We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
(In the US) a married couple, each earning the minimum wage, investing only 10 percent of their earnings at a modest 7 percent return, retires with an annual income of more than $100,000 a year—even if they never touch the $1.5 million principle they’ll leave to their children. President George W. Bush was mocked for calling his proposal to cultivate such minimum-wage millionaires the “Ownership Society,” but it was the most important initiative of his presidency.
and
It will be considerably easier to create a market-based alternative to Social Security when there are no more Social Security checks being cut—and they are not going to be cut (cf. that $100 trillion unfunded liability). If we’re lucky and smart, we’ll start doing it before the Social Security checks stop. And it won’t just be Social Security: Medicare and Medicaid are going away, too, whether we like it or not. Most of the welfare state will either wither away entirely or be severely truncated. Americans will have the opportunity to rediscover such hoary-sounding virtues as thrift and independence, and their joint product, liberty. All of which turns out to be worth having in a way that is not nearly so corny and Tea Party–sounding and tricorn-wearing as you might think. That’s the optimistic take, and there is reason to believe that this is the more accurate forecast.
I was informed, as 2011 waned, that my tax credit for commuting would fall from $230 a month to $125. This bothered me. Not because I feel I deserve a credit to commute, but because I can't figure out what the government is trying to do.
The fact is, if public transport is a 'good' we should all take advantage of no matter what, then the government should pay for it by taxing everyone and making it available for 'free' - as they do in Portland. Of course, I oppose this idea entirely. However, if the theory is that we can get people to do something that is 'good for everybody', then isn't this the way to do it? Half-measures, like credits, subsidies, and other methods of this ilk only mask what is possibly (though probably not) a problem - that public transportation isn't really viable. There are ways to determine whether this is true, but not for the average commuter.
What is the premise behind having a tax credit for public commutation? I like it, I'll use it if it's offered, but I didn't demand it, nor did I write Congress to keep it at $230/month. The cost, to me, of increased taxation due to the lower credit will be about $270 over the course of the year, so it's not a big deal. Why not just get rid of it altogether? If public transport is truly efficient, then it would make much more sense for me to take it, rather than driving into the city myself (or carpooling).
My commute is about $330/month. The cost of driving (assuming the Federal allowance of .55/mile and $150 a month parking) is about $780/month. Even if I made a more realistic assumption of about .25/mile, public transport is still an advantage. But public transport is heavily subsidized. So I really don't know which is more efficient, and determining this is very hard.
Here is the issue: Subsidies and tax breaks are supposed to promote the 'public good'. But how do I know which is more efficient, let alone even better, for me personally? If it is a 'public good', then its value will be transparent without subsidies and credits. I'll take whatever credits get offered. It would be crazy for me not to. But I'd much rather have a clear means of determining which makes more sense by comparing simple features like cost, time and effort (hey - in the end, I like reading on the train, so if it did cost more I'd probably still take it).
It is precisely this lack of transparency that makes other government initiatives, like Obamacare, a pure misallocation of resources. Unable to determine where our real efficiencies lie, we opt for what we assume is 'best' or costs us least. But we cannot know for sure if these things really make sense at all.
"The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing."
...charity and compassion are always the actions of autonomous people acting as individuals. And, however much intellectuals try to argue otherwise, socialism in the end has to trade on envy and resentment, just as surely as tentative lovers discover that they cannot after all confine themselves to just holding hands, or a stolen kiss. Soon enough people are taken to be good or kindly only if they espouse the correct socialist opinions - we see this all around us in the present age - and human sympathy gets redefined in doctrinal terms.
Yet although left-wing assumptions have captured the intellectual elites of the western world - the humanities are almost dead - they have had limited impact on older people untouched by the bureaucratic and academic caste.
In my little old conservative Connecticut town, people help eachother every day. In fact, we do everything we can to assist eachother. The beauty of collectivism, charity, mutual help, etc. lies in its voluntariness, its mutuality, and in its local-ness. When there are guns and jails behind it (as via government), all of the beauty and love are lost and it just devolves into political power and into legal, armed plunder.
Infantile utopian dreams, in real life, quickly turn into real nightmares. They scare the heck out of me.
If you haven't heard about Congress' latest push to regulate the Internet, here's a primer:
My feeling is that either SOPA (the House version) or Protect IP (the Senate version) will pass. More info here and here, and if you're looking for a specific reason why they're doing this — outside of the usual power, ignorance and control — check out who's #4 on this list.
