Max Borders's blog

There's blood in the water. Republicans are licking their chops. But these very lucky partisans had better think very clearly and carefully in the coming months. Things have changed. The dynamic is tentative, fragile and fortunes can turn on a dime. The calculation for politicians has changed, too. People are empowered like never before. And they're watching.

Scott Brown is what many might call a RINO. I know, I know. He may help America dodge a legislative bullet in Obamacare. And, of course, for Massachusetts, beggars can't be choosers. Still, we must be leery of stuff like this, from Senator-elect Brown: "In Massachusetts, I support the 2006 healthcare law that was successful in expanding coverage, but I also recognize that the state must now turn its attention to controlling costs." The Massachusetts healthcare plan is the last thing Congress should emulate. (So tread softly, Scott. Or should I say "don't tread.")

Unlike 2000-2006, principles have to come first. Otherwise, the independents and RINO hunters will find you and take shots. If you come into office with an incumbent-mentality - cozying up to special interests and building bridges to nowhere - they will call you out. They will cool your ambitions in the icy waters of truth. Why? People are tired of the 'lesser of evils mentality', for what has it gotten us?

Also, the old calculation was a system that rewarded crony capitalism: i.e. if you ensured that regulations, subsidies and pork projects benefited supplicants in your district, more than likely, you'd keep power. Then, occasionally, you'd get to do something idealistic that would obscure the dirty deals that really kept you in office. Not any more. The Democrats are learning a very difficult lesson about a very different age.

Your job will be to cap spending, reduce the debt and pass regulatory review to begin stripping out the perverse incentive systems both your party and the Dems have woven for your respective benefit. These systems pick winners and losers. They are destroying competition and thus our economy. Indeed, the special interest state is destroying our very institutions.

It used to be that the logic of collective action was such that the costs of organization favored special interests. It was too costly to organize taxpayers and people of principle, being so many people with so little access to information and means to organize. But technology has lowered those costs. They're organizing now. They're RINO hunters and they're coming to your district. When they arrive, they'll hold your feet to freedom's fire. So if you have anything else in mind but something like First Principles, your time in power will be short. If you're the product of some old-boy network and ran in order to serve that network, they'll find out. Your political life may be but an asterisk in the New Book of Purgation.

There are armies - mad as hornets - carrying flashlights, too. They are bringing to light your practices. They are coming armed with ideas and principles. So again, the calculation has changed. The blood you smell in the water by 2012 could be an elephant's.

Your new motto is "Principles First." Don't like it? To succeed, you will serve principle slavishly. Not self, not career, not power, not the crony-capitalist complex your party helped the Democrats to build (and that Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress have perfected). You will serve principle. Your job will be to free the American people,  American free enterprise and renew that contract with America.

Otherwise, your career may be a one-term proposition. Why? Because you'll be temped to cozy up to the special interests in your state. But these unholy alliances won't keep you safe. You may try to hide behind the moralistic rhetoric of this issue or that, but it does not trump principle. Your elections and reelections will depend on navigating the waters between the Scylla of special interests and the Charybdis of the RINO hunters and tea-partiers. Either way, term limits will be imposed from without. Welcome to 2010.

To continue building its infrastructure, the center-right is going to have to start hiring talent from around the country. I understand the value of having most of your human resources in a dynamic, creative cluster like NoVa/DC, but it’s time to tap folks that don’t relish living in Termite Town. Besides, there are creative clusters in other places.

Telecommuters and remote workers aren’t going away any time soon. To remain competitive while extending their national reach, both partisans and non-profits need to think nationally. Virtual workforces are now possible. (Reason Foundation, for example, has people all over the country.) Novel, immersive conferencing environments like Teleplace are getting less expensive and improving collaboration across geographies. There are trade-offs to distributed workforces to be sure, but the costs are going down and the benefits are going up.

The next time you post a job, open your mind. Your best candidate may be in Silicon Valley, Austin, Texas, or Research Triangle, NC—and may want to stay there. 

