Billionaire Marc Andreessen loves him some plutocracy, which his beloved Thomas Jefferson would have taxed into oblivion

Trump's so-called party of populism has given us a cabinet teeming with billionaires.

Welcome to rule by the rich. We deserve them, good and hard.

Andreessen's hero, Thomas Jefferson, would have taxed them all into oblivion to keep their baneful influence from destroying republican government. Thomas Jefferson was an advocate of what we have known as steeply progressive taxation.

But billionaire Andreessen thinks you are too dumb even to know that.

Hell, he's probably too dumb to know that.

 

"Exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."

Iraq combat vets wondered why National Guard member Pete Hegseth showed up in Iraq in 2005 leading a platoon

 “I showed up in the 101st Airborne Division, in one of the most storied units in our nation’s history, with a bunch of combat vets who’d already done a tour in Iraq and they looked at me like, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’” Hegseth said in a 2021 interview on “The Will Cain Show” podcast.

One former officer who served with Hegseth said he was surprised to see a National Guard member taking on such a role. He surmised that Hegseth probably wanted to run for office someday and thought a combat tour could help, the former officer said. ...

The former Army officer who served with Hegseth in Iraq said he believes he has latched on to “populist scenarios” in a quest for personal gain. When news of Hegseth’s potential nomination emerged, old acquaintances from those days got back in touch with one another, the former officer said.

One text he received especially stood out. All it said: “WTF?”

More.

German party Alternative für Deutschland wins in Thuringia, comes in close second in Saxony, still frozen out of governance by CDU member who heads German intelligence

 For the first time ever, the right-populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won a state election. In Thuringia, the party gained 32.8 per cent of the votes – nearly 10 points ahead of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which came in second with 23.6 per cent. In Saxony, the AfD won 30.6 per cent and came just 1.3 per cent behind the leading CDU. ...

Meanwhile, the three parties of the ruling coalition government lagged far behind. Combined, their vote share amounted to less than 15 per cent in Saxony and just over 10 per cent in Thuringia. ... The AfD’s gains are not a one-off slip-up, but a continuation of its successes. The party was already the second-strongest force in both federal states in the last state elections in 2019. On a national level, the AfD came second in the EU elections this June. ...

The attempt to combat the AfD by merely dismissing it as beyond the pale clearly isn’t working. Even those who don’t like the AfD, but are principled democrats, can see the problem with freezing out a party that just won a democratic election. ... The polls are crystal clear about which topics matter most to voters – rising crime rates, unregulated migration, a sinking standard of living and the growing influence of radical Islam. These are all real, rational concerns.

More.

Another salvo at Kamala Harris: WaPo editorial board calls her anti-big business proposals populist gimmicks, says her first-time home buyer $25,000 down-payment plan will increase housing prices

 

 The whole thing makes sense, which is surprising coming as it does from The Washington Post, which ends this way:

 [Even] her [good] ideas would cost money, yet she insisted in her speech that she would hold to President Joe Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on any household earning $400,000 or less annually. That excludes 80 percent of taxable income, and does not take into account the recent surge in families earning over $400,000. The Harris campaign says it plans to raise revenue to cover these costs but did not provide specific offsets in its economic plan rollout. Without them, Ms. Harris’s full plan would add $1.7 trillion to federal deficits over a decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan budget watchdog.

To be sure, every campaign makes expensive promises that will never come to pass, especially with a divided Congress. Remember Mr. Biden’s pledge to make community college free? Even adjusted for the pandering standards of campaign economics, however, Ms. Harris’s speech Friday ranks as a disappointment.

Wow.

What's that old saying, When you're a liberal and you've lost The Washington Post, you've already lost?

Well ......................................................................................... is the Democrat Party still liberal though?

British conservatives are still blind to Nigel Farage's truth, which is identical with Henry Kissinger's long-held position that Ukraine should not join NATO

 Western civilisation is being destroyed by its own decadence

Zoe Strimpel, UK Telegraph

Last week, Nigel Farage outed himself as deeply unfit for leadership by piping the same line as other populists in Europe and the United States: that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is effectively our fault because, through Nato expansion, we had “poked” the Russian bear . . ..

