Earthquake for Unions in Detroit

To residents in New York, or California, Illinois or others, who wonder why their property taxes are so high, the answer isn't complicated: it's the wildly generous pensions we pay to our public employees, particularly teachers. The typical teacher where I live is able to retire at age 57 with a (present value) retirement package worth $1.6 million (see "Your Kid's Teacher, Millionaire"). Some of us have been arguing for years that this is an unsustainable tax-and-spend death spiral that will result in New York's gradual slide towards bankruptcy, like Detroit.

Not surprisingly, public unions are not particularly accommodating of this argument; after all, in many states, such as here in New York, state constitutions protect retirement benefits from ever being touched or modified in any way.

Except, no. In a remarkable ruling last week, a federal court ruled that federal bankruptcy law trumps state constitutional law, and that existing pensions in Detroit could be cut or even eliminated.

If this isn't a wake up call to public sector unions and their political enablers, I don't know what is. Your pensions are not safe, and it's a problem of your own creation. Your members, many of who don't even want to be but are forced by state law, will be the victims of your decades of overreach.

It would be nice if this could be calmly fixed before the inevitable crisis, but don't hold your breath.

The Obama Ex-Presidency

You weren't thinking he'd retire to a farm and chop wood, were you?

We have a pretty well established tradition in this country of retired presidents leading quiet lives, having passed the mantle on to others. Our very first president established this tradition by relinquishing power to be a gentleman farmer at Mount Vernon.

In particular, ex-presidents are expected stay out of political affairs. There's only room for one guy at the top, and that person has to be free to make their own way. George Bush has become a painter, like Churchill. In a recent rare interview, he was served up the opportunity to criticize Obama on a silver platter, but he politely demurred. (Must have been difficult, considering how much blame Obama continues heap on Bush for just about everything, but he seemed quite peaceful about it.)

Jimmy Carter was the first to break the mold, offering his acidic opinions for anyone who would listen, which fortunately is almost no one. I have to give Bill Clinton some credit, though. Irrepressible as ever, there was no way he was going to hang out all day gardening in Chappaqua. Instead, through the Clinton Global Initiative, he has found a "third" way - staying relevant on the world stage while not interfering too much politically. (Okay, he interferes, but it could be much worse.)

Normally, it would be way too soon to think about how President Obama will spend his retirement years, but Obama himself has forced the conversation by suggesting that he won't leave Washington in 2016. The last time this happened was Woodrow Wilson, and that was only because he was dying.

I will call this now: Obama will be the most meddlesome and irritating ex-president in our nation's history. For starters, he'll only be 55, and looking at another 30 years or so to fill. He will become the community organizer again, this time writ large, a roll he will arguably like better than actually being president. Think about what a community organizer actually does: disrupts, argues, and hectors, constantly jabbing at existing power structures. This is, in essence, how Obama has tried to run his presidency. The tiresome process of consensus building is something with which he has no experience, and it holds no interest for him. This has resulted in not just zero lines of communication with his opponents, but, remarkably, his allies as well. Not surprisingly, leadership as Scold-in-Chief isn't very effective, and actually being responsible for the outcome of things like Obamacare is an annoyance.

But how much fun it will be on the outside! No responsibility! No more boring meetings or stupid heads of state to meet with! The press, ever idolatrous, will provide a mic as needed. Watch out, in particular, if there's a Republican in the White House. Obama will be asked for his opinion on every policy, and he will gladly give it, even organize actively in opposition to whatever warms the hearts of the MoveOn crowd.

There will not be the slightest hesitation. This is a man who decides what laws he wants to enforce and which he doesn't, and even makes new law himself. This is a man who cheered the nuclear option last week after saying it was a fundamental threat to our democracy when he was out of power. This is a man who lied about Obamacare because, with a compliant Fourth Estate, he knew he could. This is a man who has blown off scandals that would have felled others because, again, he knew he could. To suggest that over two hundred years of tradition, starting with George Washington, will give him any pause is about as likely as Self Magazine running a cover story titled, "Get a Large Ass Just Like Michelle."

Somewhere, Saul Alinsky is smiling.

Don't Go to Law School

 "The minute you read something you can't understand, you can almost be sure that it was drawn up by a lawyer."

    - Will Rogers

All the smartest students in my college class went to law school. They didn't do it because they had the concrete notion that they actually wanted to practice law. No, it was more that they didn't know what they wanted to do, and law school was perceived as a logical extension of a liberal arts education. It was an easy way to kick the can on making a hard decision, and it didn't seem as, well, self-interested as a business degree.

