Progressives destroy their government god, especially with young

The liberal-progressive faith relies on inculcating a belief in an omniscient, benevolent and just government god, so it's heartening to watch progressives systematically destroy that faith in their own deity (particularly among the young), as polling data now show.

Pondering how the IRS scandals (which occurred entirely on Obama's watch) have destroyed public confidence in the government agency, Peggy Noonan writes:

One irony here is that the Obama White House, always keen to increase the reach and power of government, also seems profoundly disinterested in good governing. It is strange. The long-term project of liberalism involves encouraging the idea of faith in government as a bringer or guarantor of greater justice. But who needs more government if government works so very badly, and is in its operations unjust?

Recalling Stein's Law in economics—If something cannot go on forever, it will stop—Charles Krauthammer writes:

Detroit, for example, can no longer go on borrowing, spending, raising taxes and dangerously cutting such essential services as street lighting and police protection. So it stops. It goes bust.

Cause of death? Corruption, both legal and illegal, plus a classic case of reactionary liberalism in which the governing Democrats — there’s been no Republican mayor in half a century — simply refused to adapt to the straitened economic circumstances that followed the post-World War II auto boom.

Dan Mitchell, in Atlas Shrugs in Detroit, argues:

Reason for Optimism

He has "a little over 1200 days left in office," a scandal-ridden Barack Obama recently reminded an audience. To which one New York newspaper editorial writer responded, "I imagine that he is not the only person counting down the remaining days of his presidency. ... Given his high recent disapproval polling numbers, I doubt that President Obama will have trouble finding people willing to help him pack his bags as he prepares to vacate the White House."

Given, too, his grossly heavy hand on the free-market economy, no doubt every business sector (and every job seeker) is anxious for that new day.

One business sector isn't waiting, though. As this graphic by AEI's CarpeDiem blog shows, U.S. crude oil production has soared in the last couple of years to 1990 levels.

Bottom Line: A two million bpd [barrels per day] increase in US oil output in only 24 months, almost exclusively from the dramatic increases in shale oil production made possible by revolutionary drilling technologies, is an important energy milestone and has to be one of the most remarkable success stories in the history of US energy production.

Welcome to America’s shale energy revolution, which continues to be one of the strongest reasons to be optimistic about the US economy.

If the energy sector can accomplish this feat despite Obama, just imagine what all other business sectors can do after he leaves office and his anti-free market policies end.

Henninger: Big Government Implodes

"Mark July 3, 2013, as the day Big Government finally imploded," writes Dan Henninger at the Wall Street Journal.  That's the day a deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy quietly announced that the "complexity of [Obamacare] requirements" required delaying implementation of the employer mandates for a year. Two days later, the Obama administration announced "that because of 'operational barriers' to IRS oversight, individuals would be allowed to self-report their income to qualify for the law's subsidies."

Even if you are a liberal and support the goals of the Affordable Care Act, there has to be an emerging sense that maybe the law's theorists missed a signal from life outside the castle walls. While they troweled brick after brick into a 2,000-page law, the rest of the world was reshaping itself into smaller, more nimble units whose defining metaphor is the 140-character Twitter message.

He notes that "ObamaCare's failures are not the only sign of a great public crack-up."

• The NSA data collection has people upset, even frightened that someone like Snowden can pull data onto a thumb drive and walk with it;
• Responding to the IRS political abuse scandal, the agency managers' defense was that the IRS is too big for anyone to know what its agents are doing;
• The nation's deteriorating weather satellites will wear out before being replaced, so government is looking at a possible 17-month gap in the availability of crucial weather data;
• The State Department failed to understand the Arab Spring despite warnings.

Concludes Henniger:

Those indispensable but dying weather satellites are a metaphor for the U.S. now. Whether ObamaCare or the border fence, Washington is winding down into a black hole of its own making. The debate's over. Liberalism will be swept into this vortex, too.

