Barone: Progressivism's Discredited Conceit

"The roots of American liberalism are not compassion, but snobbery," writes Michael Barone. "That’s the thesis of Fred Siegel’s revealing new book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class."  The article highlights how the liberal elite's claim that they are uniquely fit to govern has been discredited by their policies — from prohibition to Obamacare.

[Siegel] depicts the Progressives as Protestant reformers, determined to professionalize institutions and tame the immigrant and industrial masses. Progressive projects included women’s suffrage and the prohibition of alcohol.

But the many pro-German Progressives were appalled when Woodrow Wilson led America into World War I and by Wilson’s brutal suppression of civil liberties.

Progressivism was repudiated in the landslide election of Warren Harding in 1920, at which point disenchanted liberal thinkers turned their ire against middle-class Americans who, in the “Roaring ’20s,” were happily buying automobiles, refrigerators, radios, and tickets to the movies. [snip]

Liberals since the 1920s have claimed to be guided by the laws of science, but often it was crackpot science, like the eugenics movement that sought forced sterilizations.

Other social-science theories proved unreliable in practice. Keynesian economics crashed and burned in the stagflation of the 1970s.

Predictions that the world would run out of food and resources turned out to be wrong. In the 1970s, people were told global cooling was inevitable. Now it’s global warming.

Barone: How ObamaCare Misreads America

"The evidence is not all in," writes Michael Barone. "But it seems that Americans are not behaving as ObamaCare's architects—and many critics—expected." He notes three key assumptions embodied in the law that have proven to be mistakes:

• Everyone wants health insurance, and the uninsured will flock to buy it, especially if they qualify for a subsidy. It didn't happen. Moreover, recent polls show only 24% of the uninsured has a favorable view of Obamacare.
• Having health insurance will make people healthier.  It didn't. Based on a two-year randomized study done in Oregon and reported in the May 2013 New England Journal of Medicine, "... after two years there was no significant difference between insured and uninsured in blood-sugar level, blood pressure and cholesterol levels..."
• Having health insurance will reduce costly emergency room visits. The opposite has happened. The Oregon study also found that those with insurance coverage were 40% more likely to go to emergency rooms than those without coverage.

This disconnect between expectations and reality, Barone writes, "reminds me of the divide described in Charles Murray's 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010."

Mr. Murray, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, documents the sharp differences in behavior between the upper (in education and income) 20% and the bottom 30% of white Americans.

The upper group has low rates of divorce and single parenthood and high rates of what Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam calls social connectedness. They belong to voluntary associations and churches; they vote and follow public-policy debates. They tend to be connected, engaged and conscientious. The lower (income and education) group has high rates of divorce and single parenthood and low rates of social connectedness. They tend to be disconnected and disengaged, and sometimes heedless. It should not be surprising that they may not respond to the same health-care mandates, incentives and nudges that policy makers and others in the upper group do. ...

Arguing that an ObamaCare law might work for "homogeneous populations with high levels of trust, conscientiousness and social connectedness," it doesn't work well in larger populations "where a much larger proportion of people are socially disconnected."

ObamaCare cuts against this grain. The trouble that has resulted—from the architects' apparent failures to anticipate the behavior of fellow citizens who don't share their approach to the world, and the architects' determination to impose their mores, such as contraception coverage, on a multicultural nation—is a lesson to national policy makers, conservative as well as liberal.

Govern lightly if you want to govern this culturally diverse nation well.

Barone: Obama Admin's Astonishing Incompetence

From Michael Barone:

Evidence of the astonishing incompetence of the Obama administration continues to roll in.

It started with the stimulus package. One-third of the money went to public employee union members — a political payoff not very stimulating to anyone else. Billions went to green energy loans, like the $500 million that the government lost in backing the obviously hapless Solyndra.

Infrastructure projects, which the president continues to tout, never seem to get built. He's been talking about dredging the port of Charleston, for example, to accommodate the big container ships coming in when the Panama Canal is widened. The canal widening is proceeding on schedule to be completed in 2014. The target date for dredging the port of Charleston: 2024.

Then there's ObamaCare. Barack Obama has already said the administration will not enforce the employer mandate, will not verify eligibility for insurance subsidies and will not require employer-provided policies to cap employees' out-of-pocket costs. The Constitution's requirement that the president take care to faithfully execute the laws apparently does not apply.

ObamaCare administrators continue to miss deadlines set by the health care law — 41 of 82 of them, according to Forbes' Avik Roy's reading of the Congressional Research Service report.

Then there's the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law. According to the law firm Davis Polk, the administration as of July had missed 62% of the deadlines in that law.

All of which indicates incompetence in drafting or in implementing the legislation — likely both. We have a president who delights in delivering partisan speeches to adoring audiences but doesn't seem interested in whether his administration gets results.

Read the rest at Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/082613-668794-evidence-of-obama-administration-incompetence-piles-up.htm#ixzz2dBHUPVtT

Gangster Government

"The president ... looks magnificent in the temple where laws are made," writes Michael Barone. "But he doesn't seem to consider himself bound by them." Barone recounts a few of this administration's lawless acts:

Could Millennials be the Next 'Greatest Generation'?

Since we work with young college-age women, we tend to follow polls and trends of the 18 to 30 age group. Recent articles suggest those under age 30 — the Millennial generation — are facing tough times, and it's causing them to undergo the kind of philosophical shift that often occurs when reality overwhelms ideals. Could the tough times forge the Millennials into the next 'greatest generation'?