Politics, the 'system', the 'experts', and the American Dream

Three rather depressing articles have made me fume today . . . but they're worth noting, precisely because they're true. We need to keep this sort of thing firmly in mind as we prepare for next year's elections.

First, investment advisors Casey Research, in their daily newsletter, shed some interesting light on how the 'system' works in Washington DC.

The television news reports and op-ed columns never reveal the true face of Washington politics. The real D.C. is hidden behind a wall of silence and secrecy. There isn’t a soul in the city without a story to tell and a confidentiality agreement to protect it.

Aside from the legal problems, whistleblowing is political career suicide. The D.C. job market rewards those who can keep their mouths shut, and potential whistleblowers are carefully scrutinized. Job candidates are typically run through an ideological gauntlet. If a Congressman or lobbying group finds that one strongly disagrees with just 15% of their positions, there’s almost no way to get the job. Leaks here are a serious business, and trust is often more important than any other qualification.

. . .

If someone searches your name online and finds that your political beliefs do not match their own, your chances of getting the job become practically zero. So, there are two options: don’t write at all; or write on topics that follow the party line. Otherwise, at best, one’s future holds a prestigious position as the director of communications for the National Association of Hubcap Distributors.

When one turns on the news or reads an article, the piece has already been filtered by these incentives. Anything worth saying can’t be said. And no one wants to write a real opinion – only the party line.

. . .

Well, surely someone has written on what happens behind the scenes. There are some revealing works out there. My favorite has to be the comedy Thank You for Smoking, a fictional story of a tobacco-industry lobbyist. One may watch the trailer and the whole movie in parts. (On a side note, it’s no coincidence that the story is “fictional.” Don’t forget the confidentiality agreements.)

My experience on K Street was frighteningly similar to Thank you for Smoking, but the film fell short on one way. It showed the tobacco industry as a manipulative organization conjuring questionable studies and manipulating the public at every turn. And many critics of the movie falsely believe that the movie is only a criticism of the tobacco industry. In reality, the exact same tactics are the standard from labor unions to your favorite cancer organization; everyone is overexaggerating their case and specializing in ways to manipulate the public.

D.C. as whole is simply a giant fraud and theater for the masses. None of it is genuine. Every speech, position, and research study is manufactured by some group of analysts and writers. This experience has forever twisted my perspective of politics. When I hear a president quoted – whether it’s JFK, Reagan, or Obama – I don’t think to myself, “Man, what a great, inspiring quote”. Instead I think, “Wow, what a great speech writer. If only his opponents were lucky enough to have the same team of writers.”

There's more at the link.

Next, George Will cautions us against government 'by the experts'.

“The legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands. . . . The power of the legislative, being derived from the people . . . [is] only to make laws, and not to make legislators.”

— John Locke, “Second Treatise of Government”

Here, however, is a paradox of sovereignty: The sovereign people, possessing the right to be governed as they choose, might find the exercise of that right tiresome and so might choose to be governed in perpetuity by a despot they cannot subsequently remove. Congress did something like that in passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.

The point of PPACA is cost containment. This supposedly depends on the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB, which is a perfect expression of the progressive mind, is to be composed of 15 presidential appointees empowered to reduce Medicare spending — which is 13 percent of federal spending — to certain stipulated targets. IPAB is to do this by making “proposals” or “recommendations” to limit costs by limiting reimbursements to doctors. This, inevitably, will limit available treatments — and access to care when physicians leave the Medicare system.

The PPACA repeatedly refers to any IPAB proposal as a “legislative proposal” and speaks of “the legislation introduced” by the IPAB. Each proposal automatically becomes law unless Congress passes — with a three-fifths supermajority required in the Senate — a measure cutting medical spending as much as the IPAB proposal would.

This is a travesty of constitutional lawmaking: An executive branch agency makes laws unless Congress enacts legislation to achieve the executive agency’s aim.

And it gets worse. Any resolution to abolish the IPAB must pass both houses of Congress. And no such resolution can be introduced before 2017 or after Feb. 1, 2017, and must be enacted by Aug. 15 of that year. And if passed, it cannot take effect until 2020. Defenders of all this audaciously call it a “fast track” process for considering termination of IPAB. It is, however, transparently designed to permanently entrench IPAB — never mind the principle that one Congress cannot by statute bind another Congress from altering that statute.

. . .

... Obamacare’s most grotesque provisions ... radiate distrust of the public and its elected representatives. The essence of progressivism, and of the administrative state that is progressivism’s project, is this doctrine: Modern society is too complex for popular sovereignty, so government of, by and for supposedly disinterested experts must not perish from the earth.

Again, more at the link. Remember Nancy Pelosi? "But we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy." Well, we now know what's in it . . . and it stinks! Question is, how do we get rid of it as quickly as possible?

Both of these articles are aptly summarized by the inimitable Mark Steyn in his latest column.

The American Dream, 2011: You pay four bucks a gallon to commute between your McJob and your underwater housing to prop up a spendaholic, grabafeelic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end bankrupting your future at the rate of a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.

In a sane world, Americans would be outraged at the government waste that confronts them everywhere you turn: The abolition of the federal Education Department and the TSA is the very least they should be demanding. Instead, our elites worry about sea levels.

The oceans will do just fine. It’s America that’s drowning.

More at the link.

Folks, the American Dream has become little more than a waking nightmare. It's time to kick out all those responsible, on both sides of the political aisle, and replace them with representatives who'll listen to their constituents, and take their oaths of office seriously. Question is, are there enough of us left who care enough to work towards that? If there aren't . . . then our future is bleak indeed.

Peter