Maggie's Farm

P.J. O'Rourke's 1988 Eat the Rich begins thus.

Out of print I guess, but readily obtainable if you never read this wise but highly entertaining treatise on basic economics.

Arthur Laffer: The Age of Properity is over. One quote:

...unfortunately in this world there is no tooth fairy. And the government doesn't create anything; it just redistributes. Whenever the government bails someone out of trouble, they always put someone into trouble, plus of course a toll for the troll. Every $100 billion in bailout requires at least $130 billion in taxes, where the $30 billion extra is the cost of getting government involved.

If you don't believe me, just watch how Congress and Barney Frank run the banks. If you thought they did a bad job running the post office, Amtrak, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the military, just wait till you see what they'll do with Wall Street.

He concludes:

Twenty-five years down the line, what this administration and Congress have done will be viewed in much the same light as what Herbert Hoover did in the years 1929 through 1932. Whenever people make decisions when they are panicked, the consequences are rarely pretty. We are now witnessing the end of prosperity. 

Via Insty from Mankiw:

If there were no taxes, so t1=t2=t3=t4=0, then $1 earned today would yield my kids $28. That is simply the miracle of compounding.

Under the McCain plan, t1=.35, t2=.25, t3=.15, and t4=.15. In this case, a dollar earned today yields my kids $4.81. That is, even under the low-tax McCain plan, my incentive to work is cut by 83 percent compared to the situation without taxes.

Under the Obama plan, t1=.43, t2=.35, t3=.2, and t4=.45. In this case, a dollar earned today yields my kids $1.85. That is, Obama's proposed tax hikes reduce my incentive to work by 62 percent compared to the McCain plan and by 93 percent compared to the no-tax scenario. In a sense, putting the various pieces of the tax system together, I would be facing a marginal tax rate of 93 percent. The bottom line: If you are one of those people out there trying to induce me to do some work for you, there is a good chance I will turn you down. And the likelihood will go up after President Obama puts his tax plan in place.

Is it possible that the Dems don't want folks to work hard?

Spring Island, SC, is just a stone's throw from Savannah, GA, one of my favorite towns in the US.

If I planned to remove myself from Yankeeland when I get tired of working, I think I'd like Spring Island.

However, I will never do that. I have roots where I am, and the idea of leaving real life behind for a WASP ghetto of prosperous aging golfers has only slight appeal. Might be nice for a getaway place, though.

I wonder how the duck hunting is down there.

The comfortably unpretentious Spring Island bungalow pictured is here. The two guest cottages are great additions. Here's the Spring Island website.

Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.

- P.J. O'Rourke

Who is greedy? New York, London, Hong Kong and Singapore bankers who work 18 hrs/day, and the investors around the world who take the risks which make economies work and grow?

No. Those are folks with real and challenging jobs. I'll tell you who is really greedy: Politicians with their endless demands on my money, and the people whose votes they want to buy by making me pay their bills (after passing it through the governmental/political machine which always takes its own generous cut) and to give them the money I have earned through hard work and taking risks. That is real greed, and "Gimme yours" is the Dem agenda.

Anybody who wants an entitlement from somebody else's effort and risk and energy and creativity is, by definition, greedy. But Greed is Good, right? Once upon a time, it was a sin...but that's ancient history.

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.

- P. J. O'Rourke

Thanks for the reminder, Jules:

From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

John H at Powerline. To be fully accurate, I should say that Maggie's is not in the red, since we neither have nor want income from our enjoyable efforts here.

All we want are visitors to our humble yet elite boutique site. Please promote us with your friends and email lists, because we are not going out of business and I believe we do add a bit of unpredictable pleasure and unreported info to daily humdrum life.

And the price is right.

In our "It's all about ME!" America, it's no surprise that reporters feel narcissistically ungratified by the idea of being observers. Maybe just writing and talking about what other people do makes them feel small and insignificant if they are inclined that way. Shucks, they want to be important too, like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. You know, they want to personally "make a difference," "save the world," and all that nice Miss America stuff. They probably also want chicks and dough, too, along with getting rid of land mines. Who doesn't?

Dang. A white spider keeps running across my keyboard and distracting me. Run away home, little guy. It's a Little Miss Muffet moment at Maggie's.

