The following is the text of a letter I sent to the editors at The Wall Street Journal.  (The version they printed, in today’s Journal (4/11/13), was edited just a bit.)

Daniel Henninger, in “Capital’s Corruptions” (Wall Street Journal 4/4/13),  states that corruption keeps the poor down, suppresses growth, and kills capitalism, and that its eradication would be an appropriate focus for the new pope.  In making the case, Mr. Henninger treats corruption as though it were a cause, not an effect; a disease, not merely a symptom; something that could be eradicated if we attacked it.

Hayek was not the first (the early Israelites beat him to it) to observe that the very existence of government invites corruption, as the governed, having granted powers to their governors, are inevitably tempted to offer bribes and kickbacks to induce the governors to grant – or to reward them for granting – favors in the exercise of that power.  Power corrupts, absolute power, . . . and so on.  It is impossible to outlaw or eliminate corruption; it exists in every nation on earth.  But some nations are substantially more corrupt than others, and that is no accident or coincidence, because it is clear that the greater the degree of governmental intrusion into the normal operation of free markets, the greater the degree of corruption the country must eventually endure.  As Hayek has demonstrated, once a government gets into the business of picking winners and losers (i.e., planning the economy), it is inevitable that businesses will compete less and less on the basis of the price and quality of their products and services, and more and more on the basis of currying the favor of those in government with the power to determine who wins and who loses.  Just consider what has happened in the US in the areas of healthcare and financial services.  Sometimes the bribes and kickbacks are obvious and illegal; sometimes they are more subtle, and we call them “crony capitalism.”

Totalitarian, command/control, planned-economy states like Russia and China have extremely high levels of corruption: under regimes like theirs, if you want something done, you bribe somebody – otherwise, it never gets done, regardless of how capable and honest a competitor you might be.  No pope can do much about corruption  – certainly, no pope with a predilection for economic class-warfare, regardless of the piety of his motives. You want to curtail corruption?  Get the government out of the business of planning the economy.

Mr. Henninger, by focusing upon the effect rather than the cause, is playing right into the hands of the Obama crowd, who no doubt would attack corruption in the only way they know how:  mock reform, in the form of even more governmental-regulation.

Here is the text of a letter I wrote to the Wall Street Journal that was published (with virtually zero editing) in the Letters section of today’s (3/16/13) Journal:

Peggy Noonan, in “The Anti-Confidence Man” (Opinion, 3/9/13), seems to be living in a time-warp.  Five years into the Obama era, she is still critiquing him as though he were a sort of wonky LBJ (or maybe a thuggish Gene McCarthy), still wondering why he is waiting so long to install any of the easy, obvious fixes that would re-start the stagnant economy.  “It’s all so frozen, so stuck. Just when American needs a boost . . . Mr. Obama is making the same mistake he made four years ago . . he does not see it.  He thinks he’s in a wrestling match . . . Once they (the American people) do (have jobs), so much will follow – deficits will go down . . . There’s little sense he sees this.”

Sadly, it is not the President who “does not see it”, it is Ms. Noonan.  The President sees exactly what he wants, which is a steady march (actually, a decline) toward Democratic Party domination of all three branches of government and a collectivist, statist, planned-economy government, and if it means keeping the economy on hold – rather than fixing our fiscal and monetary policies, which would cause temporary pain (spiking interest rates) and might thus cost him the mid-term elections – he is more than willing to oblige.  The President is not oblivious to our pain, he is manipulating it – and winning.

The one upside to unintended down-time for an injury:  time on my hands to re-visit – and learn new things from – a couple of old-favorite books.  In this case, Paul Johnson’s wonderful A History of The Jews (1987, Harper & Row), and my pick for the best non-fiction, non-scientific, non arts-centered book of the 20^th century, F.A. Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom (original text 1944, The University of Chicago).  Eureka moment:  finally perceived the connection between Johnson’s observation that the very existence of a state (i.e, a government) tends to corrupt, and Hayek’s fundamental theorem that the state can never be as efficient a driver of an economy as the markets.

Johnson’s observation (at pp 57 and 58 of the Harper Perennial 1958 edition) is that the early Israelites, though they had their kings and other leaders, resisted the bestowal of too much power upon them – and resisted (with permanent effect as it turned out, until the establishment of the modern State of Israel after WW II) the establishment of a more formal state with geographic borders.  “On the other hand, if kingship and state became permanent, their inevitable characteristics and needs would encroach upon the religion, and worship of Yahweh would succumb to internal corruption.  The dilemma was unresolved throughout the First and Second Commonwealths; it remains unresolved in Israel today.” (emphasis added).  That is a terse and rather cryptic foreshadowing of the modern truism that the very existence of government invites corruption, as the governed, having granted powers to their governors, are inevitably tempted to offer bribes and kickbacks as inducements to grant – or as rewards for the granting of – favors in the exercise of that power.  Power corrupts, absolute power, . . . and so on.

