Showing posts with label libertarian 2015. Show all posts
Showing posts with label libertarian 2015. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Monday, December 21, 2015
Scott Sumner is simply an ideologue, and a confused one at that, otherwise he wouldn't be as unhappy as he is
In "Libertarians have nowhere to turn" Scott Sumner the market monetarist laments:
'In my view neither major political party has libertarian inclinations. ... I'm slightly more sympathetic to the progressives who insist that I should really be a Democrat. They tell me "After all, you are rational. You believe in evolution and support carbon taxes and redistribution and think money was too tight during the Great Recession. You are pro-immigration and skeptical of the idea that America is an 'exceptional' nation, which must police the world." Those are all good arguments, but then I start obsessing about economics. After all, I am an economist.'
Apart from completely missing that the Democrat Party is the party of social freedom and the Republican Party is the party of economic freedom, it's rather singular for a self-described libertarian to embrace economic redistributionism so openly (not to mention a draconian form of taxation). To do so betrays a feeling for the left, not the right, which, if libertarians were only honest enough to admit it, has always been their inclination.
Sumner might reflect on the fact that we actually live in a perfect storm of libertarianism, in which economic (and social) actors have been unleashed to be all that they can be. The trouble is, only a few "succeed". The fact that income inequality has reasserted itself to a degree not seen since the gilded age is proof of the basic fact that not all men are created equal. The very best at making money have risen to the top and become enormously wealthy in an environment specifically designed to allow it to happen. The end result of economic libertarianism is that the very best will eventually succeed in hoarding all the goodies for themselves while the rest of us are left to serfdom. The end result of libertarianism is freedom for thee, but not for me.
The same can be illustrated on the social side, where some freak flags fly higher than all the rest. They rise to fame and influence beyond all their fellows in "art", "music", "literature" and "society", if you can call violent, vulgar and obscene Hollywood films, rap, "shady" novels and the Kardashians representative of those categories.
Conservatism, primarily rooted in religion, has historically functioned in society to apply the brakes to keep these actors from getting out of control and acquiring undue influence, whether socially or economically. The left only imagines itself capable of replacing religion's heretofore tempering role, which primarily functioned through willful self-restraint. Hence the efforts to reduce income inequality by force through taxation schemes, which obviously aren't working. On the social side the left has had even less success, except by recourse to venomous speech and conduct codes which meet with little assent and not a little fear and loathing among the many.
Freedom, as currently conceived in all its sterility, is quite literally killing America.
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Trump says libertarians don't get it that we need big government to protect us from big weapons
In an interview with Alex Jones (yikes), here.
Jones called Trump a "statesman" during the interview, and Trump said Jones has an "amazing" reputation.
Well, I guess one true statement out of three ain't bad.
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Conservatism revealed as libertarians finally agree on SOMETHING: They hate Trump to a man
From TheHill.com here:
'The closest the Koch network comes to a consensus is a distaste for billionaire front-runner Donald Trump, who accused Republicans attending the Kochs’ summer donor retreat of being “puppets” of their wealthy masters. ... Not a single contribution to Trump’s campaign could be found in the donation records of the 190 attendees of Koch donor conferences.'
Lovers of American borders, language and culture vs. the money-grubbing liberal sell-outs of the libertarian consensus, that's what this election is about.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe is of that rare breed, the conservative of gratitude
Here, celebrating National Review's 60th anniversary:
"IF GRATITUDE IS the quintessential conservative virtue, then Thanksgiving must be the quintessential conservative holiday. And with Thanksgiving 2015 comes an additional reason for gratefulness on the right: National Review has turned 60 and is marking the occasion with a grand anniversary issue. ... National Review’s 60th birthday is a milestone not just for a magazine, but for an ongoing commitment to the conviction that ideas matter, and that good writing can change lives. Its longtime readers have much to be thankful for. Of course, conservatives always do."
Anyone in this day and age who does not immediately define conservatism in the economic terms of libertarianism and ideology and who knows how to use "its" in a sentence is OK in my book. However bad National Review has become since its (!) ejection of the so-called nativists, it's (!) still nice to read someone who remembers the magazine which once steered by the conservative lodestar.
"Look over the whole creation, and you shall see, that the bond or cement, that holds together all the parts of this great and glorious fabrick, is gratitude."
