Do you read a lot of contemporary novels? No, I don’t either. In the current issue of The Weekly Standard, I offer a few thoughts about why not. I argue that the place of the novel in our culture today, circa 2012, is very different from the place it occupied in the 19th-century or even up through the middle of the last century.

 It was before my time, but not I think much before my time, that a cultivated person would await the publication of an important new novel with an anticipation whose motivation was as much existential as diversionary. This, I believe, is mostly not the case now, and the reasons have only partly to do with the character and quality of the novels on offer. At least as important is the character and quality of our culture. . . .

It has often been observed that the novel is the bourgeois art form par excellence: that in its primary focus on domestic manners and morals, its anatomy of private vices and exercise of private virtues, it answered the spiritual needs of a specific historical epoch.

With the passing or maturation of that epoch, perhaps the novel, too, has matured or even graduated to the second infancy of senility. That theory would account for a good deal of what gets published and praised today, but I don’t think it tells the real story. It does seem as if there have been important alterations in the relation between life and literature—between life and the world of culture generally—and this is as much due to changes in the character of life as to changes in the character of culture.

My point is that even if a new Melville or Twain, Faulkner or Fitzgerald were to appear in our midst, his work would fail to achieve the critical traction and existential weight of those earlier masters. We lack the requisite community of readers, and the ambient shared cultural assumptions, to provide what we might call the responsorial friction that underwrites the traction of publicly acknowledged significance. The novel in its highest forms requires a certain level of cultural definiteness and identity against which it can perform its magic. The diffusion or dispersion of culture brings with it a diffusion of manners and erosion of shared moral assumptions. Whatever we think of that process—love it as a sign of social liberation or loathe it as a token of cultural breakdown—it has robbed the novel, and the novel’s audience, of a primary resource: an authoritative tradition to react against. Affirm it; subvert it; praise it; criticize it: The chief virtue of a well-defined cultural tradition for a novelist (for any artist) is not that it be beneficent but that it be widely acknowledged and authoritative.

Read the whole thing here.

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I was talking to a friend in California yesterday about the Obama administration’s latest assault on religious liberty — the “interim final rule” issued by the Department of Health and Human Services requiring all health plans, including those at Catholic institutions, to cover prescription contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion. Paul Rahe, in a brilliant historical reflection called “American Catholicism’s Pact with the Devil,” shows how this latest example of government-by-decree “unmasked in the most thoroughgoing way the despotic propensities of the administrative entitlements state and of the Democratic Party.” Mr. Rahe also shows how closely the Roman Catholic establishment has collaborated in that despotism since its embrace of the New Deal in the 1930s.

Step back even further. We’re always hearing people — well, some people — go on about the ideals of “limited government.” It was, remember, a leitmotif of The Federalist and other founding documents of the United States. Government should be limited to protect the individual, and groups of individuals, from the coercive power of the state.

If you were writing at the end of the 18th century, you had another historical reality fresh in your memory: Religious strife. It was something that John Locke, among others, conjured with. How can we maintain a secular state that fosters freedom given the competing claims of various sects? Here at the beginning of the 21st century, we may have forgotten the horrible metabolism of  that strife (though I suspect we shall soon be reminded of it, courtesy the “religion of peace”). But Paul Rahe is correct that it presented a problem that was “almost insuperable”: “how to secure peace and domestic tranquillity in a world marked by sectarian competition?” Locke’s solution, which was the solution Madison and his colleagues adopted for the United States, was limited government. “In the nascent American republic,” Mr. Rahe writes:

This principle was codified in its purest form in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But it had additional ramifications as well — for the government’s scope was limited also in other ways. There were other amendments that made up what we now call the Bill of Rights, and many of the states prefaced their constitutions with bills of rights or added them as appendices. These were all intended to limit the scope of the government. They were all designed to protect the right of individuals to life, liberty, the acquisition and possession of property, and the pursuit of happiness as these individuals understood happiness. Put simply, liberty of conscience was part of a larger package.

This much, I believe, even the most progressive among us would assent to.

Progressives, would assent, that is, to one side of the equation, the side that deployed all those nice-sounding words: Life! Liberty! Happiness! Even the Acquisition of Property (so long as it wasn’t too much). What’s not to like?