I'm opposed to any new income taxes. It matters little if they are assessed on my income or a much wealthier person's income. The average person is overburdened.
I feel the same way about corporate taxes, too. The oddity, in both personal income and corporate taxes, is how little people actually pay and how few of us pay. There are a myriad of reasons for this. Loopholes, primarily, but also the manner in which taxes are assessed. After all, capital gains and investment income are not taxed in the same fashion as earned income, for many good reasons. It is money at risk, and money at work. It must be treated differently.
My personal belief is that a flat income tax, with no (or very few) loopholes is transparent, easy to employ, and would reduce the need for a large bureaucracy chasing the average citizen. It would generate more, or at least equivalent, revenue but not cost the government as much. All told, it's a money saver. This is a preference that I'm unlikely to ever see, as many people don't fully understand the benefits of a flat tax, in particular its very 'fairness' (a vague term, but defensible in the manner I'm using it).
A flat tax alone probably isn't enough, though. To truly have an impact and get people focused on longer time frames, I've always felt a Tobin Tax would be useful. Capital gains taxes would be eliminated and replaced with a Tobin Tax on currency trades and a Transaction Tax on investments. There are many reasons to not like this, given the nature of Wall Street behavior today. However, as part of a broad tax overhaul, it would probably yield tremendous results. Bruce Krasting disagrees, as does the House of Lords. It's possible this is because the current concept would be to implement a Tobin Tax in addition to the existing tax structure, rather than as part of an overhaul. As part of a complete restructuring of the tax code, these taxes would focus investors on longer buy and hold periods, reduce High Frequency Trading, stabilize currency exchanges, and generate considerable revenue for the government. The problem, of course, is the level at which the tax is set. .03% is perhaps too high. Then again, OWS would complain it's too low.
It would be intriguing to see someone elected who is willing to alter the tax code so it more naturally meshes with the way business is done today.
Just minutes into last Monday afternoon's confab between Jon Huntsman and Newt Gingrich, I heard Newt say something really noteworthy and thought, Man, I should grab that clip for the post and jotted down the video time to snip it out later.
A few minutes after that, I heard another memorable quote and jotted down the time. Then another. Then-
At that point I realized the whole damn video was turning into a highlight reel. I realized that this wasn't a debate or a forum or even an in-depth discussion.
It was a seminar.
There quickly comes a point when you realize you've never heard anything quite like this before, and certainly not outside academia. It isn't just that both of these people are masters of the field of foreign policy, but they're both master tacticians, as well. You not only hear the what and why, but the how to, as well.
If Newt's the 'Big Picture' guy, Huntsman isn't far behind. His serving as Ambassador to China gave him a world view that none of the other candidates can touch save Gingrich. The extra dimension he provided to the affair is his in-depth knowledge on how to deal with this rising economic-military behemoth, while Gingrich does his usual superb job of keeping things in historical perspective.
When you have an hour and a half to spare sometime, give it a spin. The link is here. Click on the link over to the right to begin play.
This isn't something to be rushed through or watched in pieces. You'll see what I mean at the end. This is an event to be savored.
...the frugal wealthy understand that it is not wealth per se but rather its flamboyant display that erects barriers between the rich and the rest. Gated communities, private jets and the mass promotion of ridiculously expensive luxury goods -- all widespread only in the last generation -- have done more to provoke class division and remove the rich from contact with ordinary people than the actual increases in their wealth.
In the last generation, but also at many times in history. Let's face it. We have vulgar rich, vulgar poor, and vulgar in-between. There is no cure for vulgarity.
...it's upsetting that some people have so much while other people have so little. It isn't fair. But I accept this unfairness. Indeed, I treasure it. That's because I have a 13-year-old daughter. And that's all I hear, "That's not fair," she says. "That's not fair! That's not fair!" And one day I snapped, and I said, "Honey, you're cute, that's not fair. Your family is pretty well off, that's not fair. You were born in America, that's not fair. Darling, you had better get down on your knees and pray that things don't start getting fair for you."
Having the luck to be born in America is the most unfair thing of all. Where else on the planet do you have a wide open field to plan a life according to your own lights, interests, abilities, and desires, and run for it? Freedom of pursuit, but no guarantee of results on this planet. And still, some people bitch like babies.
