Eric O’Keefe

Mark Tapscott writes that “Noonan is right, the GOP is dying.” Noonan focuses on the GOP standing with Bush even on his frequent departures from conservative principles. But the GOP failure is much broader, and it has deep institutional origins.

Congressional Republicans thought they could entrench themselves in power the way the Democrats had for forty years– by spending lavishly on entitlement programs and pork. They were proved wrong by the 2006 election results.

Now their defeats in three special elections in conservative districts, along with polling results and fundraising efforts suggest they will face another rout this November.

Is that bad for the country? The Democrats promise to tax and spend even more than the Republicans have; they don’t even pretend to respect constitutional limits on the expansion of government.

The plight of voters this November reflects a stunning failure of leadership by the friends of liberty. How can both political parties be so enthusiastic about growing government? What has gone wrong?

The central error has been to rely on a political party as the defender of liberty for long after that was practical. In the 19th century political parties were privately run, and they held the power of nominating candidates; informed citizen leaders controlled the parties, and they worked to keep politicians and governments in check.

Starting with the mislabeled “Progressive Era” a hundred years ago incumbents began to erode the freedom of political parties; today they are mere shadows of the great parties of the 19th century. They are now quasi-governmental entities run by incumbent to expand their power. They offer no check on the power of government; and they are so heavily regulated by government that there is no prospect of reviving them.

The Republican Party collapse improves the long-term prospects for liberty. It means that more people will seek a workable way to protect liberty. No political party can perform the needed functions.

Liberty is in retreat because our political parties are controlled by incumbents in government whose goal is to increase their power over taxpayers.. Only private, voluntary organizations can hope to preserve and promote principles that limit incumbents to their proper roles.

Government 2.0 earns a fine column by Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal. The authors of Wikinomics are looking at government and how collaboration can improve the operation of that last great bastion of top-down mismanagement. Crovitz hopes that “Web 2.0 can make government more effective by tapping information among officials and citizens, perhaps even finding a new consensus on where the wisdom of government begins and ends.”

Ballotpedia is a fine example of how citizens can collaborate to make government and governing more accessible.

Tim Eyman has mortgaged his home to assure payment for the rest of a petition drive in Washington. Eyman is a veteran anti-tax leader heading the effort to pass Initiative 985 , a measure to introduce some sanity into transportation policies and spending.

Eyman reported in an e-mail alert to the media and donors that the campaign has raised $279,000, but needs another $250,000 to complete the petition drive. Eyman has been an innovative initiative leader, with a history of putting creative and popular measures on the ballot, and then running only earned media efforts to advocate a “yes” vote. Last year voters passed Initiative 960, and his organization Permanent Offense is living up to its name with this new proposal.

The Sam Adams Alliance contributed to last year’s petition drive, and is considering a significant contribution to help with this petition drive.

Taxpayers in Michigan today filed 15,498 signatures to meet the 8,724 signature requirement to place the recall of House Speaker Andy Dillon before the voters in his district. Dillon pushed a $1.4 billion tax hike through the Michigan legislature last year, as the state’s taxpayers were already suffering from the worst economic performance of any state in the union.

Dillon’s big government allies say that his constituents love him and don’t want a recall. But they fought on the street to deter circulators and signers with paid blockers; they have fought in the courtroom, and claim they will keep fighting to prevent a vote. And speaker Dillon today said that there is no support for a recall in his district; but when a reporter asked why he was going to court to prevent a vote, he said “Recall elections are unfair. You have to run against yourself” because you don’t have an opponent.

Actually recalls are rare — and fair. They generally happen only when politicians act with extreme disdain for taxpayers. Though sometimes - as in the current Jeff Denham recall in California — they happen when Big Labor wants to punish someone for opposing their pursuit of taxpayer money.

Taxpayers led by Leon Drolet and Rose Bogaert are fighting to save Michigan from profligate politicians who responded to a declining economy by slamming taxpayers with a record tax hike.

Monday’s Detroit New editorialized that their effort to recall Speaker of the House Andy Dillon “serves no useful purpose.” They also reported that the recall campaign is “working against efforts to create a more cooperative environment in the Legislature.”

Let’s see — isn’t that the Legislature which last year “cooperated” to impose a record tax hike on the long-suffering taxpayers of Michigan?

The editorial was entertaining for revealing how uncomfortable the ruling clique is when taxpayers take the offensive.  King George didn’t like it either.

Leon’s rebuttal is far more readable than the editorial — and the News does not deserve a link, but if you must you can find Leon’s response and News link on the blog for the Michigan Taxpayers Alliance.

Below is a critique applicable to climate change alarmists:

These supposedly scientific assertions are, of course, accepted only because they satisfy certain moral passions.

And:

Any criticism of its scientific part is rebutted by the moral passions behind it, while any moral objections to it are coldly brushed aside by invoking the inexorable verdict of its scientific findings.

