Well, it seems that “eventually” is getting close.  Arnold Kling has a list of links showing that all the welfare state social democracies are going to hell in a handbasket, with everyone else in even worse trouble than the US.

Arnold Kling predicts a US debt crisis between 2015 and 2035.  Public sector pensions are unpayable.

The welfare state has made a pile of promises it cannot fulfill, and like a debtor in trouble, has been rapidly escalating the promises.

When the president and the most prestigious academies are out of contact with reality, then the path to advancement is to deny reality.  As the housing debacle illustrates, the elite is incurably insane.  The process is self reinforcing – any contact with reality, or tendency to engage in reality testing, disqualifies you for membership of the  elite.  Only lowly contemptible insignificant people engage in reality testing, and as everyone knows, they are boobs and disgusting racists.

In beauty contests, the contestants are asked to demonstrate allegiance to progressivism, by asking them questions on which America is divided. They must side with the Cathedral, or else they lose.  Similarly in a job interview for any important position.  If an executive doubts the Cathedral, the company is likely to be sued for a “hostile work environment”, so a precondition for employment in any substantial corporation in any important position is sincere zeal for the holy faith of the Cathedral.

The tea party is not actually all that rightwing.  They are right wing in that they support the extreme left status quo ante and oppose the even more extreme left status quo.  They want to turn the clock back to Clinton, not 1950, but to save the day, would have to turn the clock back to 1900.

People planned on social security and medicare being there for them. They see the government blowing all the money on pork barrel spending and dud mortgages for non asian minorities, and they suspect that the welfare state on which they intended to rely is going broke fast.  They want to preserve the quite left wing status quo of the Clinton years.

Hence the progressive parody of the tea party: “get the government out of my medicare”.

Only the most extreme elements of the Tea Party movement leadership (Sharon Angle) actually propose to put social security on a sound footing, propose to make it a forced saving program, where you individually and personally own your social security trust fund, rather than a welfare program.

The welfare problem is a necessary result of the universal franchise.  Singapore, and only Singapore, has a non catastrophic solution to the welfare problem.  They were able to get away with a non catastrophic solution only because of the Singaporean/Confucian attitude that the rulers have the right to rule, provided things are going OK, which rewards long term orientation by politicians.

The stupidity of the voters, and the short term orientation of politicians means that a universal franchise guarantees social, economic, and political collapse once government becomes large enough to drag everything down with it.

The least radical solution that could actually work, could make the welfare state viable,  is to implement Singaporean style welfare, social security and healthcare, and to restrict the franchise enough that such a solution wins majority support from those few entitled to vote – which solution is a lot more radical than anyone in the tea party will advocate.

We can divide the major political programs into three:

1. The ignorant and unthinking, who are the great majority, since there is no point in knowing this stuff or thinking about it.
2. Those who doubt the expansion of the state can go on forever, and fear the end is nigh:  these are the tea partiers, who want to stop the boat right by the edge of the waterfall.
3. Those who believe the state can expand forever, because state expenditures are so much more productive than mere private expenditures: these are the elite, to whom thinking like the state thinks is a badge of status, and who therefore confidently believe that going over the waterfall will be fine because the boat will fly like a bird without any need for external support.

The practical solution, of course, is to back the boat away from the waterfall – a long way back from the waterfall, but it is too fiscally late to do that without blowing off most of the state’s financial obligations, and politically impossible to do that without radically restricting the franchise. A program of recognizing bankruptcy, and throwing most of the population of the voting rolls is unlikely to be very popular.

As Dusk tells us:

look at how much regulation the banking industry came under during the 1990s and 2000s to serve the interests of social justice by giving out more mortgages to poor and Non-Asian Minority home-buyers. Rather than bankers individually growing weary and ultimately withdrawing from their calling, they as collective corporations dove into coerced self-sacrifice headfirst and for years swam around in big bucks. And if somehow the pool’s drain opened up, someone else would keep them afloat – I mean, people aren’t just going to let saints go under for serving the cause of social justice, right?