Nobody really believed that Obamacare would do anything to improve our health-care system or, even more absurdly, "bend the cost curve." By vastly increasing the number of insured and therefore of demand for medical care, it could only drive up costs. Remarks like Nancy Pelosi’s about having to pass the bill in order to see what’s in it showed that they weren’t really interested in what was in it — and nor was the President, who left all that up to congressional Democrats. What they cared about was the establishment of the progressive principle that the government should be in charge of overseeing health care. The details would be worked out later as history pursued its inevitable course of increasing government control over people’s lives.
Leftists take the long view, the Gramscian approach. At one bite at a time, their growing Leviathan wants to consume all that it can of private life in America. It's never enough, and never will be.
That's the essential problem: there is no end-point.
For competitive college admissions, it is tough for Asians to dodge the Asian quotas by labelling themselves as "white." Goes to show how insane this preoccupation with race has become.
What race is a half-Asian? What race is an American Indian or an Eskimo? (Asian, right?) What race is Obama, who "passes" as black to his great advantage in life?
In my opinion, private colleges can do whatever they want (eg Morehouse College), but taxpayer-supported schools should be racially blind. After all, our taxes are racially blind. Ignore race and ethnicity, and just think about their potential to benefit from, and to add something to, the place.
This past weekend, my elder son asked me to drive him to the outlets so he could get some Ralph Lauren shirts at a reduced cost. Frankly, I don't know where he got this penchant for name brand clothing, but it's his money, not mine. What is my money is the gas it takes to drive an hour to the outlets and the time I gave up to make the 2 hour (round trip) drive. I thought it would be a good lesson for him on 2 levels. First, I could teach him about opportunity costs by showing him why the trip was frivolous. Second, he'd get some driving practice so he could get his license in 2 weeks.
I wound up getting to fulfill my goals, he got his shirts, and we both learned a valuable lesson.
No good deed goes unpunished. In other words, Murphy was right. You can almost count on unintended consequences.
I love the old phrase: "We have the answer. Now what was the question again?"
It's the corollary to "For a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail."
Re my post yesterday, I still cannot understand why a jelly shop needs to be licensed and regulated. Haven't farmers been selling jams, jellies, and pies to happy customers for hundreds of years?
Lengthy and complex regulations are employment schemes for government employees and lawyers as much as anything else. Forget state regs -there are 86,000 pages in the Fed Register. Nobody knows what is in there, but it you violate one of them, you can be screwed.
The rules are stacked against even the smallest of entrepreneurs. If and when I decided to set up my own thing, I already know what I'll need to borrow money for: Lawyers.
When we ask how our current political state of affairs measures up to the Founders’ standard, we usually find ourselves discussing whether a given law or program is constitutional, and soon enough get tangled in precedents and lawyerly rigmarole. But let’s frame the question a little differently: How far does present-day America meet the Founders’ ideal of free government, protecting individual liberty while avoiding what they considered tyranny? A few specific examples will serve as a gauge...
Read it. Wonderful essay. Another quote:
There’s indeed a lot of petty tyranny going around. The question is, at what point do many little tyrannies add up to Tyranny? Likely voters suggested a troubling answer in an August Rasmussen poll: 69 percent of them said they didn’t think today’s U.S. government enjoys the consent of the governed. And in September, 49 percent of respondents, an unprecedented high, told Gallup pollsters that “the federal government poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”
"We created a group of self-entitled monsters." Hey youths, this is for you. Hey, OWSers, this is for you, too. Adam Carolla tells it like it is (language not entirely SFW, and h/t, SDA):
"Life is difficult." That book did me a lot of good, a few years ago. Got me into a little therapy, changed my life for the better, helped me realize that I was my biggest obstacle in getting on with life. Corny as it sounds, that empowered me. Shrink told me that there was nothing wrong with me except for being a "blaming and excuse-making a-hole" and I had to get my shit together, quit blaming and making self-flattering excuses, and take charge of my life like an adult who was willing to deal with reality instead of fantasies. Mean SOB was spot on. That's why I am, at present, having a very good life in New York City.
It is also why I don't do the morning posts here anymore. I am grandfathered in, to post whatever I want, whenever I want.
