Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Capitalism Magazine - The Tea Party vs. The Conservatives

"According to serious economists (such as Thomas Sowell), the primary cause of the bank meltdown was the fact that mortgages were handed out to people who could not afford houses. As people who never should have been granted loans in the first place piled up debt, the entire mortgage industry imploded. This is because the federally managed mortgage industry mandated that more people get mortgages. Politicians in both parties, including George W. Bush, liked to see those home ownership numbers increase because it made them feel like they were creating a vibrant economy. In reality, the collapse of the financial industry which "required" TARP was due to government intervention in the economy."
Capitalism Magazine - The Tea Party vs. The Conservatives

Monday, December 6, 2010

The American Spectator : Caplan's Constitution

"Far from being an obstacle to solving our economic problems, fidelity to the Constitution would have prevented many of them. If the federal government operated within constitutional constraints, we would not stand on the brink of national bankruptcy. Our currency would not be debased. The federal government would not be inflating real estate or investment bubbles. Taxes would be much lower yet there would not be deficits as far as the eye can see."
The American Spectator : Caplan's Constitution

Thursday, December 2, 2010

The American Spectator : Opposing Obama

I thought the article was pretty insightful about Obama. I just have to laugh, however, in reading so many of the comments that simply ignore the role of George W. Bush in advancing the cause of Leviathan. Granted, Quinn brings up Clinton, but his focus in on Obama. Yet on and on, the comments spew their disdain and hatred for Clinton, a president, who, with a conservative Republican Congress, gave us some of the best, most limited government we've had for decades.

George Bush wanted to transform the world by using Leviathan to advance "freedom" not understanding how self-contradictory and inconsistent it is to create a Leviathan in order to transform the world. Thus we got the Second Iraq War.

GWB created the TSA. He's the president who passed the bank bailouts. He's the president who increased spending and vastly expanded the scope and power of the federal government.
Yet one hears not a peep of criticism. Bush was not a conservative. Advancing the unholy alliance between religion and conservatism, Bush demonstrated that philosophies of government have a moral foundation and when that foundation is based on the religious morality of altruism, of the view of man that claims his life has worth only when sacrificed for the benefit of others, then what do you expect?

Obama simply takes Bush and the religious at their word. He argues that we are all our brother's keeper. That's what altruism boils down to in practice, and that is what the Left believes. Everyone should take care of everyone else.

If you wish to advance the cause of true conservatism, i.e. limited government, protection of individual rights, then religion must not be allowed to corrupt the conservative message and the conservative goal of limiting government to the protection of individual rights, as stated in our Declaration of Independence.

Altruism is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism and with any governing philosophy whose goal is the protection of individual rights. Such a philosophy must be based on the moral premise that man has a right to live his life for his own sake, and not for the sake of others. He is an end in himself, morally, and not merely a means to the satisfaction of other men's desires, goals and purposes, no matter how "noble."

The American Spectator : Opposing Obama

Capitalism Magazine - Voters To Politicians: I Want My Cake and I Want To Eat It Too

The problem is the ideology of self-sacrifice. Politicians rely on the neurotic guilt of their victims (the producers) to get the loot they want for their constituents. The neurotic guilt of their victims is the result of the ideology of self-sacrifice, the false and destructive view that people must sacrifice themselves for one another, regardless of the consequences to self or others. If Americans were more selfish, in the rational sense, politics and wealth redistribution as we know it would come to an end. America would become a free country, a much more prosperous and stable one than it presently is. They would elect the politicians able and willing to bring this about, rather than the ones they keep electing.
Capitalism Magazine - Voters To Politicians: I Want My Cake and I Want To Eat It Too

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Capitalism Magazine - Ideas Have Consequences

Americans have come to realize that it is wrong---morally wrong---for the government to forcibly take the earnings from those who produce values (products and services) and give that money to those who have produced nothing, or are financially irresponsible.


Capitalism Magazine - Ideas Have Consequences

American Thinker: Congressional Earmarks: Embracing and Ignoring a Message From Voters

"House Republicans seem ready to declare at least an earmark moratorium. After early resistance, most senior Senate Republicans accepted the people's November 2 verdict on earmarks, but the body, with eight foolish Republicans defending them, resolved to retain earmarks. Big mistake."
American Thinker: Congressional Earmarks: Embracing and Ignoring a Message From Voters

Monday, November 29, 2010

Capitalism Magazine - Tea Parties, Then & Now

Today's American government is just as bad as the British government that preceded it, and that gave rise to the American government in the first place. In fact, today's government in America is arguably even worse than the British oppressors of yesterday. The people let this happen, slowly and over time. The single biggest reason people let this happen is the entitlement mentality. This mentality can best be summarized by two emotions: One, "I must take care of others." Two, "Others must take care of me." Neither of these emotions, or the ideas underlying them, are fitting for a free people.
Capitalism Magazine - Tea Parties, Then & Now

Friday, November 26, 2010

The Great Sweep of 2010 - Michael Barone - National Review Online

GENTRY LIBERALS: The tsunami swept from the George Washington Bridge to the Donner Pass, but didn’t wash away affluent liberals to the east and west of these geographic markers. Also surviving were the cannibals — the public-employee unions that are threatening to bankrupt states such as California and New York, a prospect that doesn’t faze the left-leaning gentry.
In these areas, Republicans picked up one House seat anchored in Staten Island, two in New Hampshire, and one in Washington State, and they came close in two California districts wholly or partly in the Central Valley. Gentry-liberal territory stayed staunchly Democratic.

The Great Sweep of 2010 - Michael Barone - National Review Online

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

American Thinker: Respectable Conservatives Still Don't Get Obama

To preserve their respectability, respectable conservatives have chosen to ignore what the blogosphere reports. As a result, when they look at Obama, they still see Michael Jordan and wonder why he is off his game. Out in the blogosphere, we see Stuart Smalley and wonder when the breakdown comes.
American Thinker: Respectable Conservatives Still Don't Get Obama

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Thoughtless Taxation | Richard W. Rahn | Cato Institute: Commentary

Many Democrats, including many lame ducks, are still demanding that tax rates for entrepreneurs be increased under the absurd claim that not to do so will "cost" the government "almost $2 trillion over the 2011-20 period" in lost tax revenues.

To believe these bogus numbers that the Joint Tax Committee staff and the administration put out about the revenue loss, one needs to believe that upper-income people will not alter their behavior when faced with higher tax rates, that high marginal tax rates on capital (the seed corn of the economy) and double taxation of it do not damage economic growth and job creation, and that the government is smaller than its optimum size to maximize the general welfare.

The empirical evidence as well as good economic theory demonstrate that none of the above is true — but to those politicians, mainstream media sorts and left-wing economists who cannot understand the difference between variables and constants, facts don't matter.


Thoughtless Taxation | Richard W. Rahn | Cato Institute: Commentary

Friday, November 12, 2010

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The American Spectator : Stop the Obama Tax Hikes

Of course, this Fed reflation is not going to work either, because as Milton Friedman explained long ago, easy money from the Fed does not change the real economy. It is just going to bring back the 1970s with a vengeance, combining long-term stagnation with inflation. This is the result of President Obama's stubborn, Rip Van Winkle return to the Keynesian economics of the 1970s, play acting like nothing has happened since 1980 to prove how braindead those economic policies are.
The American Spectator : Stop the Obama Tax Hikes

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

American Thinker: The Wrong Track Election

The hills are alive with the sound of liberal Democratic contempt for the electorate. So are the valleys, the prairies, and the coasts. For months, voters have been signaling their discontent with the president, his party, and their priorities; tomorrow, they appear poised to deliver a stinging rebuke. Yet rather than address the voters' concerns with seriousness and respect, too many Democrats and their allies on the left have chosen instead to slur those voters as stupid, extremist, or too scared to think straight.
American Thinker: The Wrong Track Election

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Poll: Most Want Obama Fired In 2012 - Washington Whispers (usnews.com)

But that personal favorability doesn't translate into re-election support when voters are asked if Obama deserves a second term. Says Schoen: "Despite voters feelings toward Obama personally, 56 percent say he does not deserve to be re-elected, while 38 percent say he does deserve to be re-elected president." Worse, Schoen adds, "43 percent say that Barack Obama has been a better president than George W. Bush, while 48 percent say Bush was a better president than Obama has been."
Poll: Most Want Obama Fired In 2012 - Washington Whispers (usnews.com)