Henry Kissinger was US Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford.

This position has nothing to do with populism, except by the accident of thinking correctly.

Who needs FreedomWorks 1984-2024, its mission accomplished by BIDEN letting in 10 million illegals ha ha ha ha ha

The libertarian political action organization FreedomWorks is calling it quits effective immediately as funding evaporates and it is no longer able to sell its pro-immigration and free-trade message to Republicans now transformed into populists by Trump.

Politico reports here.

The world is drunk on debt: Global debt at all levels reached $307 trillion in 3Q2023

IIF CEO Tim Adams sounded the alarm on rising levels of debt while speaking to CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. ... "We need sobriety . . .."

The global banking industry’s premier trade group said late last year that worldwide debt climbed to a record of $307.4 trillion in the third quarter of 2023, with a substantial increase in both high-income countries and emerging markets.

The IIF said it expected global debt to reach $310 trillion by the end of 2023, warning that elections in more than 50 countries and regions this year could usher in a shift toward populism that brings with it still-higher debt levels.

More.

For a good time, call Angela: The Libertarian Party is very interested in RFK Jr for Election 2024 but not Justin Amash lol

 In July, Mr. Kennedy met privately with Angela McArdle, the chair of the Libertarian Party, at a conference they were both attending in Memphis — a meeting that has not previously been reported.

 “He emphasized that he was committed to running as a Democrat but said that he considered himself very libertarian,” Ms. McArdle said in an interview, adding that they agreed on several positions, including the threat of the “deep state” and the need for populist messaging. “We’re aligned on a lot of issues.”

 “My perspective is that we are going to stay in touch in case he does decide to run,” Ms. McArdle said. “And he can contact me at any time if that’s the case.”

More.

Lolbertarian says the worst possible thing which could happen to the economy (i.e. "to me") is higher future taxes

More self-absorbed than your average tranny.

Scott Sumner, here:

The consequence of the reckless fiscal policy will not be a financial crisis. Nor will it be a default. Even the permanent monetization of the debt is unlikely, in my view. The most likely consequence will be higher future taxes and slower economic growth. This will lead to reduced living standards. It might also push politics in a more “populist” direction, with consequences that are difficult to predict (but unlikely to be desirable.)

Four true words

 Trump lacked the discipline.      

Stated here.

That's still the fundamental problem, but that's been the case from the beginning.

Character counts. Trump has never had it and never will. I cut my losses with Trump in 2018 when he exposed himself as a phony on his chief plank, illegal immigration. He already did that in August 2016, so fool me once, shame on Trump. I am not ashamed to state it over and over again.

The rest of the party still hasn't come around, however, with so-called conservatives still yammering on about stuff like pOPuLiSm. But that's because opposition to illegal immigration was never a GOP value. The GOP would never be upset because he lied about that.

It's hard to imagine the GOP pointing to anything in particular which was a line too far. 121 voted in the House to object to the 2020 Arizona vote, 138 to the Pennsylvania vote. Not even three horrible elections in a row is proving to be decisive.

Meanwhile Democrats have exploited Trump's weakness, and therefore the GOP's, to consolidate power with extraordinary new depth. The new regime of mail-in voting everywhere changes everything. The chain of custody of ballots in voting precincts is broken forever.

It's the end run around representative government we only imagined the National Popular Vote Compact would be. It's the path to pure democracy. It's the end of legislatures, the end of republicanism, and makes the tyranny of the majority and the repression of the minority the new, terrible future.

A Supreme Court in principle deferring to the states on everything from election law to drugs, marriage, abortion, gender, etc. is no bulwark against what's coming, indeed, what's already here.

The people will decide by referendum.

The people be damned.

The Fed was supposed to tighten its balance sheet starting Jun 15th: Nearly three months later it's down a measly $110 billion to . . . $8.822 TRILLION

 The Fed is all talk about combating inflation, no action.

Because the top 10% of the country has 89% of the money that way, dummy.

True populism would throw the bums out and end The Fed, but we haven't got any.

