Let this be a sign unto you: The era of libertarian looting ushered in by Reagan now reaching apogee will be followed by another FDR-like "progressive" era of welfare statism

Bernie tapped into the amorphous socialism clamored for by today's young people who face dim job prospects while saddled by large college debts for degrees incommensurate with what's available in the job marketplace. This is the direct result of the takeover of public education from bottom to top by the left. It never delivers what it promises, except for hope.

As "millennials" replace the Baby Boom at the polls, their vote will transform America, and already has. Obama and Bernie were signs of this. Expect a return to high taxation of the rich, even larger federal government, and the transformation of existing welfare state programs into universal systems.

Like it or not, that's the future. Patriotism will take the form of socialism for Americans instead of for the world.

Now that Republicanism has thoroughly committed itself to globalism, libertarians are advised to take the money and run. 

Sometimes Ann Coulter is an idiot, for instance when dissing federal encouragement of having children

You'd think someone who wants America for Americans would want to encourage anything which promotes Americans having more children instead of importing them, but you would be wrong.

Rubio's insistence on a larger child tax credit stops some of the damage being done by Republicans to people with families larger than four.

Abolishing the personal exemption meant parents lost those exemptions for all their children, and the increased standard deduction didn't go far enough to replace them, meaning they'd pay more in taxes just because they have more kids.

Coulter's indignation appears to be purely personal, an ugly intrusion of the irrational into her otherwise often rational positions.

She doesn't realize how libertarian she sounds (she hates them by the way). Americans who have children are making it possible that something like America survives into the future, which is a more sure and lasting contribution than any law which might be passed.

Some of the founders recognized that laws are a mere parchment barrier. When the pirates are attacking, you need a navy, which means sailors, not a bill of rights.

In all seriousness, Republican elimination of personal exemptions is just sleight of hand to raise your taxes

In 2017, the personal exemption is $4,050.

If your little tribe is six, mommy, daddy, and four kids, your personal exemptions add up to $24,300.

Add in the standard deduction for a married couple filing jointly of $12,700 and you are up to $37,000 shielded from taxation. (Itemize deductions instead and you might shield even more, but Republicans are proposing new limits on those, too).

The new Republican tax reform, however, eliminates the personal exemptions and caps all this at the new higher standard deduction of $24,000, thus exposing $13,000 to taxation that wouldn't have been exposed before. And you'll pay at a higher rate in the lowest bracket, too, which has been raised from 10% to 12%.

That's what's really going on here. The only way this benefits families is if those families are small. And, of course, small families implies something else: more immigration.

It's anti-American and anti-family, and in fact, it's inhumane. Taxes were always meant to be personal, and by eliminating personal exemptions for the first time in history the libertarians who wrote this bill are showing their purely materialistic hand.

You aren't a human being to them. You're merely capital.

Don't let them get away with this.

CNBC's Jake Novak lets it slip that his libertarian hatred of single family homes has been aesthetic all along

Seen here, italics added by me:

Second we have perhaps the most controversial proposal: The plan to cap mortgage interest deductions for new home purchases at $500,000, but keep the rules as is for existing mortgages. This starts the long-needed process of eliminating a tax policy that mostly aided the rich and has aided America's ruinous and unsustainable suburban single-family home sprawl. 

Funny how so many Americans like to live in that suburban sprawl instead of in cities.

Funny also how they overwhelmingly vote Republican.

Strike Three and You're Out: Both National Associations, of Homebuilders and of Realtors, pull support from House tax plan

Trump looks set to be defeated on tax reform as 2017 winds down, just as he has failed to overturn Obamacare and build The Wall. And considering what the tax reform is looking like, it's just as well.

The tax plan as it stands this weekend eliminates the itemized deductions for mortgage interest and state income taxes, keeping only the deduction for property taxes.

Reported here:

[I]n a sign of the complex balancing act that [House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin] Brady must perform to produce a tax-overhaul bill this week, the property-tax announcement came on the same day that the National Association of Home Builders pulled its support for the legislation. The group’s chief cited concerns that the bill might undermine existing tax breaks that support the housing market. Likewise, a coalition that includes the National Association of Realtors said in an emailed statement that it “will vigorously oppose this plan.” ... It would appear that deductions for state and local income taxes and sales taxes would still be repealed under the planned House bill.

This is all the fault of our so-called conservatives in the US House. They aren't conservatives. They're doctrinaire libertarians who HATE people who want to get married, settle down and buy a house and have children. They view people as CAPITAL, whose value only decreases if it is too difficult to move them around at the whim of GLOBAL BUSINESS. That's why you'll never hear these people target the tax revenue lost to the lower capital gains and dividend tax rates, which are almost TWICE those lost to the mortgage interest deduction. These people are the enemies of localism and are instead the champions of the homogenization of society with its bland sameness everywhere. They are the ones who've shipped our jobs overseas and let in the tens of millions of immigrants who've further reduced our wages and opportunities.