With a reported bump in public support for some variation on Obamacare after the President’s speech last week, there is no time to rest. Rather, it’s time to drive stakes into the heart of the “public option” vampire. And stakes we shall provide. The following are solid reasons why no version of the public option must be resurrected:

1. A government “competitor” can’t go out of business when it fails. Failing government entities only drains resources from more productive places—not to mention from taxpayers. (Witness the Postal Service.) The left has been particularly disingenuous with this constant doublespeak about the public options offering “competition and choice.” This is another example of the left trying cleverly to co-opt the language of the right. Call the b.s.  
2. Sooner or later any public option will be subsidized by the government. This will put private companies at a competitive disadvantage, which is not only unfair, but threatens the private market so many Americans currently enjoy (despite all the cost-drivers created by government).
3. A public option will create a new set of special interests and dependents. These supplicants will be beholden to the Democrats and Barack Obama. This is why government programs never go away. People who don’t think this is really about buying their power with our tax dollars are kidding themselves.
4. Co-ops are a ruse. We already have non-profit health insurance companies with their own special place in the tax code. They’re called Blue Cross Blue Shield. Talk of co-ops is but a ruse to reawaken the vampire. Co-ops too must be killed.
5. A public option will have different rules to play by.That’s not fair.  Believe it or not, the regulations and mandates that make premiums unaffordable in places like MA, NJ and NY are not as bad at the federal level. So the regulatory framework for the public option would be more favorable than for insurance companies in most states. Another reason private insurers would die off—preparing the way for a complete government takeover of healthcare.

There are fundamental asymmetries between government and private companies. Those asymmetries make government provision of most goods and services unfair and illiberal. Let’s take these stakes and kill the public option. (Lest cries of “you have no proposal” go up from the Left, this should keep you busy. And this.)

(Note: Baucuscare – i.e. Obamacare Plan B – has most of the elements of the failed Massachusetts plan. The MA plan jockeys for most expensive in the country with NJ and NY. All are more expensive due to regs Baucus is proposing for the whole country.) 

Ever heard the term useful idiots? Thousands of them gathered in the streets of D.C. at the height of the Iraq War. Pink-bedizened. Face paint. Bush/Hitler signs… strutting and fretting their 15 minutes on the stage. They were incapable of engaging in rational discussion. Arguments began with an effigy and ended with a ‘No Blood for Oil’ sign. America eventually turned against the War. Perhaps the idiots were useful. But when it came to “rational discourse,” there was no outcry from the establishment left.

These days, useful idiots comprise a small percentage of the town hall meetings and tea-parties of the center-right. This subset is loud, angry and not particularly conversant on the subject of health care. But they may be useful. Early on, the MSM tried to magnify this minority as a means of discrediting all opposition to healthcare nationalization. Turns out, they were more useful to the right for whipping up the base and expanding opposition to healthcare nationalization despite the MSM. For better or worse, people did a double-take.

Now that these idiots are being somewhat effective, the left (and even some libertarians) are whining about “rational discourse.” Part of me longs for an intelligent conversation. But as one who has witnessed way too much useful idiocy on the left – from Code Pink to the Hope and Change sheeple – I am no longer terribly eager to explain the nuances of end-of-life consultation now that the tables have turned. Democracy is warty. And tit was made for tat.

When it comes down to it, the right has been offering good ideas for healthcare reform for years—one of which was completely sandbagged in 2006. Saner rightwing voices are being marginalized by the MSM. The MSM's favorite narrative is that the right is being “obstructionist,” offering no reform ideas of their own. Nothing could be further from the truth. Now that a merry band of useful idiots is helping shut down the left’s aspirations for a “public option,” I’m okay with some of these folks being right for the wrong reasons. Until the left and the MSM are willing to a) acknowledge our reform ideas exist, b) discuss them intelligently before the public, and c) stop framing genuine opposition as nothing but a bunch of birthers, racists and troglodytes, I for one will sit back and smile whenever I hear a useful idiot say something like “death panel.” 

(Note: none of this is meant as my weighing on on the World Net Daily controversy. Some forms of idiocy are not useful.)

You’ve heard some chatter about scrapping the “public option” in favor of a co-op model. Remember: government healthcare by any other name smells just as bad. We can’t let them sneak in any variant on the original evil using doublespeak and legerdemain. As Harry Reid said: “We’re going to have some type of public option, call it ‘co-op’, call it what you want.”

Congress is also considering a federal mandate that would force insurers to cover people after they get sick or injured, called “guaranteed issue”. In states like New York and Massachusetts where this mandate is already the law, premiums are about four times the national average. This is simply unacceptable if Congress wants to make insurance affordable for people. (It’s not insurance if you can call and buy a policy after your house burns down. Likewise, it’s not insurance if you can call and buy a policy after you break your leg.) But they’re not interested in making insurance affordable. That’s never been the goal.

