OMG, the primus refers to the singular bloody dictator Augustus Caesar, the pares to the supine aristocrats of the Roman Senate whom he had subdued by murder

 Joe Lonsdale, here:

The founders set up a country in which aristoi would rule alongside and with the people, first among equals, primus inter pares, but not over them in the monarchical or oligarchic sense. Nobody would have a permanent or divine right to rule in the United States. The founders had had a sense of duty to rule honorably, and a sense of humility that their governance wasn’t an end in itself — but a means of preserving the rights of the people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

This man is a small sea of confusion, who writes that aristocracy is "rule by the few". 

The oligarchs laugh at Fugazius. 

Jefferson and America's Lost Idea: Natural Aristocracy

Joe Lonsdale, Substack

 

The default position of liberalism is to blame obstruction by reactionaries for republican failure, not the revolutionary impulses of the autocrat

"The republicans made me seize power".

You know whose side they are on when people talk like this. Spengler long ago observed how liberalism is all about tyranny, but does anyone still read him?

"The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is all that Liberalism sets out to be."

The voices opposed to the US Senate filibuster, are, to put it bluntly, not related to our founding.

"However high-minded":

Caesar would soon seize autocratic power, and Cato would commit suicide rather than live under Caesar’s rule. Goodman and Soni argue Cato’s obstructionism — however high-minded — was a contributing factor to the Roman Republic’s collapse. America’s Founding Fathers, however, idolized Cato. George Washington’s soldiers staged a play about Cato at Valley Forge.  Patrick Henry’s famous quote, “Give me liberty of give me death,” is derived from a line in that play.

Dear Rush Limbaugh: Publius Decius Mus doesn't get it at all, and neither do you

From the conclusion of the anonymous conservative intellectual, here:

"The possibilities would seem to be: Caesarism, secession/crack-up, collapse, or managerial Davoisie liberalism as far as the eye can see … which, since nothing human lasts forever, at some point will give way to one of the other three. Oh, and, I suppose, for those who like to pour a tall one and dream big, a second American Revolution that restores Constitutionalism, limited government, and a 28% top marginal rate."

A 28% top marginal rate?

He must be kidding.

The income tax is the cornerstone of the contemporary part of the anti-American revolution which made big government and rabid anti-constitutionalism not just possible but plausible. The 16th Amendment shredded the intent of the Founders, so why not shred the rest? They have, and they will.

Dreaming big means shedding the shredding, and along with that the imperial presidency and the Leviathan State implied by that, which was bequeathed to us by Abraham Lincoln.

But the followers of Harry Jaffa will never be able to imagine that, which makes them nothing more than the hollow men of Conservatism Inc.

During a commercial break in the Houston debate, Cassius and Brutus met to conspire behind Caesar's back

The video is here.

Some of the hottest early Black Friday deals in the country are in Ferguson, Missouri

Postmodernism at The Atlantic, continued, where the seven-day week is completely man-made

What's completely man-made is this account of the week, "Where the Five-Day Workweek Came From", in which long observation of four lunar phases of 7.4 days in length over millennia means nothing to an architect, who is, fittingly, cited as an authority, as in architects making stuff up.

The author, one Philip Sopher, an economics graduate from Princeton who should know his dates better, is completely ignorant of the Julian calendar reform of the Roman market day cycle of eight days to the more natural seven, which together with its other changes in 46 BC helped remove ever after in the West, not add, deliberate human meddling with the calendar, a common problem at the time of Caesar, here:

“Seven days,” wrote Witold Rybczynski in the August 1991 issue of The Atlantic, “is not natural because no natural phenomenon occurs every seven days.” The year marks one revolution of the Earth around the sun. Months, supposedly, mark the time between full moons.  The seven-day week, however, is completely man-made.

If it’s man-made, can’t man unmake it? For all the talk of how freeing it’d be to shave a day or two off the five-day workweek, little attention has been paid to where the weekly calendar came from. Understanding the sometimes arbitrary origins of the modern workweek might inform the movement to shorten it.

... At the very latest, the seven-day week was firmly entrenched in the Western calendar about 250 years before Christ was born.

---------------------------------------------

Little attention, indeed.

Commentary Magazine Defends Reagan's Liberalism

Peter Wehner, here:

"[I]magine the Norquist and Shirley standard being applied to Reagan in the 1970s. If Jeb Bush’s comments unleashed heated attacks, even given his sterling anti-tax record, think about what Reagan’s support for unprecedented tax increases–including higher taxes on top rates, sales taxes, bank and corporate taxes, and the inheritance tax–would have elicited. The Gipper would have been accused of being a RINO, a pseudo-conservative, unprincipled, and a member of the loathsome Establishment. Fortunately for Reagan (and for America) the temptation to turn conservatism into a rigid ideology was not as strong then than it is now."

Let's face it.

Reagan was a Democrat in recovery who brought a substantial number of Democrats in recovery to the Republican Party, where they met fellow liberals with whom they could forge an alliance around the liberalism bequeathed to them by Wilson and FDR, without the communist fellow traveling. Conservatives got pushed to the side, or taken for a ride.