-- Robert South (1634-1716)
Labels:
Boston Globe,
Jeff Jacoby,
libertarian 2015,
National Review,
nativism
Monday, November 9, 2015
Libertarian Paul Ryan, disgusting traitor, advances immigration bill to bypass cap on guest workers in order to employ Obama's illegal hordes
From the story here:
'The cap exemption on the H-2B expired in 2007. At the time, it doubled the number but it could as much as quadruple, legislative sources told WND. This is the same way the total number of existing H-1B visa workers got so much higher than the annual inflow. The H-2B visa program, though referred to as a “seasonal” guest worker program it is not an agricultural guest worker program. “These are explicitly non-farm jobs, often for lower-skilled work but also middle class jobs,” the source told WND. “Of course, because we don’t have a visa-tracking system and the president is not enforcing over-stay rules, it increases another avenue to add to the illegal population.”'
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Rand Paul's warped view of unfunded liabilities
"Your grandparents had too many kids."
No Rand, we didn't have enough.
Libertarian moron.
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Monday, October 12, 2015
Trump's success teaches that Republican voters are not libertarian ideologues
So says John Reid, here:
'Yet if the Trump’s enduring success has taught us anything [it] is that Republican voters are not libertarian ideologues. He recognizes that politics is about “Who, whom?”'
Rush Limbaugh sticks up for the traditional family against National Review and Kevin Williamson
And Williamson is stung by it, here.
Rush is right. National Review used to be a conservative magazine. Now it's a libertarian one:
"This all took place [says Williamson] in the context of a discussion of Mississippi governor Phil Bryant’s boneheaded remarks about working mothers. It was conventional-wisdom stuff — that children do better when the mother is at home rather than working outside it — and, as is very often the case, the conventional wisdom is wrong here."
Not alienating potential voters is more important to libertarians than defending what is right.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
The Detroit News calls the libertarian Freedom Caucus "brats", wants Boehner back at least temporarily
Here:
"Too many House Republicans have taken their eyes off the prize. Rather than craft a patient strategy to position themselves as the party of adult leadership in a broken Washington, they have become battling brats intent on mounting quixotic fights they can’t win in the interest of proving their conservative cred."
The Freedom Caucus is doing what libertarians customarily do to Republicans in election contests
Keep them from getting elected, and advance Democrats to power. It's their reason for existing.
When are Republicans finally going to say enough is enough and throw them out?
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Biased polling: Libertarian leaning polls have Trump averaging 20%, the others 25%
IBD 17
WSJ 21
BLOOMBERG 21
Average 20
USAT 23
PEW 25
FOX 26
QUINNIPIAC 25
CNN 24
Average 25
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Sean Hannity the hypocrite: Shocked Rand Paul criticizes Ted Cruz while the three of them have ripped fellow Republicans for years
Well, I say "fellow Republican" advisedly. What they are is libertarians, and put three libertarians in a room, or 300, all you'll get is dissension.
Sean Hannity isn't a Republican, by his own admission, but likes to play in its sandbox. Rand Paul is self-consciously "purple", imagining that right and left can be united as libertarians as opposed to remaining separated as conservatives and liberals. And Ted Cruz' behavior in the Senate makes him a RINO, at least from the RINOS' perspective.
Audio here.
The libertarian wing of the Republican Party would rather spend its time eating one other than uniting to fight Democrats.
They can't agree on anything, can't function as members of a party, and will never be able to run a country, except into the ground.
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Libertarian impotence: Purple PAC suspends raising money for Rand Paul but has spent next to nothing on him all year
Amazing but true.
Reported here:
“I don’t want to raise money for a futile crusade,” [Ed Crane of Cato fame] said. “I still hope to raise money for him, but not until I see a concerted effort to get back to the roots that got him where he was for a while.” . . .
Sergio Gor, a spokesman for Mr. Paul’s campaign, said, “It is untruthful for a story to say that this super PAC stopped supporting Sen. Paul, when in fact they don’t seem to have lifted a finger in the first place.”
The group spent less than $8,000 in the first half of the year.
Purple PAC raised $1.2 million in the first half of the year, $1 million of which came from Jeff Yass, owner of the trading firm Susquehanna Partners. Mr. Crane said he had not consulted with Mr. Yass on his decision to suspend fundraising. The super PAC currently has $1.4 million on hand, which it won’t spend until Mr. Crane feels more positively about Mr. Paul’s campaign, he said.