_________
UPDATE:  Washington Examiner editors take Henninger's point further in Obamacare: A 19th Century Answer to a 21st Century Question:

Simply put, the digitization of social interaction, economic transaction, the political process and everything in between is decentralizing the world, moving it in the opposite direction of the massive centralization of Obamacare. But nobody needs a federal bureaucrat to tell him what health insurance to buy when anybody with an Internet connection can simultaneously solicit bids from thousands of competing providers, pay the winner via electronic fund transfers, manage the claims process with a laptop, consult with physicians and other medical specialists via email, and even be operated on remotely by surgeons on the other side of the globe.

Rather than imposing a top-down, command-economy, welfare-state health care model with roots in Otto von Bismarck's Germany of 1881, a 21st-century government would ask what is needed to apply to health care access the Internet's boundless capacity to empower individual choice.

Arbitrary Justice, Progressive Style

In Deconstructing Reality and Zimmerman, Peter Wehner argues that Justice is being subordinated to the progressive narrative:

What we’re seeing from the left is post-modernism on full display. The facts, the truth and objective reality are subordinate to the progressive narrative. In this particular instance many liberals so want the killing of Trayvon Martin to be driven by bigotry–which would serve as both an indictment of racial attitudes in America and turn a horrible mistake into a “modern-day lynching”–that they will make it so, even if it requires twisting the truth into something unrecognizable. What matters, after all, is The Cause. And everything, including basic facts, must be bent to fit it. This kind of systematic deconstruction of truth is fairly common in college liberal arts courses all across America. But when it becomes the primary mode of interpretation in a murder trial, it is something else again.

Most of us, when we hear the words “justice must be done,” believe that what is right, reasonable, fair and in accordance with the facts be done. But some on the left have something else in mind. For them, justice is a tool in a larger political struggle, a means to an end. Justice can be at odds with reality if reality is at odds with liberalism. Which is why the efforts to turn the Zimmerman verdict into a racial miscarriage of justice is so discouraging and so damaging.

In Open Season?, Dave Carter laments progressive-style justice as well:

Darwish: Fake Outrage in the Martin/Zimmerman Case

"Having lived half my life in the Middle East, I am especially sensitive to recognizing fake outrage and shaming forced upon ordinary people by the social system," writes Egyptian-born Nonie Darwish.

AP Photo

Every society uses shaming to define its morality, but some societies go too far in using and abusing shaming words that make people cringe and shrink whenever they are mentioned. Such intentional shaming is often fake and bogus done for the purpose of manipulating and controlling others. In America, expressions like 'racist' and in the Muslim world expressions like 'apostate' can do the trick of silencing citizens and keep them muzzled and beaten down....

Study: Cohabitation Worse Deal for Women

According to a RAND working paper, "cohabiting young adults have significantly lower levels of commitment than their married peers," writes W. Bradford Wilcox at the Atlantic. "This aversion to commitment is particularly prevalent among young men who live with their partners." The study offers "three cautionary notes for young adults considering moving in together..."

Source: RAND Analysis of Add Health, 2001-2002, based on 2,068 adults age 18-26

York: Start the OCare Money Redistribution

"What part of 'It's. The. Law.' don't you understand?" asks Byron York, seemingly of the White House that posted that very tweet weeks ago.

Just to add emphasis, in early June President Obama dismissed concerns that the national health care startup was not going well. "This is the way the law was designed to work," he told an audience in California. "Since everyone's saying how it's not going to happen, I think it's important for us to recognize and acknowledge that this is working the way it's supposed to."

Now, however, it appears the administration's bravado was all for show. At the same time Obama was expressing great confidence, White House officials were secretly meeting with representatives of big business to discuss ways to postpone enforcement of parts of the new law. And on Tuesday the White House announced that the employer mandate -- sometimes described as a "crucial" element of Obamacare -- will be delayed to 2015 from its scheduled start on Jan. 1, 2014.

Don't expect a similar delay (relief) for individual taxpayers or exchanges, however.

Obamacare is designed to increase the number of Americans who depend on the government to pay for health insurance. It will expand the Medicaid rolls, and it will give subsidies to millions of individuals and families to purchase insurance on the exchanges. In all, the government will be transferring hundreds of billions of dollars to Americans for health coverage.

