Hennessy's View

Here are the top Hennessy’s View posts of each month of 2012, scientifically selected by . . . me.

January

The Gabrielle Giffords shooting by lunatic Jerod Lee Loughner was the biggest news event of the month. The cynically attempted to use the tragedy for political gain.  The left failed.

February

The Arab Spring began last winter. When Mubarak was on the ropes in Egypt, some questioned whether or not his fall would be good for the region and the world. Other questioned whether it would be good for Egyptians. Still others blindly rooted for Mubarak’s death.  These last were the American Idiots. I suppose they’re still cheering the de-Christianization of Egypt.

March

If you look at the world as a fixed pie, you begin fighting others for your piece.  If you see the world as a limitlessly growing pie, you join others and get about baking.

April

I went to the Tucson Tea Party with Jim Hoft and Dana Loesch.  I met Larry Schweikart, author o A Patriot’s History of the United States and other great books and movies. 

May

Benjamin Hennessy graduated from high school.  I love all my children, but this was very special accomplishment for Ben. And the school’s approach demonstrated what education could be in the United States, if we have get over the 19th century factory model.

June

Obama made it worse.

July

What’s your FICA score?  For Millennials, your payroll taxes are a sign of things to come. Don’t be fooled by temporary FICA breaks—you’ll pay in the end and the through the teeth.

August

Warren Buffett wrote an ill-advised op-ed calling for higher taxes on the rich.  Months later, he sued the government to avoid paying back taxes on his businesses.  Never take tax advise from a man who stands to make billions if high taxes drive investors toward annuities. (Buffett owns lots of insurance companies.)

September

The St. Louis Tea Party kicked off its After Party program: a 12-month project to repair the fabric of society.  Big goal? You bet.  But we can do it.  After all, we’re Americans.

October

Occupy Wall Street’s celebration of defecation had just begun. 

November

The Republican Establishment begins asserting itself violently against the Tea Party movement. 

December

Finally, I ended 2012 with a 4-part series on what we can learn from Charles Dickens’s classic, A Christmas Carol.

So that’s my list.  You can see my archives here—by Date, Category, or Word Cloud. But I’d really like to see your list to top stories of 2011. Use the comments box below.

Thanks and Happy New Year,

Bill Hennessy

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Some St. Louis area conservatives cheered Roy Blunt’s (R-MO) elevation to the Number 5 leadership position in the Senate Republican caucus.

I didn’t. At least not politically. I like Senator Blunt personally, so I’m happy in that respect. But I’m not happy for the reasons some others are.

First, as I told Jo Mannies of the St. Louis Beacon, internal party stuff isn’t really a Tea Party matter. Leadership in the Senate’s GOP caucus is for Republican Senators to worry about.

More importantly, I’m a little disturbed about the expressed reason for the local happiness.

It seems some conservatives are eager for Senator Blunt to use his new power to channel more pork to the area. 

I don’t really understand how that’s conservative.  I thought we were trying to reduce the size and scope of government.  I thought our goal was to get Washington out of the business of picking winners and losers. 

When a Senator transfers money from one state to benefit another state, it’s socialism.

When a Senator writes regulations to help one business over another business, it’s corporatism, another word for fascism.

When a Senator bring home the bacon by borrowing from my future grandchildren, it’s generational theft.

Conservatives who protest wealth transfer though welfare payments to poor people can’t cheer wealth transfer to corporations.  Well, they can, but there’s a word for what that would make them.

The most difficult aspect of conservatism is eschewing short-term personal gain when it conflicts with the lawful role of government and good morals. On this point, I am far from perfect.  But I’m getting better at recognizing and correcting my own hypocrisy.

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Everyone knows and accepts that government does stupid things. Sometimes it feels like people institute governments and delegate them certain powers just to give us something to complain about.

Government stupidity, scandal, and corruption hits different people in different ways. Government hyperactivity keeps poor people poor by limiting opportunity and by building barriers to exiting poverty programs.  “If you take that job, you’ll lose your health insurance.” Compassion my non-qualifying asset.

Government induces moral complacency by telling otherwise decent people not to help their fellow humans.

Perhaps most insidiously, government steals opportunity from future generations for the benefit of generations that can and should take care of themselves.

Traditionally, business people, among others, watched and checked government.  They did this through local chambers of commerce, like the RCGA in St. Louis.

According to this article on Harvard Business Review:

Chambers of commerce are the oldest surviving business organizations. The earliest in the English-speaking world were set up in the 1760s in New York City and the Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. Charleston (SC), Manchester and Liverpool (UK), Quebec, and Jamaica followed in the 1770s, with the chamber model diffusing to all major towns and cities by the 1920s.