Researchers, inventors, and artists too resent having to comply with state regulations such as meeting affirmative action targets – e.g., when appealing to the government for grant money, having to detail how some expensive piece of equipment will be used in equal measure by men and women, as well as by whites / Asians and NAMs. Or having to detail how some community arts outreach project will target all demographic groups equally, if a financially strapped arts group wants state funding for it. Nevertheless, as annoyed as they may be, on the whole the members of these professions are not in revolt, do not even give off the smell of stewing in resentment, and don’t suffer from the high burn-out rates that Rand would’ve predicted.

…

What Rand fundamentally miscalculated was the ability of inventors, businessmen, etc. to not just slip out of their regulatory fetters but to then form them into lashes with which to whip their competitors, a phenomenon known as “regulatory capture.”

Anti anti communism, the repudiation of McCarthyism, is the same phenomenon: We now know that McCarthy was correct, but politically inconvenient.

McCarthy named Fred Fisher on television as a hostile communist infiltrator within the American government – as indeed he was.

Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Fred Fisher never denied being a communist. No one has ever said he was not a communist He was a member of the National Lawyers Guild, which we knew then to be a communist front organization, and subsequent intercepts has confirmed to be a communist front organization – therefore, a hostile infiltrator, sabotaging the US government from within.

The reason communist infiltration was tolerated and encouraged was that the Cathedral perceived itself to be using the Soviet Union, rather than being used by the Soviet Union.

Similarly, the Cathedral likes to import Muslims precisely because of their anti western attitudes.

To say that it was outrageous to criticize Fisher,was to say it was outrageous to worry about hostile people
exercising power in sensitive positions within the US government.

On the evidence revealed in the Venona intercepts, there is compelling evidence that the Lawyers Guild was a communist front organization.

The evidence presented by the House Unamerican activities committee also seem to me to be quite convincing, but someone might reasonably disagree – the evidence could plausibly be interpreted as evidence of anti anti communism, rather than evidence of communism, plus evidence that the benevolent and helpful soviet union
was benevolently assisting the benevolent and helpful Lawyer’s guild to engage in helpful benevolence.

And that is precisely why anti communism came to be demonized – because the Lawyer’s guild, with the direct and substantial support and assistance of the Soviet Union, was in fact assisting the Cathedral in its war against ordinary Americans, and was not directly assisting the Soviet Union in its efforts to conquer the world – so the Cathedral quite reasonably and realistically perceived themselves as using Stalin, rather than being used by Stalin.

The Lawyer’s guild were doing what the Cathedral perceived as good – at the instigation and with the assistance of Stalin and the Soviet Union, and were not obviously doing anything the Cathedral might perceive as bad, like arranging for the Soviet army to shoot Cathedral members and bury them.

Thus the Cathedral could plausibly view the Lawyer’s guild as the Cathedral infiltrating and manipulating the communists, rather than the communists infiltrating and manipulating the Cathedral.

The activities of the Lawyer’s guild are evidence that the Cathedral was soft on communism and allowed themselves to be infiltrated. It is also evidence that the Cathedral strategy of being nice and doing favors was working, that infiltration was a two way street.

Remember when Khrushchev said “we will bury you” they immediately proceeded to reinterpret him as proposing a
relatively peaceful takeover that leaves the existing cathedral in place as Soviet apparatchicks, rather than shipping them off the gulag – revealing what they really wanted and hoped for.

They hoped for and expected the kind of Soviet takeover that was the implied backstory of those “Startrek the Next Generation” episodes created before the fall of the Soviet Union – though I am pretty sure the Soviet Union had a very different kind of takeover in mind, intended to deal with the Cathedral with hot lead and shovels, rather than giving Cathedral members cushy jobs as Soviet Apparatchiks.

The Cathedral realistically believed that communists could and would promote their ideal of a greater, more powerful, and more benevolent state, just as they realistically believe that Muslim voters will vote for more government. They were unrealistic in believing that the Russians shared progressivism or could be persuaded to share it.

They realistically hope to use the enemies of America against their American enemies, and unrealistically hope to convert the enemies of America to progressivism.

It is even less realistic to suppose that Muslims will be converted to progressivism, but observe the strident response of progressives when we ridicule this delusion:  “Raaaaacist!”

The Cathedral sets a very high value on being reasonable and nice and civilized. I recall that when a warmist scientist addressed skeptical scientists, he urged them that if they took a more conciliatory position they would have “more influence” I don’t remember his exact words, and they matter little because the message was primarily in the way his body language commented upon his words, the unspoken but gestured message being “accept a lot of warmist beliefs, and warmists will accept a little of skeptic beliefs, and we will see to it that you get grants.”

