Obama The Marxist Thinks The Middle Class Is His Greatest And Most Dangerous Enemy

"The most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat."

"The greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution."

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Impose a dearth of ammo for their guns, mediocritize their healthcare, impoverish them with unemployment, make them servile with food stamps and disability payments, destroy their incentive to save with artificially low interest rates, spy on them with cameras, wire taps, drones and email intercepts, make it too expensive to travel, or too humiliating, dumb them down with inadequate public school educations, reduce them to the level of the gutter in their speech and morals through ridicule of all standards of public discourse and thinking, and destroy all traditional conceptions in institutions from the Boy Scouts to the US military. Politicize everything, but threaten the wrong politics with the power of the State. Anesthetize with drugs. Make them hate the rich so they stop trying to be so. Meanwhile, party, and spend their money like it's never been spent before.

Libertarian Mish Is Happy Republican Mourdock Lost In Indiana

Mish is on the side of the Democrats, plain and simple, here, referencing a story at the Christian Science Monitor:

Yet this is what happens when views are too extreme. I am very pleased to report "'Red' Indiana sends Democrat to US Senate, as women fled Mourdock".

Of course Mish is happy the Democrat won in Indiana. Libertarians ran a spoiler candidate in that race to throw the race to the Democrat. When it comes down to it, social freedom is more important to libertarians than economic freedom. They cry "Freedom" all the while they mean only "License!"

Libertarians are not on the side of conservatives or Republicans. They are on the side of the Democrats, the party of death to the unborn, and soon the party of death to the elderly under ObamaCare, and eventually the party of death to the middle class, which will not long exist because of Obama.

The middle class stands in the way of the Alinskyites' real objective: the rich. Middle class people, after all, would like to be rich some day, too, not poor. So they must go first in order to get at the rich. If the middle class had any brains they'd understand that Obama's invective against the rich is primarily aimed at them because, compared to the poor, the middle class is rich. Unfortunately, they went to public schools. 

One thing at a time, making use of the useful idiots, the libertarians.

"I'll Turn Public Schools Into Food Deserts, You Take Care Of The Rest"

That's Hysterical: Do 2 Recessions Equal 1 Depression?

So Paul Vigna in The Wall Street Journal, here:

"Do two global recessions equal a modern depression? We seem destined to find out."

Notice the word "modern",  as if to say we in our time are much too advanced to have an old-fashioned depression like they had way back in the day. You know, a god-awful depression where massive numbers of people go hungry and die before their time.

The fact is depressions happen. They have a technical character. You can measure them. Some are indeed severe, as in 1920. Some are also short, as in 1920. Some are relatively shallow, as in 2008 or 1937, and go on forever due to incompetence. Some are severe and go on forever due to incompetence, as in 1931, or in Greece today. Our problem is that we won't agree to agree on a name for this depression enemy this time around because depressions don't happen in "modern" times. Insisting that depressions don't happen in "modern" times is actually a form of hubris. And you know what cometh before a fall. But try telling that to an entire civilization.

By the way, isn't the "modern" age over already? The old right in America, you know, the opposition to FDR in the 1930s, used to stand against the modern age which FDR, and Wilson before him, represented. There's still a magazine in print by that name which hails from the conservative ethos of that very time and continues to talk about this, which really is a mark of true conservative distinction, seeing that conservatism at its best brings forward into the present the truths, and critiques, of the past. But "modern" truly is an old conception which is getting a little long in the tooth to continue to be used of this age when we have clearly moved on in any number of ways, except perhaps in our conceits. An exception to this might be our nostalgia for Glass-Steagall, which makes us sort of conservatives of modernism, if it's permissible to speak that way.

But I digress.

What thoughtful people are worrying about at this moment is that we could re-elect this incompetent boob, Barack Obama, who is working on the choom gang, and finally go really and truly insolvent while he fritters away four more years getting in touch with his inner Arnold Palmer. Some people think insolvency is actually his objective, which to my mind gives him way more credit than he deserves. He seems to think money grows on trees, planted by the financial, insurance and real estate sectors, but hasn't yet figured out that his usefulness to them comes with an expiration date not unlike the expiration dates which attach to all the promises he has made and end up going poof into the air.

