Showing posts with label William F. Buckley Jr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William F. Buckley Jr. Show all posts

Friday, August 19, 2016

How the mighty are fallen: The Financial Times calls National Review "establishment GOP"


"Publications such as the National Review have long been part of the establishment GOP while drawing on outsider status as the Democrats held control of the White House."

That whir you're hearing is William F. Buckley, Jr., who died in 2008, spinning in his grave.

Friday, March 11, 2016

Friday, January 22, 2016

Pat Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly have both joined Laura Ingraham on her show so far today addressing the excommunication of Donald Trump by National Review

Phyllis Schlafly said she's never recognized National Review's authority on conservatism.

She pointed out that the magazine was never any help in her long battle to stop the Equal Rights Amendment.

And she also pointed out that William F. Buckley Jr. was for giving the Panama Canal to Panama, which most conservatives of the time opposed

Sunday, February 8, 2015

Like flies on manure, the libertarians swarm to any story about Ayn Rand

CNBC.com has a story up celebrating the 110th birthday of Ayn Rand, here (I don't recall seeing one for Ronald Reagan this week, whose 104th it was), entitled "Ayn Rand is 110 and still in your face after all these years".

Well, she wouldn't be in your face this week if it weren't for CNBC. And I swear the Randians use Google Alerts to swarm the comments section for any story that pops up about their heroine. CNBC even egged them on with an online poll embedded in the article.

Those of us old enough to have voted for the Gipper remember the critical verdict against Ayn Rand from the likes of Reagan's intellectual compatriots William F. Buckley Jr. and Whittaker Chambers, and against libertarians generally from people like Russell Kirk, all of whom insisted that man does not exist for his own sake, implying a transcendent, as opposed to a purely immanent, moral order. It was that precisely ideological character of Objectivism, that theological mistake, which made it but the other side of the totalitarian coin which Ayn Rand still carried in her pocket from the USSR, and which American conservatives instinctively rejected.


Sunday, July 14, 2013

The Swiss Overwhelmingly Want To Be Home Owners But Aren't

And the famous Robert Shiller really doesn't care, here:


Consider Switzerland, which by several accounts has had one of the lowest rates of homeownership in the developed world. In 2010, only 36.8 percent of Swiss homes housed an owner-occupant; in the United States that same year, the rate was 66.5 percent. Yet Switzerland is doing just fine, with a gross domestic product that is 4 percent higher, per capita, than that of the United States, according to 2011 figures produced at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s not that the Swiss inherently prefer renting. A 1996 survey asked a sample of Swiss whether, if they could freely choose, they would rather be homeowners or renters. Eighty-three percent said homeowners.

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

To hell with what people want, right? Just keep property values so high only the likes of David Niven, William F. Buckley, Jr. and Tina Turner can afford to own there.



Monday, January 7, 2013

Rush Limbaugh Adopts The Class Warfare Of Obama/The Wall Street Journal

Today, here:

The middle class still is, in an aggregate sense, where all the money in the country is. That's where all the money is in the economy. The rich do not hold all the money.

This is the voice of a very rich man who is under attack by a leftist president and a leftist consensus which says that the rich do not pay their fair share, the voice of a man who is not reasoning as a conservative but emoting as a rich man. If he reasoned as a conservative, if The Wall Street Journal reasoned as conservatives, we would be seeing something other than the suggestion that the leftists go victimize the middle class. Like the bank robber, this thinking, if it can be called thinking at all, maintains that you should tax the middle class because that's where the money is.

As such what Rush says is not conservative, but purely reactionary in the worst sense of the term: it responds to an historical development in which it finds itself the victim and seeks escape instead of statesmanship. This is what you get from a Rush Limbaugh, who abhors learning. You wouldn't get that from a William F. Buckley, Jr.

It goes without saying that it is absurd to suggest that all the money is in the middle, but apparently we must insist that it is not so.

The middle quintile of households made a median income of almost $50,000 in 2011. Generously speaking, this approximates to every single income in the country in 2011 making between $35,000 and $65,000 annually, 35 million workers, accounting for $1.7 trillion out of $6.2 trillion in net compensation, just 27% of the total pie. The bottom end of the richest quintile, on the other hand, begins somewhere just north of $100,000 annually, 10 million workers, accounting for $2.1 trillion out of $6.2 trillion in net compensation in 2011, significantly more at almost 34% of the total pie.

But this is no way for a conservative to look at it.

The founders of the country envisioned equality of contribution from taxation, which the original constitution required to be direct, apportioned according to population. This is why taxation was always very low, because the poor could not afford it. This is also why we have a census in the constitution, not so that we may learn how many Americans are of Italian descent, but simply how many there are, for tax purposes. If it is pleaded that the constitution has been changed to permit indirect taxation, it is still more originally American to insist on equality of treatment under the tax code. The real problem with America is that originalist principles were thrown under the bus in the early 20th century by progressives like Teddy Roosevelt, and enshrined in constitutional amendments under people like Woodrow Wilson.

Equality of treatment under the law is the principle conservatives should be trumpeting. But you will listen for that in vain from Rush Limbaugh.

