Trump administration fails to intimidate Canada, goes Galt and ends trade talks

 

Trump ends all U.S. trade talks with Canada over digital services tax

 

 

 

 

 

 

... The first payments from Canada’s digital services tax, which was enacted last year and applies retroactively to 2022, are set to be collected Monday. The tax would hit both domestic and foreign tech companies, including U.S. giants such as Amazon, Google and Meta.

Canadian officials said this month that they would not pause the digital services tax, despite ferocious opposition from the United States.

“Obviously, we think it’s patently unfair to do it retroactively,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said later Friday on CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime.”

Bessent said the Trump administration was hoping that Carney’s government would “put a brake on” the tax “as a sign of goodwill.” ...

 

Trump's idea of good will is 50% tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, 25% tariffs on autos, an overall 10% tariff on most everything else, and a 25% "fentanyl" tariff.

 

 

The Trump administration lives in the libertarian past of Atlas Shrugged, in John Galt's 1957, when US GDP was 40% of world GDP and everybody needed us more than we needed them

They are as stupid as they are insufferably arrogant.

 

US GDP as a share of world GDP has been in steady decline since 1960 to just 26% in 2023

Um, excuse me, America was founded by people who had given up . . .

. . . on England, and on Ireland, Germany, Italy, and the rest.

The libertarian impulse to go Galt, to run away, is a feature of America, not a bug, a built-in self-destruct mechanism which went off most spectacularly and destroyed the root in 1861.

The rest of the plant has been withering and dying on the vine ever since, overtaken by tenacious weeds.

Freedom for Christian religion combined with plenty of Lebensraum, home country memory, and time made it seem otherwise in the face of the steady decline, but here we are with Scylla and Charybdis for choices come November 2024.

The Declaration of Independence was a repudiation of politics. Two thirds of the country was not down for the struggle. Secession was a repudiation of politics. There was resistance to military conscription everywhere, but especially in the Confederacy. We were content to let the world burn for more than two years before the Japs forced our hand on December 7, 1941. We have right now the unthinkable European land war in its 20th month and sports is what trends on Twitter day in and day out. Mao killed by the tens of millions during The American Century. Americans quietly go to church every Sunday while tens of millions are aborted. It all began with migration, the most basic form of repudiating politics.

We do not need, in short, to relearn to think politically. Most of us have never thought politically in the first place. Apolitics is our politics, but this horror vacui is why the left seems to have won and why we hate them. We hate politics. As polarized as we think we are, as rigged as our politics is, 100 million eligible Americans still did not vote in 2020.

You do not get political blood from this turnip.

Ultimately, nothing could be more un-American than to give up on America.

The American idea, alas, is precisely to stay out of it. 

Here. 

Against the Black Pill

David Azerrad, Chronicles

Why no one can get a fair trial in increasingly libertarian America

If justice stood on the side of the single person, it ought to give good men pleasure to see that right should take place; but when, on the contrary, the commonweal of a whole nation is overborn by private interest, what good man but must lament?

-- Jonathan Swift

Libertarian kitty has had enough

 

If it isn't obvious by now that you're an idiot, Johnny Reb tried to tell you

The Civil War was obviously a waste of time, blood and property.

For every Confederate statue now coming down at the hands of BLM there will eventually be three of a founder of America, a Yankee, or an abolitionist to match it. Eventually, the symbols of your country will be gone. That you'll just let them go shows the actual country is already gone.

This isn't a war on racism. It's a revolution against America. Racism is simply the pretext for it. It is led by the "worldly" type of communist, the black radical who:

"with the realist political outlook, hopes through its followers to destroy society, either from envy or revenge, because of the low place assigned in it to their personality and talents, or, alternatively, to carry away the masses by some program or other for the satisfaction of his own will-to-power".

Think Shaun King the "Christian", who now explicitly aims to obliterate the white Jesus from every one of America's ~375,000 congregations.

No good deed is going unpunished, but fools like Ann Coulter will still argue that blacks deserve and should be paid reparations: Those who have done no wrong should pay those who have suffered no harm, we are told.