Saturday, September 26, 2015
Conservatives give thanks for the achievements of John Boehner, libertarians, the ignorant and the stupid just snarl
- Saved taxpayers $762 billion over ten years by making the Bush tax rates permanent for 98% of all filers beginning at the dawn of 2013
- Saved taxpayers $1.8 trillion over ten years by finally fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax for all victims of bracket-creep
- Saved taxpayers $339 billion over ten years by maintaining the 15% capital gains tax rate for incomes below $450,000
- Saved families $354 billion over ten years by maintaining the child tax credit
- Cut average annual federal deficits of $1.3 trillion 2009-2012 by 57%, to $556 billion on average 2013-2016 by ending the emergency Social Security Tax reductions and instituting the sequester spending cuts
- The S&P 500 immediately responded with total returns in 2013 of 32.39%, the fifth best year since 1970
- The moribund US Dollar rose 19%, from below 80 to 95 today as overall fiscal rectitude improved
- Causing oil prices to plummet from an average of $95/barrel 2011-2014 to $52/barrel on average in 2015
- Causing average US gasoline prices to fall from $3.34/gallon one year ago to $2.28/gallon today
- Helping to keep the all-items consumer price index year-over-year nearly flat, rising just 0.2%
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Yanis Varoufakis calls far left party Popular Unity's plan for Grexit and a return to the drachma "isolationist"
In Greece the left calls the left isolationist.
In America the right calls the right isolationist.
Maybe the isolationism is where the real meaning is, the other monikers "left" and "right" being obfuscatory and Orwellian, and useless.
The two candidates for president in America with any energy in their campaigns are against free-trade because it is one-sided trade which slowly impoverishes the American middle class. A more insidious form of Fabianism is hard to imagine. One of the candidates is a patriotic socialist throwback to the FDR 1930s, the other a businessman whose hero was another Democrat in recovery, Ronald Reagan.
In our time it has been only some people from the left who have seemed capable of understanding that our capitalism-in-name-only actually requires the destruction of the economic ladder along which historically Americans have more or less freely traveled both up and down. This is because only people of the left are acquainted with the truth of the observation by Marx how free-trade was to be welcomed because it hastened the revolution. We get absolutely no insight from the American right about this and they run headlong unaware toward their fate. Accordingly we get no sympathy from them either for the plight of formerly prosperous millions of Americans who have crashed onto the rocks of the libertarian free for all. Their few children will become the next proletariat, the wealth of their parents and grandparents only a faint memory.
The irony of the world situation is that it is creatures of the left who want to stop this, both here in America and in Greece.
Yanis Varoufakis on the other hand is not one of them. Chalk it up to being an "erratic" Marxist, as he likes to say. What he is is a pan-Europeanist, a world citizen and globalist who is more at home in European capitals than he is on Aegina. He is not for what Greeks need most, which is the ability to feed themselves and export at a profit, for which they must have control over, and responsibility for, their own affairs.
Seen here:
'The 54-year-old Varoufakis has already dismissed speculation that he would join the far-left Popular Unity party that broke away from Syriza last week, telling ABC that he had "great sympathy" but fundamental differences with them and considered their stance "isolationist".'
Labels:
class,
George Orwell,
Greece,
Grexit,
libertarian 2015,
Marx,
Reuters,
Ronald Reagan,
Syriza,
Yanis Varoufakis
Friday, August 21, 2015
Libertarian Ben Domenech, like every sick liberal does, descends into the politics of personal destruction
Libertarian Ben Domenech, here, sensing his own marginality, states quite seriously that deporting law-breakers and enforcing the constitutional concept of jurisdictional citizenship is nothing short of racism and despotism:
"The idea that America is going to endure the blood and moral outrage over the deportation of 11 million people, including young children of illegals born here who are constitutionally American citizens, is absurd. Even one of the most prominent immigration hawks, Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, dismissed this mass deportation as impossible on my radio show this week. But Donald Trump has proposed this, and loudly insisted he will do it. And the faction of the country that believes not in freedom but identity politics for white people adores it."
Sprinkled throughout he calls Trump supporters a bunch of narrow-minded, disaffected, angry street thugs who are motivated by an unprincipled and frankly anti-constitutional emotionalism to support a dangerous man who is only too willing to rule in a dictatorial and autocratic manner in the style of Obama but for the "right" reasons. Why, they'll even abolish the US Senate!
It's that simple you see. You knuckle-dragging conservatives have an insufficient concept of freedom. How dare you have a border and stop other people from exercising their right to be free by crossing it! How dare you successfully deport over a million illegal aliens in 1954 with just 750 agents!
The outrage! The horror!
Monday, August 17, 2015
Liberal media love John Kasich, and so does Michigan's libertarian radio talker Steve Gruber
Liberal media love Governor John Kasich of Ohio.
For example:
WaPo:
Slate:
MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell:
Fake conservative radio talker Steve Gruber on Lansing's 1240 WJIM loves him too:
And here was Gruber's "me love you long time, sailor boy" in June:
It just goes to show once again that libertarianism has more in common with liberalism than it does with conservatism.
Liberal Stevie, John Kasich doesn't stand a chance!
Labels:
John Kasich,
libertarian 2015,
Marco Rubio,
Medicaid,
Slate,
SSM,
Steve Gruber,
WaPo
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