And thus, contrary to what was predicted in “Atlas Shrugs”, scientists have come on board with the Cathedral and abandoned science, rather than retreating to Galt’s Gulch.

A similar tendency towards shear niceness was evident in the financial collapse. It was quite unthinkable that financiers who has pissed away billions of their clients money in nice behavior, should thereby become unemployed, or even have their wealth and power seriously diminished, or even have their control over other people’s money diminished, or be asked to make any substantial changes in the way they managed other people’s money. And so the bankers are not heading off to Galt’s Gulch either.

The Cathedral, though quick to accuse its American enemies of being extreme, uncompromising, and violent, is paralytically incapable of dealing with enemies that actually are extreme, uncompromising, and violent. It likes to ally with them against its American enemies, but even absent that inclination and strategy, is just generally incompetent and incapable at dealing with them, so in desperation ascribes its own niceness and willingness to compromise, to them.

Its tendency to compromise, to distribute power in tiny little bite sized chunks, means that stuff just does not get done – as for example, the fact that the buildings damaged and destroyed in 9/11 are still damaged and destroyed nine years later.

To repair or replace any of these buildings, needs a hundred approvals from a hundred Brahmins, which no normal American businessman is ever going receive for anything (hence our European levels of unemployment).  Islamists, however, can achieve it, because of their ability and willingness to apply negative incentives to roadblock bureaucrats. Being nice to each of one hundred Brahmins, good members of the establishment, unfortunately precludes being nice to one businessmen. When, however, the businessman is a dangerously non nice Muslim, such obstacles can be readily overcome.

The Cathedral approach to coalition building means it has no ready answer to those that spit upon its coalition and murder its members, other to welcome them inside, as it welcomed Ward Churchill inside.

Anti anti communism was not necessarily crazy, since they perceived themselves to be using Stalin to make war on evil Americans, even though Stalin thought he was using them, but the mortgage disaster, which is still under way, was definitely crazy, dismantling technological civilization to avoid possible slight warming is seriously crazy, and the Muslim takeover of Europe is really seriously crazy.

Intefluidity reports that Treasury is not willing to deal with this problem.
Interfluidity tells us:

I believe these policymakers conflate, in full sincerity, incumbent financial institutions with “the system”, “the economy”, and “ordinary Americans”.

…

Ultimately, this “minimalist” approach to managing the GSEs amounts to nothing more or less than keeping the existing system and proposing that it be better regulated, including specific regulatory suggestions that are foreseeably unlikely to withstand industry pressure. No offense to its very smart proponent, but this was a non-idea dressed up as reform.

…

Large, complex, leveraged and interconnected financial firms simply cannot be regulated, by the private or public sector. Without regulation they quite rationally maximize stakeholder wealth in a manner that happens to be socially and economically destructive. The only way around this is to change the incentives of all stakeholders, and that could only happen by placing them in a different kind of firm. We have to limit the size and composition of firms’ creditor base, so we can be sure losses to creditors would be socially and politically tolerable. (We do this already, or try to, with hedge funds.)

But the Cathedral is not much affected by contact with reality.  Dylan Matthews took a survey of  the elite, to ask them where the Laffer curve maxed, and all of them that were among our masters answered 69% or 70%, or refused to answer. Such a high value is improbable, but what is really improbable is such perfect agreement on such an uncertain number. You cannot get perfect agreement on anything unless it is official Cathedral doctrine. And if a high Laffer maximum is Cathedral doctrine, then actions that would be insane unless you believe in a high Laffer maximum are the Cathedral program

The recent substantial increases in the cost of employing people have not been reflected in substantial reductions in people’s wages, thus wages are substantially above market clearing levels.  The Fed could, I suppose, inflate their way out of this problem, using inflation to sneak the real value of wages down, thus causing employment to recover.  Government could then point out that the bloated capitalists are increasing their oppression of the victimized proletarians, and use that as justification to make employing people even more expensive.  Never let a good crisis go to waste.