Chambers of commerce organized out of anger against government stupidity and growth.

Their earliest business leaders were angry protesters against the Stamp Act, taxation of the colonies, and military coercion on America. They were responding to a period of extreme contention between economic and political interests. A chamber of commerce provided a new model to shape anger and protests into more effective, reasoned, and sustained economic lobbies to the imperial government in London.

Somewhere between Stamp Act protests and Aerotropolis, though, chambers of commerce switched teams. They become lobbyists who curry favor with politicians in order to win unfair advantages for certain members of the chambers. According to economist Stephen Moore:

The Chamber of Commerce, long a supporter of limited government and low taxes, was part of the coalition backing the Reagan revolution in the 1980s. . . . [M]any chambers of commerce on the state and local level have been abandoning these goals. They’re becoming, in effect, lobbyists for big government.

That certainly seems to be the case in St. Louis. 

The RCGA, which once helped revitalize areas of town like Laclede’s Landing, Soulard, and Dog Town, now focuses on transferring tax dollars from future generations or from tax payers in distant Missouri counties into the pockets of the RCGA’s favorites players.

In the process, St. Louis has fallen in almost every category.  Population is declining in both St. Louis City and St. Louis County.  City schools are a discredited shambles.  St. Louis County is shedding tax payers to adjacent counties thanks to its insatiable appetite for fees and taxes. The St. Louis region has fallen dramatically in job creation.

Instead of working to get government off the backs of businesses and improving the region, the RCGA is focused on growing government and shifting business risk to the tax payers.  That’s not only bad for business and bad for the region, it’s bad for the soul.

Stephen Moore says St. Louis’s RCGA is not unique:

In as many as half the states, state taxpayer organizations, free-market think tanks, and small business leaders now complain bitterly that, on a wide range of issues, chambers of commerce deploy their financial resources and lobbying clout to expand the taxing, spending, and regulatory authorities of government.

The reason I and many other Tea Partiers oppose the Republican Establishment is because we’ve seen how that Establishment has gutted American cities like St. Louis. The Republican Establishment is almost indiscernible from various chambers of commerce.  Neither advances limited government, free markets, and fiscal responsibility.

Conservatives like me have a knee-jerk tendency to defend all private businesses against all accusations.  But that’s a knee-jerk reaction, not a wise consideration of facts and consequences.

Big businesses are famously myopic.  We’ve all heard the woes of companies that look only to the fiscal quarter or year, not to the long-term value of the business.  Many conservatives have oversold themselves on certain aspects of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations without ever trying to square those ideas with his other work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 

As a result, we on the right have become de facto enablers of big government, defending big business in their efforts to gain advantages through activist governments.

Stephen Moore found a small business owner in Maryland who’s had enough with his local chamber and the big businesses using it to destroy everyone else:

“I used to think that public employee unions like the NEA were the main enemy in the struggle for limited government, competition, and private sector solutions,” says Mr. Caldara of the Independence Institute. “I was wrong. Our biggest adversary is the special-interest business cartel that labels itself ‘the business community’ and its political machine run by chambers and other industry associations. [emphasis mine]“

Luckily, that Harvard Business School piece offers some solutions.  I’d like to responsible and serious St. Louis businesses start a rival chamber to advance these 7 principles of business-friendly government:

1. Set an ambitious new vision for engagement with the deepest irritations among chamber members; involve non-members to aid recruitment.
2. Build capacity among staff and volunteers to manage protest.
3. Recognize that government “bads” and threats are usually a far more influential force on businesses than government “goods”: avoid the US “pork barrel” and do not be trapped by the UK or EU incentives to “chase the funding”. This just gets non-profits to follow politicians’ agendas.
4. Focus on where threats, risks, and anger are highest; most businesses are not interested in the minor or trivial.
5. Use new technology to expose contention and open new avenues to welcome protest. Take on the tough problems and avoid easy solutions. Use business networks, social media, and crowdsourcing to re-engage business communities at low cost.
6. Prepare for long term and sustained campaigns; policy victories are rarely won quickly.
7. Expose policy incompetence, look for public programs that do not work and press for termination; but celebrate policy successes, especially where businesses and chambers have contributed. Use blogs and networks to keep up to date and monitor feelings. [emphasis mine]

If you’re interested in starting such a chamber, please enter comments below.

Update:  Perhaps Joe Reagan will changes things.  I forgot that the RCGA recently replaced long-time CEO, Dick Fleming.

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This is the fourth in a series. If you haven’t, please read part 1, part 2, and part 3. 