Fast forward to my 10th reunion. All the long faces, those that already looked beaten down by life at age thirty-two, were the lawyers. Much to their surprise, going to law school actually results in becoming a practicing lawyer. Somehow that wasn't the plan. Heck, the plan was to change the world, but no one came to interview for that, so the job at Cravath sounded really prestigious, and their moms were really proud, but how come no one told them that being a lawyer was so bone-crunchingly tedious, a world of endless minutia and reams of time sheets?

What they were told was you could "do anything" with a law degree. In theory, there's something to this. A knowledge of the law is useful, and some do escape the confines of law firms. But here's the thing: legal training is all about risk aversion, and that's where I take issue. As a lawyer, you're been hired by others - people actually taking risks - to cover their backsides. Usually, this involves endless amounts of time considering contingencies that have less than a 1% chance of actually occurring.

Is this a necessary process? Yes.

Does it sound like fun? It's not.

Should our country's brightest minds be doing it? Absolutely not, at least not in the numbers that they are.

Seriously, if you're young, go build skyscrapers, cure diseases, start the next Google - solve some interesting problems. Fail at some stuff. Be one of the risk takers that make our country great. If, for some reason, you're hell-bent on becoming a lawyer, for God's sake, I beg you to first go get a job as a paralegal. Get inside a law firm and see what it's like for yourself. Perhaps you're the type that likes to proof read endless documents that only a handful of people will ever read. Then by all means go for it. You've done your due diligence.

Most of you will seek a different path and will be happy that you did.

Ted Cruz Is Electable

Scott and Ted

Could Ted Cruz be the One? Yes.

Conventional wisdom, generated inside the Beltway and the media, says he's a crazy conservative and could never be elected to be president. John McCain called him a "wacko-bird" (a moment of immense eloquence, that). The filibuster was said to be the death sentence for the Cruz brand.

I had lunch with Cruz today and about 25 others, and I'm here to tell you it's hogwash. This guy is the real deal. For starters, he will be the smartest guy in any field. Alan Dershowitz, no conservative, called Cruz the smartest student he's ever had at Harvard Law. He was a legendary debater there, and at Princeton. Son of a Cuban immigrant who was tortured by Batista's henchmen, he memorized the U.S. constitution when he was thirteen. The left generally likes to frame conservatives as "dumb," but I don't see how that's possible here. They will go with crazy. And he most definitely isn't.

Cruz is an articulate and passionate conservative, but more than that, it turns out he's very funny, charismatic, and good on his feet. Every answer was precise and spot on, and frequently sprinkled with a great anecdote. Of course, he was speaking to a very conservative bunch, but it's clear he won't change a word of what he says to suit a different audience. This is where Romney had so much trouble; since he wasn't informed by any particular philosophy, he always had to think about his answers and they always seemed carefully calibrated to the room in which he stood.

Here's where we get into the great Republican debate about "electability." You know who was electable? Here's a list:

Gerald Ford
George H.W. Bush
Bob Dole
John McCain
Mitt Romney

So, I don't have to piece this together, do I? They all LOST. (Note: Bush 41 did win the first time when he ran as Reagan's heir. He lost the second time when it became apparent that he wasn't.)

Seriously, how many data points do Republicans need? The conventional wisdom, promulgated by consultants and dismissed by Cruz, holds that you run to the right in the primaries and then move to a spot just a smidge to the right of the Democrat in the general. Nixon first said this. The problem is, as a strategy this DOESN'T WORK, because you're not giving Republicans a real reason to turn out. What was Mitt Romney trying to sell us? I still don't know, other than he "wasn't Obama." What did he, or any of the failed candidates above, really believe in? Who knows? Liberalism light? Points of light?

Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, made it clear what he was selling, and as a conservative, he was naturally written off by most as a cowboy with an IQ slightly above room temperature. Perhaps not all there. And this is what the mainstream Republicans were saying about him!

Of course, Reagan beat the establishment candidate, Bush, in the primaries, and then, not changing his tune one bit, eviscerated Jimmy Carter in the general, much to the shock of the intelligentsia everywhere. His first term was then the most conservative four years from the executive branch since Coolidge, and this resulted in winning 49 states against Mondale.

Why has it been so difficult for Republicans to follow this playbook? Well, that's a longer blog post, but one thing is clear: Cruz is following it to the letter. He is basically ignoring the media and the party elders, and he's taking his message straight to the grass roots. You need a spine of steel to do this, but from what I saw today, he's got one.

To Republicans who still think we need a moderate to win, consider this: the press will turn on our guy no matter what. You really think they'll go easy if we nominate Chris Christie? Think again, it's a set up. They played nice with Romney right up until the convention, then they turned on him like hungry sharks. When Romney was accused of being a "murderer" by the Obama campaign, where were they? Nodding their heads in agreement. It was the same with McCain, who was a "maverick" and a "war hero," right up until the general. Then he was just the enemy.

