Freedom Line Blog

Mark Steyn puts the federal government’s spending spree in a global perspective:

When you’re spending on the scale Washington does, what matters is the hard dollar numbers. Greece’s total debt is a few rinky-dink billions, a rounding error in the average Obama budget. Only America is spending trillions. The 2011 budget deficit, for example, is about the size of the entire Russian economy. By 2010, the Obama administration was issuing about a hundred billion dollars of Treasury bonds every month – or, to put it another way, Washington is dependent on the bond markets being willing to absorb an increase of U.S. debt equivalent to the GDP of Canada or India – every year. And those numbers don’t take into account the huge levels of personal debt run up by Americans. College debt alone is over a trillion dollars, or the equivalent of the entire South Korean economy – tied up just in one small boutique niche market of debt which barely exists in most other developed nations.

Newt Gingrich has had a rough time of it the past week or so. The press is all over him for his hard-line stance on the federal judiciary (including abolishing the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals), his poll numbers are slipping, and some of the brightest lights in the conservative commentariat (including Charles Krauthammer, Mark Steyn, and George Will) have been taking him out to the rhetorical woodshed.

Newt’s due a little holiday cheer then, and it comes in the form of Thomas Sowell’s new column, which essentially provides an endorsement from one of conservatism’s leading intellectuals. Sowell begins with the premise I expressed in an October column. I wrote at the time:

It represents a healthy political idealism for Republicans to search for the second coming of Ronald Reagan. But it’s a bit tiresome when they become inconsolable at his absence. Reagan was of a class alone, not only in his combination of political skills and ideological bearings, but also in the way that his abilities uniquely met his moment in history.  Cursing the whole enterprise just because you can’t find his carbon copy is akin to writing off a Super Bowl win because you didn’t have a perfect season.

Sowell applies this principle to the Gingrich candidacy:

Do we wish we had another Ronald Reagan? We could certainly use one. But we have to play the hand we were dealt. And the Reagan card is not in the deck.

While the televised debates are what gave Newt Gingrich’s candidacy a big boost, concrete accomplishments when in office are the real test. Gingrich engineered the first Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 40 years — followed by the first balanced budget in 40 years. The media called it “the Clinton surplus” but all spending bills start in the House of Representatives, and Gingrich was Speaker of the House.

Speaker Gingrich also produced some long overdue welfare reforms, despite howls from liberals that the poor would be devastated. But nobody makes that claim any more.

Did Gingrich ruffle some feathers when he was Speaker of the House? Yes, enough for it to cost him that position. But he also showed that he could produce results.

In a world where we can make our choices only among the alternatives actually available, the question is whether Newt Gingrich is better than Barack Obama — and better than Mitt Romney.

Sowell is certainly an outlier amongst the right-leaning intelligentsia. The question now is whether he’ll also be in the minority when it comes time to vote.

Sheer genius, about the perils of Gingrich. Mark Steyn is funny as can be, and right on target, explaining way back right after it happened that Gingrich lost his speakership because he was weirdo, ninny and Grinch all at the same time. Amazing reading.

Mark Steyn puts federal spending into yet another helpful perspective:

Under the 2011 budget, every hour of every day the government of the United States spends a fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have.

Your (future) tax dollars at work.

With Day 60 of the Gulf Oil Spill now upon us, Mark Steyn provides a trenchant diagnosis of the mental state directing President Barack Obama’s approach to governing:

The UN, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Bono: these are the colors a progressive worldly westerner nails to his mast. You don’t need to go anywhere, or do anything: You just need to pick up the general groove, which you can do very easily at almost any college campus.

This Barack Obama did brilliantly. A man who speaks fewer languages than the famously moronic George W Bush, he has nevertheless grasped the essential lingo of the European transnationalist: Continental leaders strike attitudes rather than effect action – which is frankly beneath them.

BP’s demoted CEO Tony Hayward may be in hot water for attending a glitzy yacht race while oil continues to saturate the Gulf, but are his actions really that much different than Obama giving a national speech on the subject before turning his attention towards challenging Arizona’s immigration law?

Anyone watching the British Parliament’s “Question Time” over the years knows that the one issue that will be discussed no matter which party is in power: the National Health Service.  The NHS is adept at socializing medicine but precious little else.  To hear both Tories and Labour MPs tell it, the service is chronically underfunded, and hopelessly incapable of reducing waiting times for patients to see doctors.  It is precisely the kind of rationed health care that American conservatives are warning will be inflicted on United States citizens if Obamacare is passed into law.

But battling Leviathan isn’t the only consequence of nationalizing the health industry.  As the prominence of NHS during “Question Time” shows, nationalization moves a nation’s political center irrevocably to the Left.  Why?  Because putting everyone involved with medicine on a government payroll eliminates private choices for almost all voters, and with it, the ability of markets to provide competition and choices.  Thus, like roads, utilities, and garbage collection, delays in service and controlling costs become problems for politicians – not entrepreneurs – to fix.  And so, even politicians who would otherwise oppose government control are left with arguing how to manage a failed system.

As Mark Steyn notes:

I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative”). The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

This is why President Obama can push repeatedly for Democratic members of Congress to fall on their swords for a dramatically unpopular health care “reform” bill – he knows the power shift in American politics will benefit his ideology in the long run, even if it weakens his party in the short term.

In his book “America Alone”, Mark Steyn discusses the “strong horse, weak horse” theory of foreign affairs. When terrorists like Osama bin Laden see a strong horse and a weak horse, they will necessarily like the strong horse. Traditionally, weakness was shown by the absence of power. Among many modern nations, it is evidenced by the refusal to use power. In either case, weakness is a provocation to those seeking to do harm.

And, as Ivan Krastev describes in today’s Washington Post, President Obama’s weakness on foreign affairs – silence on the killings of Iranian dissidents, making nice with dictators, bowing to the Japanese emperor – is signaling an over matched man in critical times. The Russians are familiar with a leader whose celebrity masks his country’s drop in prestige.

Obama himself is largely viewed in Russia as the American Mikhail Gorbachev, but Russians are less impressed than other Europeans have been with Obama’s brilliance and rock-star popularity. They remember the Gorbi-mania that conquered the globe at the moment the Soviet Union was about to crumble. Russians are tempted to view Obama’s global reformism and his progressive agenda as an expression of American weakness and not as an expression of America’s regained strength and legitimacy.

What does all this mean for the “reset” policy? First, it means that Russians will not be in a hurry to respond to the positive signals coming from Washington, and any perception of Washington weakness will diminish Moscow’s willingness to cooperate even in areas of common interest and common concern. It is not Obama’s deference but his strength that can persuade the Kremlin to cooperate with Washington. Simply put, to persuade Russians to join him, Obama must first demonstrate that he does not need them. He needs a clear victory, whether against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Iran’s nuclear ambition or Beijing’s habit of devaluing its currency. Obama must show strength for the “reset” policy to succeed.

Chances are Obama’s decision tonight to send less than the requested amount of troops to Afghanistan will do nothing to achieve either a clear victory in Afghanistan or more esteem for the Russians (or anyone else for that matter).