Maggie's Farm

I have a simple question.

Instead of a near-trillion dollar spending bill (which I doubt will do much for the big picture anyway, and put us and our kids in hock to the Chinese for a couple of generations), why didn't Washington simply propose a time-limited tax credit or tax reduction of the same amount, and let the people invest or spend that money into the economy as they saw fit? It would have had an immediate effect - and no different budgetary effect.

Why not? (I know - it's a naive, dumb question. Nevertheless, I think biz and individual tax cuts is the way to go.)

Thanks to Tiger for pointing out a new economic site, Baseline Scenario.

Their global Baseline Scenario, 2/9/09 is a grim but plausible piece. They do a clear job putting the housing bubble in perspective, as one part of a global cheap money house of cards. Furthermore, it is written in English instead of economese.

How Democracies become Tyrannies. Am Thinker

Somebody will eat crow. But who? Dino

Men often view naked women as objects. How much did that study cost? (h/t, Theo)

Re Fairness:

Waxman is also interested, say sources, in looking at how the Internet is being used for content and free speech purposes. "It's all about diversity in media," says a House Energy staffer, familiar with the meetings. "Does one radio station or one station group control four of the five most powerful outlets in one community? Do four stations in one region carry Rush Limbaugh, and nothing else during the same time slot? Does one heavily trafficked Internet site present one side of an issue and not link to sites that present alternative views? These are some of the questions the chairman is thinking about right now, and we are going to have an FCC that will finally have the people in place to answer them." 

Rowan Williams: "Everybody agrees" that some Sharia would be good

No goat jokes allowed in Europe.

Media needs to be more hysterical about warming, says IPCC official

Is Hannity right about Japan's recession?

Britain literally a police state now. Stumbling

Quagmire: Losing the war on drugs for 40 years

BDS: They just can't get over it. VDH.  Related, from John Hawkins:

It's ... worth noting that it was Barack Obama who made unity and bipartisanship a core part of his campaign platform. Granted, Bush ran as a "uniter, not a divider, too" but he actually tried to make it work. He did institute a "new tone." He did partner with Ted Kennedy to write "No Child Left Behind." His payback for his effort to reach out to Democrats was a campaign of demonization unprecedented in the history of American politics. John McCain also promised bipartisanship, but John McCain would have actually made it work by moving his proposals to the left. That's why Republicans like me constantly want to strangle the guy.

Today we remember the Virginian George Washington, but, since it is now called "Presidents Day," why not remember this fine Vermonter too:

"The people cannot look to legislation generally for success. Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act of resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil."

Calvin Coolidge

Photo: Coolidge in 1930 at his home in Northampton, MA with his dogs, Tiny Tim and Rob roy.

What's my house worth? What's yours worth? We all have no idea today. Probably darn little right now - or nothing at all - because I hear there are no bids out there for anything. No bid means no current value or, as they say sort-of euphemistically, a highly "illiquid investment."

I'm glad my place is my home, and not an investment. I wish it were fully paid for.

I recently noticed somebody at Samizdata refer to the "client class," but I cannot find the link right now. It is a useful phrase. It refers to those directly or indirectly employed or supported by government (ie their neighbor).

From my perspective, we will watch this client class grow, while those who feed that class diminishes. I am not convinced that this is a good long-term plan, because most of us gave up on Santa a while ago. Last Christmas, for example. I am still waiting and hoping for my pretty pony.

Who will be productive and produce the wealth to pay these bills? The Tooth Fairy?

Our sense of entitlement to an easy life - decadence - will be death to us and to the American can-do spirit. We currently seem to have a "You Can't Do" government and a growing "Can't Do" population. Not good. Weak. Can I say "flaccid"? Not the American "Yankee Doodle, keep it up".

Who the heck do people expect to take care of them? Me? My shoulders are not broad enough to carry that load, but I do carry my own. Plus I pay my taxes (unlike many Dems, apparently. And I give generously to my charities).

