For Democrats, blame lies with Republicans who refused to allow tax increases.

“We need a balanced approach. And the extremism, the Tea Party obstructionism here in Washington, is keeping us from restoring that balanced approach that America has always used of investing in the future, investing in job creation, and also being fiscally responsible at the same time,” said Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

-Blame Game Vitriol Demonstrates S&P Disgust

So the Tea Party, which wouldn’t accept tax increases as part of a debt deal, is responsible for the downgrade?

Casting the issue in terms of “balance” is a marvelous rhetorical sleight of hand – as if spending cuts are a Republican (or even Tea Party) thing and tax increases are a Democratic thing, and both sides have to give a little to get us out of the crisis. It’s partisan moral equivalence. Sounds wonderfully magnanimous and bipartisan, doesn’t it?

That would be a good way to cast the issue if we were dealing with feuding families. If the Hatfields and the McCoys are fighting over a piece of land and making everyone around miserable with late night gunfire, public opinion might justefiedly tell them, “split the difference and leave us be”.

But we’re not dealing with private families. They’re not fighting over Republican territory and Democratic territory. They’re fighting over our money – and that changes the entire dynamic of the fight. Instead of imagining yourself as a bystander to a fight, imagine yourself walking back from dinner one night when a mugger approaches you and demands your wallet. You decide to fight, and after exchanging a few blows, you realize you are about evenly matched in strength. The mugger, getting tired, pushes for a compromise: “While wrangling for your wallet, I saw you had about $1,000. Why don’t you give me $500 and I’ll call it a day. After all, we’ve got to have a balanced resolution to this conflict, and I need to buy healthcare for my wife. I’ll even give some of my half to the soup kitchen down the street.”

Is this an appropriate situation to which to apply moral equivalence? If you refused, and your fight damaged the restaurant beside you, would you be at fault once the cops came? Would they charge you with being “obstructionist” for fighting when you could have just compromised and given him the $500?

To blame the downgrade on a failure to raise taxes is to say the mugger has an equal right to your money as you do; that there is no presumption one way or another, so whatever stops the violence is the way to go. And the fact that the mugger promised to buy healthcare for his wife would give him even more of an entitlement to your money.

I doubt anyone would side with the mugger in this situation. So the only way left to hold that tax increases constitute appropriate “balance” is to question the aptness of the analogy. What would justify the mugger in taking your money? If he organizes his family into a mafia and offers you “protection”? If he buys certain things for you with your money? If he robs everyone on the block, most of whom readily comply? If five people approach you and let you pick which of them mugs you? If he robs you once a year, but to date had only taken $400 at a time? What makes tax increases appropriate, but not highway robbery?

Martin O’Malley, John Kerry, and David Axelrod are the problem. Their rhetoric is our national sclerosis; the entitlements they defend so vociferously the very reason we have come to a budget crisis at all. And while it’s fair to question the genuineness of the Tea Party in their budget rhetoric – it’s much easier to talk a small government game than to actually do something about it – there is no question their rhetoric is in the right.

Since 2009, the value of the Plenary Indulgence has fallen 17% against a basket of penances including the Hail Mary and the Our Father. At the close of churches on Sunday it was trading at 1.2 Years of Purgatory per indulgence, its lowest value in nearly five centuries.

But officials at the Vatican were quick to reassure penitents.

Ben Tetzel, chairman of the Vatican Reserve, the Church’s official storehouse of merit which is charged with maintaining the value of the Indulgence, stated in a press conference on Tuesday that church recovery is “on the horizon”, and that the skyrocketing price of penance is “transitory”.

However, many are skeptical of Tetzel’s optimism. Martin Wurzelbacher, a small church owner in Ohio, has become a lightning rod for dissatisfaction with Vatican policy since Pope Benedict’s stumbling response to 95 questions he raised at a town hall meeting near his hometown in March.