What guaranteed all those lovely things was the other side of the equation, limited government, i.e., government that did some few things but expressly did not do other things, not because they weren’t worth doing but because 1) they were outside the scope of a government that was limited by design to foster freedom and 2) to unchain government would be to undermine freedom. It was just this, Mr. Rahe points out, that “the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church forgot”:

In the 1930s, the majority of the bishops, priests, and nuns sold their souls to the devil, and they did so with the best of intentions. In their concern for the suffering of those out of work and destitute, they wholeheartedly embraced the New Deal. They gloried in the fact that Franklin Delano Roosevelt made Frances Perkins — a devout Anglo-Catholic laywoman who belonged to the Episcopalian Church but retreated on occasion to a Catholic convent — Secretary of Labor and the first member of her sex to be awarded a cabinet post. And they welcomed Social Security — which was her handiwork. They did not stop to ponder whether public provision in this regard would subvert the moral principle that children are responsible for the well-being of their parents. They did not stop to consider whether this measure would reduce the incentives for procreation and nourish the temptation to think of sexual intercourse as an indoor sport. They did not stop to think.

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Which would you prefer: a female al-Qaeda terrorist? Or a Somali refugee who has dedicated her life to combatting religious oppression and fighting for women’s rights? You might think it a no-brainer: the Somali refugee, right? Not if you are Deborah Scroggins, who shows that the question really is a no-brainer, but in a sense different from what is usually meant.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was an embittered Muslim terrorist called Aafia Siddiqui, Pakistani-born but educated in the U.S.  In September 2010, she was  convicted of assault with intent to murder and was sentenced to 88 years in prison.

Once upon another time. in another land far, far away, there was an oppressed but courageous woman called Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-born but who fled the mephitic swamps of Islamic oppression for the Netherlands in 1992. In 2003 she was elected to the Dutch parliament, but took refuge in the United States when her life was threatened by Muslims in the Netherlands — the same chaps who murdered her firend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. (“The killer shot van Gogh eight times with an HS 2000 handgun, and Van Gogh died on the spot. The killer also tried to decapitate van Gogh with one knife, and stabbed him in the chest with another. The two knives were left implanted; one attached a five-page note to his body. The note (Text) threatened Western countries, Jews and Ayaan Hirsi Ali . . .”)

Now imagine you are are a left-wing American journalist with the Dickensian name of Scroggins. You write a book about the al-Qaeda terrorist Siddiqui and Ayaan Hirsi Ali called Wanted Woman, whose burden is to show, to the consistent detriment of Hirsi Ali, how the two are “mirror images” of each other. Moral: Siddiqui is a brave warrior, oppressed by the West, while Hirsi Ali is a “lying” tool of decadent Westerners.

Amazing isn’t it?  Don’t read the repulsive book, but do read the historian Andrew Roberts’s brilliant  demolition of it at The Tablet. Cato the Elder (Carthago delenda est) would have been proud. Roberts treats this morally imbecilic book with the contempt it deserves.

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I’ve had occasion before in this space to note that high on Matt Drudge’s list of journalistic talents is a knack for juxtaposition. He does it again to today with this trifecta:

MICHELLE OBAMA CITES ‘REMARKABLE PROGRESS’ ON ECONOMY…

AMERICAN AIRLINES to cut 13,000 jobs…

NYC goes on hiring spree — for people to work its welfare offices…

One, two, three and you’re out, or so you’d think.

Regarding the first item, The Hill reports on a speech for “a small crowd of high-profile Hollywood names in Los Angeles.” They must be a stolid bunch, those “high-profile” Hollywood folks, for they listened to the First, er, Lady say “In the last three years, we’ve worked hard to get out of this mess and we’ve made some remarkable progress” without, as far as I could tell, falling out their Guccis laughing. It must have been a short speech, for it was mostly given over to listing President Obama’s “accomplishments”:  healthcare “reform” (i.e., the greatest contraption for wasting money, curtailing choice, and bureaucratizing health care ever invented), “the removal of troops from Iraq and the repeal of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ among other items on the list of ‘promises kept’ touted by Obama’s reelection campaign.”

Speaking of lists, though, how’s this list, sent to me by a friend some months ago?

Thanks a lot, Barack!

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Ah, the venerable London School of Economics. According to its web site, the elite social science institute was “set up to improve society and to ‘understand the causes of things.’” The  LSE, continued the bulletin, “has always put engagement with the wider world at the heart of its mission.” What better way to accomplish that than by censoring free expression about sensitive topics? Here we have it, folks: an institution that prides itself on being on the cutting edge of all things modern — and devoted, what’s more,   to understanding n”the causes of things — resurrects that icon of medievalism: a law against blasphemy!