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

American Thinker: ObamaCare and the Constitutional Crisis

An unintended consequence of the Supreme Court ruling, should they rule in favor of the Case Law adherent, is that the Literalist majority of Americans might come to feel as if they are no longer free, as if they are unable to understand the rules under which they have given their consent to be governed, as if the conclusion of a long-felt oppression is complete. At this point, social upheaval is not only possible, but likely.
American Thinker: ObamaCare and the Constitutional Crisis

American Thinker: Will of the People

Governments throughout America, particularly the federal government, are broken and making a huge mess of things. Though significantly changing this equation is a long haul, no doubt, next week's elections will prove monumental -- the biggest test to date for the rebels who seek to have their voices heard.
American Thinker: Will of the People

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

American Thinker: The Curse of the Welfare State

What we see happening in France and across Europe are the devastating effects of the welfare state. We see a citizenry whose work ethic, morals, power of reason, and grasp on reality have been grievously damaged. They balk at hard work, yet they want to enjoy lives of plenty and ease. Their governments are bankrupt, but they still keep demanding benefits that are impossible to deliver. And while they refuse to engage in hard labor themselves, they see nothing wrong with living at someone else's expense.
American Thinker: The Curse of the Welfare State

The Coming Landslide - Michael Barone - National Review Online

Bigger government, in this view, helps the ordinary citizen, who is otherwise at the mercy of the masters of the marketplace. And those citizens will be grateful, especially in times of economic distress, to the politicians who expand government ever further.
This theory has been getting some empirical testing over the past two years. And it doesn’t seem to be working any better than Keynes thought the theories of defunct economists were working in the 1930s.
The Obama Democrats have been giving Americans more government, with a vengeance. But the voters seem about to wreak vengeance in their turn.
The Coming Landslide - Michael Barone - National Review Online

American Thinker: At the End of the Liberal Dynasty

In the Juan Williams affair, they are telling us that liberal journalists have to take a vow, as members of the exclusive NPR Vegan Club, never to be caught grabbing a salty snack at the Fox News Drive-In window. Is that what liberalism is reduced to?

American Thinker: At the End of the Liberal Dynasty

Monday, October 25, 2010

American Thinker: A Mass Nervous Breakdown of the Left

The left can be mean, vicious, and deceitful. I've recently concluded, however, that the left is having, before our eyes, a mass nervous breakdown at the prospects of its collapse, exacerbated by the lost prospect of being on the verge of something really big. They thought they had won. Now, they're seeing it all crumble in a mountain of unsustainable debt, a loss of freedom, and an awakening of voter awareness of who's and what's at fault.

American Thinker: A Mass Nervous Breakdown of the Left

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

The Sharp Political Instincts of the Tea Party Should Not be a Surprise

Now, this, my friends, is a profundity, particularly coming from Michael Barone. Let me read this to you again. "The tea party movement today, like the peace movement 40 years ago, has brought many new people into politics -- and many with sharper political instincts than their detractors in the press have been able to understand."
The Sharp Political Instincts of the Tea Party Should Not be a Surprise

There’s No Avoiding ‘Repeal and Replace’ - James C. Capretta - National Review Online

But Washington’s newcomers must not lose sight of the big enchilada on the government-reform menu: the repeal and replacement of Obamacare.
Because the hard truth is that the proponents of a supersized welfare state believe they have already won the fight. Their vision is now the law, with the government on course to control the flow of resources in the entire health sector. Even if every other idea to downsize the government is enacted, Obamacare as passed has us on the road to unlimited government — with America’s middle class increasingly dependent on the benefits they receive from elected political leaders.

There’s No Avoiding ‘Repeal and Replace’ - James C. Capretta - National Review Online

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

The President vs. the Public - Rich Lowry - National Review Online

They got a 1,073-page stimulus bill, a 2,409-page health-care bill, and a 2,319-page financial-reform bill passed. That’s 5,801 pages in just three pieces of legislation, at a very conservative cumulative estimated cost of $1.9 trillion over ten years. If this is what Obama’s broken Washington produces in three bills, what would a functioning one do?
For all their reputation as obstructionists, Republicans weren’t able to stop any of this. Unlike in the early Clinton years, Republicans aren’t benefiting from obstructionism so much as from failing to block a president’s deeply unpopular priorities. Washington worked for Obama — and now he’s paying the price.

The President vs. the Public - Rich Lowry - National Review Online

American Thinker: The Democrats Will Steal the Election if We Let Them

A number of comments on my recent pieces dealing with electoral issues (particularly "The American Left Slides Into Psychosis") have mentioned the importance of protecting the vote to assure that standard corrupt Democratic tactics are not allowed to lessen the weight of the impending November avalanche. This is certainly a valid point in this age, when Stuart Smalley has found his way from the tube to the Senate and the Black Panthers have been resurrected from their status as footnote to the '60s to serve as enforcers for humane, progressive liberalism. It will serve us well to take a close look at the Democrat record in this matter, consider what they may be up to regarding this election, and, the most serious question of all, ask why the GOP lets them get away with it.

American Thinker: The Democrats Will Steal the Election if We Let Them

Monday, October 18, 2010

Paul Krugman: Professor Ahab - Stephen Spruiell - National Review Online

Krugman’s claim that the stimulus should have been bigger is consistent with his view that for every macroeconomic problem there is a correct answer that it is within the power of one man to calculate. Not only is such a claim unfalsifiable, but our experience with fiscal stimulus indicates that this particular form of voodoo economics simply steals demand from the future and leaves us worse off in the long run. Krugman urges us to ignore that history: He argues that real fiscal stimulus has been tried only once in recent memory, when massive government borrowing during World War II pulled America out of the Depression. But there are many competing explanations for the post-war boom — too many to allow us to gamble our prosperity on a World War II–sized stimulus on the chance that the Keynesian view is right this time.
Paul Krugman: Professor Ahab - Stephen Spruiell - National Review Online

Higher Education Subsidies Wasted | Downsizing the Federal Government

Just as housing subsidies incentivized people to purchase homes that they otherwise shouldn’t have, higher education subsidies have incentivized people to go to college who weren’t ready or suited for it. In both cases, the cost to taxpayers has been substantial while the alleged benefits have proven illusory.
Higher Education Subsidies Wasted | Downsizing the Federal Government

Good Time to End Farm Subsidies | Downsizing the Federal Government

Better news for taxpayers would be the abolition of farm subsidies. While they obviously remain popular with the beneficiaries and their patrons in Washington, the general public seems to be increasingly aware that the subsidies amount to little more than legalized theft.
Good Time to End Farm Subsidies | Downsizing the Federal Government

Two Wars and We Don't Feel a Draft - Reason Magazine

"Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or wickedness of government may engage it?" he demanded. That was the end of that idea, until the Civil War.
Two Wars and We Don't Feel a Draft - Reason Magazine

Friday, October 15, 2010

The American Spectator : Obama's New Teacher

The reality is that for all the small government rhetoric, Republicans and conservatives alike have supported expansive federal education policy when it suits them. It was the Reagan Administration that nurtured the modern school reform movement in 1983 with the publication of A Nation at Risk, which called for improving (and standardizing) curricula and academic standards. Obama's own reform efforts are a continuation of those of his predecessor, George W. Bush, who, with the help of then-education committee chairman John Boehner, passed No Child. Another pet project of conservative reformers, the now-shuttered D.C. Opportunity school voucher program, was established by the then Republican-controlled Congress in 2003 (admittedly, at the behest of residents frustrated with the woeful school district).
The American Spectator : Obama's New Teacher

Obamacare Suit Can Proceed - By Robert Alt - The Corner - National Review Online

When Speaker Pelosi was asked by a reporter, “Where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health-insurance mandate?” she responded, “Are you serious? Are you serious?” By contrast, when the judge today considered whether the states had made a significant enough claim that Congress lacked the constitutional authority to enact the mandate, he found that it was “not even a close call.”

