Obama And Holder WANT The Country Divided Over Race Relations

It's one key to maintaining their power:

"What has been already mentioned is as conducive as anything can be to preserve a tyranny; namely, to . . . endeavour that the whole community should mutually accuse and come to blows with each other, friend with friend, the commons with the nobles, and the rich with each other."

-- Aristotle, On Tyranny

NRA Grades Dem. Pestka Better Than Rep. Amash In Michigan 3rd

Don't believe it? See for yourself, here.

Michigan Democrats are making hay with this. A four-color direct mail piece arrived in my mailbox today highlighting the fact, mailed from the party office in Lansing.

Amash's beef with the NRA is principled, based on his belief, which is correct, that the Commerce Clause of the constitution is not the basis for legislation for interstate reciprocity for concealed carry. The McDonald decision is another example of a "victory" for gun rights which was wrongly decided, but the NRA nonetheless cheered. The NRA is not infallible, and Amash is right to point it out, but in the political contest against the foes of gun rights, his trumpet makes an uncertain sound.

But while Pestka scores better than Amash with the NRA, you'll notice there's no endorsement by the NRA. That's because NRA members think they know Amash is a friend of gun ownership who just hasn't yet persuaded the NRA to improve its constitutional interpretation.

One might be tempted from this to think Pestka is an alternative to consider instead of Amash, especially since liberals haven't been too happy with Pestka for once voting to de-fund abortion providers, something Amash recently couldn't bring himself to do, alienating social conservatives, including me (a specialty of libertarians like Amash). See the HuffPo story, here. But Pestka now regrets his vote. His record is being used opportunistically.

Amash continues to defend his vote against de-funding Planned Parenthood because singling out PP for defunding is unprincipled, thus favoring others who still get funding. To which we say, so what? There is tons of spending in government which is unprincipled because it picks winners and losers, and is otherwise simply wrong. To err on the side of picking losers by cutting them off isn't a failing, it's a start! The journey to a clean room begins with one moldy sock.

We shouldn't make the good the enemy of the perfect as Amash does now and again. It's a lesson learned from life experience, which Amash hasn't had enough of yet. That's an argument against investing young people like him with political power until they are ready, something Aristotle understood long ago, and our Founders understood when they enshrined age requirements for office in the constitution. The young are to be tested and tried as they climb a ladder of offices, an idea which derives from the old Roman cursus honorum, with which the Founders were intimately familiar. A good boy is just that. It remains to be seen if he turns out to be a good man.

Not all matters are susceptible of resolution by appeal to the constitution. It is not an infallible holy book which dropped from the sky for our instruction in everything, as much as we rightly submit to it. For example, the constitution is now schizophrenic because it allows those aged 18 to vote, but only those aged 35 to serve as president. It is probably only theoretical that one day there could be a dearth of people in the country old enough to serve as president, or that there might one day be a surplus of people serving in Congress under 35. Nevertheless in the former case the pressure to change the constitution to lower the age requirement would fly in the face of the Founders' wisdom, experience and judgment on the matter. In the latter it could happen that the death of the president and vice president might mean a too young speaker of the house would be next in line to the presidency, in violation of the constitution.

We adhere to the spirit of the constitution, but to which part? Shall we make the 26th Amendment the enemy of Article II. Section 1, or the other way around? Shall we stifle youth and enthusiasm utterly, or channel it and shape it?

Not everything is reducible to the letter on the page, or to a single principle one only imagines superintends our deliberations. What were once thought remedies on later reflection turn out to have been mistakes, which only the good mind can conclude. 

Imported British "Conservative" Condescends To Instruct Us About Communism

John Derbyshire

Here:

"But Barack Obama was never about the downtrodden masses. If he associated with revolutionaries such as Bill Ayers, it was only to feed off them and advance himself. Once he’d advanced, they went under the proverbial bus, as did the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Barack Obama has always been about Barack Obama. ...