Those lines were published in 1958. Michael Polanyi was analyzing the Marxist ideology that had done so much damage to civilization. (Personal Knowledge, p. 230)

Where have all the Marxists gone? As the Soviet Union and other communist models collapsed nearly twenty years ago, the socialists in America and Europe did not admit their errors and join the friends of liberty. They looked for a new vehicle to ride to dominion over their fellow men — and they gradually found it in “global warming,” recently amended to the infinitely accomadative “climate change.”

The climate change dogma is an amazing complex of myths, the greatest of which is that man is not a part of nature, but a dangerous imposition and a threat to a fragile natural world. This is a delusion which could be coddled only amidst the wealth of an advanced civilization.

The extremists want an end to industrial civilization. That would entail a 95% decline in the number of people living on earth; and it would prove to the survivors that nature is a large and dangerous setting for humans, and even more so for civilization, which can be destroyed not only by nature, but when popular delusions draw society away from the truth.

Paul Chesser and others provide sensible antidotes to the alarmists from Climate Strategies Watch.

A Wall Street Journal editorial gets it right on the “farce” of current campaign finance regulations. They are effective — at entrenching incumbents in power.

Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge is making me look forward to my airline flights, where I can study it further.

The back jacket of my copy does an injustice to this spectacular book, by making it seem to be for scientists or philosophers only. But it is a hugely ambitious attempt to “re-equip men with the faculties which centuries of critical thought have taught them to distrust. The reader has been invited to use these faculties and contemplate thus a picture of things restored to their fairly obvious nature.” (p. 381)

It is a devastating attack on materialism or reductionism as promoted by Laplace and many others, which “has created a pervasive tension throughout our culture, similar to that generated at an earlier time by the rebellion of reason against religion, but even more comprehensive in its scope.” (p. 142)

Polanyi wants to restore confidence in a common sense view of man, life, and the world.

“For once men have been made to realize the crippling mutilations imposed by an objectivist framewor — once the veil of ambiguities covering up these mutilations has been definitively dissolved — many fresh minds will turn to the task of reinterpreting the world as it is, and as it then once more will be seen to be.” (p. 381)

Polanyi was a great thinker; his insights have fundamental implications for our struggle for liberty.

I’m at the SamSphere Denver on the anniversary of the “shot heard ’round the world” which launched the Revolutionary War in America — as we were reminded by Ken Marrero in a stirring introduction.It is a dangerous time in American history — and therefore world history.

In this same city in a few months one of the Democratic party will nominate an unrepentant socialist for president of the United States. This will be a candidate whose main connection to the Constitution will be fleeting discomfort with the constraints our founding principles put in the way of his (or her) ambitions.

That would create a crisis even if the Republican party were presenting a clear contrast rooted in the enduring principles of the Founding.

But instead we have a country with one party trying to lead us into an abyss, and the other trying to — I don’t really know what they are trying to do.

We need a permanent network for friends of liberty not only independent of the governments, but also independent of the political parties, which have been corrupted by law and other methods into being happy arms of the state.

The Sam Adams Alliance is hosting some wikis which invite citizens to help other citizens bring transparency and accountability to government. They are Ballotpedia, Judgepedia, and SunshineReview.

Wikis may be as revolutionary for human civilization as the invention of movable type by the printer Gutenberg around 1450 A.D.  Movable type meant that manuscripts could be produced for much lower cost, and therefore made available to thousands of people. That lead to more books, then book collections, more scholars, and an acceleration of human learning and human civilization.

However scholarship, science and other book learning were still an exclusive area, confined to the privileged, the lucky, and the occasional determined genius.Libraries later offered a wealth of knowledge to millions, just for the cost of the time. Not just the time to visit the library, but the time to search and research among dusty books and journals; information was there, on the shelves, some of it accurate, some not; but it was not easily searchable or verifiable.

Enter the internet — and much information is available. It is easy to find many things — though not so easy to verify. And it may not be easy to find just what you want. But there seems to be an expert in everything — and with wikipedia Jimmy Wales facilitates a spontaneous order F.A Hayek would have appreciated. Dispersed experts add their knowledge, engage with other experts, and reach a consensus presentation on millions of terms, events, and people.

Now wikis are developing on many other topics — some of them very important. And some covering areas where the obscurity of information is deliberate — government power and government spending. Enter Judgepedia, to cover the least accountable, but often the most powerful branch of government. How many sitting judges can you name? Most operate with great power and little scrutiny. Judgepedia offers a forum for those who know to let the rest of us find out what judges have done, and what citizens can do about it.

SunshineReview is just getting going — and it promises a window on the spending of governments at all levels — right down to the counties and school districts least likely to want citizens to look behind the budget categories that often obscure more than they reveal.