McCain is onto something

John McCain is a man of countless certitudes, some of them annoying. His merciless moral judgments fall like bombs from passing sea gulls, and are as welcome. Although global warming appears to have debarked to another galaxy, McCain still talks about it. Hardly anyone else does.

It is easy to think of McCain as the price conservatives have to pay to get Sarah Palin in the Oval Office, hopefully in 2013.

And yet, just when hope is almost out of sight, McCain miraculously rescues himself once again. One sentence does the trick. If elected, McCain will move the political office, otherwise known as the World That Karl Rove Built, out of the White House.

It seems like a small thing, but it isn't. It was in Karl Rove's world that the permanent campaign was born. All politics all the time. Eventually, it became expensive. Very expensive.

George Bush entered the White House in camouflage. He had campaigned as a "compassionate conservative." He was, in fact, a social engineer.
He wanted to put more Americans in their own homes.

Until then, individual initiative and the markets had determined whether someone could buy a home. Bush and his pals figured out how to overcome the markets. They lowered interest rates, again and again. Mortgage lenders soon figured out the game that was being played and began winking at shortomings that previously had disqualified applicants.

After all, if you're going to hold the mortgage for only an hour or two, you're not taking much risk.

Until then, a mortgage had been a homebody, usually staying near the home for 20 or 30 years.

Under the new regime, the mortgage became an international traveler. The lender wrote the mortgage and promptly sold it Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac in Washington, allowing the lender to immediately write more mortgages. Fannie and Freddie bundled the morgages as bonds and sold them all over the world. The money raced through its cycle and never stopped for long.

Even if somebody had an urgent need to locate risk, he wouldn't have been able to find it. Risk was traveling..

From the perspective of the White House, low-income blacks who were able to buy homes might be grateful to the party that had made it happen.

Social engineering plays a storied role in American history. The U.S. Supreme Court got into the act in 1954, when it ruled that racially segregated schools were illegal. Fifty years later, economist Thomas Sowell, who is black, was unimpressed by the results.

"Blacks were already rising out of poverty at a rapid rate that was not accelerated by the civil rights laws and court decisions of the 1950s and 1960s, though, of course, the progress continued," he wrote in a series of newspaper articles. "Yet, half a century of political spin has convinced much of the media and the public that black progress began with the civil rights revolution."
"It did not."
"The key fallacy underlying the civil rights vision was that all black economics lags were due to racial discrimination. The assumption has survived to this day, in the courts, in academia, and above all in politics."

Lyndon Johnson's Great Society made good on the court decision by relying on busing for the purpose of integrating schools. But busing infuriated whites, especially, and caused a spike in racial animosity.

The unintended consequences of social engineering can hurt, but the urge to use government enticements and hammers to achieve social goals never seems to go away.

If a candidate appeears to harbor an inner social engineer, don't vote for him.