The White House knows that once those payments begin, repealing Obamacare will no longer be an abstract question of removing legislation not yet in effect. Instead, it will be a very real matter of taking money away from people. It's very, very hard to do that.

So yes, retreating on the employer mandate was a big deal. But the White House would rather do that than endanger the flow of money that is the heart of Obamacare. The White House will not waver on that, no matter what Republicans say or do.

Crouch: Body Language at the Workplace

"Studies have found that thoughtfully reinforcing verbal dialogue with accurate non-verbal cues can carry a message farther, especially in the workplace," writes Ashley Crouch, Contributing Editor/PR Manager at Verily magazine (and a former intern at the Luce Institute). "In fact, it makes more than four times the impact on first impressions than any words we say. So here are five quick tips from [Carol Kinsey] Goman’s free downloadable e-book, Body Language for Women Who Lead..."

If you're unfamiliar with the new magazine Verily, check it out.

NFL Refs - Another Glass Ceiling Cracking

Sarah Thomas, a 39-year-old woman, is "poised to become the Nation Football League's first permanent female game official," reports Bloomberg news, "possibly as soon as the 2014 season." A wife, mother of two boys, and a full-time pharmaceutical sales rep, Thomas has spent "16 years calling high school and college games."

“I didn’t set out to break a glass ceiling or a gender barrier,” said Thomas, a 39-year-old from Brandon, Mississippi. “If you’re doing things because you love them, then things have a tendency to just kind of fall into place.”

Study: College Sex Hook-Ups Linked to Anxiety, Depression

"As narratives of 'hook-up' culture take center stage in popular media, behavioral researchers are starting to ask what psychological consequences, if any, may be in store for young adults who engage in casual sex," reports Science Daily.

A new study in The Journal of Sex Research found higher levels of general anxiety, social anxiety, and depression among students who recently had casual sex. Entitled Risky Business: Is There an Association between Casual Sex and Mental Health among Emerging Adults?, the study surveyed over 3,900 heterosexual college students from across the United States about their casual sex behaviors and mental well-being.

"Casual sex" was defined as having intercourse with a partner one has known for less than a week. Students from over 30 institutions around the country completed the online survey, making this the largest sample to be collected for a study on this topic. On average, 11% of students reported a casual sex encounter during the month prior to the survey, the majority of whom were men.

The study was led by Dr. Melina M. Bersamin of California State University, Sacramento. According to Dr. Bersamin, "It is premature to conclude that casual sexual encounters pose no harmful psychological risks for young adults." The results "suggest that among heterosexual college students, casual sex was negatively associated with well-being and positively associated with psychological distress."

Parker: A New Birth of American Freedom, Again

Noting a Gallup July 4th poll showing 71% of Americans think the Founders would be "disappointed" by the way the country has turned out, Star Parker argues that many Americans are living a contradiction: they hold the ideals of freedom while allowing those freedoms to be slowly eroded.

It is hard for me to believe that many in our country see no contradiction in believing that freedom can be an American ideal while half of Americans live in households getting some sort of government benefits.

Or that somehow a country can be thought of as free in which forty cents of every dollar the national economy produces goes to government at either the federal, state, or local level.

Or that government can put us in debt to the tune of the total value of the annual output of our economy.

Or that the real debt burden sitting on the American public is some $90 trillion – more than five times the size of our GDP – that represents the unfunded liabilities of social security, Medicare, and other government programs.

How can we see this as a free, moral country when we legally and casually use abortion as a means of birth control and provide hundreds of millions of taxpayer funds to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider?

Or that government can tell us what kind of health care we need and must buy and can tell employers what kind of health care they must provide.

Or that government can force employers to provide birth control and abortion pills to employees, even, as in the case of the Christian owners of Hobby Lobby, it violates their religious convictions.

Or that children go to public schools where it is illegal to pray or teach traditional family values.

Parker calls for "courageous leadership that will lead us back to the path of freedom and moral principle that inspired our founders and which is our destiny."