Via Town Hall:

In his classic book, "The Conservative Mind," Russell Kirk established his "canons of conservatism," which on Wikipedia, Russello (2004) has abbreviated as follows:

1. A belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;


2. An affection for the "variety and mystery" of human existence;


3. A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions;


4. A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;


5. A faith in custom, convention, and prescription, and


6. A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.

They removed E-Verify from the "stimulus" bill. Now you can hire all the illegals you want.

The savior-based economy. Michelle.

All expenses paid. Obama orders Palestinian immigration.

No Wilders, but look at the creeps England does allow in. And they want to ban the flag. Why don't they all just get it over with and shoot themselves. Oh, they can't. They gave away their guns.

You are going to pay for this so-called stimulus for a long time. Enjoy it, suckers.

Hollywood's Che Chic

" '[Senate Democrats] don’t know everything that’s in the bill,' said a laughing Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Ways and Committee."

From a Politico post on the deal. What does Rangel care? He doesn't seem to pay his taxes, and he has gotten rather rich as a Congressman.

The laughter is what ticks me off.

Without registering, you can read some of John McPhee's piece on fact-checking at The New Yorker, here.

We see how quickly government intrudes into enterprise when "their" dollars are involved. Their intrusions are, naturally, political rather than rational. Note the usually calm, restrained, and reflective Jim Cramer comparing Obama to Lenin re Obama's call for "no profits."

Here's Reagan in 1961 on government control of medicine (h/t, Axis of Right):

The Left does not want you listening to Rush's ideas. I guess dissent is no longer "the highest form of patriotism." How can we all come together if we disagree about things?

I do not have the time to listen to Rush often these days, but I get a kick out of him when I do. He's a fine entertainer.

George Reisman corrects the record and concludes his piece thus:

Serous Leftists, i.e., those who want to establish and maintain actual government ownership or control over the economic system are all implicitly totalitarians. On the one hand, they want to take total control over people’s lives under the pretext of improving and enriching their lives. But their policies are so bad, cause so much destruction and human suffering, that the potential is created for an explosive outburst of hatred and vengeance against them once the public draws the logically inescapable conclusion that it is they and their policies who are responsible. To stay in power and keep socialism in existence, they have to prevent this from happening by crushing all possibility of dissent.

Limbaugh is a major thorn in the side of the Left. They need to remove him, because his criticisms serve to slow their advance and might even help to stop them in their tracks.

That’s why I’m for Limbaugh and I too hope Obama fails at every turn in his efforts to expand the powers of government.

Me too.

AVI saved me the trouble of doing a post on "whom." It's one of those words, like "shall," with which the youngsters, who were not taught grammar, have trouble.

I agree that "whom" does sound a bit stiff when it doesn't directly follow a preposition, as in the casual "Whom shall I deliver it to?" Over time, the line between formal, genteel English, and informal English, is disappearing.

You still can't say "To who..." though. Makes you sound like a hoot owl.

In response to my shout-out about MacFarlane's book last weekend, our friend Tom Brewton sent this (which he had posted previously):

The simple, undeniable, and clarion fact is that our personal freedoms came about only, exclusively, and entirely because, centuries before, enough Englishmen had owned enough private property to compel the crown to recognize their rights. When individuals hold the nation’s purse strings, the rulers can’t afford to be too arbitrary.

Evolution of individual property ownership and individual liberties was a process that took place only in England, and it was the very heart of the ethos brought to America by the English colonists.

As Alan Macfarlane (The Origins of English Individualism) explains, England’s traditions of property ownership and the rights of contract, along with its supporting legal system, are historically unique in the world. Only in England did the legal right exist for individuals to own and freely dispose of property. As a consequence, according to accounts by visiting merchants and diplomats from the 15th century onwards, England had a per capita wealth and standard of living, even among the peasant farmers, vastly greater than that of any other European country. It is no accident that the 19th century industrial revolution was more extensive and more effective in England than on the Continent.

Elsewhere in Europe, property was a vague concept based, not on a legal title as in England, but on the feudal tradition of occupancy by generations of the same family. A peasant farm was “owned” by the whole family. No member of the family had any legal way to dispose of any of the property by contract. Every member of the family was entitled by tradition to live on the farm. When a family grew larger, there was less produce from the farm for each member.