Obamacare Suit Can Proceed - By Robert Alt - The Corner - National Review Online

The American Spectator : Party Like It's 1995

What the Gingrich Congress did in those first three years -- against calumny from most Democratic colleagues, fierce opposition combined with prevarications from the Clinton White House, and an extraordinarily hostile establishment media -- was nothing short of remarkable. On the substance of domestic policy, it may have been the greatest congressional performance ever. Its performance provides a template for how to do things right, while providing Republican Leader John Boehner (a key figure in 1994 as well) some lessons about the sorts of actions to avoid -- lessons that a duly chastened but energetic Republican Conference can make great use of in 2011 and 2012.
The American Spectator : Party Like It's 1995

Your Pre-Election Post-Mortem - Charles Krauthammer - National Review Online

Conventional wisdom is that the election is being driven by anger and blind anti-incumbent fervor. Nonsense. Overwhelmingly, it is Democratic incumbents, not Republicans, who are under siege. This is a national revolt against the Democratic governance of the last two years.
Your Pre-Election Post-Mortem - Charles Krauthammer - National Review Online

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Freer Is Better - Reason Magazine

The 2010 Index of Economic Freedom lowers the ranking of the United States to eighth out of 179 nations—behind Canada! A year ago, it ranked sixth, ahead of Canada.
Don't say it's Barack Obama's fault. Half the data used in the index is from George W. Bush's final six months in office. This is a bipartisan problem.

Freer Is Better - Reason Magazine

The American Spectator : The Limits of Liberal Demagoguery

The political success of liberalism is parasitic, feeding off order and prosperity that the implementation of liberal policies couldn't possibly create.
Bill Clinton's recent bragging on the campaign trail about the budgets that he balanced in the 1990s is an illustration of this: Where did those budgets come from? Not from the policies of liberalism. Take away the significant reductions in defense spending that came from Ronald Reagan winning the Cold War, the wealth from an entrepreneurial economy that an era of tax cuts generated, and the check on Democratic spending schemes from Newt Gingrich's Congress, and those budgets would never have been balanced.

The American Spectator : The Limits of Liberal Demagoguery

Jim DeMint: Senator Tea Party - John J. Miller - National Review Online

“This is part of an American awakening,” says DeMint. “If people want to take back their government, they can do it. No state is out of play.” DeMint is now positioning himself as the Great Awakener — a national leader of a highly decentralized tea-party movement whose activist energy may hold the key to turning 2010 into another 1994 for the GOP.
Jim DeMint: Senator Tea Party - John J. Miller - National Review Online

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Keeping the Poor in Poverty - Michael Tanner - National Review Online

Yet Obama and the Democrats, in thrall to the teachers’ unions, steadfastly resist proposals to give parents more control over their children’s education. Washington, D.C., has a public-school system that, despite spending more per child than almost any other system in the nation, still has a dropout rate of more than 50 percent. Yet one of the first actions of the president and congressional Democrats was to kill the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which offered vouchers to permit poor children to opt out of the city’s rotten public schools.
Keeping the Poor in Poverty - Michael Tanner - National Review Online

The American Spectator : So Much Worse Than Carter

But the indictment of Obamanomics goes beyond the actual performance so far. Even worse is that the economic policies have been so illogical, so transparently doomed to failure, and so threatening to America's future.
The American Spectator : So Much Worse Than Carter

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

New Library Topic: Keynesianism | Intellectual Takeout (ITO)

"The Keynesian idea in itself is actually fairly simple: The market economy is inherently unstable, and recession and high unemployment are mainly the result of insufficient spending in the private sector. Therefore, to achieve full employment and sustained economic growth, the government needs to actively intervene to increase spending, if necessary through deficit financing.
Critics of Keynes pointed out problems with his theory relatively quickly."

New Library Topic: Keynesianism | Intellectual Takeout (ITO)

The Republican Pledge to America | www.hillsdale-econ.com

"Instead we have the arbitrary rule of whoever has power. This regime uncertainty, as Robert Higgs has called it, is the primary reason that we have nearly 15 million unemployed and another 8.9 million working part-time who would rather have full-time employment. The most important aspect of The Republican Pledge is that it provides the certainty of limited government that allows the market economy to provide opportunity and an elevated standard of living for all Americans."
The Republican Pledge to America | www.hillsdale-econ.com

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Monday, August 9, 2010

The Unemployment President | Jim Powell | Cato Institute: Commentary

Overall during the New Deal period (1933-1940), the amount of money taxed away from the private sector tripled.
The Unemployment President | Jim Powell | Cato Institute: Commentary

Friday, July 16, 2010

American Thinker: The Key to a Real Revolution

In short, Republicans could produce a conservative revolution which achieves, in two short years, everything we have been seeking for the last fifty. All this would require great boldness and vision. But our nation needs just such a revolution. Half-measures and compromises simply prolong our slow death. We need a revolution. We have the means to that revolution within our grasp soon.
American Thinker: The Key to a Real Revolution

American Thinker: The Left's Psychological Assault on Independence

The most important question, then, is, "How to change the direction of the cycle?" The answer: Individuals with a strong internal locus must preach the value of independence. They must teach those they encounter -- their family, friends, colleagues, and especially the disadvantaged (whom they should make extra efforts to reach out to through voluntary service) -- that as human beings with free will, we are responsible for our own actions, that we are not the victims of fate, and that we will achieve happiness and self-esteem if we take hold of our lives and never let go.
American Thinker: The Left's Psychological Assault on Independence

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Karl Rove: My Biggest Mistake in the White House - WSJ.com

The damage extended beyond Mr. Bush's presidency. The attacks on Mr. Bush poisoned America's political discourse. Saying the commander-in-chief intentionally lied America into war is about the most serious accusation that can be leveled at a president. The charge was false—and it opened the way for politicians in both parties to move the debate from differences over issues into ad hominem attacks.
Karl Rove: My Biggest Mistake in the White House - WSJ.com

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Obama’s Crisis Is GOP’s Opportunity - Jonah Goldberg - National Review Online

Now is the time for the GOP to call Obama’s bluff and offer a real choice. My personal preference would be for the leadership to embrace Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s “road map,” a sweeping, bold, and humane assault on the welfare state and our debt crisis. Doing so might come at the cost of trimming the GOP’s victory margins in November, but it would provide Republicans with a real mandate to be something more than “not-Obama.”
Obama’s Crisis Is GOP’s Opportunity - Jonah Goldberg - National Review Online

Friday, July 2, 2010

The Obama Tax Trap - WSJ.com

Republicans need to break out of their rhetorical preoccupation with debt and deficits, focusing their political aim instead on spending and above all on reviving economic growth. They should hold the line against all tax increases and begin to consider a menu of tax cuts to make the U.S. more competitive, especially if the economy continues to underperform.

Mr. Obama's strategy of spending our way to prosperity clearly hasn't worked, as the voters are coming to understand. But if the GOP policy response is merely to bemoan deficits, they will soon find themselves back at their historic stand as tax collectors for the welfare state. To avoid Mr. Obama's tax trap, Republicans also need a growth agenda.

The Obama Tax Trap - WSJ.com

Friday, June 25, 2010

Facebook | Tom Anderson

In a healthy human being, the faculty of reason integrates particular facts into conceptual systems, i.e. formal knowledge, and as we find success in using this knowledge to pursue our purposes, we feel great joy and happiness. Conversely, when we meet failure, we experience pain. Pain and pleasure are the two great emotions man can feel. Everything he does will either bring him pain or pleasure. But he must not be ruled by pain or pleasure, since they are not proper guides. Reason is the guide, based on knowledge of facts, and integrated with the sum total of previous knowledge.
Facebook | Tom Anderson

Monday, June 21, 2010

Obama’s Thuggery Is Useless in Fighting Spill - Michael Barone - National Review Online

Feinberg gets good reviews from everyone. But the Constitution does not command “no person . . . shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law — except by the decision of a person as wise and capable as Kenneth Feinberg.” The Framers stopped at “due process of law.”

Obama doesn’t. “If he sees any impropriety in politicians ordering executives about, upstaging the courts and threatening confiscation, he has not said so,” write the editors of The Economist, who then suggest that markets see Obama as “an American version of Vladimir Putin.” Except that Putin is an effective thug.
Obama’s Thuggery Is Useless in Fighting Spill - Michael Barone - National Review Online

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Common Fallacies About Capitalism 1

On my Facebook Page I come across misconceptions about capitalism, about corporations, and about business.  From time to time I will quote snippets from such misconceptions and then apply some reason and facts to enable you to make a more accurate judgment and revise your own notions accordingly.  Here are just a few I've recently come across.