One year from now you'll have another chance to send them packing.

I'll be voting for Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck before voting for a libertarian in 2018.

A. Barton Hinkle shows once again that libertarianism is of the left, not the right

Here:

[B]oth parties have grown more extreme in recent years. Congressional Republicans certainly have. Congressional Democrats tend to be more moderate, relatively speaking.

The perception that the Democrats haven't shifted radically left in recent years is due to libertarianism agreeing with what that shift represents more than disagreeing with it. And frankly, the evidence A. Barton Hinkle cites shows how the whole country has indeed shifted left. Not completely, obviously, but shift left it has, and that libertarians can't see that tells you more about libertarianism than libertarianism tells you about libertarianism.

It's not that Republicans have become more extreme. It's that the country's shift to the left has isolated them. And Democrat positions are only "moderate" in the sense that they are now more widely shared. It's the growing isolation of Republican conservatism in the face of these which only makes it seem extreme. It would be more accurate to say that Republican positions have become anachronistic, not extreme.

Hence much of the recent evidence cited by Hinkle which demonstrates where Americans are united today is of the "shift-left" variety, including:

62% now believe in gay marriage when for generations the vast majority of Americans did not, and for millennia human beings did not, and anti-sodomy laws still dotted the land up to 2003;

73% now favor utopian pipe dreams of "alternative energy" when it was coal, oil and nuclear which made America the industrial powerhouse of the world;

73% now unsurprisingly favor euthanasia just 44 years after the Supreme Court made it legal to murder unborn children;

83% favor "medical marijuana" despite the evidence of its risks for human health and well-being;

85% want to let the Dreamers stay;

90% favor universal background checks for weapons purchases;

83% disavow "extremist bigotry" under the influence of multiculturalist indoctrination in American public schools.

And libertarians are pretty much on board with these things, along with most Democrats. That's why all the action is in the Republican Party. The war for its soul continues to animate the present time. The Democrat soul already belongs to the devil.  

The libertarian Charles Murray is in the news advocating the crackpot idea of handing out free money

Here.

The shock that is no shock: Open borders fanatics in the libertarian Freedom Caucus like Mark Meadows are OK with delaying The Wall some more

To libertarians there is no injustice too great which can be perpetrated in the pursuit of open borders

Kurt Andersen in The Atlantic projects his now-rejected experience of libertarianism onto all of the GOP and conservatism

Unfortunately for Kurt, he thinks recovery means doing some cherry-picking of his own, exchanging one insanity for another. It never occurs to him that while Paul Ryan found his life's inspiration in a novel, millions of young Americans today derive theirs from film. If forced to choose, I'll take active insanity anyday over passive. Kinda makes you miss the "Jesus is my favorite philosopher" president, doesn't it? And how could anyone still seriously speak of an anti-psychiatry "craze"? I must have missed that in my "Man from U.N.C.L.E." years.

In other words, it takes a kook to know a kook. In his own words Andersen expresses the affinity which exists between the insane, the left and libertarianism.

Here:

Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the ’60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists) ... Another way the GOP got loopy was by overdoing libertarianism. I have some libertarian tendencies, but at full-strength purity it’s an ideology most boys grow out of. On the American right since the ’80s, however, they have not. Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: Let business do whatever it wants and don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism. Libertarianism, remember, is an ideology whose most widely read and influential texts are explicitly fiction. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has said, “and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.” It was that fiction that allowed him and so many other higher-IQ Americans to see modern America as a dystopia in which selfishness is righteous and they are the last heroes. “I think a lot of people,” Ryan said in 2009, “would observe that we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel.” I’m assuming he meant Atlas Shrugged, the novel that Trump’s secretary of state (and former CEO of ExxonMobil) has said is his favorite book. It’s the story of a heroic cabal of men’s-men industrialists who cause the U.S. government to collapse so they can take over, start again, and make everything right.

Mark Levin is at his best to start the show this evening

He's ripping every president back to G. H. W. Bush as appeasers of North Korea, our feckless Congress, our fifth column media, and even the libertarians, observing that the president is almost alone in facing this problem.

One of Trump's biggest enemies on the radio is tonight one of his biggest supporters.

Like most libertarians, Ben Domenech is a progressive who imagines America began as a tabula rasa on which we wrote "manifest destiny"

I'll bet he's memorized Emma Lazarus' poem, too. Ben is deeply confused about the American founding.

Here, where you might be forgiven for thinking he's talking about Australia:

Once there was a country born without an inheritance. It was a civilization carved by the rejected refuse of the old world, by the religious freaks, criminals, bastards, and orphans. They were the type of men and women willing to risk all to cross the wine-dark sea in search of their fortune. They came from all the corners of the world, and in this land they worked the good earth and made their way. In time they built marketplaces and cities and governments, and threw off the shackles of their far-off, old-world rulers to make their own law. Where other revolutions had been crushed, they prevailed. They risked it all, and won.