The Continental peasant economy was characterized by subsistence farming. Peasant families hardly ever possessed money, but lived by bartering produce at local markets. There was almost no hired labor working for wages. The effect was social and economic stagnation with little prospect for increasing the wealth or living-standards of individuals.

In contrast, England at least as early as the 13th century, around the time that Henry II instituted the common law, had a well developed legal system of individual ownership. Church and court records of the time, both in the rural districts and in the cities, show continual sales of all or parts of farm land and other property by the legal owner, who was always an individual, not a family. Fathers could, and did, disinherit individual children; women owned and sold property in their own name, appearing by legal right to represent themselves in such transactions before the local courts.

The expected pattern in rural England, described by Henry de Bracton in the 13th century (On the Laws and Customs of England), was for sons to leave their families at an early age and hire themselves out as laborers on other farms or in the trades. They usually worked and saved their wages until they had accumulated enough to buy a small farm or business, then they married and began to raise their families. Harder-working and more capable individuals often became well-to-do by continually adding to their property holdings, but there was nothing guaranteed by law or tradition. Indeed, records over several generations in any given local jurisdiction show a constant turnover of family names in the property ownership and tax records. The grandchildren of a wealthy yeoman farmer could easily be poor, if they were not equally hard-working and prudent.

The result of this ethos was an unparalleled degree of economic and political individualism in England, and later in the British North American colonies. For an additional perspective, note the striking contrast between British North America and Latin America, where the Spanish crown originally controlled or owned all property. Latin Americans have never enjoyed the secure personal freedoms found here from the earliest days of the English colonists.

For non-English immigrants to America, especially the millions after the Civil War from historically-feudal Continental Europe, this almost universal private ownership of property was both a jarring social and legal ethos, and, at the same time, the source of their great opportunity for a better life in the New World. Their European heritage led them to identify property ownership with the hereditary landed aristocracy and therefore with repression. They had heard all their lives that liberty was to be taken with armed revolution against existing authority. With no conception of the English heritage of working and saving to accumulate private property over the long term, small numbers of them simply transferred their radical socialism to American soil.

The proposed performance Czar. These Dems have no clue how much time I spend to pay my taxes properly. No wonder they don't mind raising taxes - they don't pay them.

This is becoming a joke. Maybe paying honest taxes is for chumps, as Leona Helmsley used to say.

The end of hunting season is always a sad time. After all, how many hunting seasons does a fellow have left? Maybe 25, maybe none. Image above from Mr. Free Market.

"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media."  - Noam Chomsky. That seems to apply right now. (Found that quote while perusing Kos to try to find out whether the Kos Kidz are happy yet. They are not, nor will they ever be).

Obama has picked one sleaze after another. Is that normal?

Steyn says big government is the sign of a dying nation: Stimulated right into being another Europe

Real estate update in fancy towns.

Headhunters are having a tough time these days.

What's the truth about "ocean acidification"? Don't worry. Be happy.

California's green jobs plan isn't going very well. Unless the plan is to destroy the state's economy.

Fully half of the House stimulus bill goes to unions. Sounds like old, old politics to me.

Palin is the downscale candidate? Count me in. I can do downscale, upscale, whatever you want.

Obama wants white folks to die. Shame on him for partying while white folks freeze to death.

The prima facie immorality of wealth. Come on, Ron. That's nonsense. Does that apply to Barbra Streisand, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Jimmy Buffet, Donald Trump, A-Rod, J-Lo, Paul McCartney, Hillary Clinton, Rafael Nadel, Luciano Pavarotti, Jim Carey, John Updike, Yo Yo Ma, Rush Limbaugh - and my local neurosurgeon? And my high-school drop-out friend who built up a 50 store-and-gas chain of mini-marts from one run-down gas station, beginning  when he was 19, and then sold his chain for many millions? Populist envy, I think. People at the top of competitive fields often end up making lots of money. Why would it be different for bankers? Good on all of 'em, say I.

Go Nukes! I agree.

"I thought they said he wasn't a socialist," and other Style Notes, at Jules.