"To be a real communist is to make a serious commitment to a cause. Communism is a hard dogma, completely at odds with the soft-handed girlish narcissism of a late-20th-century American leftist such as Obama, who has never risked, fought, struggled, or suffered."

Well, by this standard most businessmen, and most people who work with and for them, aren't real Americans either because the only thing they're committed to is the advancement of number 1. Nor are they real capitalists, but fascists, ever seeking preferments in law to protect their fiefdoms. Nor are they real Christians, eschewing renunciation of the world and service to the poor.

Serious commitment to anything hardly exists anywhere at any time for very long. There are only degrees of commitment, the few outstanding examples of which momentarily intrude upon our attention, as when devotees of a 7th century bandit religion would just as soon blow them- and ourselves to smithereens as live another day.

Just because Obama is a hypocritical communist fellow-traveler doesn't invalidate classifying him as one. After all, Obama also claims to be a Christian but believes things about the unborn and human sexuality which many a Catholic bishop would say destine him for hell, but people still say he is a Christian. Obama's lavish expenditures on his own presidency, which mark him out as a tyrant according to Aristotle ("the good of one man only"), stand alongside his belief in redistribution of income, in spreading the wealth around, in the same way that his friendship with and fundraising among the rich coexists with his sustained inveighing against them because in his opinion they do not pay their fair share in taxes.

The real problem with calling Obama a communist isn't that it isn't true but that the term doesn't exhaust the possibilities. What is instructive about Obama is that he is a blend of enthusiasms and idealisms, a character Herbert Hoover would have recognized as in the mould of FDR who admired the strong men of Europe, who were at once fascist, Nazi and communist. Obama may be a dilettante communist, but you'll still get an alphabet soup of statist experiments at his dinner table. 

But, of course, communist purists would demur at this point, Stalin having been an "aberration". Yet we still call Stalin a communist dictator and his rule a communist dictatorship even though Stalin's partnership with capitalism and people like Henry Ford arguably aligned Stalinism more with fascism than with communism.

Over time the terms lose their adequacy, primarily because they are invented by human beings who will do nothing if not disappoint, eventually. There's a word for that, but like "communist" the word "sinner", to quote our British instructor, is just not "ironic enough for our very ironic age".

Chicoms Have Biden's Back: "The guards too of a king are citizens, a tyrant's foreigners."

So says Aristotle in the Politics.

And Medvedev has Obama's back.

Slum Lord Obama: Lower Class Self-Identification Grows 28 Percent Since 2008

Story here.

Is Obama intentionally impoverishing the middle class as a means to overthrow the constitutional republic? You don't have to be a Marxist to think so.

"When there is a want of a proper number of men of middling fortune, the poor extend their power too far, abuses arise, and the government is soon at an end." -- Aristotle's Politics

Brian Wesbury Attacks the VAT Because the Problem is Spending, not Taxation

Brian Wesbury is very skeptical on historical grounds that adding a VAT can do anything to increase revenues relative to GDP:

"[T]here have only been eight years of balanced or surplus budgets in the 61 years since 1950; spending as a share of GDP averaged just 18.1% in those years. In other words, the more the government spends, the harder it is to balance the budget.

"[N]o matter the rate on the income tax, tax receipts are rarely above 19.5% of GDP. The top individual income tax rate has been as high as 90% and as low as 28% in the past 60 years, but revenues have remained in a fairly narrow range. ...

"In 2011, government spending was 24.1% of GDP, and under President Obama’s budget proposal it is never going to fall below 23% of GDP. In other words, there is no tax regime in the history of the United States that has generated enough tax revenue as a share of GDP to balance the budget today, or in the future."

But the problem with this analysis, of course, is that Wesbury is comparing income tax "apples" with value added tax "oranges." The latter have never been on the menu here. They have been elsewhere, as he discusses, but not as stand alone systems. Like Christianity, a VAT isn't a failure. It just hasn't been tried.