Three salvos this morning in the libertarian war against homeownership: Fortunately human nature is stronger

Insane libertarian fixation on mortgage interest deduction, edition 4716

You would think a libertarian would acknowledge that shielding YOUR money from taxation is a good thing, but you would be wrong. There are at least seven tax loss expenditures more costly to the tax man than the mortgage interest deduction, but their crazy war on it continues nonetheless. What it masks is the underlying hatred of conservatism homeownership represents. Homeowners settle down and raise kids instead of sacrificing themselves to the needs of global capitalists. That's their real problem with it.

As I predicted Real Clear Markets wastes no time trotting out another libertarian to attack your mortgage interest deduction, this time from the Manhattan Institute

Your mortgage interest deduction is only eighth in the latest list of top things on which government claims it loses revenue

But libertarians especially hate it. Expect more articles telling you it's got to go as tax reform talk heats up in Congress.

Here are the top 20 "tax loss expenditures" for 2016-2020:

1.  Exclusion of employer contributions for health care and insurance: $863 billion

2.  Lower tax rates on dividends and long term capital gains: $678 billion

3.  Income made by controlled foreign corporations: $587 billion

4.  Contributions made to IRAs and 401k plans: $584 billion

5.  Pension plan contributions: $424 billion

6.  Earned Income Tax Credit: $373 billion

7.  Deductions taken for state and local income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes: $369 billion

8.  Deductions taken for mortgage interest on owner occupied homes: $357 billion

9.  Obamacare "subsidies": $327 billion (what a laugh: they raise the cost, give you a subsidy, and count the subsidy as a tax-free gift)

10. Child tax credit: $271 billion

11. Expensing depreciable business property: $248 billion

12. Deductions taken for charitable contributions: $231 billion

13. Social Security benefits: $214 billion

14. Municipal bond income: $195 billion

15. Deductions taken for taxes on real property: $180 billion

16. Capital gains taxes excluded at death: $179 billion

17. Medical expenses and over the counter medications under cafeteria plans: $169 billion

18. Capital gains taxes excluded on sale of principal residence: $166 billion

19. Life insurance proceeds: $128 billion

20. Deduction for income from domestic production activities: $102 billion.

Total revenue the government claims it's "losing" because of its "benevolent" tax policy on these items: $6.645 trillion over five years, or $1.329 trillion annually.

My, how nice of them. 

The Reagan GDP miracle is a complete myth: It was all government spending (on defense)

And it set a horrible precedent for the dramatic overspending of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, which has sent us on a course to oblivion. You can argue it was necessary to defeat the USSR, but you can't argue that baseline spending (in black) has done anything but go up, up, up to dangerous new levels as a result (notice the baseline Jimmy Carter inherited from liberal Republicanism, for which he got the blame from Ronald Reagan, which wasn't very nice of the old man who went on to bequeath a similar giant new baseline to his successor, G.H.W. Bush).

No, the real miracle was the pathetic loser in Iran, Jimmy Carter, who spent the least in the post-war for his additional GDP, followed by Bill Clinton.

Of course, the spending is all the prerogative of the Congress. The president proposes but the Congress disposes, as the saying goes.

Beware libertarian politicians preaching balanced budgets, as well as utopian infrastructure spending enthusiasts promising the moon and liberal Republicans selling government spending as security to senior citizens at the expense of younger Americans in a time of protracted war. They have delivered little beyond $20 trillion in debt.

Kevin Williamson of National Review, CNBC's kind of conservative, tries out for job with better liberals, calls Trump a coward and a fool

Here, saying Trump is no different than Obama for being all talk and no action.

Williamson is unhappy that Trump hasn't yet started a shooting war with North Korea, which makes Williamson actually little different from Trump, who gave China all of two months to get North Korea under control.

Williamson has a BA in English from UT-Austin. Travis County Texas, home of UT, went for Hillary over Trump by nearly 66% to 27% in 2016, and gave libertarian crank Gary Johnson over 4.5% of its vote.

Not to be outdone by P. J. O'Rourke, libertarian Mark Perry also genuflects toward the hypocritical French today

Namely toward Frederic Bastiat, here, who wrote against "legal plunder", never once mentioning that the estate off of which Bastiat derived his living had been stolen from the aristocracy during the French Revolution.

Mark Perry is not just a one-off, either. Bastiat is a hero to libertarians generally. For example, to Rep. Justin Amash, who not coincidentally owes his fortune to the family business in tools, which are manufactured in China, not the united States.

Protestations against legal plunder, my foot.

For some unknown reason The American Conservative decided to remind us today about the crack-up of Bruce Bartlett

They reran his 2012 piece detailing his several intellectual crises, in which the libertarian finally gave up and became the liberal, although he denies it.

Nostalgia on the editors part, no doubt, for wound-licking in defeat.