“The beach will fix itself”

“More oil spilled every year in Africa, in Nigeria, than so far in the Gulf, so it’s not unique. It’s not exceptional. It’s not the largest. Mexico had a spill that larger than this, nobody talks about except apparently me”

And behold:  The beach has fixed itself.

The reason that BP was drilling there in the first place is that giant oil plumes occur naturally from time to time in that location– not as big as this one, but comparable. There is an entire ancient oil eating ecology naturally present in the gulf

This supposed crisis is akin to the supposedly horrifying crisis of the radioactive boy scout – any man made radiation is deemed ten gazillion times worse than naturally occurring sources of radiation, and any man released oil is deemed ten gazillion times worse than naturally occurring sources of oil.

Just as the soil is full of living creatures things that turn dead leaves into compost, the Gulf of Mexico is full of living creatures that turn oil into asphalt. The asphalt sinks to the bottom, and eventually gets buried in mud. It appears that sea creatures ate most of the released oil, and cleanup crews collected only a tiny portion. No doubt it was rough on those sea creatures that cannot eat oil, which all the cute charismatic creatures from seagulls to crabs cannot, but nature is rough whether humans meddle or not.

And while the cute charismatic creatures had a hard time for a while, now the oil is gone.

Let each church decide for itself what marriage is, which views the government should ignore, and let people draw up what contracts they choose for living together.

You have the right to contract.  Let us have gay nuptial contracts, not gay marriages.

And the same for heterosexual relationships:  If a seventeen year old girl can contract for gigantic college debts that cannot be expunged by bankruptcy, in return for some academic training that will not necessarily give her a career, then she can agree to a nuptial contract that government does not necessarily think is fair to women.

There are several possible explanations of this

1. People tend to give politically correct replies to polls, rather than what they genuinely believe.
2. Republican party activists do what Palin tells them to do, and republican party voters do what republican party activists tell them to do.
3. A nobody cannot beat a somebody. Get Palin’s endorsement, you are no longer a nobody, you are a serious candidate, the one to beat.

I suspect all of these explanations are true.

“The Pleasure of Finding things out” by Richard Feynman, page 187

We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations and they make lists and they do statistics, but they do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science-like the South Sea Islanders making airfields, radio towers out of wood, expecting a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners’ airfields around them, but strangely, they don’t fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are-experts. You teachers who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, maybe you can doubt the experts once in a while. Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

When someone says science teaches such and such, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it. If they say to you science has shown such and such, you might ask, “How does science show it-how did the scientists find out-how, what, where?” Not science has shown, but this experiment, this effect, has shown. And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments (but we must listen to all the evidence), to judge whether a reusable conclusion has been arrived at. . I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television words, books, and so on are unscientific. That doesn’t mean they are bad, but they are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.

Genuine science is replicable. And “replicable” does not mean two priests recite the same doctrine, it means they explain what they did in such a fashion that anyone else could do it also.

If they refuse to explain, they are not scientists, but priests of Gaea.

Unsupported and unexplained politically correct pseudo science appears all the time in “Science” and “Nature”
For example:

Despite the fact that these papers appeared in top journals like Nature and Science, none of the journal reviewers or editors ever required Briffa to release his Yamal data. Steve McIntyre’s repeated requests for them to uphold their own data disclosure rules were ignored.

This sort of thing (that PC science is in practice exempted from data disclosure, and proudly proclaims results on the basis of secret evidence) has been an ongoing scientific scandal from the very beginning of the global warming movement, and everyone aware of this unscientific practice should have realized that global warming science is not science, but politics and religion, and that global warming scientists are not scientists, but priests of Gaea.

Environmentalism, and several other isms, are state sponsored religions, which because of state backing have the privilege of publishing their holy texts in scientific journals despite conspicuous and infamous failure to comply with the standards and rules of those journals.

Nine years later, Briffa’s Yamal data for twentieth century temperatures turned out to be that one tree of ten selected trees grew unusually rapidly during the twentieth century as compared to fossil trees of the same type from the same area. These ten trees were selected by Bricca after a great many other trees in the same area were measured, but the rest of the measurements were not included.

The larger population of trees, taken as a whole, shows much the same growth pattern as the fossil trees.