WALCL.

Joel Kotkin has come around, now calls it what it is: Global fascism

In 2018, Kotkin was still tip-toeing around the obvious, but not anymore:

Mussolini’s notion of fascism has become increasingly dominant in much of the world . . .

Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving centre of economic life”. In Italy and, to a greater extent, Germany, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded highly populist welfare state much as we see today.

Mussolini’s idea of a an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. ...

fascism — in its corporate sense — relies on concentrated economic power to achieve its essential and ideological goals. ...

China, in many aspects the model fascist state of our times, follows Il Duce’s model of cementing the corporate elite into the power structure. ...

But in the battle between the two emergent fascist systems, China possesses powerful advantages. Communist Party cadres at least offer more than a moralising agenda; they can point to the country’s massive reduction of extreme poverty and a huge growth in monthly wages, up almost five-fold since 2006. At a time when the middle class is shrinking in the West, China’s middle class increased enormously from 1980 to 2000, although its growth appears to have slowed in recent years.

Like Mussolini, who linked his regime to that of Ancient Rome, China’s rulers look to Han supremacy and the glories of China’s Imperial past. “The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,” Xi Jinping told party cadres a decade ago, “is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and [to] rejuvenate the Chinese nation.”

Kotkin recognizes at least that American right-wing libertarianism is part of the problem, not part of the solution:

the consolidation of oligarchic power is supported by massive lobbying operations and dispersals of cash, including to some Right-wing libertarians, who doggedly justify censorship and oligopoly on private property grounds.

Regrettably, however, Kotkin still does not connect this failure of the old liberal order in the West with the failure of the old moral order which gave it birth and on which it depended. This is because Kotkin still sees things in primarily materialistic terms.

Kotkin is oddly politically correct when he denounces possible recourse to nativism, which blinds him to the nativism which is at the heart of Chinese state capitalism and gives it much of its appeal and strength. He calls for "a re-awakening of the spirit of resistance to authority" in the West, not realizing that it was Protestantism which made that even possible in the first place.

The problem of the West is spiritual, and Catholicism will never be able to rise to the occasion of refounding it as long as globo-homo defines Rome. The whole idea is inimical to the notion of founding a nation "for our posterity".

Washington Examiner lists Pocahonky's identity lies, starting with, well, Pocahonky

Here:

It's common knowledge by now that Warren, one of the top four 2020 Democratic presidential contenders, identified as a Native American, despite being somewhere between 0.1% and 3% Native American . . ..

[T]he senator also fibbed when she promised to serve her full Senate term if reelected in 2018. Her 2020 presidential run began a few weeks after she won that election.

Warren has emphasized again and again that her children attended public schools. Her storyline here suffers from a material omission: Her kids also attended private schools. Perhaps this particular misdirection stems from the fact that she’s campaigning against the school choice programs . . ..

Warren’s brother told the Boston Globe, “My dad was never a janitor," and he said it makes him “furious” that Warren has repeatedly claimed otherwise on the campaign trail.

Warren must know that her own background, as a millionaire whose children attended private school, doesn’t fit easily with her soak-the-rich rhetoric.

Commentators often lump Warren's run in with that of Bernie Sanders. But Sanders's base comes from the young and the working class, while Warren's base is mostly highly educated baby boomers who surely feel a warm glow from the belief they are part of some populist uprising.

John Gray: The possibility that millions value some things more than economic gain is not considered by the British political classes

Sounds oddly familiar.

Brexit has left the British political class trapped by its own history:

Persistently denying respect to Leave voters in this way can only bring to Britain the dangerous populism that is steadily marching across the European continent.

So why did Trump appoint a Secretary of Agriculture who doesn't support The Wall?

The only other explanation than the one below is that Trump isn't really serious about The Wall and never has been, and is only interested in how he can play the politics of The Wall.

Donald Trump can fund the border wall without congressional approval:

Opposition to the wall within Trump’s own administration has prevented progress on this issue, which is wildly popular with the GOP’s conservative base and is the consequence of the president surrounding himself with establishment advisers who have worked to thwart his populist agenda from within. For example, after being briefed on the concept of selling USDA commercial paper to pay for border security, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue’s then-Chief of Staff Heidi Green shot down the idea by curtly stating, “The secretary does not want the wall.”