When liberals finally do conclude the emperor has no clothes on, this indeed will be all over, but the problem with that is that most liberals went to public school. They won't figure it out until it's way too late. Say 2022, if they live that long.

The left already figured it out, however, in the first year of Obama's presidency, but decided to make their strategy of destroying the country Obama's strategy by continuing to support him. This was an inflexion point where all that stupid talk from the right about how we share some common ground with the left should have come to an end. I don't recall the left saying they had any common ground with us. Instead what we got and continue to get from Republicans and other liberals is incredulity about Obama's failure to have learned anything by now.

Here's a newsflash for you: He has no intention of learning anything. Republicans continue to misunderstand his opposition, as is their wont. Saddam Hussein was not worth getting angry about, but they did, and Barack Obama is worth getting upset about, but their response is . . . Romney. No wonder Democrats have contempt for Republicans. The stupid party.

No, everything now depends, unfortunately, on the residuum of common good sense among the rank and file out there, the apolitical people who simply have had enough of this. Considering the depths of our social dissolution, however, and Obama's attempts to subsidize that with food stamps, free cell phones, disability payments and the revivification of welfare (what else would you expect from a drug addict?), it is hard to remain optimistic about them, but that's probably all we've got remaining.

"The Great Depression, after all, actually comprised two technical recessions, 1929-1933 and 1937-38, not that most people could tell the difference.

"What would you call a 7-10 year period of suppressed growth and stagnant wages, of economies on the verge of collapse and overwhelmed leadership? You could do worse than “depression” – lowercase “d” to be sure, and we’ll hope for a great new age on the other side of it. But a depression all the same."


I'll see you at the polls in November, voting for Romney. I'll be the one with a clothes pin on my nose.

And I'm going to keep it because I have a feeling I'm going to be needing it.

George Will Only Imagines Congress' Power Has Been Limited, But It Hasn't

Here:

If the mandate had been upheld under the Commerce Clause, the Supreme Court would have decisively construed this clause so permissively as to give Congress an essentially unlimited police power — the power to mandate, proscribe and regulate behavior for whatever Congress deems a public benefit. Instead, the court rejected the Obama administration’s Commerce Clause doctrine. The court remains clearly committed to this previous holding: “Under our written Constitution . . . the limitation of congressional authority is not solely a matter of legislative grace.”

The fact remains, however, that with the stroke of a pen the Court has changed the locus of unlimited power-seeking from the venue of commerce to the venue of taxation. Congress' power "to mandate, proscribe and regulate behavior" hasn't been diminished one bit, just shifted.

I can now be penalized (!) with a tax (!) for not buying whatever Congress' decides. This used to be a power reserved to the States, which can force you, say, to purchase a gun. Now the Court has given that power over you to the Congress, by-passing the States.

The issue was well-framed for us already, in the dead of winter, during the Republican primary debate about RomneyCare, here:

One difference between the health care bills is that Romneycare is constitutional and Obamacare is not. True, Obamacare's unconstitutional provisions are the least of its horrors, but the Constitution still matters to some Americans. ... As Rick Santorum has pointed out, states can enact all sorts of laws -- including laws banning contraception -- without violating the Constitution. That document places strict limits on what Congress can do, not what the states can do. Romney, incidentally, has always said his plan would be a bad idea nationally. The only reason the "individual mandate" has become a malediction is because the legal argument against Obamacare is that Congress has no constitutional authority to force citizens to buy a particular product. ... States have been forcing people to do things from the beginning of the republic: drilling for the militia, taking blood tests before marriage, paying for public schools, registering property titles and waiting in line for six hours at the Department of Motor Vehicles in order to drive. There's no obvious constitutional difference between a state forcing militia-age males to equip themselves with guns and a state forcing adults in today's world to equip themselves with health insurance.