Reagan defended the welfare state but on a scaled back basis with emphasis on less reliance on government and lower income taxes. The New Deal was not scaled back, nor was The Great Society. Even the ramped up Cold War to defeat the Soviets was interventionist and therefore arguably anti-conservative in its basic impulse. The resulting glorification of the US military would horrify the founders who feared them as instruments of tyranny in the hands of an American Caesar.

And now here we are with an enlarged welfare state in OBAMACARE, and actually having a public kerfuffle about an administration which resisted abjuring the use of said military on American soil to snuff out people it and it alone decides are a threat. You know, like gun owners. Are we really supposed to be charmed by the likes of the Krauthammers of the world who insist what Obama has been doing is entirely consistent with the model of Abraham Lincoln who put fellow Americans Confederates to death based on a private interpretation of the constitution?

Nothing's changed, except for the worse. His truth keeps marching on.

Bush Paved The Way For Obama's Insane Imperial Claim He Can Kill You

If you still harbor the slightest loyalty to either George Bush or Barack Obama after reading this withering, eviscerating critique of what's happened to our liberties under these two ne'er-do-wells by noted American lefty Glenn Greenwald for The UK Guardian here, then the future truly is hopeless.

From the concluding paragraph:

"[W]e have the current president asserting the power not merely to imprison or eavesdrop on US citizens without charges or trial, but to order them executed - and to do so in total secrecy, with no checks or oversight. If you believe the president has the power to order US citizens executed far from any battlefield with no charges or trial, then it's truly hard to conceive of any asserted power you would find objectionable."

He must know that when the purge starts under a future American Caesar, his ilk will be among the first to go.

Notice The Subtle Anti-Reaganism Of Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK)

TARP Republican

Sen. Tom Coburn comes to bury Caesar, not to praise him, here:

"The last time Congress reformed the tax code was 26 years ago, which preceded the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history."

What's wrong with that? you say.

Well, that statement dates the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history from after 1986, ignoring that it actually began much earlier as a result of Reagan's stimulative tax cuts in the early 1980s. Now why would a Republican ignore that? Maybe because he's a Bush Republican who hates voodoo economics, the ungrateful louts who never defended the Gipper against the left's attacks then and still won't.

What's worse is that Sen. Coburn goes on to pretend that Reagan viewed tax credits with scorn like Martin Feldstein does:

Reagan’s key economic advisers such as Martin Feldstein persuasively argue that tax extenders are spending by another name. If tax carve-outs for green industry, rum makers, Eskimo whaling captains, and more, were on the other side of the ledger – such as in President Obama’s stimulus bill – they would be derided as spending, and rightly so.

Actually, Reagan defended spending through the tax code, for example, through the Earned Income Credit which he expanded considerably in the very 1986 tax reform Coburn praises, to get people off of welfare and into work.

Martin Feldstein may have been Reagan's economic advisor, but he was a deficit hawk who often collided with Reagan over spending, and left the service of the president after only two years, in 1984.

To rewrite the history of Ronald Reagan as Coburn does is completely dishonest.

TALK OF CAESARS . . . AND OTHER SUCH LIKE

In this editorial, "Will Washington's Failures Lead To Second American Revolution?" by Mr. Christian and Mr. Robbins, the first sentence alone deserves reproduction for its grasp of the present day political reality on the ground, which is that the revolution is of Obama's making, and the reaction it has caused seeks to prevent it:

The Internet is a large-scale version of the "Committees of Correspondence" that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington's failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another.

People are asking, "Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?"

Pruning the power of government begins with the imperial presidency.

Too many overreaching laws give the president too much discretion to make too many open-ended rules controlling too many aspects of our lives. There's no end to the harm an out-of-control president can do.

The rest tells you how. Don't miss it, here.

The Fault Is In Ourselves . . .

. . . that we are underlings.

-- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II

Barack "Fabius" Obama Can Still Be Stopped

Among other things, Bill Flax shows why expunging the study of classical antiquity from the public schools was a priority of the radicals of the 1960's: its stories, repeated and memorized through the study of Latin, stood in the way of their program to subvert our country and destroy our liberty. If you read nothing else this year, read this, which was posted here:

February 13, 2010

We Picked the Wrong Roman Dictator

By Bill Flax

From Government Square in Cincinnati, I often sit surrounded by impressive displays of federal invasiveness, and muse that we picked the wrong Roman dictator.

The Federal Building across the street, serving primarily to dispense largesse confiscated from the workers packed into the square below. The brilliantly marbled Federal Reserve branch where regulators seek enhanced power to oversee commerce while recoiling vigorously against any attempt to be scrutinized themselves. And the block long Federal Court House, which unlike the others, has constitutional legitimacy even as its reach and depth far surpass anything our founders would have tolerated.

