Rush Limbaugh: A Colossal Failure of Liberalism

CALLER: You were talking about the political fallout for the governor and the mayor, but I'm talking about an immediate reaction like a recall. They're going to have a tremendous amount of money pouring into the state, and they've shown at the very least a gross mismanagement and at the worst, huge graft.

RUSH: You know, that's an interesting question because let me go back to something I mentioned at the top of the program to tell you where that battle is being fought. I mentioned earlier today a story in the New York Times by Robin Toner which says that this episode says the conservatives have a lot to answer for in the sense that conservatives have been hammering away at large government and they've been whittling away at large government, and they've taken the government down and they've limited it, and they've made it more efficient, they've made it smaller, and then this disaster comes along and look, why the conservative version of government doesn't succeed. Well, of course that's pure folly. The government is not smaller in any measurable away. It has been the desire of some conservatives, but it has not been the desire of this president. He may be conservative, but he has not tried to make the government smaller. This government has built more bureaucracy and layered it on top of other bureaucracies. Created homeland security, moved FEMA into it, and just made it all the more difficult here for the big bureaucracy to handle itself and to function efficiently as a small one would more likely do. So you've got that and that's a media reality once again that's totally untrue. There is no smaller government.

On the other hand, Jeannie, you have the literal fact that more money has gone to New Orleans for levees and the Corps of Engineers in five years of the Bush administration than any time during the Clinton administration. As you pointed out, the local officials have not spent it wisely, who knows where it's gone. It hasn't gone to poverty relief because the poverty rate down there is bad. The reality is that you have a massive socialist type entitlement state in New Orleans and through a lot of Louisiana, and you look at when a disaster hits, the people are out there saying, "This is just really displaying the depths of American poverty." No, it's not. It's displaying the depths of poverty in a liberal Democrat-run community, not the depths of poverty in America. You're not seeing this, as I say, from Mississippi. You don't see stuff like this when hurricanes go through Florida. You just do not see it. So what Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin are saying is that it's not their fault, that the government didn't succeed, government didn't work, and government needs to be bigger. The left is saying this proves that government is not yet big enough.

The lesson here is something that I and other conservatives have been saying for decades, and that is that self-reliance and self-responsibility are the best things to be able to fall back on. You hear that a disaster is coming, make sure that you have the ability to get out of the way. Make sure you have the ability to move. We're talking about saving lives here. Everybody is going to suffer economic and financial losses in a disaster this size, so we're talking about saving lives. Why is it that the people who were able to get themselves out have become enemies? Why is it that, "Well, easy for them to do, but what about the poor?" What about the poor? We still haven't had the proper argument in this country about why they're poor, and the reason that we haven't is because the left believes they're poor because of the construction of this country. They think that the system of capitalism dictates that there will be haves and have-nots and therefore there is no attempt even made to help the have-nots, that capitalism is comfortable with haves and have-nots. But socialism, even though it's never worked, even though it is something that requires revolution, dictators, and walls to keep people in, even though it's never worked, the self-loathers constantly rely on the promise of socialism and the promise of equality, the good intentions of equality. "We'll make sure that there are no haves and have-nots, there are just haves." Well, when you take away entrepreneurial capitalism and free markets, and that's why socialism does, you don't have achievers. You've got people that become more and more and then totally dependent. So the argument here really is, "Is the government not big enough, or is it too big?"

The media, which is creating a reality for everybody, is out there saying, "This proves small government doesn't work and we need to have government get even bigger." And mark my words, when the inevitable hearings begin, that will be the theme of the left. That government wasn't big enough and it wasn't ready enough and it needs a new department of disaster relief, we need a new cabinet level, homeland hurricane security, or whatever, something along these lines. And then we'll have a whole new bureaucracy that's supposed to sit around and do nothing but get ready for these. On the other hand, you'll have people saying that, "No, the government is too big and if you're going to make it even bigger it's only going to get worse." The bottom line, if you want the real truth, the bottom line is that the local and state governments failed miserably, there's no question about it, I don't care who wants to try to rewrite history here. The dirty little secret is that the feds got there pretty quick and they got there pretty quick with a lot of stuff that could help people. They got there faster than they got there in five other hurricanes. In some cases, the lag was five or six days. They were there in three days. This was big. We now know that the Salvation Army was ready with pallets of food and water to go to the convention center and the Superdome, but the state Department of Homeland Security said "No, if you take that stuff in there it's only going to attract more people and we want to get them out." As time goes on -- this is why you're going to see Democrats less and less eager for hearings. As time goes on, we're going to learn that the federal government did pretty much what it is supposed to do in these circumstances, and that the one element of the federal government that the left literally despises, the US military, deserves the gold medal, and General Russell Honore, because once he got off the plane and started doing his John Wayne routine, things started happening, one guy in charge. He didn't care about which bureaucrat he had to answer to, he didn't care about the leaflet of forms that he had to go through, and check off that box, check off that box, call this bureaucrat, call that bureaucrat, fill out Form 345(b,) Section 2, subparagraph 4, he threw all that to the shreds, and simply started barking orders.