Don’t believe me?  Check it out here: “The London School of Economics [LSE] Student Union has passed a motion effectively making it impossible for students on campus to criticize Islam.”

Ouch.  Remember the Danish cartoon saga?  Cartoonists lampoon Muhammed, Islamists go wild, burn embassies, kill a few score infidels, and generally exhibit the extreme anti-social behavior that has made Islam synonymous with insanity wherever reason prevails. The LSE’s bargain with the barbarians was also provoked by a cartoon, though I suspect just about anything less than total acquiescence might have set the, off.  A touchy, thin-skinned bunch, these followers of the “religion of peace.”

The LSE has recently been embroiled in another scandal on campus – notably the shutting down of a union-affiliated “Atheist, Humanist and Secularist Society” for the posting of a cartoon entitled “Jesus and Mo.” The cartoon depicts Jesus and the Prophet Muhammed having a drink together in a pub and is a regular cartoon shared within the atheist community.

In response to the cartoon being posted, students at the London School of Economics forced through motions denouncing “Islamophobia” which defined the act as “a form of racism expressed through the hatred or fear of Islam, Muslims, or Islamic culture, and the stereotyping, demonisation or harassment of Muslims, including but not limited to portraying Muslims as barbarians or terrorists, or attacking the Qur’an [i.e., the Koran to us infidels] as a manual of hatred.” Critics have argued that the loose terminology — i.e. Islamic culture — makes parody or criticism of Islam impossible.

The critics, of course, are 100 percent correct.

Another detail, the motion passed with only 6 percent of the student body turning out for the vote.

Yet another detail: the motion also disenfranchised hundreds of students by revoking the ability to vote on line, a provision that Raheem Kassam, director of the an organization called Student Rights, called “Putin-esque.” “This is an extremely worrying day for the London School of Economics,” Kassam observed. “Shutting out people from voting online, effectively leaving the Union in the hands of political extremists who turn out day-in day-out, and passing what is a flimsy motion on Islamophobia means that freedom of speech, expression and effective representation is being curtailed on campus by those with a distinct political agenda.”

Exactement, mon brave.

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John Stuart Mill famously described conservatives as “the stupid party.” The description has unwritten boundless hilarity among liberals for more than a century, but that is only because they (stupidly?) neglected to take Mill’s deeper message on board. Every true partisan of liberalism, Mill wrote, should pray for the enlightenment and acuity of conservatives if for no other reason than intelligent opposition tends to have a tonic effect on liberalism itself.

That is probably true. But there is a toxic assumption lying behind Mill’s strictures that is worth pondering.  It is this: the more closely one compares liberals and conservatives, the more it emerges that by “stupid” many liberals (including, I believe, Mill himself) mean “disagreeing with me.”  Liberalism, that is to say,  regards its political opinions not as opinions but as reflections of the state of nature: what any right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) person believes. But your opinions, my conservative friend, are regarded not so much as opinions as some form of heresy. Here in a nutshell you have the motor behind political correctness and the staggeringly illiberal attitudes espoused by the elite liberal establishment.

There’s a lot more that might be said about Mill’s diagnosis of conservatives as “the stupid party.” You might, for example, want to ask the embarrassing question “stupid compared to what?” or — another embarrassing gambit — “What counts as liberal these days?” In any event, whether or not conservatives can really be described as “the stupid party,” I fear that Republicans, having repudiated the instinct of self-preservation, are shaping up as a kind of suicide club.  (H/t, Robert Louis Stevenson.)  I know, I know: if you were to create a Venn diagram of conservatives and Republicans, you would have less overlap than you might suppose. But if you are thinking about political realities — about how power is acquired, held, and exercised — Republicans, for the time being anyway, are the closest thing to conservative  players we have  in the game (as distinct from those quarter-backing from the bench).

This is not, it pains me to report,  a cheery fact. Conservatives look around and see that, when it comes to simple venality, Democrats nearly always take the palm.  The party that spoke up for slavery in the 19th century, segregation in the 20th century, and the neo-segregationist muddle that is multiculturalism, affirmative action, and political correctness in more recent years is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Entitlement, Inc., committed  not simply to a redistributionist but also centralizing, statist agenda, the pursuit of which licenses all manner of Alinskyesque  subterfuge.