“Tetzel’s policy has been a disaster for the Church,” he said in an interview with ABC on Friday. “Indulgences are buying fewer and fewer years of purgatory, and all of a sudden the Catholic dream is out of reach for your average family.”

Others have also expressed skepticism of the Reserve’s ability to recall the indulgences once church recovery begins, but Pope Benedict believes the policy is necessary to close the Church’s massive grace deficit. He has also proposed a 5% “saint tax” on all grace earned from nonsacramental merit. The measure is expected to go for a vote in the College of Cardinals on Thursday.

The Vatican Reserve Board is scheduled to meet next month, after which it is widely expected that Tetzel will announce a second round of plenary easing

We have seen how a simple announcement of discontinuance of protection for non-contributors might work in the case of defense. Fire protection would probably fall into the same mold. Let just one house burn down, with the private fire department and its apparatus on the scene but refusing to quench the flames – all because the owner not only did not keep the company on retainer, but also refused to meet a “special, emergency price” – and let this event be widely reported by the media, and fire protection would probably cease, from that moment on, to be an example of Olson’s public goods.

-Walter Block, Public Goods and Externalities (1983).

This condition was realized late last month. Except for the special emergency price, Block’s excerpt reads almost prophetically. The mayor sums up succinctly why the policy was in place, demonstrating a clear grasp of logical cause and effect:

South Fulton’s mayor said that the fire department can’t let homeowners pay the fee on the spot, because the only people who would pay would be those whose homes are on fire.

So will fire protection cease to be regarded as a public good now? Can we count it among the other things the private market excels at providing? Well…

“Professional, career firefighters shouldn’t be forced to check a list before running out the door to see which homeowners have paid up,” Harold Schaitberger, International Association of Fire Fighters president, said in a statement. “They get in their trucks and go.”

…not if the moralizers get their way. And boy has this story sparked an outpouring of sanctimonious moralizing. This story is definitive proof that the only thing standing in the way of total privatization of fire departments is peoples’ misguided moralism. Shouldn’t people have a choice as to the amount of risk they assume in life? Obviously the Cranick family had better things to do with the fee than buy fire protection. It was a bad decision in retrospect, but so is the decision to skimp on car insurance once you get in a wreck. Should the insurance company be forced to cover damages you didn’t pay for them to cover?

Indeed, how is the socialization of fire protection – forcing everyone to pay for everyone else’s – any different in principle from the socialization of healthcare, except for the fact that it’s already the norm? Anyone with the slightest misgivings towards Obama’s Affordable Health Care for America Act must also be sympathetic towards these firefighters. Why would we expect them to act any more altruistically than doctors?

If we want fire protection, and if we want to shrink the scope of government, then let’s cheer this resounding expulsion of fire protection from the category of public goods. If we think that our money is better spent by ourselves than by the government on our behalf, then let’s clamor to see this fire policy everywhere.

A few miles south, Cuba finds itself in even more dire economic straits than the US. The drastic step of cutting 10% of the government workforce was just announced – which in a Communist regime is almost 10% of the total workforce, in the hope that a private economy can spring up where none has existed for decades.

This means that Cuba’s unemployment is about to go from virtually zero to ten percent in a month. Though some are hopeful, others are naturally wary of the changes:

“To imagine that the private sector is going to absorb so many people is a bit of a stretch,” he said. “It’s going to be major problem for the country.”

Here’s where the Democrats can do some real good for Americans, for Cubans, and look good while doing it. Obama says “That’s what we Democrats believe in — a vibrant free market“. The guffaws from everyone but his own party notwithstanding, the lip service paid to the free market could use some actual feet, and Cuba is the perfect opportunity:

End the Cuban embargo totally and immediately.

The embargo is a cold war relic. Communism as such is no longer a threat; and all the posturing against it was totally ineffective in keeping Socialism out of the American system. If it was designed to do any good at all, this is it. If you’ve been waiting for a good opportunity, Fidel has laid it at the doorstep of the Capitol dressed up in a ribbon.