Promiscuity Leaves Women Friendless

"College-age women judge promiscuous female peers ... more negatively than more chaste women and view them as unsuitable for friendship, finds a study by Cornell University developmental psychologists," reports Science Daily. Even women who are promiscuous themselves don't want promiscuous peers as friends: 

The findings suggest that though cultural and societal attitudes about casual sex have loosened in recent decades, women still face a double standard that shames "slutty" women and celebrates "studly" men, said lead author Zhana Vrangalova, a Cornell graduate student in the field of human development. The study, titled "Birds of a Feather? Not When it Comes to Sexual Permissiveness" and published in the early online edition of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, reports that such social isolation may place promiscuous women at greater risk for poor psychological and physical health outcomes.

"For sexually permissive women, they are ostracized for being 'easy,' whereas men with a high number of sexual partners are viewed with a sense of accomplishment," Vrangalova said. "What surprised us in this study is how unaccepting promiscuous women were of other promiscuous women when it came to friendships — these are the very people one would think they could turn to for support."

She added that prior research shows that men often view promiscuous women as unsuitable for long-term romantic relationships, leaving these women outside of many social circles.

"The effect is that these women are really isolated," Vrangalova said.

For the study, 751 college students provided information about their past sexual experience and their views on casual sex. They read a near-identical vignette about a male or female peer, with the only difference being the character's number of lifetime sexual partners (two or 20). Researchers asked them to rate the person on a range of friendship factors, including warmth, competence, morality, emotional stability and overall likability.

Progressing Backwards to Tribalism

I occasionally rile up my liberal friends by noting that a century ago the rich were fat and the poor were thin, but today the rich are thin and the poor are fat. Same with work. Back then the poor worked all the time; today the rich work all the time. Liberals don't like to hear stuff like that.

[snip]

It is the responsible individual that created the modern world, and it is liberals, with their politics of identity and victim-hood, that are turning the clock back to a primitive age of tribalism. They are reinventing caste with their rage for credentialism, and reviving clan with their multiculturalism and race-card politics.

It makes complete sense that liberals sneer at the responsible individual, the busy bourgeois, the independent householder, the church member, and harass them. The bourgeois middle class with its businesses, its adaptability, its families, its work and its savings represent the existential threat to liberal power and its curdling tribalism.

We know full well the consequences of liberalism. They are manifesting themselves before our eyes in Chicago's bloodbath and Detroit's bankruptcy. 

Read the rest of The Consequences of Liberalism by Christopher Chantrill at AmericanThinker.

Goldberg: Freedom - The Unfolding Revolution

Jonah Goldberg addresses the question, why there are no libertarian countries today?, raised by Michael Lind in Salon.com.

Such is the philosophical poverty of liberalism today that this stands as a profound question.

Definitions vary, but broadly speaking, libertarianism is the idea that people should be as free as possible from state coercion so long as they don’t harm anyone. The job of the state is limited to fighting crime, providing for the common defense, and protecting the rights and contracts of citizens. The individual is sovereign; he is the captain of himself.

It’s true, no ideal libertarian state has ever existed outside a table for one. And no such state will ever exist. But here’s an important caveat: No ideal state of any other kind will be created either.

America’s great, but it ain’t perfect. Sweden’s social democracy is all right, but if it were perfect, I suspect fewer cars would be on fire over there.

Ideals are called ideals for a reason: They’re ideals. They’re goals, aspirations, abstract straight rules we use as measuring sticks against the crooked timber of humanity.

In a fitting tribute to Independence Day, Goldberg quickly weaves through the various experiments of governments and their failures (and Anne Morrow Lindbergh's 1940 that statist governments were the "wave of the future") to conclude:

The only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years is this libertarian idea, broadly understood. The revolution wrought by John Locke, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and the Founding Fathers is the only real revolution going. And it’s still unfolding.

Indeed, what’s remarkable about all of the states Lind identifies as proof that libertarianism doesn’t work is that they are in fact proof that it does. What made the American experiment new were its libertarian innovations, broadly speaking. Moreover, those innovations made us prosper. Even Sweden — the liberal Best in Show — owes its successes to its libertarian concessions.

I’m actually not a full-blown libertarian myself, but it’s an ideal I’d like America to move closer to, not further away from as we’ve been doing of late — bizarrely in the name of “progress,” of all things.