OK, he's gone. Now, to continue. Today, we have yet another confession from a political reporter at Newsweek. But he's not a reporter, he's a blogger getting paid to pretend to be a reporter. This sort of thing, which we have seen everywhere this election year, demeans the entire profession of reporting. In fact, it mocks the very illusion that it is a profession at all if my definition of a profession holds. This fellow is basically saying "I am neither capable of, nor interested in, being a devoted, ethical, and disinterested professional in my professed profession."

In real professions, you get tarred and feathered if you screw the pooch. A note pad does not a reporter make any more than a knife makes a surgeon. I want to say to these guys, who should have their hands full just trying to find and state the facts, "When I want your opinion, I'll ask for it."

Today's IBD/TIPP tracking polls:

Contrary to other polls, some of which show Obama ahead by double digits, the IBD/TIPP Poll shows a sudden tightening of Obama's lead to 3.7 from 6.0. McCain has picked up 3 points in the West and with independents, married women and those with some college. He's also gaining momentum in the suburbs, where he's gone from dead even a week ago to a 20-point lead. Obama padded gains in urban areas and with lower-class households, but he slipped 4 points with parents.

Whoever wins this election will provide plenty of material for us at Maggie's to get indignant about and worried about. That's a shame, because we'd rather write about other subjects - like real life. I guess we can do both.

Dear Barack,

I'm rich in income by your tax standards, although at your age of 45 working in government and community organizing you appear to have a greater net worth than I do. What did I do wrong? Maybe it's because I have the wrong sort of pals, and maybe it's because my wife didn't get a $350,000/year job because I'm in politics.

What is "rich" is, of course, relative. It takes a lot more money to be rich in NYC or CT than it does in Montana or Louisiana.

Anyway, here's my plan to adjust, if you get elected and your tax plan goes through:

1. I am going to cut back on my billable hours, and put my wife on our payroll as an expense. She'd be glad to do that to minimize our tax burden.
2. I am going to fire the lawn guys, and do it all myself. Harming them. And I will mow the fields myself, eliminating money from the economy.
3. I will, of necessity, donate less to church and charities.
4. I will patronize restaurants less, harming their incomes and employees.
5. I will buy less stuff I want, harming retail and manufacturing.
6. I will do what I can to put my assets in tax-advantaged investments which do little or nothing to invest in economic growth.
7. I will call the handyman less often, harming his kids. I will do the jobs myself instead of reading by the fire.
8. I will skip a hunting trip, harming travel, guides, hotels, and etc.
9. I will keep our cars longer, harming our automotive industry.
10. I'll take a pass on my plan to replace the upstairs windows in the barn, thus harming Anderson Windows and their employees.

Fact is, there are two kinds of redistribution of money. One is the type that we all do voluntarily to obtain things we want and need, and to invest in business growth, and the other is the kind governments do at gunpoint to buy votes.

Taxes come out of my disposable income because I live within my means, on a budget - but at some point they start hitting bone. When it hits comforts, conveniences, and luxuries, I just get mightily annoyed, but if it hits bone (as Clinton's tax hikes did while I was paying tuitions), I get mad. 

And remember, the USA already has the highest corporate taxes in the world. That is not something for us to feel especially proud about either, because businesses taxes are simply indirect and invisible taxes on consumers and savers.

With warmest personal regards,

The Barrister

Hurray for Captain Spaulding. ("Did someone call me shnorrer?"). It's my favorite Groucho bit, of which yesterday's Marx post reminded me:

Our News Junkie noted the other day that ACORN and the Dems are playing for keeps. That is opposed to "playing for clearsies," which is the gentlemanly, softball, McCain approach.

Games with acorns and other nuts or rounded stones go back to the beginning of human time but, when I was a lad, marbles weren't a popular game. Games with marbles remain very popular in the Third World.

Here are a few expressions from marbles:

Playing for keeps
Knuckle down
Lost his marbles
Pick up one's marbles
Over the line

I'm sure there are plenty of others. Help me out if you can, in Comments. I love the etymological and cultural derivations of expressions. Don't you?

The article in Zombietime, The Left's Big Blunder, is about the famous Asch experiments on conformity.