The progressives like Wilson, a Presbyterian whose grandiose ideas bordered on the fanatical and are reminiscent of no one so much as George W. Bush, misused Christianity by insisting that "to whom much is given, much is required" in arguing for progressive taxation, and forgot that "no one can be my disciple who does not say goodbye to everything that he has". The actual price of Christian discipleship was everything you had, whether you were rich or poor. But in the secularized, immanentized bastard version of this under progressivism, the price became distorted so that the richer you were the more you owed, the poorer the less. It is little wonder that for that the rich demanded more, and eventually got it, in special rules in the tax code designed especially for them, which since that time have evolved into the elaborate distortions and complexities of the tax code we face with trepidation and consternation today.

In a very real sense when it comes to the tax code, The American Century has been the most un-American one of all, and the crying need of the time is to reverse it and refound the country anew on the original American principle of equality of treatment.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Hey John Tamny! Did The Electorate Get It Right Last Night?

The invisible hand of the electorate and the invisible hand of capitalism cannot be falsified by anything, because they are, well, invisible, here:


Put plainly, Wanniski argued that the electorate always gets things right, or in his words:

“…the electorate as a whole is wiser than any individual member in understanding its interests, it is wiser than any economist or group of economists.”

No doubt many readers are scratching their heads in response to the above, but as Wanniski put it to the late William F. Buckley (paraphrase), “You’re likely smarter than every individual inside a packed football stadium, but collectively those individuals are smarter than you are.” The wisdom of crowds….


We may not have always liked the end result, but the electorate has always been right. ...


The electorate unhappily gave [George W. Bush] another shot; one it presumably came to regret. ...

Obama ... [i]s as a result presiding over a sick economy that should be strong, and as the electorate dislikes failures, Obama’s days in the White House are numbered. ...


The electorate is dying to fire Obama, history says it will given its aversion to failures, yet Romney’s timidity with regard to policies actually meant to grow the economy point to a close win for Romney when it should be a rout. Wanniski’s electoral model says so.

The libertarians are as bat-shit crazy as the Keynesians.







Friday, December 23, 2011

In Order For Third Parties To Rise, They Have To Have Representation

Third party candidacies for president fail in this country, as do those for representative or senator, because the two parties have a lock on the political process. The lock concentrates power and money in their hands, to the exclusion of the other interests which no longer have representation.

How did the two parties lock it?

Or to put it another way, how did Americans lose representation to the Republicans and Democrats?

The Republicans deliberately ignored the constitution's re-apportionment requirements after the 1920 Census, some say out of fear of competition from representatives of the massive number of then-new immigrants, and eventually prevailed in fixing representation at the arbitrary number of 435 in the US House through legislative fiat. There's absolutely nothing sacred about the number 435. It's just a number we reached when population required that number of congressmen after the 1910 Census.

Normally, the constitution's requirements have to be overcome by amendment, not legislation. But that's what we have, legislative fiat, because both parties found it in their best interests to concentrate power in themselves. The last thing they wanted to do was diffuse power to additional new players as the constitution requires. Since the constitution doesn't specify the upper limit of representation, only the minimum number and minimum proportion (Article 1, Section 1), a problem of first importance in the founding era but never resolved, they got away with it. But they shouldn't have. We're all the poorer for it.

Republicans in particular wear its stain. Today its Tea Party claims to wear the badge of constitutional originalism, but that badge is covering a huge blot of hypocrisy.

If Americans actually had the government the constitution requires but the Republicans of the '20s prevented, we'd have a US House today with 10,000 representatives, not 435.

There would most likely be a number of odd duck political parties represented in that sea of representation, like Greens, Communists, Fascists, Socialists and Constitutionalists. And probably a Gay Party from Saugaytuck, Michigan. But there might also be a rather substantial number of Conservatives and Independents. Considering that "conservative" is today's most identifiable political self-description, you can bet Republican golfers everywhere certainly don't want the competition.

But consider, for example, New York State. It has a Conservative Party, whose most famous public face is perhaps the radio host Sean Hannity. Another famous conservative from New York was the brother of William F. Buckley, Jr. US Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is a Socialist, from a state with next to no gun laws! Why not have more of their ilk as the people desire in the US House? Lots more.

Once there, the give and take of politics on a grander scale would most probably change the dynamics of the current politics of not-a-dime's-worth-of-difference between Republicans and Democrats. New actors would arise and give voice to ideas which in the past have had to settle for one congressman's endorsement here, or one there, only to be squelched by the Republicrat party apparatchiks.

More importantly, Republicans and Democrats would have to make alliances and share power in exchange for support. This would increase representation of ideas which today see the light of day in legislation only infrequently. And more importantly still, candidates for national office would have to forge alliances with such representatives too, which means third party candidates for president would actually begin to have some credibility with legislative support, without which a tax reformer like a Herman Cain, Ron Paul or Steve Forbes goes nowhere.

Think about it America!

Stop settling for representation without representation!

"One Representative For Every Thirty Thousand!"

Monday, April 26, 2010

On Systematizing Too Big To Fail

Jonah Goldberg channels William F. Buckley, Jr. to remind us that it is human nature to try to game the system, even the capitalist system:

Washington’s solution to Wall Street’s problems is to get Washington deeply, deeply involved in Wall Street. So involved that the savvier capitalists will recognize — once again — that the safest bets are not to be found in the vicissitudes of a fickle marketplace, but in gaming the system run from Washington. The “reform” coming down the pike will put bureaucrats in charge of investors. If bureaucrats were better than investors, they wouldn’t be bureaucrats. The government will decide which firms are worthy — “systemically important” — and which are not. Those that are will use their official “importance” to game the system. Instead of eradicating “too big to fail,” we will systematize it.

Read the whole thing here.