140,414 dead Yankees are just chopped liver to these ingrates and fools.

Pay all you want, it won't change a thing. Still more will be required of you.

They now think they have the upper hand and are out to replace you. "Diversity is our strength" means "their" strength, not yours. Diversity means your weakness, and the unchecked riots and looting are proof of it.

Christians 244 years ago took up arms against "tyrants" like these and called it "obedience to God".

I can't imagine finding one such person among us today. And you certainly won't find one among the paid mercenaries, the cops. They're just trying to make it to full retirement like everybody else.

Instead, most Christians have become Spengler's "credulous" type of communist, who:

"obsessed by doctrine or feminine sentimentality, remote from and hostile to the world, condemns the wealth of the wicked who prosper and also, at times, the poverty of the good who do not prosper. This lands him either in vague Utopias or throws him back upon asceticism, the monastic life, Bohemia, or vagabondism, which proclaims the futility of all economic effort".

On obsession with doctrine think First Things Magazine, think Sojourners, Christianity Today, and the Patheos crowd for the feminine sentimentalists and wealth condemners, think the Prosperity Gospel movement and the charismatic Dominionists for the critics of the Christianity which is content with little, think Rod Dreher's Benedict Option or the survivalists for the separatists, and also the libertarians who "go Galt", accountable to no one but themselves. Representative all.

Perhaps the only Christians who think in robust opposition to the communists are the followers of Adrian Vermeule who envision a once and future Roman Catholic authoritarianism from North to South America with a heavily Spanish content. In other words, when white supremacy fails, replace it with . . . not black.

 

"To put through the ideal requires dictatorship, reign of terror, armed force, the inequality of a system of masters and slaves, men in command and men in obedience - in short: Moscow".

 

The answer to Bolshevism from the foremost grandmothers of Bolshevism is to double down on the Bolshevism. Pre-modern Europe was just a dress rehearsal.

 

I'm sure Black Lives Matter will be thrilled.

Blame the libertarians for handing Romney his loss in 2012, not conservatives

Third parties bled away over 60% of the few votes Romney lost by in his failed eastern strategy in Election 2012.

Mitt Romney's bid to win the White House failed by 64 electoral college votes, all of which he narrowly lost in an eastern strategy in just four states by a total of only 429,522 popular votes:

Florida, lost by 74,309 votes, where third parties garnered an unbelievable 90,972 votes;

Virginia, lost by 149,298 votes, where third parties garnered 60,147 votes;

Ohio, lost by 166,272 votes, where third parties took a whopping 101,788 votes;

and New Hampshire, lost by 39,643 votes, where third parties took 11,493 votes.

That's a loss for Romney of 64 electoral college votes, enough to have taken him from 206 to 270 to take the presidency, losing 429,522 total popular votes in just four states where third parties all told took 264,400 votes, 61.5% of the total needed by Romney to win.

This isn't to say that those were all necessarily Republican votes which went third party, but fully 50.5% of the 264,400 were cast for the libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson of New Mexico, who had been a Republican candidate for president until late 2011 when he was excluded from the Republican debates. At that point he bolted to the Libertarian Party, and openly stated his intention to play a spoiler role:

“I hope that I would get labeled as a ‘spoiler’ from the standpoint of people actually focusing on what it is I am saying, and that this changes the way whoever wins governs,” Johnson told Sunshine State News in an exclusive interview Saturday at the 2012 Ron Paul Festival.

Combine the pique factor around that with the natural alienation felt by libertarians toward a Mormon candidate who was himself socially conservative in his habits and loathe to exercise himself on behalf of libertarians' usual limited government ideas and you can make a case that it was libertarians who cost Romney the election, by casting spoiler votes, staying away from the polls entirely, or even voting for Obama out of spite.

This is a better explanation for the Romney loss than some mythical 4 million conservatives staying away from the polls in 2012 as Rush Limbaugh keeps saying. The numbers themselves disprove that, as Romney garnered 1 million more votes in 2012 than McCain in 2008. It was a much closer election than the (mostly libertarian) punditocracy wants you to know.