While there is every reason to be as skeptical as Wesbury is that a VAT would replace the income tax and wouldn't instead be layered on top of it and contribute to an even more onerous spiral of taxation and spending, Wesbury leaves out of account the moral virtue of a VAT as a tax on consumption and a spur to saving and investment.

Historically conservatism has too rarely taken a stand critical of materialism, especially of the American kind where 70 percent of the economy has depended on consumption. From this perspective, taxing consumption is a much more commendable idea than taxing income, which we say we want to encourage. "If you want less of something, tax it." Is it any surprise that incomes are declining?

Instead what Wesbury is unintentionally demonstrating is that our civilization has reached the limits of the income tax regime instituted in 1913, just as the limitations of the tariff and excise regime for financing mass democracy had been reached at the end of the 19th century.

Perhaps the even more fundamental point is whether mass democracy itself is viable anymore, whether in fact "mass democracy" is not an oxymoron. After all, once the people vote themselves goodies picked from their fellows' pockets, it can't help but implode.

The rich will only put up just so long with this arrangement until they pick up their capital and leave. Indeed, one could argue that precisely that has been occurring for quite some time already. The exodus of manufacturing capacity is the form it has most obviously taken since the opening to China. Less well recognized is the rise of the international citizen who picks up his family and settles in places like Singapore or Macau as the case may be. Greece has imploded under similar circumstances, its richest citizens having long ago made arrangements to avoid the plundering which its tax system means.

Aristotle even longer ago understood the affinities between extreme democracy and tyranny. The rich do what they can, and exile themselves. The rest do what they must.

"The Whole Community Should Mutually Accuse and Come to Blows With Each Other"

Just one of the many ways a tyranny maintains itself in power, according to Aristotle.

In our case, bring up women's rights and "health" and make them an issue when they weren't.

A house thus busy being divided against itself is a house which cannot unite in revolt against its master. And what better way to divide the house than according to nature, the division between the sexes?

Another form of Locke's "crossing nature".

The Rich Should Answer Obama's Class Warfare With A Prosperous Middle Class

As recognized long ago by Aristotle:

Now a tyranny is a monarchy where the good of one man only is the object of government, an oligarchy considers only the rich, and a democracy only the poor; but neither of them have a common good in view.

Tyranny, the worst excess imaginable, [is] a government the most contrary possible to a free state.

Tyranny arises from a headstrong democracy or an oligarchy, but very seldom when the members of the community are nearly on an equality with each other. When there is a want of a proper number of men of middling fortune, the poor extend their power too far, abuses arise, and the government is soon at an end.

A tyrant is chosen out of the meanest populace; an enemy to the better sort, that the common people may not be oppressed by [the better sort].

How To Preserve A Tyranny

Aristotle, Politics, 1313-1314:

[T]o preserve a tyranny . . .

keep down those who are of an aspiring disposition

take off those who will not submit

allow no public meals, no clubs, no education, nothing at all

guard against everything that gives rise to high spirits or mutual confidence

[do not permit] the learned meetings of those who are at leisure to hold conversation with each other

keep all the people strangers to each other; for knowledge increases mutual confidence;

oblige all strangers to appear in public, and to live near the city-gate, that all their actions may be sufficiently seen; for those who are kept like slaves seldom entertain any noble thoughts

endeavour to know what every one who is under their power does and says ... employ spies ... send out listeners wherever there [is] any meeting or conversation; for the people dare not speak with freedom for fear of such persons; and if any one does, there is the less chance of its being concealed;

endeavour that the whole community should mutually accuse and come to blows with each other, friend with friend, the commons with the nobles, and the rich with each other

It is also advantageous for a tyranny that all those who are under it should be oppressed with poverty, that they may not be able to compose a guard; and that, being employed in procuring their daily bread, they may have no leisure to conspire against their tyrants.

The Pyramids . . . are a proof of this . . . the edifices . . . the temple . . . all these [public works] produced one end, the keeping the people poor.