Further: It is an irony of language that those who congregate under the banner of liberalism more and more associate themselves with policies that are inimical to individual liberty and its great enabler, democratic capitalism, while conservatives, committed to free markets and policies that promote self-governance and individual initiative, should be denied the moral lubrication of that coveted term. Russell Kirk was right when he said that he was conservative because he was liberal, i.e., committed to ordered liberty and the fiscal responsibility that underwrites it. But Republicans, having largely ceded the rhetorical high ground to the Democrats, have lost access to such clarifying formulations. (They have also, in the name of “compromise,” capitulated on . . . well, on nearly every important Democratic initiative.  See, e.g., Andy McCarthy’s depressing column about the fiscal side of this tawdry reality in “The Myth of GOP Stinginess.”)

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In “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents,” his brilliant anatomy of covert state despotism, Edmund Burke noted that “the forms of a free, and the ends of an arbitrary [i.e., despotic] Government” are not at all incompatible. You may well live in a country in which the law of the land states that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” But it is the work of a moment for a despotic government to supersede that law in fact if not in name.

Consider, to take just one example, the Transportation Security Administration. When Senator Rand Paul was detained by the TSA for refusing a pat-down, the senator’s father, Congressman Ron Paul, declared that “the police state in this country is growing out of control.” Indeed.  The chaps and chapettes who staff the TSA specialize in useless physical violation — useless, that is, for foiling terrorists or improving security: for intimidating citizens and encouraging the habit of docility, the intrusive searches are powerful tools.

But if the TSA is an obnoxious institution, it has plenty of competition from certain local police forces.  Consider the letter I received yesterday from a friend in an upscale town in the mid-West:

Last Saturday, [my son’s] kids were playing in their front yards in the snow with the neighborhood kids. About 5 pm [their mother] called them in for dinner.  James (age 6) came in, took off his hat and coat (he was still in his snow boots, snow pants, long underwear and long shirt) when [his mother] told him to run two houses down the street to get his sister to come home.  James ran past [his father] who was waiting on the front porch for a client and watched James run down the street.  He then saw a cop car make a u-turn, stop and walk up the neighbor’s walkway and confront James.  [My son] was there within seconds.  The cop said he was writing [him] up for James not having a coat on (temp was about 25).  Now this house he ran to wasn’t more than 100 feet from [my son’s] house.  Cop called DCFS  [Department of Children and Family Services] that moment and said that James was barefoot, had inappropriate clothing, and lack of adult supervision.  [My son] went back to his clients and Julie went to confront the cop.  She was as mad as I have ever heard her and the cop was just abusive.  Said he was writing down everything she said and kept asking her if she was done yet. [My son] called the sergeant on call who said he didn’t know the cop but would look into it.  [He] got no call back.  Sunday morning at 9 a.m. a person from DCFS appeared at the front door wanted to search the house and talk to James who was hysterical by this time.  DCFS said they didn’t think there was going to be a problem.  On Monday [my son] called the police department asking to talk to the police chief.  Secretary wouldn’t put him through but sent him to another sergeant.  [He] explained his story and sent him the photo he took of James after he got back into the house.  Officer said that the picture was taken some time after the incident and [My son] could have dressed James up.  [My son] wanted to file a police harassment complaint but the cop said, “If you do and we find that any of what you say is wrong, we will prosecute you!”  [He] finally got a hold of the police chief who really wasn’t going to do anything about it.  [My son] is giving up for fear of reprisals.  Amazing isn’t it.  Now we should call the police station so they can determine what type of clothing we should put on our kids before we let them out of the house.

Note the phrase “fear of reprisals.”  I omitted the names of my friend’s son and changed the name of their little boy to minimize the chance of reprisals from this publicity.  But think about it: since when should law-abiding citizens in a free country fear reprisals from the police or other government bureaucrats? The answer, of course, is “just as soon as that country starts treating its citizens as wards of the state.” I sent the above missive to a lawyer friend who advised that the best recourse was publicity in some local papers. I hope it is forthcoming. In the meantime, I hope my friend rallies all his acquaintances to do exactly what he suggested: call the police station every morning to get a bulletin on what to wear that day. A few hundred calls a day might just dampen police  enthusiasm for this particular form of harassment. It will also while away the time until the town can get around to cutting the budget of their local police force and publicly humiliate the egregious officer who thinks he was hired to be a nanny-state bully not a public servant.

(Thumbnail on PJM homepage by Carolina K. Smith, M.D. / Shutterstock.com.)