Conservatives, most of whom are Christians, aren't put off by abstainers like Mitt Romney the way libertarians might be (many Christians are abstemious too), and Christians find it much more morally problematic to stay away from the polls, or to vote out of spite, in a way which libertarians would not. Christian voters are nothing if not preoccupied with their moral and social responsibility, but libertarians care little for that.

In fact, withdrawing from social responsibilities is elevated to the level of a moral principle by libertarians. Staying away from the polls is a John Galt tactic straight out of the playbook from Ayn Rand. It's an ongoing and adolescent fantasy of theirs. It's not a Christian tactic, which is to say it's not a conservative tactic. Conservatives love their country too much to let it go down the drain, and they actively admired Mitt Romney for his commitment to and long record of public service even if his religion and social policy positions bothered them.

It remains a question if Republicans can expect to succeed in future with a brood of vipers in their party such as the libertarians. Republicans should reconsider their tilt toward libertarianism and seriously ask themselves whether things might not go better for them if they more actively pursued the social conservative vote. From the Christians Republicans can expect forgiveness, but from the libertarians only vindictiveness. Isn't that how the Bushes got elected after turning their backs on the Reagan revolution? Isn't that the conceit of moderate Republican presidential aspirants still today?

Why isn't that an easy call? After all, the libertarian Ron Paul who bitterly lost to Romney in the Republican primaries never left the Republican Party, but he never endorsed Mitt Romney either: "I don’t fully endorse him for president,” he said, as late as August 2012, less than three months before the election. Message to libertarians: good ahead, stay home, see if I care.

Call it an ironic payback to Romney, whose moderate Republican father likewise wouldn't endorse the conservative Barry Goldwater after losing to him in 1964, but it's also another sign in a long list of signs that libertarians have more in common with liberals than with conservatives.

They're content if they too can defeat Republicans.

Obama is John Galt

"The problem is, Republicans in Congress keep blocking or voting down almost every serious idea . . .. This obstruction keeps the system rigged for those at the top . . .. And as long as they insist on doing it, I’ll keep taking actions on my own . . .." (Radio address, 6/28/14)

Senator DeMented Jim Bailed On Fiscal Cliff Compromise Vote

Senator Jim DeMint bailed on the fiscal cliff compromise vote.

People wonder why.

Answer: it's called going Galt.

Reminder: Elected Democrats in Wisconsin did the same thing by fleeing the state to try to prevent a quorum. Not that that was the situation here. But nevertheless . . .

Really bad form, there, Jimmy boy.

Have fun wrecking the Heritage Foundation, if it were possible to wreck it even more than it already is.

Libertarian Republican Sen. Rand Paul Recommends Going Galt On Fiscal Cliff

Gee, what a shock, a libertarian recommending "strategic withdrawal" on new taxes. Does anyone think libertarians really believe in any principles at all?

It's the one principle they do believe in which is at work here: freedom, a license to do anything.

They are no less culpable, and no less liberal, than the liberal Republicans they attack for raising taxes.

Senator Rand Paul, here:

"Why don't we let the Democrats pass whatever they want? If they are the party of higher taxes, all the Republicans vote present and let the Democrats raise taxes as high as they want to raise them, let Democrats in the Senate raise taxes, let the president sign it and then make them own the tax increase. And when the economy stalls, when the economy sputters, when people lose their jobs, they know which party to blame, the party of high taxes. Let's don't be the party of just almost as high taxes."

It's a kind of paraprosdokian like "We had to destroy the village in order to save it": We have to raise taxes in order to cut taxes.

Do House Republicans, who would have to surrender their majority and vote "present" on a Democrat tax bill, really want to be remembered for crashing the economy even more to make a political point? Haven't enough of us lost our jobs already? Hasn't the economy already sputtered for too many years?

If libertarians had their way, we'd all be smoking the dope that makes Senator Paul think this way.

How about just doing the right thing for its own sake and continuing to be the party of no new taxes in the face of economic stagnation, and let the chips fall where they may?