I had written:  "As to fear, Americans have considerable justification to fear zero [the Obama Administration] and his thugs in Congress for the simple reason that Congress has been voting away our individual rights in favor of a dictatorship.  This is seen most notably with the recent passage of legislation that socialized the medical industry and deprives everyone of their right to run their lives as they wish."

To which my correspondent claimed:  "The insurance companies have regulations like any industry has."

Insurance companies are heavily regulated by the states.  Their rates are regulated directly and indirectly.  The state controls the market by limiting entry and it controls the product by specifying in detail what the product is.  To take Florida as an example, if you are an insurance company you are not permitted to sell medical insurance in Florida unless the state permits it, and the state will not permit it.  The state further tells the few insurance companies who are permitted to do business exactly what must be covered in the policies they are permitted to sell.  For example, I am not permitted to buy a policy that does not cover maternity benefits or mental health benefits, even though I do not want to pay for those benefits and can have no need for them.

The purpose of such regulation is to force me to subsidize through my excessive premiums the maternity benefits and mental health care benefits the legislature has decided it does not want to pay for directly from taxes.  Essentially the state is "shifting the cost" and indirectly subsidizing favored classes of people at the expense of others. 

So your facts are wrong.  Ordinary companies selling product or services are not required to get a permit to do so from the state, the state does not limit market entry, and the state does not tell the company what it can and cannot sell.  Companies must simply abide by the common laws all citizens must follow, pay any taxes due, which is the state's main concern, and the state will generally leave the company alone.  Customers then benefit by purchasing the product or service, or the company goes bankrupt because people choose not to do business with it.  People are not forced by the state to do business with it, as they are with insurance companies.


Claim:  "Without regulations, Lake Erie would still be dead and the Cayahoga river [sic] in Cleveland would still be burning."

This statement depends on what you mean by "regulations".  The principle of individual rights requires laws, and when a geographical area is without law, it is, quite literally, "lawless."  That was the situation with Lake Erie.  The "regulations" you cite--the Clean Water Act of 1972--essentially prohibited the dumping of nutrient phosphorus.  However, the problem would have been more effectively addressed by laws written to protect private property interests.  When you have a "commons" it is a well-known and understood phenomenon that unless the people who use the resource are permitted to develop informal or even formal rules for its use and disposal you will put into motion incentives that ultimately destroy the resource.

It is clear, for example, that current regulations do nothing to prevent dumping of raw sewage into these waterways and Lake Erie itself from public, not private, sources.  52 communities within the Lake Erie Watershed Basin, ranging from small towns like Avon Lake, to the larger metropolitan cities including Toledo and Cleveland, have 598 combined sewer overflow outfalls, or pipes, that feed into the waterways that lead into Lake Erie, or directly into the Lake itself.  An analysis of 38 of the 52 communities that dump untreated sewage shows that these communities dumped more than 10 billion gallons of sewage into the Lake Erie watershed in 2005 alone.  This is equivalent to more than 3 billion toilets flushing into Lake Erie--a drinking water source for more than 11 million people.  Combined sewage overflows are a major cause of beach advisories, wildlife destruction, and human death problems.

If private property rights were clearly defined in the Lake Erie Watershed Basin, Americans would have recourse to the courts to sue local and state governments to compel behavior from them that respected private property rights in Lake Erie.  But we do not have those protections because people have been mislead to believe that government "regulations" are protecting them.  Government typically does not monitor itself, doesn't sue itself, and, in fact, generally does everything it can to mislead and hide its malfeasance, just as ordinary criminals do.  This is another reason why the state should be separated from the economy as much as possible, i.e. a society based on laissez-faire capitalism, rather than the mixed economy of socialistic and fascistic controls with some freedoms also allowed.


Claim:  "BP didn't follow what scant regulations on drilling and we see the results."

Oil drilling activities are among the most heavily regulated in the country.  The facts are that the United States prohibited safe drilling on land and shallow water by fiat, forcing companies into the far more riskier deep water.  The government even gave oil companies incentives to drill in deep water and the current administration even exempted BP from having to meet its own regulatory standards.  In addition, the US specificially praised BP's platform, the one that blew up.

The outrage does not stop there.  Because of US regulations, BP was insured for only $75 million beyond the cost of any cleanup.  If BP had to get its insurance on the private market, instead of having the government insure its operations, that limit would have been far higher, the premium would have passed on through the chain in the form of higher production cost and the market would have substantially determined whether or not it was economically feasible to take such a risk.

The US government socialized the risk to BP for political reasons.  Such events happen when you have a mixed economy.  The solution is not more "regulations" but getting the government out of the the private sector so that it can provide the one thing it is qualified to provide the market:  clear liability laws that protect the people whose lives and property are being put in jeopardy.  We can't abolish risk, but we can insure against accidents.  When the government encourages risky behavior, rewards corporations for engaging in risky behavior, and then socializes the risk for risky behavior to further encourage it, how can the government be absolved of any responsibility?


Claim:  "The insurance companies are just leaches off the medical needs. It is not in any way single payer nor are these companies restricted. Hell, they wrote this health bill which sucks because it doesn't include an individual's right to bypass the insurance monsters who love to drop sick people and refuse to insure those with pre existing conditions."

You are misinformed.  As Adam Smith used to say, the tailor does not make you a new suit of clothes because he wants to see you well turned out; he turns you out in the best suit of clothes because he wants to feed his family and otherwise provide for his own economic needs.

Insurance companies are owned by stockholders, just ordinary people, looking to make some money by providing a service, a service that most people appreciate.

When government interfers with the private market, it initiates the use of physical force to compel people to behave in ways that oppose their own rational self-interests, and thereby corrupts the relationships between buyers and sellers, making them hostile.

People trade values voluntarily for mutual advantage, by definition, for otherwise they would not trade.  When government forces sellers to sell what they don't want to sell, and forces buyers to buy what they do not want to buy, government creates hostility, bad feeling, injustice, and sets up incentives for buyers and sellers to game the system in order to get what they want.

The fault lies not with the buyers and sellers, but with the government for intervening in the private economic activities of citizens.


Claim:  "Pray tell what individual rights have been removed since Bush/Obama?"

Perhaps you will accept just one example, since there is not enough time or space to list them all here.  The recently passed legislation that socializes the medical industry will have the effect of abridging the right of the people to seek medical care and to provide medical care as they wish.  Doctors will be forced to provide services and patients will be forced to accept services neither of them wants in precisely the way that they want them.  The government in this legislation establishes bureaus that will decide on what services doctors may provide and what services patients may receive, independently of the wishes of the doctor or patient.

The abridgment of individual rights, of course, occurs in some measure to some degree any time the government intervenes into the free market.  The medical industry was very heavily regulated prior to the rise of the Regime, a situation that created the manifold number of difficulties and injustices the new law pretends to resolve.  However, government intervention always creates many new problems that then require more government intervention, ad infinitum, until government comes to manage every aspect of life and no freedom remains for the individual.

Most everything the critics said of the new law, and denied by its supporters, is coming true as the regulations are put into place or proposed.


Claim:  "That bad memory lives on in the financial disaster we all are living thru [sic]. We and our government let billionaires play games with OUR money and homes. Capitalism sucks."

Your facts are wrong.  The system we currently have is very different from a capitalistic system.  Under capitalism, people have rights and the government does not have the legal power to abridge people's rights.

For example, in a free society (i.e. a capitalistic society) government would not have the power to force a citizen to pay the debt incurred by other citizens, as the current Regime has done in regard to the so-called "bailout".


Claim:  "AND your definition of socialism is not accurate. You describe communism."

Socialism commonly means government ownership and control of the means of production, i.e. all property.  Fascism commonly means government control of the means of production, but technical "ownership" remains in the hands of private citizens.  Communism commonly means government ownership and control of the means of production.