But now the Congress has this power, under the taxing authority, at least until some enterprising citizens challenge healthcare premiums they actually pay as a form of unapportioned direct taxation, and win.

Until then, we have no place left to hide. The whole country has become Massachusetts.

An Historicist Explanation Of Fascism Which Unintentionally Describes America

Seen here:

"Fascism resulted from the mobilization of mass armies, the creation of command economies, and the problem of reintegrating veterans into war-torn societies."

Is there a better explanation than this for what happened in America since The Great Depression, whose presidents have drawn their inspiration, now more, now less, from the strong men of Europe as mediated through the legacy of FDR?

In America the creation of the command economy preceded the mobilization for the world war, but the twin developments set the conditions for the state's new role in American life. 

American-style fascism bloomed in The Great Depression and Second World War and then grew through the post-war cult of education, with its original GI Loan Program writ ever larger year by year with newer names and until finally nationalized under Barack Obama, who owes his political success not to the Marxist socialists who inspired and bank-rolled his education but to Chicagoans whose financial success in real estate depended upon government planning, cooperation and exploitation of the poor. He is the epitome of the strangely blended system. 

The proliferation of American fascism occurred through the decades-long expansion of minor educational institutions, cow colleges and junior colleges into degraded and degrading universities which came to elevate the promise of mere vulgar employment to the status of an educated person's learned and wise perspective. A Bachelor's Degree in Physical Education became the equivalent of one in mathematics, and the sixth grade teacher seriously asks the students today to bring an empty white business "envelop" to the next class.

If an education no longer results in gainful employment, we are told, a sin has been committed against education's one and only commandment: Thou shalt get a credential for a job. From fund-raisers who call university alumni to the Rush Limbaughs and Dave Ramseys of the world, an education in a traditional department of human knowledge which fails to lead to employment is useless and worthless.  

Today there are hopeful signs of acute crisis in this consensus even as it reaches its zenith.

Participants graduate with crushing loads of debt in a new environment of depressed wages, long before they have good jobs, spouses, homes, cars and children.

And while the fields of graduates are white unto harvest and they continue to be recruited on-site by big businesses, many of which are responsible for key program funding for the system itself, the number of available jobs has shrunk dramatically as low American GDP resembles present day Europe more than it does its own much more vibrant past. It's as if the system has reached its limit to perpetuate itself.

The lesser products of the universities end up as functionaries in government union shops in the public school system or as media mouthpieces whose job it is to promote the jobs message, but declining tax revenues in the states and diffusion of media due to technology change the calculus for career-minded teachers and "information" workers. As we've seen in Wisconsin, the people who must pay and pay and pay again have had enough. And today's pad will doubtless become yesterday's laptop.

Those not yet quite up to the college experience who can't get an assembly line job because there aren't any may hope to join the military with the promise of money for education later, after the tour of duty. But the prospects for duty look less likely to include personnel-rich adventurism going forward as drone-war proliferates. Out-of-shape teenagers and malcontents in any event will find it increasingly difficult to join a shrinking all-volunteer military.

The failure of faith in the cult of education will necessarily precede the demise of the system, and it appears to be accomplishing this all by itself by not delivering on its promise. It wouldn't be the first time, but you'd need a useless degree to appreciate that. 

Whatever Ann Coulter is, it isn't Conservative

Whatever Ann Coulter is, it isn't conservative.

At least since her endorsement of Hillary Clinton in 2008 we've had, on the other hand, some good clues about what she in fact is.

For example, she was willing to endorse Hillary Clinton and campaign for her were Hillary the candidate for the Democrats for president. The reason? Because Senator John McCain, the Republican, was determined to end the practice of waterboarding prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Now she has endorsed John McCain's one time nemesis from 2008, Gov. Mitt Romney. And Gov. Romney has just put his foot in it twice only days after winning the very same Florida primary McCain won four years ago, and shown us thereby that he isn't a conservative, either.

