home where Liberal doctrine was like mother’s milk. Daddy Jim was a huge federal Liberal who HATED Conservatives. One of their neighbors in Burnaby recently wrote me with some wonderful anecdotes about Jim Clark and his thoughts about anyone outside the federal Liberal fold. It might explain his failure to gain election and why his youngest daughter is such a mess.

(2) Spent high school and university (all two years, cumulatively) as a federal Liberal lapdog. Whatever daddy said went. When she ran for student council at SFU, she was supported by federal Liberals. Organized by federal Liberals and ran the Young Liberal Association.

(3) Was a former federal Liberal staffer in Ottawa for a controversial and staunchly Liberal Cabinet Minister.

(4) Part of the federal Liberal machine that took over the provincial Liberal party. Conservatives were not welcome until Gordon Campbell came along (what does this tell you???)

(5) Along with ex-hubby, smashmouth, scorched earther Marky Marissen (and his cheating funky bunch) destroyed the federal Liberal party after helping anoint Paul Martin as Prime Minister.

(6) Spent her entire time as a talk show host reading from federal Liberal speaking notes when dealing with national issues (I know at least two people that have shown me emails sent to her, including responses, about what kind of “shitheads” Conservatives are and how Stephen Harper was (is) an “*******.”)  Spent years HAMMERING Stephen Harper for little or no reason–and all with federal Liberal talking points sitting right in front of her–retyped and ready.

(7) While on talk radio was the only word jockey that defended AdScam and played down the significance of taxpayer dollars being re-routed into the pockets of federal Liberal operatives. One famous interview included Joyce Murray, her son’s former babysitter (no, I’m not kidding–federal Liberal Marissen operative Cameron St. John ran Murray’s election for her and a great candidate, Cindy Grauer, lost).

(8 ) Remains consumed by federal Liberal loyalists, with token Tories, that are by her side in aid of resume advancement–or building a pipeline no one in this province should ever want

(9) During her leadership campaign, when her operatives CHEATED to win her the crown, they worked off federal Liberal campaign lists and federal Liberal donor sheets.

(10) Of her immediate political circle of influence, NOT ONE member, is anything but a federal Liberal. The Tories in her office are window dressing and last minute additions. Kim Haakstad, her brother Bruce, ex-hubby Mark, election readiness chair Steve Kukucha, de facto Deputy Premier Mike deDung and closest advisors during the campaign, were all federal Liberals. Only ‘Cocktail Conservatives’ working the lobbying or advancement circuit made guest appearances (some have already reaped rewards).

(11) Her biggest defender of the BC Liberal establishment is none other than David McLean, who was recently confronted about the Premier’s “dismal performance” by another industry titan. McLean’s response? ‘Give Chirsty more time. She’ll be just fine.’ Can’t imagine why the blind loyality…by McLean–a long-time federal Liberal.

(12) ANY former federal “Conservative” MP standing next to her is either a lobbyist in the province of BC or has some business reason to be near the Premier’s circle.

(13) The endorsement of Presto! Manning must rank as one of the most embarrassing moments in anyone’s career, but it requires a robust media to ask questions like: “Premier, Mr, Manning has a very socially conservative view of gay marriage and abortion. What are your views on both topics?” Or “Premier. Mr. Manning at one time hinted of Western alienation, dare we say possibly separation, what are your views on linguistic duality west of the lakehead and are we in an era where Quebec disgruntlement might spark that same Western alienation? What do see in in Canada’s future as the glue to our unity?” Or “Premier, Mr. Manning has some very strong views on promoting pipelines across the province that even REAL Conservatives like writer Alex G. Tsakumis are against. Even if a report supporting pipelines across BC is endorsed by any govt Board, how would you save harmless the BC environment and specifically the ecology of the areas in question?”

(14) Pretends to be socially conservative, while living a life completely detached from such a constrained reality. While a declared church going Anglican, she’s progressed significantly from the toga parties she was famous for (as recently as 2003–with a guest list that included Dave Basi and Erik Bornmann). If there was ever a practitioner of what I refer to as ‘Ted Kennedy Catholicism’ Christy Clark must be the classic high priestess. At least I don’t lie about my station of sinning. Or my THOROUGH enjoyment thereof. And without betraying confidences, next time she tells someone that she prefers a private school education for Hamish because “it’s faith based” just wait for the lie to be revealed shortly. I can’t tell you anything yet and I believe family members are off limits, but this poor kid, who understand is a gem of a boy, had his mother brazenly lie about him. If they’re lucky, her son won’t be attending the faith-based Catholic school he’s currently at past  September. So when she recently claimed on the Bill Good Show about her need for a “faith-based” education for Hamish, she was COMPLETELY LYING, as she’d made an application well-before her statement, for the lad to attend a school that is excellence-based, but not faith-based. Typical of a ‘Ted Kennedy Catholic’. Jesus is the reason for my treason…

Tell me again that Christy Clark is a ‘Conservative’??? Or that she has ANY Conservative credentials, social or otherwise? Christy Clark about as real a Conservative as Peter Popoff is a sincere preacher.

If she’s a Conservative, why all the shameless efforts to court Conservatives? If you are one, it happens without ANY effort necessary. Right? If the Premier has Conservative credentials, why attack those long-time, principled Conservatives for exercising their rights to vote with their feet and leave the BC Liberals–the most corrupt party in BC history?