It’s always been about getting us to a socialized system. If you can drive up costs with government mandates, then turn around and blame insurance companies—that’s the quickest way to get what you want: single payer.

With this bill, Congressional Democrats are going to do anything they can to create dependant constituents and special interests. In other words, people, companies and providers will depend on them for resources. Creating dependents helps keep them in power, so they're happy to hop into bed with the very companies they publicly malign. This reform bill is, and has always been, a resources for votes-n-contributions deal. So they’re going to pull out all of the tricks. But it’s now clear: we won’t be duped. Let us go forward with Zen-like patience and continue to oppose anything these shifty politicians propose.

Let’s put aside our right-leaning suggestion box for a moment and put the challenge straight to the left as follows… (Warning: intellectual honesty check.) Will your bill:

1. Control Costs? If you have any third-party payer system, you’ll have a situation in which people overconsume. Because they have no incentive to be bargain shoppers, they won’t shop for bargains. Costs will continue to go up. Subsidized healthcare ensures people will continue consume more of what they don’t have to pay for directly. That’s the major driver of costs in healthcare. How will you deal with this problem—which is the main problem (not “administrative costs”?)

2. Avoid Using Price Controls? Bureaucrats determining prices will, as it always has, mean gross distortions (that whole supply and demandt thing). In the absence of real prices, resources don’t get allocated properly, because prices are a way to deal with dispersed, complex information. This is the problem we saw in the Soviet Union and it’s a major problem for the Canadian system. Will your system use price controls?

3. Avoid a Special Interest Bonanza? Any subsidized, government-provided reform will mean healthcare becomes a Freddie and Fannie phenomenon. Private companies that serve the government insurer will become special interests. They will game the system and rape it, as they have in so many other spheres of our life when colluding with government. Their prices will go up (unless controlled) and their profits will remain private. Losses will get covered up by continued subsidies and cost-shifting through higher taxes. This may also mask the cost-spiral (for a while). Eventually, heavy rationing will ensue or taxes will go through the roof. Is this bill healthcare corporatism?

4. Avoid Rationing Healthcare (Limiting “Access”)? If the government really wants to control costs, it will have to ration care. The problem is, we need a system in which individuals ration their own care, not bureaucrats with little or no connection to the individual. I ration my own healthcare (by shopping with my HSA dollars) and I prefer to keep it that way, despite the protestations of leftish types who believe they can make better decisions about my healthcare than I. Rationing means quality goes down and access gets limited.

5. Avoid More Deficit Spending? President Obama seems to be betting on energy taxes (cap and trade) to pay for what would amount to massive increases in government spending on healthcare. If the cap and trade bill doesn’t pass, will the government be able to pay for healthcare reform by simply cost-shifting to the wealthy? Or will taxes go up for everyone and big time rationing happen? The American people are at their end with the record deficits. Are you willing to push the envelope?

If your healthcare bill can’t pass this simple 5 question test, it’s not a good bill.

Capitalizing on America’s displeasure with Democrat overreach, corporate welfare and dependency politics means the Right is soon going to need that rebrand they’ve been promising. To be successful, Rs messaging will complement the electorate’s consternation and offer a contrast without signaling any return to the Bush years:

Tapping the “WTF?” – Americans are whispering a collective WTF? at what Obama and Congress have been up to. The Rs should be standing alongside America with similar headshaking. What’s happening is beyond the pale to be sure, but righteous indignation won’t work as well as a tone of empathy-cum-bewilderment. In other words a tone of: “They seem to have gone off the deep end” is probably better than “This is an outrage!”

New Blood – Signal that the new GOP is smarter, younger and more diverse. You can’t out-Obama Obama, but you can flood the market with fresh faces and smart, succinct messages coming from those faces. The old power-players can work behind the scenes, but let the principled New Blood stand at the fore.

Innovation without Insanity – The best ideas for America don’t require raising taxes and spending other people’s money. We need to unleash entrepreneurship, not bureaucracy and profligacy. We need political entrepreneurship, too—that is, leadership with a view to freedom, pragmatism and common sense—all of which the left has abandoned.