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I am down in Antigua for a few days with friends sorting out the problems of the world. It seems as remote as it is beautiful here high on a bluff overlooking Green Island then three thousand unobstructed miles to the coast of Africa. Modernity is just about everywhere, though. The beach below my window is empty all day long, except when we do our daily perambulation and the heartier among us plunge into the ocean to swim. But there is plenty of ice for the rum punches and, more to the point, the satellite-enabled wifi silently connects us to the chatter back home.

And what chatter it’s been. Yesterday, I popped out of my room to announce that Rick Perry had dropped out of the race and was endorsing Newt Gingrich to the chagrin of some and the delight of others in my party. I popped out again to provide a précis of Marianne Gingrich’s nasty and indecorous rant about her ex-husband in an interview with ABC’s Brian Ross. “Monkeys with clubs,” said one of our band of studious researchers. “That’s what politics is: monkeys with clubs.” He was not, by the way, a Gingrich partisan, but he could recognize a monkey — and a club — when one paraded by.

It was all old news, you know: notwithstanding the attention-grabbing headline about Newt wanting an “open marriage,” Marianne had no new scandals for us. The lack of novelty did not, of course, temper the viciousness of her attack, which was underscored by the opening act earlier in the day of how some ABC execs were debating the “ethics” of broadcasting the  interview before the primary vote in South Carolina.

Ha, ha, ha: Oh, those cards at ABC!  You can just imagine how tormented they were by the ethics of the situation. “Hank, what do you think, should we broadcast this bucketful of sewage from the guy’s angry ex now when it can do some serious harm to his candidacy, or do you think it would cause more damage if we held it until later in the campaign?”

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The stars must be aligned to foist the constellation anaticula into the Zeitgeist: for the Duck, otherwise known as “the canard” casts its ghoulish light over our sublunary world. Four times in the past week someone has written to inform me that (I pick one formulation of the falsum anaticula) “when Bill Clinton left office there was a government surplus, it was the Bush administration  that turned that into a deficit . . .”

This is a canard one hears almost as frequently as this election- year staple: that Newt Gingrich, heinous fellow, asked a former wife for a divorce while she languished in hospital, dying of cancer.  What a terrible man, eh? Except that the story isn’t true, as even the most cursory research (e.g.,  The Gingrich Divorce Myth) would show.

But research, even the cursory sort, isn’t as much fun as simple repetition, especially when there’s a reputation to ruin, smugness to be enjoyed, or a political point to score.

So it is with “Clinton delivered a surplus to George Bush in 2000” canard. You can discover this by going to the monthly statements published by the U.S. Treasury. “But wait,” you say, “that chart linked shows a surplus of  more than $200 billion! It’s right there in black-and-white: $236 billion and the word ‘surplus.’ So there.”

Not quite “there,” actually. That $236 billion is only one part of a larger puzzle, the bottom line of which is the total national debt, which grew every year under Clinton.  Talk of a “surplus” is possible only because of accounting legerdemain.  The economist Craig Steiner has put the case more clearly than anyone I know in a series of articles: “The Myth of the Clinton Surplus,” “The Myth of the Clinton Surplus, Part II,”  and “The True Federal Deficit.” In the second article, Mr. Steiner casts his beady eye upon that $236 billion and  explains how the national debt is calculated:

If there’s a $236 billion surplus then most people would think the national debt would go down by $236 billion. Instead it went up by $18 billion [in the year 2000]. This is the difference that must be explained.

Public Debt is calculated by taking the previous year’s public debt and adding the total unified budget deficit (or subtracting the surplus), and then adding any “other means of financing.”

Intragovernmental Debt is calculated by taking any trust fund surpluses and adding it to the previous year’s intragovernmental debt.

 

Total National Debt is calculated by adding the public debt to the intragovernmental debt. As a result, the national debt can increase even when the public debt decreases if the intragovernmental debt increases by a larger amount.

Why? When a trust fund (such as social security) takes in more money than it pays out in benefits, it takes the extra money and “invests” it in government bonds. Essentially social security says “We received $100 billion in social security contributions but only paid out $80 billion in benefits, so we take the extra $20 billion and buy U.S. government bonds.” Social security doesn’t keep the extra cash but rather loans  it to the U.S. government and, in return, it gets a U.S. government bond. That means the U.S. government can immediately spend that $20 billion on normal government operations but owes that $20 billion to Social Security. [My emphasis.]Hence one part of the government (the U.S. Federal Government general fund) owes $20 billion to another part of the government (Social Security). That is intragovernmental debt.