Socialism and communism mean the same thing.  The term "communism" has come to be associated historically with Marxism-Leninism, and the sorts of totalitarian governments that arouse under those politicians who identified as such.  However, there is really little to justify saying one is, in any particular, different in kind from the other.  For example, liberals greatly admire Fidel Castro and the murderous thug Che Guevara, and both these infamous sociopaths considered themselves socialists.  Liberals never tire, for example, in extolling the manifold virtues of the Cuban health care system, or the wonders of its education system.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

The Tea Party & Illegal Immigration

Those wishing to defend the premise that the only legitimate function of government is the protection of individual rights may defend laws against illegal immigration on very simple, straight-forward national security grounds.

Does the man next door to your apartment have an indefeasible right to keep a nuclear weapon on the premises? Some might argue he has; I would argue for a rule of reason and common sense. Clearly we have a right to keep ourselves safe from a potential terrorist, and a man with a nuclear bomb is not likely to be acting from the self-defense motive of a man keeping a Sig-Sauer 9 mm at the ready.

We must look to intent to decide questions of this sort. All abstract propositions become conditional propositions when applied to matters of fact. Some facts are these: that illegal immigration into the USA permits terrorists into the country. It therefore follows a rational country needs an ordered procedure to determine such questions as whether to permit a foreign national from crossing our national borders. By what principle would one argue that he had a "right" to enter the United States?

Therefore I see no rational, factual, or moral basis for the belief that the US is violating that man's rights. Until we know who the man is, what his background is, what his beliefs are--indeed, everything about him--we have no moral obligation to permit his entry into our country. The first order of business for the federal government is the protection of our individual rights from threats or potential threats created by those who wish to make war on the US. Until we can determine whether he is an enemy of the US, he has no right to be here.

On that basis I am completely with the Tea Party people and others who oppose illegal immigration. That our immigration laws may need reform is another conversation. I think it is to our interest to have guest worker programs, on the principle that we do honor individual rights of those who wish only to trade values on a non-coercive basis, but that is an important condition and one that is not met by Mexicans crossing our borders at night in the desert, murdering, kidnapping, or otherwise endangering the lives of Americans.

It is true there is a collectivist premise in the thinking of those who oppose illegal immigration on the grounds that illegals are abusing the welfare system we have established in this country. Actually, they have a point. Illegals are abusing the welfare system, in the sense they are obtaining benefits at the expense of taxpayers. But then so are those Americans who avail themselves of those same benefits.

What is overlooked in this argument is that the primary abuse is of the taxpayers. But their emotional hostility is completely understandable as the present American regime has just enacted legislation that will vastly intensify the abuse by indirectly extending taxpayer-funded benefits to millions of illegals. The Regime understands its actions will further divide Americans and wishes to exploit such divisions for partisan advantage, as has been demonstrated in its cynical--and shamefully ignorant--handling of the recent law passed in Arizona to protect its citizens from threats to their lives and property.

Americans, by and large, do not oppose legal immigration, nor do they oppose a rational, liberal immigration policy, but the laws as imperfect as they may be should be followed, they should be enforced by constituted authority and at present and for many years have not been enforced. Presently the people of Arizona are facing a catastrophe. We already have parts of California becoming a wasteland of socialist and open-borders sentiment, such as the school district of Los Angeles, electing to teach the students in public schools that Arizona's laws are the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany's concentration camps and urging an economic boycott of the state and of the people.

We are in serious trouble when we have political districts in our own country thinking and talking as if they were citizens of another country, and one that clearly has an interest in solving the problems of its own socialist economy by encouraging its people to "migrate" to the US illegally and then to lecture us on our responsibility to protect the individual rights of Mexicans!

I have a further point to make. Our culture has been so degraded--intellectually, morally, culturally--that intelligent political discourse is all but made impossible both by the lack of intellectual ammunition on the Right and the militantly anti-intellectual political tactics of the Left. It is true that Illegal Immigration may become a hugely symbolic issue that will "carry the emotional freight" of the public's gut-level antagonism to the Regime's heavy-handed collectivism on many fronts. Illegal immigration, tax increases, irrational spending--these are issues Americans can all understand and relate to, and therefore, it is to be expected in such an emotionally toxic political environment that nativist sentiments will also become part of the mix, as I am also certain racism will too.

But such sentiments must not be allowed to dominate the discourse and the political campaigns, for the Left will attempt to make these legitimate issues seem to be nothing but illegitimate racist and nativist anger. They are already following this tactic, as we have seen in the campaign the Left has conducted against Arizona. Expect much more of that sort of thing.

The tactic, however, is a lie and a cheat, and if we can keep the focus on protection of individual rights, and the right of the American people to be secure in their lives and property from those who would make war on us, then we should be able to defeat the Left.

I have not mentioned the recent oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. Probably the biggest issue now will be the Regime's gross incompetence. If I believed in God I would definitely find the guiding hand of providence in these events, and while the pain in the short term is very great, I am tempted to believe that the election of Obama will prove to be America's Great Secular Awakening to both the evil and the inherent incompetence of Big Government.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

The American Spectator : The Coming Resignation of Barack Obama

I am now ready to predict that President Obama will not even make it that far. I predict that he will resign in discredited disgrace before the fall of 2012. Like my previous prediction, that is based not just on where we are now, but where we are going under his misleadership.
The American Spectator : The Coming Resignation of Barack Obama

Friday, June 4, 2010

On the Claim that Socialism is "More Just"

Leon,

Obama and the collectivists of this world do not support socialism or communism because it is practical, efficient, or yields more net wealth to "society."  They support collectivism because they believe it is a moral system, it is a system that is "more just" than a capitalist system.

You may argue until you are blue in the face that capitalism is more practical; their argument is always socialism is "more just," and the moral claims of justice will always trump practicality or efficiency.

Part of the problem rests with the fact that you perhaps unwittingly share the moral premises of your collectivist opponents.

For example, you say the following:  "Capitalism is a society based on the principle that everybody contributes to society’s profits and gets a share according to his/her contribution . . . ."  Wealth produced by individuals in combination or individually is not wealth that belongs to "society."  To say such a thing is to accept the premise of communism, that wealth is "created by society".

While it is obviously true to claim that individuals in society greatly enhance their wealth-creating potential through cooperation, that is, through specialization of labor, and the free exchange of goods and services, what creates the wealth is the voluntary choices of individuals each aiming to enhance his own long-range interest. 

The tailor, as Adam Smith liked to say, does not make you clothes because he wants to see you well turned out; on the contrary, he provides the clothes in order to feed his own family and to enhance his own wealth by providing you with the goods and services you are willing and able to pay for.

What we call "capitalism" is simply the economic arrangements men create when force and the threat of force is eliminated from their relationships with each other. 

All forms of collectivism introduce into such relationships the initiation of force, or the threat of force, to compel individuals to act against their own welfare. 

The moral argument for capitalism rests on this premise:  that capitalism is the only social system founded on the defense and protection of man's rights.  The concept of man's rights is the moral principle that subordinates society to the rights of individuals, which is why societies founded on the individual rights are the only moral societies on the face of the earth.

To effectively oppose collectivism you must oppose the moral argument that collectivists use to advance their cause.  Collectivism is not "more just".  How can taking by force what does not belong to you be just?  Or moral?

Always we must ask the question, by what standard?

Wealth cannot be created by abstractions, and the term "society" is nothing but an abstraction denoting individual human beings in their social relationship with each other.

The fundamental moral claim is this:  Man has the right to live his life for his own sake. 

Either he does, or he does not.  If he does, then he is a free moral agent with a life; if he does not, then he is a slave to others.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Polarization May Be Our Best Hope - Mona Charen - National Review Online

The advent of the Obama administration, with its pell-mell rush to transform us into Greece, is transforming the Republican party as well. Grassroots activists are reasserting the virtues of limited government, personal responsibility, and public accountability. Our best hope is that tea-party principles will prevail. Those are the very principles that can save us from Europe’s fate.