I'm not endorsing Cruz, at least not now. It's way too early for that, and the Republicans have a deep field. Scott Walker and perhaps Rand Paul look interesting. Rubio, we'll see. But I am endorsing the idea that we have to nominate a principled conservative. After the disaster of the Obama years, a very clear and different vision must be articulated by our standard bearer.

No more moderates, my friends.

Harvard - Life Inside the Cocoon

In the past, I have often made snarky comments about the political hegemony of our nation's faculty lounges. Recently, I spent a couple of days at Harvard with a friend of mine who's a fellow there, and yes, we even spent time in the faculty lounge (in Harvard's case, a faculty "club"). I went into the heart of darkness.

And what a pleasant existence it is. We audited a class (immensely entertaining, if odd, and featured on 60 minutes). A Kennedy sat behind me. We wandered over and checked out Widener Library and lunched at the business school across the Charles (excellent food). We then popped over to the Law School where there was a 40th Anniversary retrospective of the Paper Chase (great movie, if you've never seen it). And yes, we fit in coffee at the Faculty Club.

The evening was spent having fun debates over beer with a variety of students about the sort of stuff you only talk about in college. An astronomy PhD candidate and an aspiring documentary film maker hotly debated the probability of life elsewhere in our galaxy. I really got into it over tort reform and "stop and frisk" with an American Studies kid.

The coccon is more pleasant than anyone can imagine from the outside. My friend says this is not an atypical day for him. Of course, many of us get to experience it firsthand during our college years. University life is a reassuring womb, where your every need is taken care of. There's a reason we all called life after the "real world."

The days and nights are perhaps most pleasant for the professors because here's a dirty little secret: teaching is not that tough. It doesn't take much time, and once you've taught a course once or twice, you can do it in your sleep. I know this from personal experience, since I taught as an adjunct at Yale. The first time I gave the course, it took some real thought and preparation. By the next year was a piece of cake. Oh sure, you tweak here and there, but nothing that's terribly time consuming. Mostly, you get to spend your days like my friend, gliding between the faculty club, lunch with interesting people, and cultural events.

There's a vast ecosystem of professors, fellows, visiting scholars, perpetual grad students, and administrators that never venture out of the cocoon. Why would they want to? And this is a problem, I think, because they all think alike. 96% of Ivy League professors donating money in the last election gave to Obama. That kind of uniform thinking is horrible if you believe in free discourse and independent thinking.

Sadly, in places isolated from the burdens and responsibilities of the real world, one can take on irresponsible positions without consequence, and everyone around you will have your back.

The cocoon will provide.

Obama's New Idea Is Setting Insurance Companies Up for Lawsuits

One concept liberals either don't grasp or just don't care about is unintended consequences. That a 2000 page bill would be rife with them should come as no surprise. Johnston's Theorem states that unintended consequences rise with the square of the number of pages in a bill.

And now we have Obama's desperate attempt to put lipstick on the healthcare pig by saying insurance companies can continue to offer their old plans for another year. More specifically, he's saying "I know it's the law, but we won't enforce it."

Aside from how constitutionally horrific this is, something Republicans are pointing out, there is an unintended consequence no one has pondered. If an insurance company goes ahead and continues people's plans, they are breaking the law. Now, it maybe true that Obama's army of bureaucratic enforcers won't go after them, but what about lawsuits? Lawsuits around insurance companies and healthcare are as common as breathing. If I sue my insurance company, say, next March over something, the centerpiece of my suit will be that they are breaking the law. Perhaps it will be a nice juicy class action suit ginned up by a law firm that specializes in such things.

What is the insurance company going to say? Yes, we knew we were deliberately breaking the law, but the president said it was okay? Oh, and the dog ate my homework.

This will be bad.

One More Example of How Screwed Up Obamacare Is

My brother and his wife both just had their policies dropped, policies with which they were perfectly happy. When they asked why and were informed that the policies were now "non-conforming." The new policy, which will be significantly more expensive, will be required to have things like "pediatric dental care."

They have no young children.

This hell-born law was written by a legion of congressional staffers and lobbyists, who all stuck in goodies they wanted. I doubt more than a small handful of people ever read its 2000 pages. Certainly none of the Democrats who voted for it did (remember "We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it?"), and certainly not Obama. The details didn't matter. It was a huge muscle flex, a message that Democrats could do something "big," and not the least, a major f*** you to the Republicans. We are now bearing witness to the fact that it's impossible for any good to come out of a process like that. This just may be the worst piece of legislation in U.S. history.

