Liberalism Explained: The "Herd" of Independent Minds

Why do liberals bitterly cling to their cults and mantras, impervious to rational counter-arguments and sound evidence? Victor Volsky offers an interesting theory called the "collective shaming code," a concept developed by Thomas Huxley ("Darwin's Bulldog") and further explored by Lee Harris in his book, The Suicide of Reason.

Huxley concluded that the shaming code was "the glue that holds together individuals in a group" in order to increase their individual chances of survival.

"It is this code that makes the members of the group feel as one," writes Lee Harris. "They are disgusted, angered, delighted and shamed by the same things. The unanimity of their visceral response is what provides the powerful sense of collective identity. It makes them feel and think as a tribal Us, in contrast to those tribes who are not disgusted by what disgusts us, or made angry by what makes us angry, and who feel no shame at what we think of as shameful[.] ... A tribe that shares a powerful visceral code that inhibits the natural tendency of the individual to self-assertion will present a united front against its enemies." ...

Lopez: It's Not a War of the Sexes

NRO's Kathryn Lopez has an enjoyable interview with Dr. Elizabeth Kantor, author of The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After, in which Kantor probes the characters of Austen's six books for insights into male and female psychology and relationships.  Here are a few excerpts of the interview:

LOPEZ: Is Austen’s advice for all ages? Or is there a particular age range that may find your book of particular use? Is this all very silly if you’re over a certain age?
KANTOR: I don’t think anybody is too old to learn from Jane Austen. She herself was eventually a 40-year-old spinster who had given up any prospect of marriage for herself. But I don’t think she ever stopped being a great role model for all of us. When the secret that she was the author of Pride and Prejudice was getting out, her comment was, “What a trifle it is, in all its bearings, to the really important points of existence even in this world.” The most important things in her life were relationships — with her sister, with her nieces and nephews. Her novels are about finding “relationships” in the romantic sense, but I certainly benefit from her insights and her heroines’ example in my married life. And for women who feel like it may be too late for love — well, that’s the exact scenario of her novel Persuasion.

LOPEZ: Is this book more an Austen fan’s indulgence at a market opportunity? Do you see it as a help to a wounded culture?
KANTOR: There is an awful lot of pain and misery out there; modern relationships seem to have hit a brick wall. Doing the research for the book, I kept noticing how bitter many single women are about men, something I was already to a certain extent familiar with, but, even more, how very resentful of women a lot of single men are.
It’s not universal, of course. But modern mating habits don’t seem to be contributing much harmony and bliss to the human race. Jane Austen can offer each sex a refreshing alternative approach to the other — more mutual respect, more intelligence about how to get what we want from each other, but in a way that’s neither manipulative nor ham-fisted.

LOPEZ: What would Jane Austen make of Fifty Shades of Grey? Of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes? Of our interest in any of these things?
KANTOR: I actually wrote a piece for the Huffington Post pointing out how the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon seems to suggest that women have some desires that aren’t being met in their relationships today, and trying to show how exactly the kind of love we see between Elizabeth and Darcy is an ultimately more satisfying outlet for those desires.
Reading erotica is just playing at a love that’s risky and powerful and life-altering. Jane Austen was more ambitious than that. She gives us pictures of how women can find a thrilling, transformative love that fits into real life, right in the middle of all the humdrum things we’re perpetually pestered with, like financial worries and annoying relatives. I think she’d advise us to forget about vicarious excitements, whether it’s reading trashy fiction or following the lives of the rich and famous, and figure out how our own lives can be more satisfying and exciting.

Koch: Fighting for Economic Freedom

Billionaire businessman Charles Koch, who has been demonized by the progressive left, penned an article explaining why he fights for economic freedom. "Nations with the greatest degree of economic freedom tend to have citizens who are much better off in every way," he writes, adding that "the tendency of our own government here in the U.S. has been to grow bigger and bigger, controlling more and more." He argues that government growth comes with a "devil's bargain," cronyism, and income inequality:

Citizens who over-rely on their government to do everything not only become dependent on their government, they end up having to do whatever the government demands. In the meantime, their initiative and self-respect are destroyed.

It was President Franklin Roosevelt who said: “Continued dependence on [government support] induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”

Businesses can become dependents, too. If your struggling car company wants a government bailout, you’ll probably have to build the government’s car – even if it’s a car very few people want to buy.

Many businesses with unpopular products or inefficient production find it much easier to curry the favor of a few influential politicians or a government agency than to compete in the open market.

After all, the government can literally guarantee customers and profitability by mandating the use of certain products, subsidizing production or providing protection from more efficient competitors.
 ...
Cronyism enables favored companies to reap huge financial rewards, leaving the rest of us – customers and competitors alike – worse off.

One obvious example of this involves wind farms. Most cannot turn a profit without the costly subsidies the government provides. Meanwhile, consumers and taxpayers are forced to pay an average of five times more for wind-generated electricity.
 ...
Some people worry about the disparity of wealth in a system of economic freedom. What they don’t realize is that the same disparity exists in the least-free countries.

The difference is who is better off.

Under economic freedom, it is the people who do the best job of producing products and services that make people’s lives better.

On the other hand, in a system without economic freedom, the wealthiest are the tyrants who make people’s lives miserable.