Polarization May Be Our Best Hope - Mona Charen - National Review Online

A Libertarian Rebel - Reason Magazine

Whatever one may think of Scott's newest incarnation of the Robin Hood legend, it is more than a little troubling to see alleged liberals speak of liberty and individual rights in a tone of sarcastic dismissal. This is especially ironic since the Robin Hood of myth and folklore probably has much more in common with the "libertarian rebel" played by Russell Crowe than with the medieval socialist of the "rob from the rich, give to the poor" clichĂ©. At heart, the noble-outlaw legend that has captured the human imagination for centuries is about freedom, not wealth redistribution—and this is reflected in many previous screen versions of the Robin Hood story.
A Libertarian Rebel - Reason Magazine

American Thinker: Computer Gamers: Conservatives in Waiting

Most successful video games are designed around themes that are practically heresy to the Left. Stories involving patriotism, the pursuit of liberty, individualism, heroism, capitalism, strategic/analytical thought, and collaboration are staples of a rewarding in-game experience. Games that do not include at least one of these themes would be nearly unplayable.

If the liberals running video game companies made games based solely on their ideological beliefs, GameStop would be nothing more than a vast bargain bin of failed games. Consumers do not want to play games where their character is an elder statesman preparing a 2,000-page piece of legislation. Nor do we, as gamers, want to play as a low-level bureaucrat tasked with delivering an EPA analysis on a proposed wind farm before time expires.
American Thinker: Computer Gamers: Conservatives in Waiting

American Thinker: Citizens or Subjects: Keynesian Economics

Keynesian economic enthusiasts are quick to shift blame for the disasters of government economic involvement we see today in the European Union and the U.S. Yet the consequences have become so obvious, the impact so far-reaching, that the correlation can no longer be spun away. Greece is insolvent, soon to be followed by Spain, Portugal, and perhaps Italy, which in concert may well bring down the euro. Germany is in the unenviable position of having to bail out the outrageously profligate Greece with hardworking German citizens' tax euros, all while realizing full well that it will not make one iota of difference in the long run. We see a productive and responsible nation following the laggard and fool to economic ruin, enabling a spend-aholic in its addiction.
American Thinker: Citizens or Subjects: Keynesian Economics

American Thinker: Cannibalizing Capital

What converts these worthless plants and minerals into paintings, furniture, and jewelry? What made it possible for our artist, our jeweler, and our craftsman to make a living out of processed plants and minerals? Hint: It's not government.

These artists may not have heard about the 10,000 homes being destroyed and the economic nihilism that inspired the project. These artists just do what they do, taking a few dollars' worth of raw materials and transforming them into goods worth ten, twenty, thirty times as much, all because of their ingenuity, their creativity, and the rewards dispensed by the invisible hand of a free market.

It happens every hour of every day, as manufacturers literally create wealth by creating valuable goods seemingly out of thin air.

American Thinker: Cannibalizing Capital

Sunday, May 16, 2010

American Thinker: Why Conservatives Love the Founders

History is full of Obamas, and the people who idolized such power-hungry self-glorifying narcissists. The Founders understood human history in their very bones, because they read history from the Bible to the Roman Empire, Europe's bloody and tyrannical history, and the Americas. If you want to understand Obama, just look at any idolized hero in Latin America: Chavez, Fidel, Bolivar, Juan Peron. Look at European monarchs. Look at Napoleon.
American Thinker: Why Conservatives Love the Founders

Hands Off My Medicare - Are Tea Partiers "Closet" Socialists?

Hands Off My Medicare - Are Tea Partiers "Closet" Socialists?

Gregory Parkinson, a far-left gay guy who specializes in labelling opinions with which he disagrees as "lacking in reality" or "ignoring facts" claims on FaceBook that Tea Partiers are closet "socialists" because a sign was seen among the protesters against socializing the medical profession last summer with the message "Hand Off My Medicare."  He never offers extended analysis; indeed, he offers no analysis whatever, just his blunt assertions, on the premise that reasonable and rational people will, naturally, accept whatever he has to say for no better reason than his blunt assertion:

"I admire facts and reason", [he quotes from a prior post of mine] leaves out "from a far distance, and have yet to welcome any into my personal worldview."


I am totally loving the rest of this, about how only if you objected to a program do you have the "moral right" to take the money. That "reasoning" gives us the "hands off my medicare, you socialist!" teabaggers as well.

Let's take a look at Parkinson's slur to see if there is any substance to it.

The phrase "hands off my medicare" clearly implies "possession." 

One fact Parkinson conveniently ignores is the government's political promise, made by generations of Democrat politicians, that the Social Security Program (and Medicare has been represented by them as part of the Social Security Program) is *not* a form of wealth redistribution, is *not* a form of "welfare" or the "dole" but should be thought of as something like a government pension program, in which the worker and the employer each contribute to a "fund" from which retired workers can "withdraw" their "earned" benefits.

The Tea Partiers holding up the signs to which Parkinson refers may have been doing either one of two things.

Their signs could actually be referring to "Medicare" in the exact same sense in which Democrat politicians refer to "Medicare," that is, as a "fund" or "lock box" into which workers' and employers' social security tax dollars have been flowing for decades, and they do not now agree that Congress should summarily and arbitrarily use the funds in the "lock box" for programs not originally contemplated and already "earmarked" as a benefit, and to which they are making a moral claim. 

In all fairness to the Tea Partiers, and against Parkinson, it is difficult to see how anyone might make a superior moral claim to the funds "locked" away in the safe and secure "lockbox" the Democrats have been saying for years actually exists and exists for the benefit of retiring senior workers who have worked hard all their lives, have paid in all those years, and have "undisputed" claim on those tax dollars extracted from them and their employers.

Of course, as politicians of both parties have known for decades, Social Security and its Medicare add-on is nothing but a "Ponzi" scheme to buy the votes of seniors.  It has been well-described as the "third-rail" of American politics--an electrified rail that will execute any politician who dares to touch it.  Bush 43 made a valiant effort to begin the process of transforming the program into a legitimate pension program, but Republicans are not very courageous and ultimately Democrats prevailed in preventing true reform even though Republicans had a majority.

The Democrats knew the program was far too useful to them politically in frightening senior citizens.  For example, liberal Democrat Laughton Chiles, when he ran against conservative Republican Jeb Bush in the 1994 race for Florida governor, ran a telephone campaign where Chiles' supporters made calls to seniors claiming that Jeb Bush was going to take away their social security benefits.  Chiles simply took a page out of LBJ's playbook in that politician's campaign against Barry Goldwater in 1964.

The fact is, the Tea Partiers, as do all Americans, have a moral claim to the taxes that were extracted from them under the threat of physical force and fraud.  They have precisely the same moral claim as do the victims of the Enron scandals, only in the case of Enron, fraud, and not physical force, was used to extract the booty.

What is wrong with holding Congress to the same standards that Congress wants to hold the perpetrators of fraud at Enron, or Wall Street, for that matter?

The argument regarding the right to a benefit only if you opposed the legislation that granted the benefit makes an underlying assumption that Parkinson has conveniently ignored.  The difference can be illustrated as follows. 

If you say that government has the right to steal people's property, which is what the advocates of social security and other forms of wealth re-distribution are claiming, then what we call "rights" do not exist legally in such a society. 

Rights still exist as moral claims, since rights exist wherever people exist, and people's rights are, by the terms of our own Declaration of Independence, "unalienable."  Indeed, the purpose of rights is to subordinate society to moral law, to say there are things which society cannot do to individuals.

In short, if you advocate theft as a social policy, you forfeit your "rights" since you cannot claim for yourself what you would deny others.

On the other hand, if you oppose theft as a social policy based on the moral claim of individual rights, then you can seek to protect your rights without self-contradiction.

In the rare possibility that the Tea Partiers Parkinson has brought in for review were petitioning Congress to increase their benefits or to enable the government to steal more property from Americans in the form of re-distributional tax increases, then certainly such Tea Partiers are guilty, at the very least, of the same crime of hypocrisy that Democrats have been guilty of for decades.

So Parkinson might be right, in which case the Tea Partiers are as morally clueless as he is; on the other hand, they could have simply been protesting government theft.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide which is more probably true.

Friday, May 14, 2010

American Thinker: The Real Reason the Left Loves Illegals

This explains why illegal immigration is so important to the left. It explains why efforts to halt illegal border-crossings, a problem that wouldn't challenge a six-year-old, are executed so halfheartedly and so often left unfinished (see the recent "virtual fence"). It explains the irrational response to Arizona's effort to tighten up existing immigration law (not create new law -- Arizona's statute is no more than a reinforcement of existing federal law). It explains the insistence that any solution to the immigration problem provide for amnesty and citizenship for the millions of illegals already living within our borders. It has nothing to do with compassion, nothing to do with fairness or practicality or any of the other reasons offered by "reform" advocates. As is almost always the case where the American left is involved, what it has to do with is power.