One wonders when the rioting will start.

You Peons Don't Know What's Good For You

Just for laughs, I just tried to log onto the Obamacare site. I got as far as putting in my name and email, but when I tried to check if my chosen password was available, the page just hung. That little spinning wheel started going round and round. That was three hours ago. It's still spinning.

I'm not going to write yet another piece on how the website sucks. Everyone knows that. I'm not even going to write a piece about what a disaster the whole thing is, generally, and how America was sold a series of blatant lies. (As one person said, "In a couple of months, we will be nostalgic for the faulty website.") Everyone understands that at this point, too, although Democrats will never admit it.

What I want to point out is today's spin out of the DNC, etc. In a nutshell, it's this:

Sure, you might lose your healthcare plan that you liked, but you probably weren't aware that you don't really have a great plan at all. You only think you like it, but did you know it didn't cover all sorts of super things like mental health and contraception? Our plans do! You will like it much more, we promise, and you'll be happy to pay the higher premium.

Translation: we know what's best for you better than you do, so just sit back and let us take over.

This attitude is a consistent one with liberal elites. What's interesting is that you rarely hear them come out and say it. 

Out loud.

The Decline of Our Culture

The other night I took my daughter to the movies in my nice, little, suburban town. About two minutes into the show, I notice that the guy behind me has put his feet up through the seat next to me. Normally, this wouldn't bother me out too much; I ocaissionally do the same, although never when there's someone right in front of me.

But here's the thing: he had no shoes on. Or socks. Just...feet.

I told him that I could deal with the feet being up but that he had to put on shoes. He responded by pulling his feet back, but two minutes later, there they are again. This time I'm a bit more assertive, to which he says, "Go fuck yourself."

Bear in mind, this wasn't some teenager. It was a middle age guy sitting with his wife. I fetched the manager who told him to stop. He put his feet down, but I don't think he ever put on his socks. (I doubt the floor was sticky or anything.)

The point of the story is that this person's actions don't even seem that remarkable anymore, and there's a remarkable lack of judgement going on. Behavior is expression. Civil society is becoming less civil every day.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

 

A friend of mine sent me a shot of this poster, which he found hanging on the wall of an exclusive Connecticut private school. I have a suspicion that it can be found in lots of classrooms across the country. Seldom has progessivism been so neatly captured.

Oh, c'mon. It's nice that the short boy can now watch the ballgame. What problem could anyone have with that? 

Well, let's imagine this was a real situation, and the boys, hoping for a better view of the game, scamper around and find three boxes. The tallest boy, realizing that his short friend still won't be able to see, gives him his box. Anything wrong here? Absolutely not. It's civil society in action, where people help others of their own volition. 

The problem is that that's not what the creators of this poster meant, not at all. The words don't read, "It's nice to help your friends." Rather, they speak of "justice," clearly meant as an imperative. You see, liberalism never trusts people to do the right thing, so the force of law is deployed to guarantee a desired outcome. Coercion is always the first and last answer, in this case spoiling the opportunity for the tall boy to do something nice for the short boy - not because he had to, but because he wanted to. The civil society is undermined.

Let's imagine further. HUD issues a federal regulation that boxes must be provided for short boys at all sporting events. Further, the boxes must meet various federal safety codes, lest a boy fall from one that was sub-standard. Come the inevitable box shortage, it happens that at some ballparks there aren't enough boxes to go around. Protests ensue, with angry demands for "fairness." Realizing they may have a federal lawsuit on their hands, but unable to procure enough compliant boxes, the ballpark owners consult their lawyers and decide to raise the fences high enough such that no one can see over them, tall or not. Problem solved.

And there is progressivism, in a nutshell. Equality created through coercion by dragging those at the top down. It never works out like the poster, where all are raised to the highest level, and it isn't supposed to. In real life it is so much easier to bring people down than raise them up. Just ask Bill de Blasio, New York's radical mayor-in-waiting.

The poster also suggests that justice and equal results are the same thing. This is a dangerous concept that has justified more tyranny, mostly of the Marxist variety, than just about anything over the last century. Looking again, the tall boy definitely has an advantage when faced with a tall fence, but what of other contexts? Perhaps the short boy is a brilliant student. What measures will be suggested then to even that score? 

Don't laugh. At a school one of my children (briefly) attended, parents were told not let their kids study anything above and beyond the curriculum, lest they get ahead and damage the self-esteem of the other, less motivated kids. Can't make this up.

Despite decades of evidence as to its disastrous effects, the intellectual left has never abandoned its Marxist longings. They won't call it by its name, of course, but the primal urge is still there, and the agenda still being pushed. Sometimes even in cute posters for our kids.