Obama supporters presume that increasing Obama's perceived support will induce informational conformity in the American public. In other words, Obama supporters operate on the assumption that individual McCain supporters or undecided voters will in actuality change their minds about who to vote for if they perceive that a majority of people are supporting Obama. The imagined line of thinking is, "Gee, if so many people like this Obama guy, then my impression of him must be wrong; I trust the group's wisdom more than my own impressions."

I suppose the Dems' efforts to portray Obama as inevitable and wildly popular are an effort to exploit the conformist tendencies in people, but this seems rather usual in politics. However, the article offers a good depiction of how conformity can distort our thinking and cause us to doubt ourselves and our lyin' eyes. 

The desire to fit in and to be accepted is strong in all of us. It's important for survival, but we need to try to make room for thinking for ourselves too, based on our experience and not on received opinion.

Quoted from Peter Salins via Minding the Campus:

According to the most recent (2007) data, 45 percent of all colleges or universities, and 66 percent of public ones, have no admissions criteria at all. In the public sector - which accounts for three-quarters of all higher education slots - among the 34 percent of schools with some kind of admissions screen, 69 percent accept more than half of their applicants. Even among the remaining somewhat selective institutions, the majority either do not require admissions test scores or they accept most low-scoring applicants, with the result that the average verbal SAT for all college applicants is 532, and that for the math SAT is 537 (both out of a potential score of 800).

This is the sharp edge of the wedge. And it's not about loving trees, believe me. Guys from Chicago politics don't give a damn about trees and wouldn't know a Blue Jay from a Flicker. It's about power and control.

We love trees and the outdoors and the critters as much or more than anyone, and we hate this sort of insidious BS.

We already linked it, but I want to highlight this excellent essay in The Economist: A Short History of Modern Finance.

It's a good clear intro for amateurs like me.

I heard Obama say last night "This country needs fundamental change."

Fundamental, in Merriam-Webster:

1 a: serving as an original or generating source : primary <a discovery fundamental to modern computers> b: serving as a basis supporting existence or determining essential structure or function : basic2 a: of or relating to essential structure, function, or facts : radical

I could not disagree more. Furthermore, I'd like to see this country return to its fundamentals.

Who pays taxes? From Spread Your Own Wealth Around at Powerline:

According to the most recent (2006) data released by the IRS, the top 1 percent of filers paid nearly 40 percent of all income taxes; the top 5 percent paid 60 percent of all income taxes. The bottom 50 percent paid virtually no income taxes (3 percent of all income taxes paid).

The personal income tax, the federal government's main source of revenue, is collected overwhelmingly from a relative handful of Americans. The large majority of all Americans pay little or no income tax.

Given that poorer citizens always outnumber the rich, political philosophers have long worried that government based on majority rule could lead to organized theft from the wealthy by the democratic masses. "If the majority distributes among itself the things of a minority, it is evident that it will destroy the city," warns Aristotle.

We have turned into a two-class society: the shrinking paying class and the large receiving class. Disgruntlement ensues, because the paying class resents carrying everybody else's load, and the receiving class covers up their embarassment and shame about receiving with resentment, envy, and a trumped-up sense of entitlement: it is basic human psychology that the recipient always must resent their benefactor who, in politics, is their neighbor and compatriot.

The obvious political strategy is to increase the % that pay no taxes (or, under Obama's plan, get "refund" checks without paying taxes, aka welfare, aka vote-buying), while raising the numbers of government employees in any way you can. That's how you create a "grateful" population of spirit-crippled dependents, incentivized to work the system and to vote to their economic advantage. Obama's plan will take from the middle class and the small number of wealthy while bringing the number of non-taxpayers up to the magic number of 50%.

100 economists say it's a disastrous idea, and so do I. I believe that everybody should pay their dues so as to feel like a part of the country by contributing their sweat and to have a stake in it, but with 50% of people paying no taxes and getting checks instead, you'll never get a flat tax through. The receiving class would rebel.

The now-famous Joe the Plumber understands life better than any Dem politician, latte liberal, or academic, because he is in real life and he made it work.

Obama campaign hands press their talking points - before the debate. The press needs to know what to say. Coordination, ya know?

Obama looks like a president. I guess that's what counts. I think he looks like a GQ model.