As a result of this, the income of the poorest in the least-free countries is one-tenth of what it is in the freest.

U.S. Energy Promises 3.6 Million Jobs

The U.S. fossil fuel energy news — and its potential for rebuilding our stalled economy — gets better and better. Citigroup Inc. estimated in a March report that a 'reindustrialization' of America could add as many as 3.6 million jobs by 2020 and increase the gross domestic product by as much as 3 percent. Bloomberg's Asjylyn Loder reports:

• U.S. natural gas production will expand to a record this year, and oil output swelled in July to its highest point since 1999.
• A surge in U.S. natural gas development has spurred $226 billion in spending plans on pipelines, storage, processing facilities and power plants, most slated for the next five years.
• The expansion of fossil-fuel production - coupled with a weak economy and increased energy efficiency - has helped the U.S. pare its crude oil imports by 17 percent since the 2005 peak
• Increased production and swelling domestic stockpiles have helped make energy cheaper in the U.S. than in other countries.
• So far, the economic benefits have been confined to states such as Louisiana, Texas, and North Dakota, but there are signs the economic gains have begun to expand beyond the oil and gas fields to industries from steel, aluminum, automobiles, fertilizers and chemicals. Orascom Construction Industries, for example, is investing $250 million restarting an ammonia and methanol plant in Texas, and another Orascom subsidiary may build a $1.3 billion fertilizer plant in Iowa that would create as many as 2,000 construction jobs and 165 permanent positions.

"This is one of those rare opportunities that every country looks for and few ever get," said Phillip Verleger, a former director of the office of energy policy at the U.S. Treasury Department and founder of PKVerleger LC, a consulting firm in Carbondale, Colorado. "This abundance of energy gives us an opportunity to rebuild our economy."

Full story: America's Energy Seen Adding 3.6 Million Jobs Along with 3% GDP.

"School Reform Gets Cool"

"A whole lot of 20- and 30-somethings across the political spectrum now believe something’s seriously flawed in our public-education system," writes Naomi Schaefer Riley. Why the sea-change?

• Teach for America has for decades place recent graduates from top colleges — some 28,000 to date — as teachers in some of the nation's worst schools. "The incompetence and corruption are hard to forget," and "they talk about it to their peers, too."
• Urban areas are looking attractive to hip younger people who are marrying and starting families, and the terrible state of urban schools presents a roadblock to be challenged and overcome.
• Teachers unions are looking like dinosaurs bent on protecting undeserving members while preventing kids from getting a decent education.
• Vouchers, charter schools, and parent-trigger laws have become "the hot cause of the millennial generation."

"Finally," concludes Riley, "a popular trend worth getting behind."

Epstein: The Obamacare Quagmire

"Now that the Supreme Court has held President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) constitutional, mounting evidence suggests that the statute’s most ardent defenders may well come to rue the day," writes constitutional law expert Richard Epstein.  Why? Because advocates "failed to take into account the old and powerful law of unintended consequences." Epstein maintains the law will hurt the very people it's supposed to help.

• Federal and state officials must grapple with implementing the law whose internal complexity and flawed design make it a program that was built to fail.
• The fine print of the ACA could leave dependents of millions of low-income employees without coverage from either an employer or an ACA insurance exchange.
• Many states may choose not to set up insurance exchanges at all, which would leave  low-income residents in those states with no access to the subsidies proponents promised them.
• The ACA requires every insurance plan cover, among other things, "ambulatory patient services, emergency services, hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance abuse disorder services, prescription drugs, rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices, laboratory services, preventive and wellness services, chronic disease management, and pediatric services" [even for plans purchased by 21-year-old single, healthy, childless males]. 
• Insurers can no longer require insurance applicants to disclosed their health conditions and have no way to determine their relevant risk or estimate the potential cost in future care.
• Fearing that private insurance companies will be driven out of business by the ACA before states exchanges are up and running, the government has issued more than 1000 employer waivers involving over 3 million people.

None of this should come as a surprise. The ACA was sold with a set of promises that were not sustainable. President Obama trumpeted his program with reassuring words in June 2009: “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: . . . If you like your healthcare plan, you will be able to keep your healthcare plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.” He has repeated that vow since. As David Hyman and I have shown, the ACA violates that promise in multiple ways.

The Act’s potential disruptions are not just confined to people who are forced into the exchanges; it extends to all individuals regardless of how they procure their healthcare insurance. All that can be said with confidence is that, thus far, the ACA has not been able to defeat the law of unintended consequences. Whether this nation will be able to extricate itself from the ObamaCare quagmire remains to be seen.

"Same-Sex Marriage and the Manufacture of Consent"

"Ninety years ago, Walter Lippmann wrote about the “manufacture of consent,” in his classic work Public Opinion,” write Doug Mainwaring and Stella Morabito in the Washington Examiner. "The general idea was that public opinion was becoming increasingly susceptible to manipulation by elites."

Most people today don’t have time to deal with the complexities of issues. Instead, they tend to take cues from the media and what they assume others are thinking. Especially in climates of fear, public opinion is less a reflection of what people really believe than it is an operative nudge to elicit approval or disapproval among the public.

This is clearly the case today as the shroud of political correctness suppresses open debate and aligns with the manipulation of polling numbers to push forward a perception of plausibility for a most implausible idea: same-sex marriage.