Hayek, of course, has written a thousand brilliant variations around the fundamental theme that no government, no central plan, no matter how smart and informed, can ever be as effective and efficient a processor and organizer of pertinent information as free markets; even the smartest government is always playing catch-up, as its best plans are virtually stillborn at utterance, because of  government’s inability to assemble and process as much of the extant data as markets perpetually reflect and refresh, and because any modest utility is instantly rendered obsolete by the birth of new data.  Not to mention that the governors, by the very nature and scope of the jobs (and even apart from political bias and ideology), can never be as smart and well-informed as the actual economic players in a free market.

Back to the Eureka moment: thus there are two reasons why the whole Marxist, Socialist, Fascist, Collectivist, Progressive, Leftist, Obama-ist model of substituting governmental planning and non-essential regulation for free and lightly-regulated markets is doomed to fail.  Government is inherently, unavoidably, both corrupt and stupid; the more government, the more the corruption and stupidity.

Daniel Henninger, lead editorialist of The Wall Street Journal, has written a piece, “The State of Obama” in the Wall Street Journal (2/14/13), that deftly presents yet another version of The Case Against Obama.  While some of the elements of the case are, even at this late date, shocking in their depiction of just how far off-the-rails this President really is, the overall picture is nothing new.  As further revealed by the Henninger piece, the President’s self-infatuation is pathological  -  can you imagine any other human being, even a politician, who could not just think this thought but publicly utter these words in the presence of another human being:  “It is very rare I come to an event where I’m like the fifth or sixth most interesting person.” (This on the occasion of being potentially upstaged by the presence of some pro basketball players.)  Mr. Henninger presents an Obama who sees himself as an historic figure of the magnitude of a Lincoln or Gandhi:  the leader – and the instrument – of a second American revolution, one so profound that it will leave a nation unrecognizable as the same country as the one that was the product of the original American Revolution.

The one false note in the piece is Mr. Henninger’s statement, in his concluding paragraph, that “Barack Obama is indeed in sync with the public will . . .”, an opinion that ignores the fact that nearly half the country voted against him and the likelihood that a very sizable portion of that half considers the man to be completely bizarre and a menace to the country.

And then, Mr. Henninger concludes this otherwise dramatic piece with this:  “In the next four years, that could prove to be a problem.”   Talk about the elephant giving birth to a mouse.

We Are At War.  Our Second Civil War Has Begun

It is conceivable that what I am about to disclose will be news to the Obama Coalition:  that curious blend of most of the Have-Nots of America with the cluster of favored Haves who manipulate them, such as the academy, the media, the entertainment industry, organized labor, Chicago politician-thugs, and the crony-capitalists – the co-opted elements of cyberworld and Wall Street and other select parts of what used to be called the private sector.  The Coalition folks quite possibly do not realize that we are now deeply engaged in a second Civil War in this country, one that might not cost lives but that will alter the country, if the Coalition wins, even more radically than the first did or could have done.  As far as the non-Coalition half of the country is concerned, their views and values are so different from (and they are so offended and antagonized by) the views and values of the Coalition half that they see no possibility of a reconciliation and indeed they see no point to making further attempts to achieve a reconciliation.

For the non-Coalition folks (essentially, the American Right), there is no longer any political solution out there, no conceivable compromise or accommodation with this President, that would be of any interest or value to them.  That is not to say that the American Right is unable and unwilling to compromise and live with the American Left; it is so say that the American Right is uninterested in attempting any further compromises or accommodations with Mr. Obama.  As far as they are concerned, he is an alien from another planet, far beyond the spectrum of anything they expect in an American President.  For some of them, it is a matter of the shocking escalation of the country’s movement toward a collectivist, statist model of government; for others, it is the escalating war on individual and economic liberties.  For many, it is just a gut reaction to the massive growth in spending and the sense that the President is concerned mainly with amassing political power and control, not in taking meaningful actions to re-vitalize the economy.  They get it, that he is deadly serious when he talks about transforming the country, changing it into the kind of place they or their ancestors once risked death in order to escape.  They are not saying he is objectively right or wrong, merely that he is talking about some other country, not America. Regardless of the specifics, they do not want to live with him, they do not want to live in his version of America, they do not want to continue to accommodate his followers and acolytes and dependents, and they are no longer interested in making any deals.  A great many of them, wistfully, are making plans to move to another country.  For the American Right, this is no longer about working things out with someone like a Clinton or even an LBJ, about maintaining the separation of powers, or about changing Administrations from time to time to keep the pendulum from swinging too far away from the political center.  This President has pushed them way beyond all such possibilities.  We are now talking, sadly, about the end of America, its conversion into some weird channeling of France or China or some other place that people want to move out of, rather than into.   They are way, way past “this could be a problem.”

