Change

I had to laugh when I turned on the TV to see Obama giving his victory speech. People waved signs that read, "Stand for Change" as Obama said something to the effect that they need to ensure that people get their social security today, tomorrow and forever. Obama was saying the opposite of what his signs read; he stands for the welfare state status quo, which must not be changed, not today, tomorrow or ever.

The liberals have spent over a century, going back to the Progressive Era, erecting the welfare state, law by law, regulation by regulation. When is the last time they had a new idea? They are, to use Mises' word, interventionists; they always have been, always will be. Their overriding task now is to preserve their creation, big government. They will fight to the death to keep every plank, every brick of the state they have built over the last century intact. The core of liberal judicial philosophy is now stare decisis. Let the decision stand. And don't let those Republican bastards touch a hair of it.

If our political parties had names that meant anything, the liberals would be the Conservative Party. Their task to is conserve the way things are, to protect big government and to expand it if possible.

What we call conservatives today should be called the Christian Welfare State Party. They want the welfare state of the liberals, but they want to add religion. Religion is growing in America. The liberals are fighting a rearguard battle, hoping to conserve the secular welfare state against the conservatives.

There is no Capitalist Party -- it's too early yet. The Libertarian Party should be called the Anarchist Party or the Subjectivist/Moral Relativist Party. Their attempt to take Ayn Rand's politics without the underlying metaphysics, epistemology and ethics dooms them to be Anarchists by the logic of their premises.

As Mises teaches us, the liberal project of preserving the status quo must eventually fail. The welfare state is unstable. Interventions will create crises that lead to further interventions until finally we will have "socialism on the German plan."

So when Obama says "change," he cannot mean it in anything but the most superficial sense. We will have change from a Republican to a Democrat President -- and the welfare state will muddle along from one crisis to another.

The biggest change Obama might effect is withdrawing our troops from Iraq. I don't think he has the courage to do it, regardless of what his moonbat base wants. I don't think Clinton or Obama want to be blamed for the chaos and violence that would happen in the power vacuum if we left. They might do something cosmetic to appease their base, but that's it. Once the war becomes a Democrat war, the base will shut up anyway. Right now the fervor among Democrats is partisan politics and hatred of Republicans more than anything.

We've been in Germany and Korea and other places since WWII, longer than I've been alive. I expect that 50 years from now we'll still be in Iraq, unless the world order changes greatly through catastrophe and war. Remember, the military in our mixed economy is now a pressure group, one that neither party wants to alienate. Base closings are resisted by the military. And I don't want to sound like a leftist wacko or President Eisenhower warning of the "military-industrial complex," but a little war now and then is good for this pressure group. It increases the budget, and what bureaucrat doesn't want that?

When significant change comes to America, it won't have anything to do with happy partisans waving signs at political rallies. It will come in a time of crisis and catastrophe, with terrified citizens screaming, "Won't somebody take over and stop the madness?! Someone give us order!" Yes, then we'll see what change can bring. Change can be a bitch.