It is necessary also to multiply taxes

A tyrant also should endeavour to engage his subjects in a war, that they may have employment and continually depend upon their general. 

A king is preserved by his friends, but a tyrant is of all persons the man who can place no confidence in friends, as every one has it in his desire and these chiefly in their power to destroy him.

All these things also which are done in an extreme democracy should be done in a tyranny, as permitting great licentiousness to the women in the house, that they may reveal their husbands' secrets;

and showing great indulgence to slaves also for the same reason; for slaves and women conspire not against tyrants: but when they are treated with kindness, both of them are abettors of tyrants, and extreme democracies also; and the people too in such a state desire to be despotic.

For which reason flatterers are in repute in both these: the demagogue in the democracy, for he is the proper flatterer of the people; among tyrants, he who will servilely adapt himself to their humours; for this is the business of [1314a] flatterers.

And for this reason tyrants always love the worst of wretches, for they rejoice in being flattered, which no man of a liberal spirit will submit to; for [the best] love the virtuous, but flatter none. ...

A tyrant also should show no favour to a man of worth or a freeman; for he should think, that no one deserved to be thought these but himself; for he who supports his dignity, and is a friend to freedom, encroaches upon the superiority and the despotism of the tyrant: such men, therefore, [tyrants] naturally hate, as destructive to their government.

A tyrant also should rather admit strangers to his table and familiarity than citizens, as these are his enemies, but [strangers] have no design against him. ...

the citizens should be of poor abject dispositions; for such men never propose to conspire against any one.

[the citizens] should have no confidence in each other; for while they have not this, the tyrant is safe enough from destruction. For which reason [tyrants] are always at enmity with those of merit, as hurtful to their government; not only as [those of merit] scorn to be governed despotically, but also because [the meritorious] can rely upon each other's fidelity, and others can rely upon theirs, and because they will not inform against their associates, nor any one else.

[the citizens] shall be totally without the means of doing anything; for no one undertakes what is impossible for him to perform: so that without power a tyranny can never be destroyed.

These, then, are the three objects which the inclinations of tyrants desire to see accomplished; for all their tyrannical plans tend to promote one of these three ends, that their people may neither have mutual confidence, power, nor spirit.

Tyrants Arise From the Want of a Middle Class

"[D]emocracies are more firmly established and of longer continuance than oligarchies; but even in those when there is a want of a proper number of men of middling fortune, the poor extend their power too far, abuses arise, and the government is soon at an end."

-- Aristotle, Politics, 1296a

Throngs Used To Greet Bill Clinton, Obama Settles For Dozens on Martha's Vineyard

Amid security concerns, says the story here.

Hm. I thought the summer playground for the rich was friendly territory.


"With a democracy tyranny quarrels with the nobles, and destroys them both publicly and privately, or drives them into banishment, as rivals and an impediment to the government; hence naturally arise conspiracies both amongst those who desire to govern and those who desire not to be slaves."


-- Aristotle, The Politics

Obama Sent Planes to Mexico to Fight Fires, But Wouldn't Help Texas

Military C-130s were sent to stop Mexico's fires in April, as reported here, but Texans didn't get a federal declaration of disaster for their recent fires, as reported here. 

Obviously, Mexico provides Obama with more votes than Texas.

Showing no favor to worthy people: one of the marks of a tyranny. And another is like it, from Aristotle: "The guards of a tyrant are foreigners."

Obama Would Tax You By The Mile If He Could

Obama is trying to figure out yet another way to tax Americans:

The Obama administration has floated a transportation authorization bill that would require the study and implementation of a plan to tax automobile drivers based on how many miles they drive.

Read the rest here.

"It is necessary [in a tyranny] also to multiply taxes, as at Syracuse; where Dionysius in the space of five years collected all the private property of his subjects into his own coffers."

-- Aristotle, Politics

The Petty Tyrant Stiffs The Free Republic of Texas, Twice

No space shuttle, no fire disaster aid.

Story here.