Proclaiming himself content with the social safety net for the very poorest Americans, Gov. Romney pledged on one day to expand it in the event it becomes inadequate to the task.

On the very next he announced his commitment to the federal minimum wage, and indexing it to inflation.

This is the same Gov. Romney Ann Coulter predicted would lose to President Obama, and therefore the Republicans had better nominate Gov. Chris Christie instead. Also the same Gov. Romney now endorsed by . . . Sen. John McCain.

Thus Ann Coulter is on record in support of a vigorous and muscular government, one which tortures prisoners of war, further entrenches entitlements which create a class dependent on the dole, and interferes in the free marketplace so that the unemployed, and especially the young, gather no useful work experience because employers cannot afford to pay large numbers of them the minimum wage.

In keeping with this unlimited government philosophy, Ann Coulter now defends RomneyCare in Massachusetts on the grounds that government compulsion is quite American:

States have been forcing people to do things from the beginning of the republic: drilling for the militia, taking blood tests before marriage, paying for public schools, registering property titles and waiting in line for six hours at the Department of Motor Vehicles in order to drive.

To the likes of Ann Coulter, "government is" evidently means "government ought."

Nevermind that conscription was resisted and unsuccessful from the beginning of the country. Fewer than 9 percent of Civil Warriors were drafted. The vast majority were volunteers. And volunteers alone comprise our Armed Forces today and have since 1973.

No one is compelled to marry, only to fulfill certain basic requirements if they choose to. Those who remain single aren't obliged to get blood tests. And those who cohabit forego them entirely without fear of the blood test police knocking down their doors.

Yes "we" pay for public schools, that is, we who own property, but the non-propertied classes do not. But no one forced me to buy a house which is taxed to fund schools.

It's in our interests to comply with government which clearly secures our interests, which is why we support property laws which guarantee clear title and oppose shortcuts which undermine them, like the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, a colossal assault on the most basic of all rights we look to government to safeguard but hasn't.

We also expect government to regulate banking to protect the integrity of our savings and of our currency, but it has done neither.  

And no, I didn't have a six hour wait at the DMV. I mailed my check and got my driver's license renewal in the mail. So what if the picture is four years old? But my mother killed the neighbor's prize sow with a car when she was 16, and never drove again. From then until she died at the age of 93 no one forced her to stand in line at the DMV to get a license she would never need.

To hear Ann tell it, we might as well castrate and sell our young, or even eat them because these things were said to be the custom once upon a time, as adultery, incest and sodomy manifestly ever are:

Be it then, as Sir Robert says, that anciently it was usual for men to sell and castrate their children, Observations, 155. Let it be, that they exposed them; add to it, if you please, for this is still greater power, that they begat them for their tables, to fat and eat them: if this proves a right to do so, we may, by the same argument, justify adultery, incest and sodomy, for there are examples of these too, both ancient and modern; sins, which I suppose have their principal aggravation from this, that they cross the main intention of nature, which willeth the increase of mankind, and the continuation of the species in the highest perfection, and the distinction of families, with the security of the marriage bed, as necessary thereunto.  -- John Locke

Is this the reason Ann Coulter is friendly with sodomites today? Because they exist? Or should Thomas Jefferson's advice to castrate sodomites carry more weight?

Did someone hit Ann Coulter with a rock? And is she now living under it? More than half of the country hates ObamaCare because it is compulsory.

The animus against compulsion is as old in America as the revolt against taxation without representation. And older still for refugees from religious compulsion.

If Ann Coulter were alive in 1776 with her present views she'd be a loyalist who would have ended up fleeing to Canada. And in 1861 she'd have gladly plunged the country into a war which killed hundreds of thousands of fathers and brothers because some South Carolinians killed a Union mule at Ft. Sumter.

Ann Coulter's way of thinking has a long pedigree. It's called tyranny.