Take out one tree from those ten, Yamal06, and most of the evidence for climate change vanishes. Restore the much larger set of tree measurements from which the ten trees were selected, and all of the evidence for climate change vanishes – the population as a whole is has the same growth rates as the fossil trees.

Take out one tree from half a dozen graphs of global warming in near a dozen papers, and suddenly they do not show global warming any more.

Bricca has, at this time, not yet explained why those ten trees, and not other trees in the same area measured in the same survey. And whatever his explanation, ten trees is not enough.

The government likes data that supports more government power, rewards those that tell it what it wants to hear, and punishes those that tell it what it does not want to hear.

Environmentalism is a state sponsored religion, for it is perfectly visible to anyone that wants to look that it is not subject to the same standards as normal science, the story of Briffa and the Yamal data being one example of a great many.

People have lost their jobs for reporting that glaciers are advancing in a particular area, even though they fully agreed that most glaciers are retreating. This makes it hard to tell whether most glaciers are indeed retreating.

Environmentalism generally, and the Global Warming movement in particular, acts like a holy and sectarian religious movement, a religious movement backed by state power, not like science.

Recent events prove that on certain topics, they do not carry science, but are mere megaphones for the holy ranting of the priesthood.

Science is not that which the state decrees to be science. It is that which follows the rules of science, which unwritten rules correspond, more or less, to the written rules of the older and more prestigious journals.

If these journals are reluctant to apply these written rules on certain sensitive topics, then what appears on those sensitive topics will not be science, and hence what appears or fails to appear in such journals is not an indication of truth, but of religion.

In particular if the replacement hockey stick had been genuinely peer reviewed, then, in accordance with the unwritten rules of science, and the written rules of the older and more prestigious science journals, the data and calculations supporting the graph would have been made available. Had the data and graphs been made available, people would have objected nine years ago that ten trees are not enough.

Since not genuinely peer reviewed, since not in conformity with journal rules, therefore not genuine science, therefore mere theology.

No way Jose.  Democracy is doomed, or the country is doomed, or, quite likely, both.Both in Europe and America we are seeing the collapse of private employment – the much prophesied death of the host under the impact of the parasite is finally unfolding:   People just are not getting into private jobs, and an ever diminishing proportion of private jobs are genuinely private,  genuinely producing stuff that has a price and a market.  Instead, it is stuff like “green jobs”.

Of course, this means an ever diminishing number of voters that will vote for the survival of the host, ever diminishing prestige and influence for the elite members of the host, and ever increasing prestige and influence for elite members of the parasite.

The parasite cannot restrain itself to match the diminished capability of the host to support it.  As things fall apart, the parasite will launch austerity measures to shrink its demands, but the austerity measures will shrink the parasite far more slowly than the host shrinks.   Russian agriculture still has not recovered from the liquidation of the kulaks.   Consider, for example, schooling.  New York spends $17 713 per student per year, which fails to pass the smell test.  It is past time for government to simply get out of the schooling business and let parents educate their children or not.  That would be a cut.  “Austerity” is never cuts, but merely reckless, extravagant, and self indulgent waste growing less quickly than the political elite would prefer.  What we need is cuts, not “austerity”.  Can you imagine how few votes a candidate who proposed actual cuts would receive?

The BLS  tells us that the normal July youth labor force participation rate before 1989 was 81 to 86% (always looking at July figures, since young people tend to be at school least in July)

Supposedly youth unemployment is a mere 18%, but since young people tend to be ineligible for unemployment relief, they do not necessarily register with the BLS, so a more realistic measure is the proportion presently employed, 51.4%, to the proportion looking for work or employed in good times, 84% in a typical july.

As everything goes to hell in a handbasket, the regime becomes more and more unpopular, but sound policies that would put everything right also become more unpopular – a vicious cycle we have regularly seen in Latin America which cannot be cured.  Only the employed and productive vote for measures that would permit productive employment.

To actually cut government spending down to what the nation can afford, you examine each government activity, and compare it with private sector businesses that do the same thing or a plausible substitute.  If the government activity is costing enormously more, as for example education, the government then abandons that activity.   As a general rule, the more unthinkable it is for the government to abandon some field of activity, the more outrageously extravagant and wasteful the government’s activities in that field are.  So if you want to cut the government back, the first place to look is at those things that are unthinkable to cut back.