Pullback from the Precipice – The Democrats are trying to reshape America in their image. Trouble is, they’re not God. We now see what can happen to things in six months if you try to play God. It’s time to pull America back from the precipice by turning away from centralized power and toward citizen-based cooperation, open markets and civil society.

Restoring Greatness – Remember when the Berlin Wall fell? America was once a beacon of freedom and prosperity. In an effort to mimic France, we may end up being like them in all the worst ways—decades of 10-plus percent unemployment, unfunded liabilities and the bureaucratization of everything.

Common Sense – “If we have to balance our budgets and cut household spending, so does the federal government.” This type of message is working. More like it can’t hurt and even if the economy starts to right itself a little, it may very well be due to more Bubblenomics. (Be prepared to deal with b.s. from the left if and when an upturn materializes.)

Principles Work. Policy Should Flow from Principles – Remind Americans that the Democrats gave us a bunch of spin and vagueness during the election. What became of all that? Destructive policies. America deserves something more straightforward. Find the best policy ideas, then remind them that we’re great because of our principles. To be great again, policy must flow from principles.

The Right is floundering in the healthcare “reform” debate. It’s complicated, but it need not be. How do you make the water cooler case? Tell ‘em “before we let them do anything stupid, we could fix healthcare in 5 easy steps”:

1. Let people buy health insurance across state lines. I live in North Carolina. If folks in my state could buy insurance in Idaho, we would cut our premium almost in half. New Yorkers could reduce premiums by about 2/3 buying in other states. Everyone would have access to the lowest rates in the country. Competition would bring costs way down. Why won’t the government let us?

2. Give poor and working class people tax credits (vouchers) to buy insurance. It’s not hard. Help the poor. Keep the competitive market, too. But for goodness sake, don’t make us pay for rich people’s healthcare and bankrupt private insurance all at once. (A high-risk pool can help people with pre-existing conditions, btw.)

3. De-couple health insurance from our jobs. (Change the tax code.) This coupling is an artifact of WWII wage controls. When your company chooses your insurance, it limits competition and choices. It's very costly, but you don't see the cost. And under the current system, you lose your insurance if you lose your job. Wealthier, employed people get subsidized to get insurance. Unemployed or independent contractors get nothing. 

4. Give greater access to health savings accounts for use on the small stuff. They can save money for old age, or purchase out-of-pocket healthcare. They’ll be more careful with their spending. We’ll eliminate much of the “split-the-check” effect where people over-consume and cost-shift. (For example: Prilosec OTC costs $15 at the store. Prescription Nexium costs a $15 copay (but $150 in reality). These drugs are almost identical. Yet people choose Nexium without a second thought. Why shouldn’t they? Still, $135 unseen gets dinged to the risk pool, so premiums go up.)

5. Stop driving up costs with regs and mandates. In some states, the government forces insurance companies to charge everyone the same rate whether they’re young and healthy, or sick and old. This is terribly costly. High rates mean young people go uninsured. Also, forcing companies to insure people after the fact is not “insurance” and drive up costs even more. Again, carrots for consumers to get insurance are far better than sticks against insurance companies and employers. Of course, consumers pay for those sticks, anyway.

On No 5, the Left has consciously been using these kinds of regulations to drive up costs. This limits people’s “access.” They don’t care. They want medical socialism no matter the cost. The plan is, and always has been, either to hasten the destruction of the insurance market and/or to drive up costs so we’ll cry uncle. Once we cry uncle, they’ll usher in the age of bureaucare. Functionaries will make our healthcare decisions. Bureaucrats will decide if and when you need a drug. You will wait in medical bread-lines for care. Innovation will dry up. Just go to a Cleveland hospital. Find Canadians getting MRIs because Canada has made them wait. 

They’re getting comfortable. As Henke alludes to here, the self-satisfaction that comes with being in control was a primary factor in the waning of GOP power after 2002. The Dems know political power is nothing if not entropic. That’s exactly why the leadership is rushing like hell to do what they can to entrench their power and fundamentally alter the economy (i.e. before things start to burn and the people turn). Having mastered both the blame game and the art of sophistry, they think they’re better and smarter—despite all the linear thinking and pseudo-intellectual fervor. But victory has a half-life.