The President Is Keeping Up The Offensive

From this writer’s perspective, every day brings news of yet another presidential speech, program, regulation, executive order, etc., that I find so appalling, so offensive, that it is like playing Whack-A-Mole (with dozens of moles), trying to keep up and to explain my objections to every single thing these people are trying to pull.  There seems no further point in trying to tackle the details of each new assault they direct at the America they so dislike.  I am appalled by the values and principles that drive these people.  I just don’t want to have to indulge them any longer.  I don’t want to share a country with them.  I don’t want to watch the movies they make or read the books they write. I am exhausted with trying to fight through the bias with which they have turned our mass media into their propaganda and PR arm.   I see no upside to trying to find common ground with them.  They have declared war against me, and I’d be prepared to see the country just split and to forfeit to them New England and the Beltway and the rest of Blue-state America.  Would I be willing to give up even California?  You bet:  the only part worth saving, Silicon Valley, will be Death Valley after a few more years of Jerry Brown’s stewardship.  Eric Schmidt, the Obama Administration’s boy toy, may stick around as the token crony-capitalist, but the rest of the Valley will head for Austin, Texas or other free-enterprise zones outside of CA.

He Gave Us Ample Warning

It is not as though Mr. Obama has deceived anyone regarding his ultimate ambitions and intentions.  Yes, he has seduced the Have-Nots with his unfulfillable promises of a lifetime of state welfare, where everything they want is free of charge and paid-for by the hated rich and there is no reason to bother to get a job.  But for those with the means to absorb Mr. Obama’s words and who take the trouble to read those words carefully and grasp their meaning, be they on the Left or the Right, there is really no deception at all.  The President’s words make certain things abundantly clear:

• that he wants to  eliminate the two principle features of our republican form of government – the distribution and separation of powers among its three branches, and the Constitutional framework that outlines and limits the powers delegated by the people to their government and that articulates a bill of citizens’ rights;
• that he would like to replace our traditional governmental system, with its checks and balances between the legislative branch and the executive branch, with a parliamentary system, in which the leader of the dominant political party is in control of both the executive and the legislative functions of the government and thus has far greater power than under our present system for so long as his party is the most popular party nationally;
• that he believes the judiciary should decide cases on the basis of “fairness,” national interests, and more useful outcomes, rather than on the basis of laws, precedents, and the Constitution – and that it has the power to do so, because the Constitution is a “living document” that means whatever the dominant party thinks it should mean today (which may be exactly the opposite of what they thought it meant yesterday);
• that he wants to convert us to a centrally-planned and exhaustively-regulated economy; and that he wants to replace our free-market capitalism with a form of Chinese-style “state capitalism,” which involves a business sector but  does not involve free markets and is not really capitalism at all.

The President’s idea of “liberties” and freedoms has little to do with the American notion of freedom to do things (such as free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, etc., under our Bill of Rights) and consists, instead, of freedom from things– such as freedom from poverty, freedom from ill health, freedom from having to pay for your own birth control, and freedom from having to endure neighbors who are better off than you are (or more religious).   His attitude toward America as the world’s benevolent super-power, supporting peace and stability while keeping the world’s bullies from abusing their neighbors, is:  Forget about it – we need to spend all of our earned (and borrowed) money on enhancing the welfare state, not on maintaining the military capabilities needed to support our peacekeeping role.

Is The Journal Content With This Passive Role?

I don’t know what is holding Mr. Henninger back, but this train, if it has not already left the station, is fully boarded, and the doors are closing.  Could the President have been any clearer?  If all of this is not enough for Mr. Henninger to go beyond, “this could be a problem,” what else would it take?  Is Mr. Henninger waiting until he is really, really certain that the President is serious and is not going to change his objectives or his methods?   Is Mr. Henninger waiting for the President to make a formal declaration of a state of emergency so that he can invoke emergency, executive powers, maybe activate his ObamaCare Ready Reserve Corps?  Must the Democrats re-take the House in 2014? Must Germany invade Poland?  What’s it going to take?

Or maybe we have already witnessed Daniel Henninger being angry.