"Someone Has to Die"

Let’s imagine for a moment that you find yourself in a difficult position — one that has led to abject panic about your future career, the fate of a valued relationship, or whether you’ll even be able to make ends meet. Let’s also stipulate that your difficulty is largely your fault. You made some short-sighted, bad decisions that precipitated the crisis, but questions of responsibility are moot now — all that exists is the crisis, the stress that has overtaken your life. To be sure, there’s a way forward, a way out of the crisis, but even the most attractive options will require considerable commitment for most of a year — with potential for prolonged heartache.

Then, one evening you’re offered a way out. Your most recent troubles can go away, for the cost of a few hundred dollars and most of an afternoon. The catch? Someone has to die.

Oh, it’s not anyone you know or will ever know. They don’t have family that knows them, they don’t have spouses or children, and they’ll be so thoroughly unmourned that no one will even have to pay for a funeral. Decide now, and they might not even feel pain. Wait longer, and they’ll feel pain — but only for a little while.

You don’t have to see the body. You won’t know the person’s name. No one will have to know what you did. Indeed, the law strictly protects your confidentiality. An anonymous kill . . . then you’re free.

Ask the vast majority of rational people if they’d kill another person to change their own circumstances for the better, and they’d quickly answer no. Put them in the actual situation, and we know that millions answer yes. We know because of abortion.

Read the rest of David French's article, Abortion and the Idol of Self, at National Review Online.

Cyberattacks and What They Would Do to Us

"The Internet's benefits are relatively modest compared with previous transformative technologies, and it brings with it a terrifying danger: cyberwar," writes Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post.

By cyberwarfare, I mean the capacity of groups -- whether nations or not -- to attack, disrupt and possibly destroy the institutions and networks that underpin everyday life. These would be power grids, pipelines, communication and financial systems, business record-keeping and supply-chain operations, railroads and airlines, databases of all types (from hospitals to government agencies). The list runs on. So much depends on the Internet that its vulnerability to sabotage invites doomsday visions of the breakdown of order and trust.

In a report, the Defense Science Board, an advisory group to the Pentagon, acknowledged "staggering losses" of information involving weapons design and combat methods to hackers (not identified, but probably Chinese). In the future, hackers might disarm military units. "U.S. guns, missiles and bombs may not fire, or may be directed against our own troops," the report said. It also painted a specter of social chaos from a full-scale cyberassault. There would be "no electricity, money, communications, TV, radio or fuel (electrically pumped). In a short time, food and medicine distribution systems would be ineffective."

If that isn't enough to stress you, Samuelson raises other "new avenues for conflict and mayhem" made easy by the Internet, including larceny and business espionage.

"The Internet's virtues are overstated, it's vices understated," concludes Samuelson. It's a mixed blessing—and the mix may be moving against us."

Does Court's Marriage Decision Mean Greater Individualism? How About Tolerance?

"It's worth taking a step back from the emotions and technical details of all these events," writes Walter Russell Mead, "to ask about the broader trend they point to."

Superficially, they point to a schizophrenic public: leaning pro-life; increasingly in favor of gay marriage; divided on gun control but unwilling to pull the trigger, so to speak, on significantly tightened gun laws. But on a deeper level, these all look like examples of the biggest cultural-political trend in America: a response to the growing complexity of 21st century life that revives individualism and states’ rights.

Individualism sometimes work for the Right and sometimes for the Left. The right to marry who you choose is as individualistic as insisting on your right to bear arms. With abortion, that same logic is muddier, which is why the public is still divided. Pro-choicers lay claim to the individualism mantle by stating that women should be free to control their own reproductive health, while pro-lifers do the same by arguing that abortion involves two individuals with rights, not one.

Given the nation's divisions, a future of a live-and-let-live individualism sounds appealing, but we've a long way to go to achieve it. The Left's passion for demonizing those with whom it disagrees reached new heights in Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in the Defense of Marriage case, when he disparaged the motives of half the nation as well as DOMA legislators. As Justice Antonin Scalia retorted in his dissent,