It’s easy enough to see how this would appeal to the Left. Rescinding pointlessly punitive measures against Cuba would portray the Democrats as compassionate to the new plight of Cuban workers. And the Right, likewise, would eat up rhetoric portraying Cuba’s announcement as “victory”, and even further relish the opportunity to be magnanimous in helping these Cuban workers back on their feet through the engine of trade and private enterprise.

It won’t be a moment too soon, either. November fast approaches, and if a Democratic congress won’t consider it, let’s hope a Republican congress will.

To repeat the story from the net neutrality piece, it was obvious by Gorbachev’s ascent to power that the Soviet Union’s centrally planned economy had no room for growth. It was facing stagnation and decline into the indefinite future. To revitalize the economy, one of the first things Gorbachev did was ease capital controls. Unfortunately for him, that was one of the bottom cards: capital was immediately whisked out of the country, and the Soviet Union forthwith collapsed.

This is one of the most dire pathologies of government control: it’s extremely hard to move back towards freedom. One cannot “just do it”; it has to be done right. One of the reasons privatization has such a bad name is because in Russia and Argentina, state industries were not really “privatized”, but sold to government cronies (or drinking buddies in Gorbachev’s case). Regulatory patchworks have to be dismantled, if not totally, then with extreme care lest we end up with a lopsided and immediately perverse set of incentives that lead to even worse outcomes.

It goes without saying of course that this is not to be used as an argument against dismantling government control; only that it must be done with care…

Or so you’d think. American conservatives use this logic all the time for exactly that purpose: keep our regulations, we’re used to them.

Immigration is the most obvious example. The most common argument against illegal immigration used by conservatives is that we don’t want them using our government services and leeching off our tax dollars. But wait, aren’t conservatives supposed to be against government services? What better way is there to demonstrate the untenability of the welfare state than to show its insolvency in the face of increased payouts; to show that it is not an extensible system? In fact, I propose that no welfare program will go away until it is on the brink of crisis.

So rather than tackling the root of the issue, conservatives focus on a symptom and propose their own patch (border control) to fix the brokenness of the patches we already have (the welfare state). We’ve got a generous welfare state? Of course the indigent poor want to come here. Duh. But that doesn’t mean the indigents are the root of the problem. Our government determines in the short run the kind of immigrants we attract, and in the long run, what kind of economic actors we ourselves are (In Sweden for example it is common to take a year off after school and live off the generous unemployment benefits – not because of difficulty in finding a job, but because there’s no reason to until the benefits stop). Conservatives in America, far from advocating caution in dismantling as their name might suggest, are actually adding new cards.

This is the fundamental flaw that denies Conservatism the prestige of being a real and consistent ideology. Rather than an ideology, Conservatism (and Liberalism too; but I’ll get to that in a future post) is more of an aesthetic. The house of cards argument is so inconsistent that I suspect it’s not even what the conservatives who make it really believe. More likely it’s a mask for a visceral xenophobia, which is (consciously or unconsciously) suppressed because they know (probably unconsciously) that cosmopolitanism is at the moment more culturally in vogue that parochialism.

Of course, xenophobia doesn’t go away, even if it is culturally suppressed and hidden behind (not so) clever arguments. And some conservatives (the incorrigible, the imperceptive, or those surrounded only by other conservatives) venture into outright xenophobia anyway. The “protect our culture” argument is hardly on the fringes of the movement (as if American culture ever lived up to their ideals, and as if culture could be static anyway). Neither is the subtly racist and/or classist crime argument (which statistically just doesn’t hold water).

So if you’re going to pretend that the house of cards argument against immigration is the real reason for opposition, then Conservatives just need a dose of logic to realize the virtue of free immigration. Otherwise, if you just want to force your cultural preferences on people with the same apparatus that liberals use to force their economic preferences on people, then at least be honest about it. And if you can’t take the marginalization that a stance like that will inevitably afford as the old guard dies off, then just keep quiet on the issue.