The Feeble-Minded, Libertarian Crank, Rep. Justin Amash Can't Encourage "In God We Trust"

The text of the bill he voted against reads as follows:

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress reaffirms ‘In God We Trust’ as the official motto of the United States and supports and encourages the public display of the national motto in all public buildings, public schools, and other government institutions.

There is nothing binding in this resolution whatsoever.

It does not require the motto be displayed, anywhere. It merely supports the motto and encourages its display where and when it happens. A wise man, even an atheist, would regard this as a mere trifle, a sop to the parochial interest of an unenlightened but harmless population, a one-off costing nothing to a politician with any sense.

But Amash still couldn't stomach it. Prudence is not a subject of the law schools, which know with Socrates that virtue cannot be taught, but especially to the ilk it attracts.

That said, it is sheer misrepresentation for Amash to say, “There is no need to push for the phrase to be on all federal, state, and local buildings.”

The bill pushes nothing, unless you're an over-sensitive freak, an un-American ideologue like Justin Amash.

George Washington, on the other hand, not only found it unobjectionable but recommended for the mere American politician to cherish and respect religion and morality:

Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion, and Morality are indispensable supports.—In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens.—The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.—A volume could not trace all their connexions with private and public felicity.—Let it simply be asked where is security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion.—Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure.—reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.—

I have seen no evidence that Justin Amash cherishes or respects religion and morality as a politician, nor that he understands their priority over him as a Christian legislator and American, which he claims to be.

Rather is it evident that his loyalties are to a narrowly conceived creed of a different kind.

The do-gooder's work is never done.

The Problem with the Public Schools is that the Teachers are Illiterate

From The Wall Street Journal:

"People who come out of college with a degree in education and not a degree in a subject are severely handicapped in their capacity to teach effectively," Mr. McCullough argues. "Because they're often assigned to teach subjects about which they know little or nothing." The great teachers love what they're teaching, he says, and "you can't love something you don't know anymore than you can love someone you don't know."

Much more here.

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels Doesn't Have the Cojones to be President

CNBC reports that Gov. Daniels doesn't have the cojones to stand up to the unions like Reagan did:

In Indiana, top Republican legislators have declared dead a "right to work" bill that would prohibit union representation fees from being a condition of employment at most private companies. Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels, who is considering a presidential run, had been saying since December that he wanted to avoid a showdown with labor that could distract lawmakers from moving on proposals such as revamping public schools and the state budget.

As in Wisconsin, the clash has drawn hundreds of protesters to the Indiana Statehouse and led most House Democrats to leave the state to shut down legislative business on the union bill and a slate of other issues. Daniels has appealed to the lawmakers to return because "their conscience tells them they should do their duty."

More here.

Teachers Averaged $272,000 in Salary Under Obama's Stimulus Bill

Stimulus funds preserved 367,524 teacher jobs in 2009-2010, and the amount spent on saving these education-related jobs in the nation's public schools was nearly $100 billion, according to a story in The Baltimore Sun which relies on data from the US Department of Education.

That's about $272,000 for each teacher. Wow. Those must be some kind of wonderful teachers.

That also means taxpayers all across America ended up on the hook for the salaries of about 7,350 teachers per state.

Formerly these teachers were paid directly from local property tax revenues, not borrowed funds, but these revenues have been in dramatic decline due to the crash in the housing market and due to skyrocketing unemployment and home foreclosures.

It is highly unlikely that more stimulus funds are on the way, and it is highly unlikely that property tax revenues will be raised easily in this economy, so isn't it time for the teachers in Wisconsin to pack it in already and quit the illegal strike?

They should be thankful just to have a job.

Wisconsin Teachers Haven't Earned Their Very Generous Pay and Benefits

As the regime itself admits:

In 1998, according to the U.S. Department of Education, Wisconsin public school eighth graders scored an average of 266 out of 500 on the NAEP reading test. In 2009, Wisconsin public school eighth graders once again scored an average of 266 out of 500 on the NAEP reading test. Meanwhile, Wisconsin public schools increased their per pupil expenditures from $4,956 per pupil in 1998 to 10,791 per pupil in 2008. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator the $4,956 Wisconsin spent per pupil in 1998 dollars equaled $6,546 in 2008 dollars. That means that from 1998 to 2008, Wisconsin public schools increased their per pupil spending by $4,245 in real terms yet did not add a single point to the reading scores of their eighth graders and still could lift only one-third of their eighth graders to at least a “proficient” level in reading. ...