American Thinker: The Real Reason the Left Loves Illegals

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

American Thinker: Declaration of Independence as Law

In order to save the fruit of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence must be recognized and enforced as law. Amending our Constitution will also be necessary -- for example, limiting federal taxation and requiring federal spending not to exceed federal revenue. It appears that neither of these changes is likely to emanate from the federal government any time soon. However, "We the People" do not need the federal government to define our sacred human rights or their associated moral laws. According to the Declaration, those truths and laws are self-evident. "We the People" are capable of becoming masters of federal government through the amendment process.

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
-
Abraham Lincoln

All American laws which are destructive to an individual's sacred, equal rights to life, liberty, and private property are un-Declarational and must be nullified -- if not by Congress or the Supreme Court, then by states and local government. The concept of "Declarational" law must find its way into the American mind and into all levels of American government.


American Thinker: Declaration of Independence as Law

How Starving Government Still Gets Fat - Reason Magazine

When they began, this approach seemed worth a try. But 30 years later, confirmation is hard to find. Like Reagan, George W. Bush reduced income tax rates. In spite of that, inflation-adjusted federal outlays this year are 60 percent higher than they were the year Bush became president.

How Starving Government Still Gets Fat - Reason Magazine

The American Spectator : The Shattered Template In Arizona

Progressives presented big government to blacks in precisely the same way they presented it to white Southerners: tied tightly together to the idea of racial identity. Thus emerged a whole generation of progressive black politicians who were the mirror image of their white supremacist counterparts: each exploiting the combustible mix of racism and big government.

The American Spectator : The Shattered Template In Arizona

The American Spectator : Shutting Down Free Speech

These heavy-handed actions, as well as worries about the Obama Administration reinstituting the so-called "Fairness Doctrine" for talk radio are small time when one considers what the government is capable of accomplishing if a handful of current proposals are enacted.


The American Spectator : Shutting Down Free Speech

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Will Republicans Support Obama Care Lite?

According to W. James Antle, III, of the American Spectator :
[Senator John] Cornyn [of Texas] initially unfurled the "repeal and replace" banner, only to quickly make an exception for the "non-controversial stuff," such as the ban on preexisting conditions which is unfortunately exactly what necessitates the "controversial stuff" like the individual mandate.

Herein lies the premise for the entire article, that Republicans will support depriving the stockholders of their investment by permitting this attack on the property rights of insurance companies, essentially making them agents of government, and thereby taking a giant step down the road to a corporate fascist state, in order to preserve such socializing moves as banning preexisting conditions.

We will just have to see, but Antle has not grasped the economics of this issue, nor how a free market solution would solve the problem.

In a free market, individuals would purchase health insurance policies just as they purchase other forms of insurance; and they would have property rights in the policy. The major attraction of such a policy would be that it would cover future medical conditions. People would thus have an economic incentive to purchase such policies in their relative youth, as they do now, for whole life policies and other policies that provide resources for future catastrophes.

Thus the issue of "pre-existing" conditions would not arise in the first place. If you were so unwise as to fail to take advantage of such policies, well, yes, then you would have a problem, but most people can take care of themselves and we certainly wouldn't have the scale of problems we have now with employer-based insurance, which makes no rational sense at all, and only came about as a result of government intervention into the free market in the first place during WWII.

We keep trying to solve problems created by government intervention with more government intervention. Why would anyone think such a procedure could possibly work?

Obama care is just another government intervention proposed and now enacted to correct earlier problems created by government intervention.

The way you solve such problems is to eliminate government intervention.

This article by a "conservative" Republican writing for The American Spectator perfectly illustrates the reason why we need fundamental constitutional reform. We have so-called "conservative intellectuals" such as Antle, who simply do not understand capitalism or free-market economics, who have, apparently, never given serious or sustained thought to how a free society would actually work and resume the social functions that since the ascendancy of Progressivism have been taken over more and more by government, on the assumption that government can do things for people more effectively than they can do for themselves.

Obviously it can't. These so-called "conservatives" may, in fact, be conservative, but they are not libertarians, they do not support limited government, and their vision is not radical in any sense of the word. We need radical--meaning fundamental--reform of government. And there are some of us who will work toward that end, trying to push the TPM and the angry Republicans more toward fundamental reform. I don't think Americans will support Obama Care Lite, which is what, apparently, some of these "conservatives" are preparing themselves to support.

Americans should reject any such compromises and work instead toward real reform and the vision of a genuinely free society. To do this Americans need new intellectual, as well as political, leadership. This current crop of Republicans, so far, certainly hasn't provided the intellectual leadership, and that failure can only lead to a further and deeper slide into statism when they assume political power in November.

Americans need leadership willing to provide the intellectually-based vision of what a free society looks like and examples of how such a society founded on individual rights would actually work. They don't need "me-too" leaders with secondhand ideas and no clue how to lead us out of this wilderness of statism.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

American Thinker: The Keynesian Fraud

Morgenthau's statement is the equivalent of Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner stating that "everything we have done has done no good." When the architect and manager of the program admits it failed, on what basis can honest historians claim that it was successful?

If only current political appointees could be as honest as Morgenthau. But the Keynesian myth is too important and must survive at all costs. It is a source of government power and an inspiration for more government spending. It is a source of many economists' income and prestige. Keynesian economics is the bedrock supporting the entire myth of expansive government. If it is debunked, then so is the twentieth-century conception of government.

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong ... somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... And an enormous debt to boot!
- Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Treasury Secretary, May 1939

American Thinker: The Keynesian Fraud

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

‘You Cut Spending’ - Reason Magazine

Check out this interview with former governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson, who pitches the limited government message.  But can he walk the talk?
In 2010 Johnson is hoping to gain notoriety for a different, though related, reason. At a time of deep and convulsive popular discontent with the economy and the politicians attempting to manage it, Johnson has launched a profile-raising 501(c)4 nonprofit organization called the Our America Initiative, pushing limited-government solutions to economic, environmental, social, and international issues. If in the process he happens to tap into the growing Tea Party sentiment and palpable Republican hunger for new leadership, well, Johnson won’t complain. As Politico reported in December 2009, the former governor “is doing little to knock down the idea that he may be looking toward a 2012 presidential run.” While ending the drug war remains a central concern (Johnson was a featured speaker at the Marijuana Policy Project’s annual dinner in January), the tanned triathlete is hoping to deliver the kind of broad-based critique of big government that proved such an unlikely success in 2008 for the less telegenic Ron Paul.
‘You Cut Spending’ - Reason Magazine

The American Spectator : Are the Republicans Up to It?

If the Republicans gain ground in the next election, are they up to the task of reforming entitlements in the face of massive baby-boomer retirements?


The American Spectator : Are the Republicans Up to It?

Cahill rips governor on health care plans - BostonHerald.com


Cahill alleged the governor has “spent like we’re in a booming economy at a time when we’re experiencing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

“If President Obama and the Democrats repeat the mistakes of the health insurance mandate on a national level, they will bankrupt this country within four years,” Cahill said. “It is time for the President and the Democratic leadership to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new plan that does not threaten to wipe out the American economy.”
Cahill's remarks illustrate perfectly how not to attack socialized medicine. You don't concede the moral argument to the socialists and pitch the extreme cost. If everyone has a "moral right" to health care, as Cahill argues, cost is simply not a relevant consideration. If Republicans make the same mistake, our freedom shall indeed be lost.

Cahill rips governor on health care plans - BostonHerald.com

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Palin, Brown & Elite Condescension

The UK Times Online says Sarah Palin and Scott Brown Set the United States Frothing, and the reporter, Christine Lamb, reports the story honestly.

http://inkslwc.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/ronald_reagan.jpgBut the "frothing" mostly represents our left-wing media's hysterical reaction to anyone anywhere who does not share the views of those who are the educational product of our self-styled elite universities.

Elitists also savaged Harry Truman, felt overwhelming contempt for Dwight Eisenhower, loved the failed presidencies of John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, hated Ronald Reagan, perhaps the most successful and accomplished president in modern times, and never ceased to admire Clinton's "brilliance" and academic credentials as a "Rhodes Scholar."