 

Mr. Steiner has a homely but clarifying analogy that explains this:

 If in a given year you earn $30,000 and a friend loans you $5,000, and you spend $32,000, is that a surplus? While you can claim “I received $35,000 and only spent $32,000, thus I have a surplus,” that’s a pretty weak argument when you know that $2,000 of the money you spent was actually borrowed and has to be paid back later. That’s pretty much what happened in 2000.

The bottom line: a real surplus would cause the total national debt to decrease. The total national debt did not decrease under Clinton: on the contrary it rose ever year.  Ergo, etc.

This is not a partisan issue, by the way. The Clinton administration is not the only one to have engaged in such deceptive accounting reporting. As Mr. Steiner notes, “all modern presidents have.” He lays it all out in “The True Federal Deficit,” where he trace the national debt from 1978 to 2008. “Every year,” he notes “the ‘official’ claimed deficit is smaller than the amount by which the national debt went up. This is true under both Republican and Democrat presidents. Sometimes the differences between the two are smaller and sometimes they are larger, but the real deficit (calculated by the amount the national debt increased) is always larger than the deficit the government claimed.”  Here it is, President by President:

 * The sum of all Carter’s claimed deficits was $252.709 billion but the national debt went up by $299.015 billion.

* The sum of all Reagan’s claimed deficits was $1.412228 trillion but the national debt went up by $1.859576 trillion.

* The sum of Bush Sr.’s claimed deficits was $1.035646 trillion but the national debt went up by $1.554057 trillion.

* The sum of Clinton’s claimed deficits and surpluses actually resulted in a net surplus of $62.904 billion but the national debt went up by $1.395974 trillion–only 30% less than the increase during the Reagan administration.

* The sum of George W. Bush’s claimed deficits (through fiscal year 2008) was $2.131405 trillion but the national debt went up $4.217262 trillion.

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I am just back from a brief family trip to our nation’s capital. The efficient cause of our sojourn was a twelfth-night party at some friends’ in nearby McLean, Virginia, but we took the occasion to visit the Air and Space Museum, a reliable hit with our 13-year-old son and a source of wonder for his 4-year old sister. We also — that is, my son and I also — visited the International Spy Museum, an establishment I hadn’t known about before, meeting up later with the distaff side at the Natural History Museums (gems, butterflies, dinosaurs). Tootling around Washington, I was struck by — well, not by its prosperity, exactly, but by what is clearly a lavish outlay of funds — your funds, in fact. Everywhere I turned there were huge building cranes. In one spot, I counted seven over the space of a few blocks. It looked a little like a third world country suddenly flush from newly discovered mineral reserves of some sort. Which I suppose describes the situation in Washington accurately enough, except that for “mineral reserves” you need to substitute “deficit spending.” I remember meeting my friend Edward Shils several years ago in Washington: “My, they live well on our money,” he said. What would he say today, I wonder, when Washington has come more and more to resemble Versailles circa 1780.

I confess to feeling despondent about our political class — what Peter Schweizer, in his depressing and revelatory book Throw Them All Out, calls the PPC, the “Permanent Political Class.” Schweizer’s book provides lavish documentation for something Sarah Palin complained about a few months ago: that the people who go to Washington to be Public Servants tend to leave several years later (those who do leave) vastly richer than they arrived. How is it, for example, that Nancy Pelosi, who was helping to shape credit card legislation, made a 50 percent profit in two days from her $1-$5 million investment in Visa? Or that John Boehner profited so handsomely from real estate speculation along a highway route that he knew about before the general public? Why is it that congressmen are allowed to invest on the basis of insider knowledge when the same behavior would bring down the scrutiny of the SEC on us plebs?

Kevin Williamson has some characteristically intelligent things to say about this and other depressing facts of government financial life and its Wall Street friends in his National Review essay “Repo Men“:

Wall Street can do math, and the math looks like this: Wall Street + Washington = Wild Profitability. Free enterprise? Entrepreneurship? Starting a business making and selling stuff behind some grimy little storefront? You’d have to be a fool. Better to invest in political favors.

But it’s not only this spectacle of banana republic favoritism that is depressing. There is also the reality of what George Will calls “The Redistributionist Behemoth.” “Liberals,” Will notes,

have a rendezvous with regret. Their largest achievement is today’s redistributionist government. But such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself.

Prominently including itself. That’s one of the disturbing ironies of Obama’s desire to “spread the wealth around.” Most of what’s spread around doesn’t find itself in the pockets of folks like Joe the Plumber but the bureaucrats who manage the distribution. Will has it exactly right:

Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage.

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