The number of doofusses taking Hillary's recent immigration comments seriously is truly astounding

It's self-evident that Hillary's "new" view about immigration is nothing more than immigration reform as a means to an end, namely the center-left's election to power in order to defeat populism and the right.

Her response to the situation of her defeat is completely in keeping with Marx, who viewed the embrace of the free-trade doctrine of unalloyed capitalism as an accelerant for The Revolution. The important thing is not that the left is wrong about "late stage capitalism". The important thing is that they are insincere about what they say they believe in common with us. 

Yet everywhere I go otherwise sane people are talking shit about this. Ooh everyone's coming around to Trump's way of thinking, and so on.

Like Obama who lied about his own mother's health insurance in propounding Obamacare, Hillary will use anything and anyone to get where she wants to go.

 

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em: Hillary now laughably blames fear of immigrants for her loss, says Europe must curb immigration, thinks the people crave tyranny!

Now we're sure she's a drunk. 

Both Clintons used to say this crap about immigration to America back in ancient times when they ruled in Washington, even as they did NOTHING to reduce the levels of legal immigration into the United States, levels which were dramatically ramped up by their predecessor, George Herbert Walker Bush.

They don't give a damn about Americans. Immigration is only a problem to them because it puts the wrong people in power.

Hillary Clinton: Europe must curb immigration to stop rightwing populists:

“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame,” Clinton said, speaking as part of a series of interviews with senior centrist political figures about the rise of populists, particularly on the right, in Europe and the Americas.

“I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message – ‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’ – because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.” ...

Clinton urged forces opposed to rightwing populism in Europe and the US not to neglect the concerns about race and identity issues that she says were behind her losing key votes in 2016. She accused Trump of exploiting the issue in the election contest – and in office. ...

“The whole American system was designed so that you would eliminate the threat from a strong, authoritarian king or other leader and maybe people are just tired of it. They don’t want that much responsibility and freedom. They want to be told what to do and where to go and how to live … and only given one version of reality.

I'm sick of headlines from Democrats claiming to defend the republic when they're out to destroy it

Like this one from the prince of liars Andrew Sullivan, the spokesman for the freak zone of democracy, not republicanism: Can the Republic Strike Back?

They don't care about the republic. If Democrats had their way, all the bulwarks of the republic would be gone already: the electoral college, the US Senate, the Supreme Court, borders, citizen-only-voting, law and order, the presumption of innocence, and on and on. They'd replace it all with a two-headed monster of populism, a country led only by the US House and a popularly-elected president, creatures of the mob. 

The rest of the republic has to go, and its defender, Donald Trump:

Congress has real power. The press can’t get his tax returns. Congress can. The press can’t truly discover the depth of the corruption in his administration. Congress can. The press can’t publicly cross-examine Cabinet members, order functionaries to answer questions, kill proposed legislation, and air everything where it should be aired — on Capitol Hill. ...

One-party rule has strained this democracy. The Electoral College, gerrymandering, the structure of the Senate, and demographics have given us a government actively indifferent and even hostile to half the country. That single party has now taken firm control of the Supreme Court as well. It will very likely retain control of the Senate in January. Capturing the House is the only way the republic can strike back.

Like just about everyone else on the left, Joel Kotkin continues to twist himself in pretzels to avoid calling our system what it already is

State capitalism.

It is the socialism of the right, despite what names people may give it. The fascist model in which business and government cooperate now more, now less was not defeated in World War II. The superior American version simply defeated the German one, and eventually also the left's inherently weaker version in Russia.

It has triumphed globally, brought to the fore in America by the libertarian resurgence under Ronald Reagan, imitated by the jealous Euro project, and notably exported to China, where it was eagerly embraced as no threat to Marxism. To the genuine Marxist, remember, free-trade is welcome because it hastens the global revolution. Belt and Road participants, take note.