Nationwide, only 30 percent of public school eighth graders earned a rating of “proficient” or better in reading, and the average reading score on the NAEP test was 262 out of 500.

More here.

"Politics Is Like A Cookbook Where The Recipe For Everything Is To Fry It"

Everyone should be so lucky to have advice from the inimitable P. J. O'Rourke. A couple of years ago he offered some of the bad kind to new graduates, which appeared in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning. The excerpt on politics is rich. Well, maybe greasy is a better description:

Politicians are chefs, some good, some bad. The problem isn’t the cook. The problem is the food. Or let me restate that: The problem isn’t the cook. The problem is the cookbook. The key ingredient of politics is the belief that all of society’s ills can be cured politically. This is like a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fried. The soup is fried. The salad is fried. So is the ice cream and cake. The pinot noir is rolled in bread crumbs and dunked in the deep-fat fryer. This is no way to cook up public policy.

Politics is greasy. Politics is slippery. Politics can’t tell the truth. But we can’t blame the politicians for that. Because just think what the truth would sound like on the campaign stump, even a little bitty bit of truth:

“No, I can’t fix public education. The problem isn’t funding or teachers’ unions or a lack of vouchers or an absence of computer equipment in the classrooms. The problem is your kids!”

Read the rest. You won't be disappointed.

Barack "Fabius" Obama Can Still Be Stopped

Among other things, Bill Flax shows why expunging the study of classical antiquity from the public schools was a priority of the radicals of the 1960's: its stories, repeated and memorized through the study of Latin, stood in the way of their program to subvert our country and destroy our liberty. If you read nothing else this year, read this, which was posted here:

February 13, 2010

We Picked the Wrong Roman Dictator

By Bill Flax

From Government Square in Cincinnati, I often sit surrounded by impressive displays of federal invasiveness, and muse that we picked the wrong Roman dictator.

The Federal Building across the street, serving primarily to dispense largesse confiscated from the workers packed into the square below. The brilliantly marbled Federal Reserve branch where regulators seek enhanced power to oversee commerce while recoiling vigorously against any attempt to be scrutinized themselves. And the block long Federal Court House, which unlike the others, has constitutional legitimacy even as its reach and depth far surpass anything our founders would have tolerated.

Taking nothing away from the many hard-working and honorable souls inhabiting these structures, but America has lost its way. My hometown was named for the Society of the Cincinnati. In ancient Rome, citizen-general Cincinnatus put down his plow to save his nation. When the battle was won, he declined a crown and returned to his farm. His self-restraint in the face of overwhelming temptation bequeathed to Rome several centuries of limited, republican government.

George Washington exhibited similar virtue after our independence. He too could have been king, but his self-denial enabled the rule of law to triumph over the rule of men. Our revolution was largely fought to settle the timeless question of whether government is answerable to the law protecting the rights of its constituents - or - are the people subject to government with a malleable Constitution bending to political pleasure.

America once enjoyed a constitutional republic where property rights were sacrosanct, contracts were conscientiously enforced and markets prevailed. Secure property rights channeled our energies into productive enterprise via the profit motive. An impartial application of the law encouraged market development which enhanced specialization and America's hallmark: an innovative spirit propelling higher living standards for all.

Freedom and prosperity are inexorably linked. Government constrained by law and limited by checks and balances, between both branches and levels of government, birthed an economic juggernaut. Yet, another Roman general has indirectly put a more pronounced stamp on our economy.