Tim Blair on Devil Children

Good logic on private property. Wilkinson

Sowell on negative campaigning.

Regulation vs. deregulation. Tiger. Related: The Reregulation mantra.

Time to go "John Galt"? Dr. Helen

Carbon taxes and the Canadian election

Messiahs, mortals, and great men. Jules

Michelle on more Ohio vote fraud. JFK pulled these stunts too. It works, if the press is in your pocket.

A commenter, Tina Trent, offered this informed comment to the Pajamas Complete Guide to ACORN voter fraud:

Some answers on how and why ACORN does what it does:

First, false registrations serve several purposes. On the smallest scale, they provide opportunities to acquire one or more registration cards to be used for illegal votes. You can have them sent to a community center, a homeless shelter, or someplace else where the cards can be picked up and used. And remember, you can also vote without your card, so long as you present yourself as somebody on the rolls and have some other (fake) form of I.D., so you can register people you know aren’t going to vote (ie. dead people) or vote for those dead people you know are registered. At this level of fraud, of course, requiring photo I.D. would make everything harder. Guess who opposes requiring picture I.D. for voter registration and voting?

You can also make up people, get them on the rolls, and then send in absentee ballots. You don’t need a body to do this, or a person to show up at the polls, so this is a major source of fraudulent voting.

You can also register people too young to vote and have them vote, along with felons and illegal aliens. The key to all of these things is to keep the laws about identification, both for registration and for casting votes, as lax as possible.

Voter registration drives also spread around money — donated by wealthy non-profits, or subsidized by taxpayers, and disseminated around to people (unsurprisingly, often welfare recipients and others with lots of time on their hands, while you have to work for a living) who will happily show up to “protest” various causes for a few bucks or bigger kickbacks, or register non-existent voters so the organization can go back to their donors (or the feds) and show that they’ve “met their goals.”

So another important purpose served is as an income stream for activism infrastructure, a way to pay the people you need for heads at a demonstration or a press conference, or to disrupt City Hall (If you’ve ever been involved in city or state politics, you’ve probably noticed that the same usual suspects show up to protest wildly disparate causes. At the Capitol where I worked, the annual “Poor People’s Day” was a good day to get your purse stolen).

Growing activism infrastructure doesn’t always translate directly into fraudulent votes cast (though it’s still fraud to file false registrations). But when you get enough money to stage large-scale efforts, then pay lots of people to get registrations, then swamp registration offices at the last possible moment with real and fake ballots, then start screaming about people being denied the right to vote, abetted by a complacent media that starts imagining itself back in “the day” — you’ve disrupted the system and laid the groundwork to whinge on endlessly about disenfranchisement, a complaint that many well-meaning Americans take at face value.

And then the loop is complete: it’s “stop the presses: voters are being disenfranchised!” time. Elected officials grandstand and get tax dollars to pay for registration drives. The money gets divvied out by elected officials to organizations like ACORN. And that money and infrastructure get used to lobby against any laws that would “make it harder to vote” by requiring things like registration in person, photo I.D., and other things required in all other industrialized countries (you know, the ones that are gleefully pointing at us right now and j’accusing us of preventing poor minorities from getting to the polls).

How does an Obama rise out of this? Easy. First you become the guy who gives out the grants (check). Then you make sure the block captains who support your election to lower-office are the ones who get in on the next grant gravy-train (check). Then you get into office and get more grants to give out to your guys on the ground (check), who re-elect you, sending your further and further up the electoral ladder. Check. Check. Check. (I am not suggesting that Republicans don’t have their own closed loops of corruption, but they don’t do this, and they don’t accuse the rest of us of being racists who suppress votes).

The one thing that must NEVER happen is “solving the problem” of poverty, or “disenfranchisement, or any other social ill, because then the gravy train dries up. The argument that “ACORN helps poor people all year long” is risible, unless by “help” you mean getting the most corruptible people from public housing onto public boards in order to open up new avenues of kickbacks and expand political power.

So it is all done at the price of keeping the poor actually poor. And that’s the cherry on top.

What an Obama presidency plus a Dem filibuster-proof Congress could mean for you. Fred Barnes.

But Scott at Powerline says that Barnes only scratches the surface.

I thought we were a center-right country. What happened?