Taking nothing away from the many hard-working and honorable souls inhabiting these structures, but America has lost its way. My hometown was named for the Society of the Cincinnati. In ancient Rome, citizen-general Cincinnatus put down his plow to save his nation. When the battle was won, he declined a crown and returned to his farm. His self-restraint in the face of overwhelming temptation bequeathed to Rome several centuries of limited, republican government.

George Washington exhibited similar virtue after our independence. He too could have been king, but his self-denial enabled the rule of law to triumph over the rule of men. Our revolution was largely fought to settle the timeless question of whether government is answerable to the law protecting the rights of its constituents - or - are the people subject to government with a malleable Constitution bending to political pleasure.

America once enjoyed a constitutional republic where property rights were sacrosanct, contracts were conscientiously enforced and markets prevailed. Secure property rights channeled our energies into productive enterprise via the profit motive. An impartial application of the law encouraged market development which enhanced specialization and America's hallmark: an innovative spirit propelling higher living standards for all.

Freedom and prosperity are inexorably linked. Government constrained by law and limited by checks and balances, between both branches and levels of government, birthed an economic juggernaut. Yet, another Roman general has indirectly put a more pronounced stamp on our economy.

Fabius was called to confront Hannibal after the Carthaginian warlord destroyed several Roman armies. Recognizing Hannibal was too strong to confront directly, Fabius conducted a masterful war of attrition. When Hannibal advanced, Fabius retreated. When Hannibal retreated, Fabius advanced always staying safely distant, but close enough to harass the invader. Several times the citizenry grew impatient only for a replacement to hurl the Roman army headlong into calamity.

These "Fabian" tactics became the archetype for a group of sophisticates in late Victorian England. The Fabian Society believed in socialism, not coming by revolution as Marx envisioned, but by evolution. Bored by leisure and rebelling against the strict mores of the time, they sought not to directly confront the existent order, but to undermine it from within.

As prominent Fabian George Bernard Shaw explained, "The Fabian Society succeeded because it ... set about doing the necessary brain work of planning Socialist organization for all classes, meanwhile accepting, instead of trying to supersede, the existing political organizations which it intended to permeate with the Socialist conception of human society."

These ungrateful children of wealth advocated redistribution of other's property while they resided in luxury. Similar to many intellectuals today, they thought they knew better than we how to live our lives. Unfortunately, Fabians and their ilk became the dominant force in our media and educational establishments, indoctrinating generations of Americans to a perverted view of economics and "social justice."

The Fabian movement spawned John Maynard Keynes, an advocate of central economic planning. The overriding focus of Keynes' theory was Aggregate Demand. Loosely defined, aggregate demand reflects the total amount of goods and services consumed at a stable price. Borrowing and spending supplanted classical economic focus on production and savings as the building blocks of prosperity.

Keynesianism was described by Zygmund Dobbs in the illuminating expose, Keynes at Harvard, "The great virtue is consumption, extravagance, improvidence. The great vice is saving, thrift and ‘financial prudence'" because, "If there are no savings there is no private money for investment. Without private investors the government must provide investment capital. If the government provides for investment it has the power to dictate the conduct and processes of those who need investment capital."

Americans wanting to mollify temporary hardship in the throes of recession resurrected Keynes. Rather than endure uncomfortable surgery guided by the market, government injects cortisone to offset the recession's corrective reallocations. Subsidies replace efficiency. Bailouts replace business revitalization. Entitlements replace personal savings. Statism replaces self-reliance. All these government proffered "solutions" may ease our immediate discomfort, but perpetuate economic weakness and come at the price of liberty.

Not only is it immoral to confiscate private property through coercion to redistribute to political favorites, it's also ineffective. Market distortions inevitably harm the economy. The more control we retain over our time, resources and abilities the more closely our efforts will be aligned with productive enterprise. A far-off central planner has no ability to effectively steer this process.

We have witnessed Washington assume greater control with each injection of dubious capital. As Henry Hazlitt warned, "Keynes's plan for 'the socialization of investment' would inevitably entail socialism and state planning. Keynes, in brief, recommended de facto socialism under the guise of 'reforming' and 'preserving' capitalism."

In the closing months of his presidency, Bush crossed the Rubicon authoring vast intrusions "to save" capitalism. Bush quickened what had been a long, painstaking march to socialism. Then a new Caesar immediately began to sprint. We elected not "change," but acceleration.

Only eunuchs were permitted to guard the harem. Entrusting power to the ambitious personalities attracted to government inevitably augments the state to our detriment. Keynes admitted his theories, "can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than ... a large degree of laissez-faire." We must never abjure our God-given rights to the arbitrary whim of professional politicians in exchange for economic safety-nets.

Incessantly higher spending and increasingly burdensome regulatory controls proved too much. Americans now fear this headlong rush into government expansion. Poor Obama misread the signs and awakened the masses. We weren't yet so effete to be bought by bread and circuses.

The Fabians underestimated the resiliency of free markets and Obama over-estimated his demagoguery. Cincinnatus might be forever gone, but Fabius can still be stopped.