Fabius was called to confront Hannibal after the Carthaginian warlord destroyed several Roman armies. Recognizing Hannibal was too strong to confront directly, Fabius conducted a masterful war of attrition. When Hannibal advanced, Fabius retreated. When Hannibal retreated, Fabius advanced always staying safely distant, but close enough to harass the invader. Several times the citizenry grew impatient only for a replacement to hurl the Roman army headlong into calamity.

These "Fabian" tactics became the archetype for a group of sophisticates in late Victorian England. The Fabian Society believed in socialism, not coming by revolution as Marx envisioned, but by evolution. Bored by leisure and rebelling against the strict mores of the time, they sought not to directly confront the existent order, but to undermine it from within.

As prominent Fabian George Bernard Shaw explained, "The Fabian Society succeeded because it ... set about doing the necessary brain work of planning Socialist organization for all classes, meanwhile accepting, instead of trying to supersede, the existing political organizations which it intended to permeate with the Socialist conception of human society."

These ungrateful children of wealth advocated redistribution of other's property while they resided in luxury. Similar to many intellectuals today, they thought they knew better than we how to live our lives. Unfortunately, Fabians and their ilk became the dominant force in our media and educational establishments, indoctrinating generations of Americans to a perverted view of economics and "social justice."

The Fabian movement spawned John Maynard Keynes, an advocate of central economic planning. The overriding focus of Keynes' theory was Aggregate Demand. Loosely defined, aggregate demand reflects the total amount of goods and services consumed at a stable price. Borrowing and spending supplanted classical economic focus on production and savings as the building blocks of prosperity.

Keynesianism was described by Zygmund Dobbs in the illuminating expose, Keynes at Harvard, "The great virtue is consumption, extravagance, improvidence. The great vice is saving, thrift and ‘financial prudence'" because, "If there are no savings there is no private money for investment. Without private investors the government must provide investment capital. If the government provides for investment it has the power to dictate the conduct and processes of those who need investment capital."

Americans wanting to mollify temporary hardship in the throes of recession resurrected Keynes. Rather than endure uncomfortable surgery guided by the market, government injects cortisone to offset the recession's corrective reallocations. Subsidies replace efficiency. Bailouts replace business revitalization. Entitlements replace personal savings. Statism replaces self-reliance. All these government proffered "solutions" may ease our immediate discomfort, but perpetuate economic weakness and come at the price of liberty.

Not only is it immoral to confiscate private property through coercion to redistribute to political favorites, it's also ineffective. Market distortions inevitably harm the economy. The more control we retain over our time, resources and abilities the more closely our efforts will be aligned with productive enterprise. A far-off central planner has no ability to effectively steer this process.

We have witnessed Washington assume greater control with each injection of dubious capital. As Henry Hazlitt warned, "Keynes's plan for 'the socialization of investment' would inevitably entail socialism and state planning. Keynes, in brief, recommended de facto socialism under the guise of 'reforming' and 'preserving' capitalism."

In the closing months of his presidency, Bush crossed the Rubicon authoring vast intrusions "to save" capitalism. Bush quickened what had been a long, painstaking march to socialism. Then a new Caesar immediately began to sprint. We elected not "change," but acceleration.

Only eunuchs were permitted to guard the harem. Entrusting power to the ambitious personalities attracted to government inevitably augments the state to our detriment. Keynes admitted his theories, "can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than ... a large degree of laissez-faire." We must never abjure our God-given rights to the arbitrary whim of professional politicians in exchange for economic safety-nets.

Incessantly higher spending and increasingly burdensome regulatory controls proved too much. Americans now fear this headlong rush into government expansion. Poor Obama misread the signs and awakened the masses. We weren't yet so effete to be bought by bread and circuses.

The Fabians underestimated the resiliency of free markets and Obama over-estimated his demagoguery. Cincinnatus might be forever gone, but Fabius can still be stopped.