"A tyrant also should show no favour to a man of worth or a freeman; for he should think, that no one deserved to be thought these but himself; for he who supports his dignity, and is a friend to freedom, encroaches upon the superiority and the despotism of the tyrant: such men, therefore, they naturally hate, as destructive to their government."


-- Aristotle, Politics

The Purpose of War in a Tyranny

"A tyrant also should endeavour to engage his subjects in a war, that they may have employment and continually depend upon their general."

-- Aristotle, Politics

The Marks of a Tyranny According to Aristotle

1.   The object of government in a tyranny is the good of one man only.
2.   The guards of a tyrant are foreigners.
3.   Tyrants arise from the want of a middle class.
4.   Tyrants gain the confidence of the people through hatred of the rich.
5.   Tyrants deprive the people of the use of arms.
6.   Women and slaves do not conspire against tyrants but instead abet them.
7.   The haughtiness of women has been the ruin of many tyrants.
8.   Tyrannies keep the warriors busy with wars.
9.   Tyrannies guard against the rise of high spirits and mutual confidence.
10. Tyrannies quarrel with the nobles.
11. Tyrannies affect to appear to protect the people.
12. Tyrannies extend poverty through public works.
13. Tyrannies oppress the people through poverty.
14. Tyrannies desire to know everything the people say and do.
15. Tyrannies multiply taxes.

The New National Security State Under Obama Progresses to Houston

In another installment in Aristotle's meme that tyrannies are abetted by women, we learn that the next city to fall to the transformation of America into the national security state is Houston.

The Houston Chronicle is reporting here that the Department of Homeland Security is helping fund the installation of 300 surveillance cameras there:

Judith Hanson, who was visiting downtown to watch her daughter's performance at the Wortham Center, said the cameras could provide comfort to women who come to the area.

"Just knowing that there is a camera just makes me feel a little bit safer," she said.

Obama Bows to Indian Parliament

The guards of a tyrant are foreigners.

UDAY AND QUSAY ARE 'BY NATURE' EADAY

Not only can no one spell in the United States, they're having trouble with the Greek Sigma in the word "by nature" from a line from Aristotle on the new glass door at the Department of Classics at the once venerable Cambridge University.

So far George Bush hasn't been blamed, but Mary Beard may yet get around to it, when she's done blogging about buggering in Catullus.

The Pyramids of John Maynard Keynes

Caroline Baum notices that President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget contains money for everything, it seems, except pyramid building:

No longer will President Barack Obama be content to cite specious numbers about “jobs saved or created” as a result of last year’s $787 billion fiscal stimulus. Now he’s proposing $100 billion of new spending to “jumpstart job creation,” according to White House Budget Director Peter Orszag. It’s part of a $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2011, unveiled Monday, that projects a $1.3 trillion deficit next year, following a $1.6 trillion deficit this year.

Spend money to save money. Spending dressed up as a jump- starter is still spending by another name.

The only thing missing from the energy-cleansing, rural- community-assisting, climate-change-mitigating, health-food- promoting blueprint is money for pyramid building. In Chapter 10, Section VI of “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” John Maynard Keynes advocated building pyramids as a cure for unemployment.

In fact, “Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one,” he wrote in his 1936 treatise.

The reason Obama avoids mentioning pyramid building, however, has to do with the fact that Obama has political power, whereas Keynes did not have political power and did not therefore feel constrained.

"What's that?" you say. "What does that have to do with it?"

Because of what Aristotle said:

It is also advantageous for a tyranny that all those who are under it should be oppressed with poverty, that they may not be able to compose a guard; and that, being employed in procuring their daily bread, they may have no leisure to conspire against their tyrants. The Pyramids of Egypt are a proof of this, and the votive edifices of the Cyposelidse, and the temple of Jupiter Olympus, built by the Pisistratidae, and the works of Polycrates at Samos; for all these produced one end, the keeping the people poor.

Obama wouldn't want to put any strange ideas in anyone's mind, now, would he?