He said, "Damn it! Go out there and take care of that." People started marching. So you can't even really call the military a bureaucracy. It is a streamlined organization with a definite chain of command and when an order is given, it's carried out. Most of the time, otherwise the person is shot. (Only kidding, members of the left.) But the fear of not carrying out an order is huge in the military. So as to your question, will there be political fallout? The governor and the mayor who may face a recall, I don't know that it will get there, once it is finally learned how much money was spent down there, and once it is learned who actually prevented all that money from being spent -- hello wacko environmentalists. Hello militant environmentalists wackos. If the truth, if the reality ever hits mass distribution, then there will be hell to pay. If the media reality of focusing all this on an inept big government, because of who's running this big government, and that of course is George W. Bush, if it stays there, then Nagin and these local people will survive. But Jeannie, what's happening now, you've got a record amount of federal aid coupled with private donations heading down to that region, and right now, while you could go down there and you could look and you wouldn't see it, because it's all happening behind closed doors, but right now the jockeying is on for who's going to be in position to receive those dollars and distribute them. It is another scandal waiting to happen. You think the looting so far has been bad, ha. Wait 'til the looting of the $100 billion starts. You just wait. That's what's being set up now, who is going to be in positions of power to accept that money and distribute it, and I think that a large factor in this is the positioning that the mayor and the governor are taking here to try to be in position to have access to those dollars. When you're in politics, it's all about money. It's all about raising it and spending it because that is where you derive your power, particularly in liberal and socialist-run communities. When you've got the money to pass out, and hand out, you've got the money to buy power. And put two and two together here.

This is a very good blog about why people are poor from "Jane Galt" over at Asymmetrical Information.

The poor really are different

The post below is complicated, for some conservatives, by the fact that if the poor acted like the middle class, they wouldn't have problems like no credit or savings.

If poor people did just four things, the poverty rate would be a fraction of what it currently is. Those four things are:

1) Finish high school

2) Get married before having children

3) Have no more than two children

4) Work full time

These are things that 99% of middle class people take as due course. In addition, there's some pretty good evidence that many people who are poor have personality problems that substantially contribute to their poverty.

For example, people with a GED do not experience significant earnings improvement over people who have not graduated from high school. In this credential-mad world, this simply should not be. And it is true even though people with a GED are apparently substantially more intelligent than people without a GED.

How can this be? Even if the GED were totally worthless, available evidence seems to indicate that intelligence carries a premium in the labour market.

The best explanation seems to be that people with a GED (as a group) are smart people with poor impulse control. What intelligence giveth, a tendency to make bad decisions taketh away. Anyone who has spent any time mentoring or working with poor families is familar with the maddening sensation of watching someone you care about make a devastating decision that no middle class person in their right mind would ever assent to.

So I think that conservatives are right that many of the poor dig themselves in deeper. But conservatives tend to take a moralistic stance towards poverty that radically underestimates how much cultural context determines our ability to make good decisions.

Sure, I go to work every day, pay my bills on time, don't run a credit card balance and don't have kids out of wedlock because I am planning for my future. But I also do these things because my parents spent twenty or so years drumming a fear of debt, unemployment, and illegitimacy into my head. And if I announce to my friends that I've just decided not to go to work because it's a drag, they will look at me funny--and if I do it repeatedly, they may well shun me as a loser. If I can't get a house because I've screwed up my credit, middle class society will look upon me with pity, which is painful to endure. If I have a baby with no father in sight, my grandmother will cry, my mother will yell, and my colleagues will act a little odd at the sight of my swelling belly.

In other words, middle class culture is such that bad long-term decision making also has painful short-term consequences. This does not, obviously, stop many middle class people from becoming addicted to drugs, flagrantly screwing up at work, having children they can't take care of, and so forth. But on the margin, it prevents a lot of people from taking steps that might lead to bankruptcy and deprivation. We like to think that it's just us being the intrinsically worthy humans that we are, but honestly, how many of my nice middle class readers had the courage to drop out of high school and steal cars for a living?

I'm not really kidding. I mean, I don't know about the rest of you, but when I was eighteen, if my peer group had taken up swallowing razor blades I would have been happily killed myself trying to set a world record. And if they had thought school was for losers and the cool thing to do was to hang out all day listening to music and running dime bags for the local narcotics emporium, I would have been right there with them. Lucky for me, my peer group thought that the most important thing in the entire world was to get an ivy league diploma, so I went to Penn and ended up shilling for drug companies on my blog.

Maybe you were different. But think back to the times--and you know there were times--when trying to win the approval of your peers convinced you to do things that were stupid, wrong, or both. Remember what it felt like to be sixteen and skinny and maybe not as charming and self confident as others around you, and ask yourself if you'd really be able to withstand their derision in order to go to college--especially if you didn't even know anyone who'd ever been to college, or have any but the haziest idea of what one might do when one got out. Try to imagine deciding to get a BA when doing so means cutting yourself off from the only world you know and launching yourself into a scary new place where everyone's wealthier, better educated, and more assured than you are.

Or take a minute right now and try to imagine how your friends would react if you announced that you'd decided to quit work, have a baby, and go on welfare. They'd make you feel like an outsider, wouldn't they? And isn't that at least part of the reason that you don't step outside of any of the behavioural boundaries that the middle class has set for itself?

Bad peer groups, like good ones, create their own equilibrium. Doing things that prevent you from attaining material success outside the group can become an important sign off loyalty to the group, which of course just makes it harder to break out of a group, even if it is destined for prison and/or poverty. I think it is fine, even necessary, to recognize that these groups have value systems which make it very difficult for individual members to get a foothold on the economic ladder. But I think conservatives need to be a lot more humble about how easily they would break out of such groups if that is where they had happened to be born.

That leaves us in a rather awkward place, because while I don't agree with conservatives that the poor are somehow worse people than we are, I also don't agree with liberals that money is the answer. Money buys material goods, which are not really the biggest problem that most poor people in America have. And I don't know how you go about providing the things they're missing: the robust social networks, the educational and occupational opportunity, the ability to construct a long-term life instead of one that is lived day-to-day. I think that we should remove the barriers, like poor schools, that block achievement from without, but I don't know what to do about the equally powerful barriers that block it from within.

But I also don't think that the answer is to use those barriers as an excuse to wash our hands of the matter.

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