The experiential groundwork for global state capitalism was laid long ago by the King and Bank of England in their joint enterprise known as the Thirteen Colonies. Everyone imitates this now in principle if not always in particulars. But everywhere it flourishes it is facilitated by the same thing, the central banking systems which coordinate their activities through rules administered under Basel III. The contemporary exemplars of state capitalism fancy that they are substantively a world away from Hitler's Germany, because, well, the Jews. We don't kill Jews, insist these experts at mass abortion and Uyghur mass re-education. 

It's the historical resonances which bother the left in using the phrase, but the underlying facts aren't different in substance. Materialism today means not having to say you're sorry for treating people like depreciated or unappreciated assets. Older workers in the West are routinely tossed aside for being too costly. Potential younger competitors are hamstrung by a culture of costly credentialing prerequisites. When such people become worthless enough, it isn't unlikely that in some places they could stop being considered people altogether (typically where atheism reigns) so that they could be slaughtered wholesale with the same relative efficiency already applied to the unborn. The tech already exists to do this. The only question is when will the people exist who are possessed of enough nerve.   

Here's Kotkin on this so-called "new, innovative approach" which looks like nothing so much as the old Soviet Union, with its hostility centered on the middle class, its dreary blocks of drab apartment buildings, the dim pall of surveillance and conformity lurking everywhere, complete with its own privileged new class in service to the party .01 percent:

Oligarchal socialism allows for the current, ever-growing concentration of wealth and power in a few hands — notably tech and financial moguls — while seeking ways to ameliorate the reality of growing poverty, slowing social mobility and indebtedness. This will be achieved not by breaking up or targeting the oligarchs, which they would fight to the bitter end, but through the massive increase in state taxpayer support. ... [T]he tech oligarchy — the people who run the five most capitalized firms on Wall Street — have [sic] a far less egalitarian vision. ... [T]hey see government spending as a means of keeping the populist pitchforks away. ... Handouts, including housing subsidies, could guarantee for the next generation a future not of owned houses, but rented small, modest apartments. ...  They appeal to progressives by advocating politically correct views . . .. Faced with limited future prospects, more millennials already prefer socialism to capitalism and generally renounce constitutionally sanctioned free speech . . .. [I]ncreased income guarantees, nationalized health care, housing subsidies, rent control and free education could also help firms maintain a gig-oriented [slave] economy since these employers do not provide the basic benefits often offered by more traditional “evil” corporations . . ..  [T]he oligarchy, representing basically the top .01 percent of the population, are primarily interested not in lower taxes but in protecting their market shares and capital. ... The losers here will be our once-protean middle class. Unlike the owners of corporations in the past, oligarchs have no interest in their workers become homeowners or moving up the class ladder. Their agenda instead is forever-denser, super-expensive rental housing for their primarily young, and often short-term, employees. ... The tech moguls get to remain wealthy beyond the most extreme dreams of avarice, while their allies in progressive circles and the media, which they increasingly own, continue to hector everyone else about giving up their own aspirations. All the middle and upwardly mobile working class gets is the right to pay ever more taxes, while they watch many of their children devolve into serfs, dependent on alms and subsidies for their survival.

Hillary at Oxford at June end avoids discussing Electoral College: Because it prevented the populism which would have elected her

She can't tell the truth about anything.

Hillary At Oxford: Let Us Not Speak Of This Electoral College Today

Hillary:

"‘Turkey also shows that political and intellectual elites, both inside the country and around the world, persistently underestimate the threat which these kinds of leaders pose to the survival of democratic institutions'".

Morrissey is too charitable to say that precisely Hillary is one of these leaders who pose a threat to the survival of democratic institutions, since she's repeatedly come out against the Electoral College since her memoir appeared a year ago:

Ahem. Among those democratic institutions in the US happens to be the Electoral College. And why did the framers of the Constitution create it? To act as a buffer against populism, at least in form. The Electoral College reflects the popular vote on a state-by-state basis to prevent a handful of the most populous states from controlling the executive through the nationwide popular vote, which creates a buffer against the very impulse Hillary decries in this speech.