Because so many school systems have driven great English literature out of students’ hands and minds, it’s possible that some kids never read Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.  If you’ve never read this classic, please do so now.  You need it.

Back?  Good. Fascinating stuff, isn’t it?  And so much more accessible than David Copperfield, which was my introduction to Dickens.

So now you know that Scrooge was a miser who treated the whole world and all of its inhabitants with a cruel contempt.  Scrooge loved money and nothing else.

But during the course of the story, a series of spirits massage Scrooge’s conscience. They begin with his own happy youth, when Scrooge still enjoyed the presence of other people.  They proceed through Scrooges present and into his future.

Somewhere along the way, Scrooge changes.  He has a conversion. He learns to love others as himself.

If I were a Millennial—those born between 1983 and about 2002—I’d ask myself, “why?”

The spirits didn’t argue politics or morality with Scrooge.  They didn’t tell him his taxes were too low, and they didn’t send bureaucrats to audit his books and extract fines.

Instead, they made it personal.  They showed him his real life—past, present, and future—in living color and 3D.  They simply held up a mirror and provided him clear evidence of what his future would be if remained on the path he’d taken.

Scrooge reformed because he knew a lonely, unhappy death awaited him. He knew that people would mock his memory.

Millennials should take a hard look at our national debt. Not just where it stands, but the direction it’s going.

Look at the amount of debt that Gen X, Boomers, and WWII have saddled you with.  It’s about $50,000 and going up every day.

What did you get for that money?  Not a damn thing, really.  Most of that debt went to pay for people who are already retired. In other words, your grandparents are borrowing money, spending it, and passing the bill onto you.

I know you’re a generous group. You want to help. You believe in this country, and you’re willing to sacrifice to make it stronger.

We all are.  That’s a common trait of Americans.

But how much can you bear?  How much of a debt burden can your generation really handle?

On top of Washington’s $15 trillion in debt and $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities, most states hold hundreds of billions or more in combined debt and future pension obligations.  Those aren’t your pensions, but the pensions of people in older generations.

Well, you weren’t asking for all that debt. Now you’re stuck with it.

Again, how much more can you and our society handle? And does it really help anyone for the government to make promises it can’t keep?

Scrooge looked at “Christmas Yet To Come” and saw his horrible death. Unless he changed.

When I look at America’s future, I see the same.

The spirits gave Scrooge the chance to reform, and he took it.

Will you?

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Scrooge’s nephew left the office and let in two men in the process. They came to ask for a donation for London’s poor.

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.

“Both very busy, sir.”

“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

–Dickens, Charles (2004-08-11). A Christmas Carol (pp. 5-6). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

Liberals, of course, consider Scrooge the quintessential Republican. Scrooge cared only for himself. He was a miser. His miserliness made him miserable, bent, and twisted. 

Of course, this liberal view of Scrooge lacks consideration. It misses the fundamental flaw in 19th century English government meddling. 

Is Scrooge’s attitude so different from most American’s? Do we really take it upon ourselves to help those in need?  Are we, as individuals or groups, trying to build a better society?

Or do we say, “let the government take care of it?”

Government largesse only encourages misers like Scrooge to remain miserly. The debtors’ prisons and Union workhouses lent Scrooge an easy out.  “That’s what government’s for.”

The traditional American view of the good society differs wildly from Scrooges; the welfare state’s view does not.

When it comes to certain topics—sex, drugs, profanity, modest dress—we often hear, “you can’t legislate morality.”  Why do we never hear that about charity?  Isn’t welfare simply government’s attempt to force a moral viewpoint on society?

And doesn’t it fail as surely as attempts to dictate skirt-lengths or song lyrics?

Good societies result from good people. All legislation is moral, but legislation can’t change men’s hearts.

The After Party is St. Louis Tea Party’s attempt to repair the fabric of society—a fabric left to rot as we turned to government for solutions to problems that can and should be handled by local communities, charitable organizations, and states.

That’s not to say that government, at every level, must withdraw from charitable programs. Rather, the Constitution provides no authority to Washington. And local programs tend to trump distant ones precisely because the benefactor and beneficiary live, work, and worship together.

While the Tea Party is not a charity, it does have the tools to make stronger, healthier human bonds.  These bonds give us all resources for handling tough times. 

More importantly, these bonds encourage us to look at each other as human beings. And we’re more likely to help fellow human beings than we are to give up another tax dollar to a bureaucracy that loses and wastes more money than returns to the needy.

By the way, the two gentlemen soliciting donations said something you’ll never hear from a Washington bureaucrat.  Did you catch it?

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