What a contemptible joke this woman’s career is…that she must now rely on failed Tory has-beens and money whores to prove her credentials as something she’s never been or ever will be.

Pathetic. While the media continues to sleep….

Conservatives are leaving the BC Liberals in droves.  Unless she leaves office, they are not coming back.

[Rifleman62]

No shidt Alloutte.

The NDP leading in the polls? What next for BC?

[RangerRay]

In BC, the NDP seldom lead.  They lead only when the Liberal/Conservative coalition implodes.

And it's imploding.

[Thucydides]

Sounds like BC needs something like the Wildrose Alliance Party or the Saskatchewan Party to bring sanity and order to the province. (Ontario could also do with the PCPO either dropping the "P" or have Reform Ontario move from an idea to a reality). The growth of small "c" conservative parties may well be the next big thing in Canadian politics, and this could be a very big story if we see a flow of people moving from small "c" conservative parties into the Federal party.

[RangerRay]

My feeling is that the BC Conservative Party (not officially affiliated with the federal party, just as the BC Liberals are not officially affiliated with the federal Libs) will probably not form the next government in 2013, but will draw enough support away from the BC Liberals so that the NDP form government.  In BC, the NDP consistently get about 40% of the vote, win or lose.

In my opinion, 4 years of NDP would not be so bad.  The free-enterprise coalition is in desperate need of an enema to clean out the corruption and crony capitalists.

[Thucydides]

This could equally go in the US economy or Canadian economic superthread as well. I expect this may be the nex "frontier" for conservatives, classical liberals and libertarians looking to create a post progressive society:

http://reason.com/archives/2012/03/15/complex-societies-need-simple-laws

Complex Societies Need Simple Laws
We need to end the orgy of rule-making at once and embrace the simple rules that true liberals like America’s founders envisioned.

John Stossel | March 15, 2012

“If you have 10,000 regulations,” Winston Churchill said, “you destroy all respect for law.”

He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That’s what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities have probably doubled that. We have so many rules that legal specialists can’t keep up. Criminal lawyers call the rules “incomprehensible.” They are. They are also “uncountable.” Congress has created so many criminal offenses that the American Bar Association says it would be futile to even attempt to estimate the total.

 So what do the politicians and bureaucrats of the permanent government do? They pass more rules.

That’s not good. It paralyzes life.

Politicians sometimes say they understand the problem. They promise to “simplify.” But they rarely do. Mostly, they come up with new rules. It’s just natural. It’s how the public measures politicians. Schoolchildren on Washington tours ask, “What laws did you pass?” If they don’t pass new laws, the media whine about the “do-nothing Congress.”

This is also not good.

When so much is illegal, common sense dies. Out of fear of breaking rules, people stop innovating, trying, helping.

Think I exaggerate? Consider what happened in Britain, a country even more rule-bound than America. A man had an epileptic seizure and fell into a shallow pond. Rescue workers might have saved him, but they wouldn’t enter the 3-foot-deep pond. Why? Because “safety” rules passed after rescuers drowned in a river now prohibited “emergency workers” from entering water above their ankles. Only 30 minutes later, when rescue workers with “stage 2 training” arrived, did they enter the water, discover that the man was dead and carry him to the approved inflatable medical tent. Twenty other cops, firemen and “rescuers” stood next to the pond and watched.

The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, sometimes called the first libertarian thinker, said, “The more artificial taboos and restrictions there are in the world, the more the people are impoverished....The more that laws and regulations are given prominence, the more thieves and robbers there will be.” He complained that there were “laws and regulations more numerous than the hairs of an ox.” What would he have thought of our world?

Big-government advocates will say that as society grows more complex, laws must multiply to keep up. The opposite is true. It is precisely because society is unfathomably complex that laws must be kept simple. No legislature can possibly prescribe rules for the complex network of uncountable transactions and acts of cooperation that take place every day. Not only is the knowledge that would be required to make such a regulatory regime work unavailable to the planners, it doesn’t actually exist, because people don’t know what they will want or do until they confront alternatives in the real world. Any attempt to manage a modern society is more like a bull in a darkened china shop than a finely tuned machine. No wonder the schemes of politicians go awry. (Interpolation: This is a restatement of the "Local Knowledge Problem")

F.A. Hayek wisely said, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Another Nobel laureate, James M. Buchanan, put it this way: “Economics is the art of putting parameters on our utopias.”

Barack Obama and his ilk in both parties don’t want parameters on their utopias. They think the world is subject to their manipulation. That idea was debunked years ago.

“With good men and strong governments everything was considered feasible,” the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote. But with the advent of economics, “it was learned that ... there is something operative which power and force are unable to alter and to which they must adjust themselves if they hope to achieve success, in precisely the same way as they must taken into account the laws of nature.”

I wish our politicians knew that. I wish they’d stop their presumptuous schemes.

We need to end the orgy of rule-making at once and embrace the simple rules that true liberals like America’s founders envisioned.

John Stossel (read his Reason archive) is the host of Stossel, which airs Thursdays on the FOX Business Network at 9 pm ET and is rebroadcast on Saturdays and Sundays at 9pm & midnight ET. Go here for more info.