What is the Right to do? Let the Left languish in their smugness. Let's innovate: 

1. Get better organized and unified. (Includes networking and collaboration.)
2. Convert talk radio listeners into givers and doers. (Need help from the jocks.)
3. Focus on popular messages of freedom, prosperity and suspicion of government.
4. Create new constituencies resistant to government takeovers of their sector.
5. Create media markets to further dilute the leftish MSM. Hasten the destruction of print.
6. Tap, activate and integrate existing grassroots networks while creating new ones.
7. Use mockery and satire to prick the Obama bubble. “What were we thinking?”
8. Redirect resources from policy wonks to message-makers, writers and activists.
9. Find and exploit joints and weak-points. (Attack from the side. A distracting swarm is better than a standing army.)
10. Develop an “operating system” for distributed activism. “Embrace and extend” the left’s successful methodologies.
11. Crowdsource investigation of key leaders. Dig Relentlessly.
12. Use technology as a means to 5 primary ends—registering voters, organizing activists, changing minds, increasing transparency and crowdsourcing ideas.
13. Make a continuous show out of dissatisfaction. Be creative. Create distractions.
14. Plan carefully, but execute rapidly. Make media. Explosive media campaigns should make people do a double-take.
15. Rebrand as a new breed with new ideas. (Use veterans/old guard sparingly.) Think: New Labour circa 1996.
16. Turn the Left’s apparent strengths (brand, power, media adoration, momentum) into weaknesses, a la Sun Tzu.
17. Create alternative funding channels, including micro-donations.
18. Invite in a million ideas and create a filtration mechanism for the best ones.
19. Take risks with policy messages and critiques. Simple and powerful.
20. More meme machine, less policy argument. (Emotion, images, stories & sticky sayings.)

When you’re clinging to power and pushing your agenda, it’s hard to keep tabs on the enemy. It’s hard to continue innovating now that your foot-shoulders spend most of their days doe-eyed before O-TV, or making snarky comments on rightwing blogs. In 2008, the Left took all the best aspects of the free market – distributed systems, decentralization, collaboration and voluntary association – and out-organized the Right. Disillusionment with the war and the Obama emotion-bubble helped too. But those will soon fade. It’s time to turn the tables.

To be sure, the Left’s leadership will be busy tearing down what is right and good about the U.S., building up what is wrong and adding to a network of special interests and dependents whom they honestly believe will keep them around forever. They’ll make a good go of it. But take heart: Ireland, New Zealand and Britain all rebounded from the depths of socialism and its crony-capitalist variants. Ireland is now economically freer than the U.S. So is New Zealand. Britain is currently moving right. So there is hope. Let’s start innovating.

Remember Jimmy Swaggart? He was the TV preacher who wept before America after a tryst with a prostitute. "I have sinned against you, my Lord,” choked Swaggart through tears. “I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God's forgiveness." The fall of televangelism in many ways foreshadowed the decline of the so-called moral majority. The Right is now reaping what it sowed. By making social conservatism central to its platform, it left no room in the GOP for sinners. 

Now we have the Sanford affair. Many on the Right had pinned their hopes on the SC governor. He’s a solid, smart fiscal conservative and liberty lover. Yet his political career will very probably dissolve. Why? Not because what he did was unforgivable. Because back in the 1980s and 90s, the Right set itself up to make hypocrites out of human beings—if but by association with Jerry Falwell under the “Big Tent”. That's why I agree with Patrick Ruffini here.

As I have argued elsewhere, it is time to purge the Right’s politics of social conservatism. That doesn't mean anyone should give up his or her values. It means personal values should be left entirely to the private sphere. The Right should make social toleration and pluralism its new plank. Indeed, there is plenty of contrast between real pluralism and the groupist multiculturalism most of the far left embraces. And you can still have your Bible, virtues and righteousness in the free market of values—i.e. at home and at church.

Of course, there are egregious moral acts the discovery of which no politician – Democrat or Republican – should survive. Breaking a solemn contract with a spouse may very well be one of them. But legal bedroom behavior between consenting adults ain’t one of them. And public moralizing has definitely become a political liability for Republicans. The Right has set up the conditions such that no one in their party can ever have a peccadillo. They have driven their sinful behavior into a black market of their own creation. In the age of transparency, however, your trysts and broken taboos will be sniffed out quickly. And it’s not just for politically pragmatic reasons that the Right should give up on public moralizing a la Falwell. It’s also that it’s none of the government’s business what people do in their bedrooms, so it doesn't belong in ANY platform.