College professors do not make particularly good presidents, and the high and mighty typically have not fared well as president either.  John Quincy Adams lost to Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson only won election in a three-way race and then his party was overwhelmingly defeated by the Republicans in 1920 with another man of the people, Warren Harding, one of our better presidents, despite the academic hostility to his presidency.

This same self-styled elite swoons over Barack Obama because he is, in the words of our VP, "such a clean, articulate [Negro]" who, according to the Senate Majority Leader, "knows how to speak [Negro] dialect when he has to."  The Democrats never can get very far away from race, either with intended praise, as demonstrated in these remarks, or in condemnation, as the party of slavery and Jim Crow, fighting civil rights for blacks tooth and nail from the founding of the Republic through the 1960s.

Sarah Palin, and to some extent Scott Brown, demonstrate an understandable reaction to the elite's dripping condescension, intellectual arrogance, and demonstrated political and economic incompetence.

Their rise in the media has less to do with their particular merits than it does to the needs of a "24/7" news cycle, and the American people's disinclination to view themselves as the moronic rubes Obama sees as "clinging to their guns and their religion."

Obama and company appear to see all Americans (at least the ones who do not worship him) as no different than the very small slice of the electorate who thinks men walked with dinosaurs.

There is even a larger slice of the electorate that believes former President George W. Bush secretly launched the 9/11 attack on the NY Trade Center.  Barack Obama even appointed one of these brilliant academic stars, a communist by the name of Van Jones, as a "Green Jobs Czar" in his administration until the "rubes" made such a fuss that Jones resigned officially (he still works unofficially as part of the Obama Administration).

Our current president, quite apart from whether you agree with his statist political philosophy, suffers from some major problems of his own making.  Even our elites are beginning to realize that when this president gives a speech, such as his recent state of the union, he becomes delusional and incoherent.  What is one to make of the call for less borrowing and lowered spending by a president who, in the same speech, calls for programs that require significantly greater spending and an astronomical increase in borrowing?

Obama's chickens are just beginning to come home to roost and even the little child in the nursery rhyme can see clearly this Emperor has no clothes.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

The Left's Disintegration

Scott Brown's election to the Senate--breaking the Democrats' 60-vote super-majority--provides incontrovertible electoral proof that Americans see in the current Obama Administration a threat to their liberty, whether in the form of socializing the medical profession, the Administration's apparent disinclination to defend Americans domestically against terrorist attack, or its revolting obsequiousness to foreign dictatorships.

We are threatened by this Administration on so many fronts our heads are literally spinning.  We are like the little dutch boy putting our fingers in the dike, but the number of holes has now so greatly exceeded the number of fingers we feel overwhelmed.

But not defeated.

Barack Obama Scott BrownThe current outrage is the level of spending this Administration is proposing, the level of taxation it is demanding, and the level of borrowing it is committing our children and our grand-children to paying off.  As the president recently commented, "we propose to spend our way out of this recession."

That these levels of spending, taxation, and borrowing are precisely what will further deepen the recession and expand it into a full-fledged depression on the scale of the Great Depression of the 1930s is an argument that is only just beginning to be articulated by Republicans and the Tea Party Movement (TPM).

Consider some facts on the ground.

Perhaps none of these issues would gain much electoral traction were it not for the essential fact that unemployment is at historically very high levels.  In itself, this fact wouldn't mean much were it not also true that the Obama Administration's irresponsible policies of more spending, more taxes, and more borrowing guarantee there will be no economic expansion of the private sector so long as these policies remain in effect.

In reality, we have unemployment nationally close to 20%, if we include everyone without a job who wants a job.  People are far more educated today than they were in the 1930s and are far less likely to be persuaded that throttling the private sector and expanding government is the way to encourage prosperity.

But these policies, far from encouraging prosperity, must have precisely the opposite effect, as they did in the 1930s, and we have already set the stage for a catastrophe that will make 2009 look good.

In 2010, we shall have the beginning of a new round of foreclosures, this time from those 2005 mortgages whose interest rates are due to be reset this year.

Many of these mortgages were of the sort where payments did not even cover the interest charge.  Given that property today is worth but half what it was worth in 2005, in such states as Florida or Nevada, these properties are all, as the saying goes, far "under water."

More foreclosed properties further depress existing prices, making Americans poorer.  As government steps in to "rescue" these mortgages, it must borrow more money, raise taxes, and spend more, further depressing private economic activity.  We haven't even discussed the coming foreclosures in commercial real estate as economic activity slows further.

There must come a point where foreigners refuse to buy more American treasury notes, and we are already nearing the point where current tax receipts go mostly to pay for the interest on the debt, rather than to pay any of it down.

The Obama Administration would argue, of course, that the economy will recover, and that our current situation is short-term and temporary.  But their policies, unfortunately, guarantee there will be no recovery of the private economy and that the situation will only get worse.  Already this Administration makes the telling admission that American will have high unemployment for as far into the future as it can see.  At least here, the Administration is honest.

So long as the private economy does not produce through taxable profit the revenue the government needs, the only alternative left is to inflate the currency, which is just another form of taxation, but a form that does more to destroy an economy than any other tax.

There is a reason why Americans are buying gold.

As the consequences of these policies become more and more evident, the American electorate will take charge of the situation in the only way our Constitution provides.  The 2010 election promises to be the most historic and revolutionary off-year election in the history of the republic.  It is clear to me, and I've been predicting this from the moment Congress passed the so-called "stimulus package" in early 2009, the Republicans, as the party out of power, will sweep both houses of Congress in a landslide, because I knew that the theory this legislation was founded on was simply wrong, and that unemployment would increase, not decrease.

Unfortunately, we shall still have to contend with a socialist president who will simply dig in his heels and prevent remedial legislation.  It is unfortunate, because the country will have to suffer at least two more years of his failed presidency; on the other hand, the Republicans will be able to pass remedial legislation, which Obama will veto, but that will present the country with a track record.  Going into the presidential elections of 2012, the Republican nominee will be positioned well to argue but that for Obama's obstructionism and failed policies, the country would be moving forward rather than mired in high unemployment, punishing regulations, confiscatory taxation, and unlimited spending.

To adjust our course the ship of state will require an extraordinary set of circumstances where Congress will actually be expected by the people to cut spending, for by 2012, we shall be in such bad economic shape with this president, catastrophic circumstances--debt, spending, and taxes--will force the hand.

The next three years will be terrible years for this country economically, millions of peope will suffer unnecessarily, yet at the end I think Americans will have finally rejected the false allure of socialism and we shall also see the death of the Democratic Party as we know it today.

Baron de la Brède et de MontesquieuI hope we shall also see the rebirth of limited government, as created by the original United States Constitution.  For that to happen we shall need some Constitutional amendments that repeal the income tax, restore the right of free contract, redefine and limit the "commerce clause", prohibit Congress from delegating its powers to bureaucracies and, perhaps, consider some new ideas about restructuring at least the House of Representatives by restoring the original ratio of 30,000 voters per Congressional district.

We would greatly increase the number of Congressional House seats which would make it impractical to meet physically in one place, at least in the current House chamber.  But we are now connected through digital networks and there is no reason, in principle, why the House of Representatives could not meet in a virtual Congress, where House staffs would be greatly diffused.  It would, of course, be far more difficult to pass complicated legislation, but that is the point.  The federal government should not be doing most of what it is currently doing. 

The long-term advantages of such a reform would be considerable and may even appeal to many on the Left, for attempts to influence any one Congressman would be futile.  With 202.7 million eligible voters in the United States, we'd then have, to restore the original Constitutional ratios, 6,757 members of the House of Representatives.  It would be very difficult for lobbyists to get special favors from Congress if they had to persuade 3,379 of them rather than a mere 218.  House members would be much closer to the people they represent and the result would be a federal government whose expansion would be far more difficult to accomplish and the people's liberties kept far more secure.

Whatever the value of these proposals, it should be clear that merely changing the gang of politicians in Washington will, at best, provide a temporary respite from the steadily expanding power of the federal government over all aspects of our lives.

We must argue for major constitutional changes to restructure the government if we are to reinvigorate the original design of our Constitution, and create more limited government, where people can once again be free to pursue happiness, secure their liberty, defend their very lives.