Forbes Magazine Calls Keynes A Dead White European Male

Some of us would beg to differ.

All kidding aside, Jerry Bowyer makes some great points about John Maynard Keynes, pederast, misogynist, anti-Puritan immoralist and devotee of the cult of the higher sodomy:

"Keynes was a man who exhibited what most of us would see as an almost pathological preference for exclusively male intellectual and sexual companionship specifically because of the great admiration for the male mind and disdain for the female one, who disapproved of the presence of women in his economics classes, who found women’s thinking patterns repugnant and who associated savings with feminine reticence. Is it really such an unforgiveable sin to take these facts and to surmise that his odd sexual views might be related to his odd economic views? Is it really right that anyone who suggests that they are connected should be drummed out of polite society?"

Much more here.

America's Own System Of Government Is Once Again Bumping Up Against The Limits Of Its Own Legitimacy

So says Jerry Bowyer for Forbes, here:

If you are a patriotic American, you believe that there are circumstances under which it is right to take up arms against your own government. ...


[T]he rationale for the existence of the nation known as the United States of America, which first appeared in print 236 years ago today, is entirely dependent on the premise that there are indeed times “…when in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another ..."

In short, the Declaration and the principles on which it is based are the foundational ideas of our Republic. One can deny their truth, but one cannot deny their legal authority.

This implies something very important: No governmental official can deny the right of the people to dissolve the political bands which tie them to a tyrannical government without at the same time denying the Declaration and, by extension, the Constitution on which his own power is based. If he says, “The Declaration no longer applies; you must obey my authority no matter what.” We can rightly reply, “If the Declaration no longer applies, then the government of which you are a part no longer possesses legitimacy; which means you have no authority in the first place and therefore have no right to demand that we obey.”

This would be a useful discussion of this issue except that it leaves out a little period known as 1861-1865.

The claims of the unitary state advocated by Lincoln were enforced at that time most bloodily, precisely by appealing to the Declaration of Independence and its language of liberty and equality. Lincoln's reasoning divined a higher obligation in the Declaration and used it to deny the right of states to dissolve the political bands which joined North and South.

We are still living today with the sorry effects of this divided reading of the Declaration by Lincoln, where once sovereign States repeatedly plead their case to a Supreme Court and demonstrate their servility as they wheedle for a nearly forgotten liberty.

That Lincoln's reading was ahistorical is proven by nothing if not by the writing of the Constitution itself, which would not have talked of negroes as 3/5 of a person if Americans at the time, just a few short years distant from 1776, really believed in the primacy of principles for political economy as Lincoln did.

Lincoln's reading of the Declaration was ahistorical because it was an ideological reading from a looming ideological age which did violence to the Declaration's other parts and set it to war against itself instead of against tyrannical monarchy. America had had limited and divided government, separation of powers, and similar artifices precisely designed to short-circuit the natural tendency in man toward the despotism of ideology until Lincoln came along and refounded the country on the unitary principles of equality and liberty.

Until Lincoln, the Declaration had been an expression of a philosophical and Protestant insight that human beings are sold under sin, an evil tyrant, whose political analogue is despotism. Without strenous preparations against it, all hell breaks loose. With Lincoln, self-restraint was thrown to the winds and hell is what we got.

The sad truth about Independence Day 2012 is that most Americans no longer hold these truths to be self-evident. Slavery is the future because it is already present, and no amount of verbal wizardry can replace what faith makes prerequisite.

Abraham Lincoln took up arms against his own government, and won. And he's still winning.

Herman Cain on Trade: Imports Are Subject To OUR Domestic Taxation

I remain puzzled by this: still as of this moment maybe only one guy has really sounded the alarms about Herman Cain on free trade to its devotees, namely Jerry Bowyer at Forbes.

Larry Kudlow talks up Herman Cain like crazy every Saturday on his radio show, and I've been listening for weeks while all the other candidates come out and talk with him about flat tax proposals of their own, and still none of Kudlow's free-trade peeps seem to have picked up on it, nor has Kudlow for that matter.

While they do not take Herman seriously enough to read even Herman's own description of his 999 Plan, however, the money has started to pour in, $5 million in October alone, most of it on-line, according to Robert Costa at National Review here.

And I don't think any of Herman's Republican challengers has brought it up either. They'll criticise one or another feature of the 999 Plan as too complicated, unrealistic, unpopular or unworkable, but I still do not hear any of them criticise Herman as a protectionist.

But Herman makes no secret of his playing-field-leveling plans.

As shown here:

Exports leave our shores without the Business Tax [9 percent] or the Sales Tax [9 percent] embedded in their cost, making them world class [!] competitive. Imports are subject to the same taxation as domestically produced goods, leveling the playing field.


In other words, imports will get slapped with a 9 percent business tax and with the 9 percent sales tax just as domestic goods are in order to protect our market from unfairly subsidized products designed to undercut our prices, capture market share and drive US competitors out of action on our own soil.

Shhhhhhh!

Herman Cain is running a stealth fair trade campaign under cover of a Fair Tax program, designed in part obviously to appeal to Democrat voters in union shops.

It tells you a lot about the guy, especially since he's the only Republican running who is serious about overturning the income tax itself. All the rest of them accept the assault on the constitution it represents.

Herman is a wily devil.

(source)

999 Plan Contains Protectionist Elements

Which to Jerry Bowyer, here, is just another reason to oppose the plan:

And I haven’t even mentioned the protectionist elements of the plan which would, for example, allow business to deduct expenditures for capital goods if they are purchased domestically, but not if they are purchased for abroad. That one alone would constitute a Smoot, a Hawley and a half a Perot in one fell swoop.

On The Religious Origins of Free Market Capitalism

Jerry Bowyer for Forbes reminds us here that Milton Freedman must have gotten his atheism from someone other than Jacob Viner, Professor of Economics, University of Chicago:

[Jacob] Viner concluded that [Adam] Smith was an example of a strand of thought which he called “optimistic providentialism.” This view goes back to the early Christian church fathers, as far back as the time of St. Augustine. It grew to eventually become popular in intellectual circles at the time of Smith. Viner pointed to the extremely important idea he dubbed “providential abundance,” which held that the universe was designed by God to be abundant. The necessities of life were widely distributed by Him, and even the luxuries of life could be had when free people are allowed to pursue self-interest. Man, being in possession of free will, could waste and squander opportunity through plunder, war and empire, but those were not the original design.