Declare a Tax and Penalty Exemption on IRA or 401K Withdrawals in 2010

This was interesting to read on January 8 over at Jesse's Cafe Americain:

Here's a modest proposal. Raise the amount of losses from investments that can be deducted from income in one year from $3,000 to $20,000 for individuals and $40,000 filing jointly so mom and pop can clean up their balance sheets. And if they really want to jump start the economy, declare a tax and penalty exemption on the first $150,000 that an individual can withdraw from their IRA or 401K in 2010.

The latter idea I proposed myself a year ago in a letter to Democrat Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan (rhymes with Stab Me Now). Except I didn't propose the tax exemption, just the penalty exemption. I pitched it as a wonderful way to help people make good on their debts, and generate some much needed revenue for the government. No reply, of course.

She probably didn't understand the significance of the idea, having been a public school teacher.

In the interim it's become quite clear that doing something helpful for the American people is about the last thing on their minds, except for the meagre scraps they gather and throw in our direction come election time. The dogs go for these every time. No wonder the contempt they have for the popular will on healthcare.

Dumb Asses on Parade

I didn't want to believe it at first when I saw this post over at Mish's blog, but after you watch the video from MarkDice.Com you begin to understand why the politicians now routinely ignore the voices opposed to the economic insanity being shoved down our throats in this country.

They realize better than we do that there are now more morons than the likes of us, and morons are easily manipulated, whether it's by a community organizer going door to door searching for a signature on his petition "to increase inflation," or an info babe on TV telling you the economy is improving, or Senator Harry Reid of Nevada assuring you that federalized healthcare will be revenue neutral.

This is the direct consequence of compulsory public education and a unionized teaching profession.

Note that Mark Dice can't even spell "ridiculous." The Pocksaclypse can't be far behind.

Palin Was Wrong on the Most Important Issue of 2008, and She Still Is

Now that Sarah Palin is out with her book, I think it's crystal clear she hasn't learned anything in the last year about the terrible precedent set by the TARP bailout, nor about why she and John McCain lost. She should have taken another year to think about it, but even that probably would not have helped. The only thing that could help Sarah is to have been reading about conservative political philosophy and policy for the last twenty years. You don't suddenly become a marksman by joining the National Rifle Association.

Americans were looking for a clear choice in the presidential race in the face of an unprecedented crisis, and John McCain utterly failed to give them one. No surprise there: he never has. The instincts of the Republican rank and file in the Congress were correct about TARP. President Bush failed them and the American people. It's too bad we still don't have national Republican leadership which recognizes this. And until we do, the voters will keep electing anyone else.

Recall this from Palin as reported on September 30th of 2008:

Gov. Palin: Th..the alt.. as I say inaction is not an option we have got to shore up our economy. This is crisis moment for America. Really the rest of the world also. Looking to see what the impacts will be if America were to choose not to shore up what has happened on Wall Street because of the…the ultimate adverse effects on Main Street and then how that effects this globalisation that we’re a part of on… in our world. So the rest of the world really is looking at John McCain - the leadership that he’s gonna provide through this and if those provisions in the proposal can be implemented and make this proposal better make it make more sense to taxpayers than again, John McCain is gonna prove his leadership.

…

But ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy um helping the… oh - its gotta be all about job creation too - shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reigning in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans and trade we’ve got to see trade as opportunity not as competitive um scary thing but one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today we we’ve got to look at that as more opportunity - all those things under the umbrella of job creation - this bailout is a part of that.

And now fast forward to today from page 270 of "Going Rogue," as reported here:

[T]he House of Representatives rejected a Bush-backed economic bailout plan in a vote in which two-thirds of Republicans voted no. The impression this made on the electorate was not helpful to our cause. Millions of Americans were poised to go bankrupt or lose their savings, and the perception was that Republicans had failed to respond.

No, what was not helpful was the way Republican leadership never made the case nationally that the taxpayer is not responsible to pay for someone else's failing mortgage, failing insurance company, failing bank, failing car company, failing public school, failing pension plan, failing Social Security, failing Medicare . . . you get the idea.

The whole damn country is stuck on stupid, which is why Sarah Palin is the news of the moment.