I am highlighting a weekend link about Fred Siegel that might have gone overlooked in the shuffle: 'The New Tammany Hall' - The historian of the American city on what Wall Street and the 'Occupy' movement have in common, and how government unions came to dominate state and local politics. One quote:
The future of his city worries Mr. Siegel. Forty years ago, New York had the most manufacturing jobs in America. But as the finance sector's share of the national economy grew to 23% in 2007 from 7% in 1980, New York turned almost into a one-company town. Meantime, the growing claims on the public purse by those who make little to no contribution to the economy have driven up taxes and the costs of doing business. The city creates jobs in tourism, hotels and restaurants at the lower end of the scale. "What we don't create are private-sector middle-class jobs," says Mr. Siegel. "We have a ladder with the middle rungs missing."
Government workers make up a growing share of the middle class. And perversely, says Mr. Siegel, unions can justifiably claim to defend the interests of the middle-class worker. "That's because the costs that they've imposed have driven out the private-sector middle class. They are the disease of which they proclaim themselves the cure."
The bad news is that she wasn't referring to Obama, dagnabbit. She thought she was just doing a voice-over and was flipping off some guys in the studio who were trying to distract her. There's a nice summation of it here.
The original progressives of the early 20th century, just like today’s seemingly incoherent liberals, were populist and technocratic — they argued both for direct democracy and for expert rule. Even as they called for enlarging the scope of the federal government and putting a class of educated specialists in charge of it, they also called for radical democratic reforms of our constitutional system. In the 1912 election, the Progressive-party platform proposed not only the direct election of senators but also the enactment of federal laws by public initiative, and even advocated allowing the public to overturn some court decisions by referendum.
And the progressives generally did not see a contradiction between their technocracy and their populism. They expected their technocratic ideas to be popular, and so they expected populism to lead to more expert government.
Progesssives hope citizens will sell their independence to the expert technocrats, without their realizing how venal and power-hungry those pols and technocrats are. Cannot fool all of the people all of the time, and there is no fool like an educated fool.
My always-fragile trust in self-anointed experts and elites diminishes daily - see the EU, or Washington, DC, for plentiful current examples.
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”
Think about what this means. All of the money and power would be focused in the state, but then the state would not do anything with that concentration of power. The state was innocent. There would be no cronyism, no corruption, no bureaucracy, and no concentration of stupidity so as to make mistakes much bigger.
This is precisely — without the proletarian aspects — the Obama worldview. Good citizens with high levels of education will be the philosopher kings, telling everyone what to eat, drive, and do for their own good. Naturally, these people would have no interests of their own. Naturally, their learning from books and theories rather than from real life would not lead them into really big mistakes.
Then, there is Marx’s view of what later became known as the withering away of the state:
“When…all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. … If the proletariat…makes itself the ruling class…then it will…thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.”
What we have here today is not the triumph of the proletariat but the triumph of the managerial-bureaucratic-intellectual-cultural elite. The best describer of this is not Marx but James Burnham, a former Marxist whose writings in the 1940s were the basis for George Orwell in writing 1984. Then there is Karl Popper, who pointed out that the greatest threat to freedom (the “open society”) were those who thought they knew everything.
Our rule of thumb at Maggie's: Never trust any human who wants any form of power, especially over you. No matter what they say, they do not mean well. If they claim they are doing it for your own good, run the other way as fast as possible. I am with George Washington:
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
Just as housework withers away, so the obligations of parents to their children wither away gradually until finally society assumes the full responsibility. Under capitalism children were frequently, too frequently, a heavy and unbearable burden on the proletarian family. Communist society will come to the aid of the parents. In Soviet Russia the Commissariats of Public Education and of Social Welfare are already doing much to assist the family. We already have homes for very small babies, creches, kindergartens, children’s colonies and homes, hospitals and health resorts for sick children. restaurants, free lunches at school and free distribution of text books, warm clothing and shoes to schoolchildren. All this goes to show that the responsibility for the child is passing from the family to the collective.
This was just as good, maybe even better, than the round table debate. The video is here. There's just something about the candidates sitting at a table that both lends itself to a more relaxed atmosphere, yet makes the whole event seem more 'businesslike', rather than sterile and 'debatelike'.
Like the last two debates, no bombs or barbs were hurled, and, much like the Cain-Gingrich confab, it was usually left to the participants to decide who answered what. More specifically, the moderator might ask the question of a specific candidate to get the ball rolling, then it was left to the group if anyone wanted to pipe up after that. It was cool, calm and collected.
There's a point to be made right from the start. This was a forum about morals and values, which actually is the definition of 'political party', in the sense that pragmatic and scientific issues such as defense spending, immigration and global warming have no business, whatsoever, being aligned with one political party or the other. The parties are supposed to be about moral issues like abortion and capital punishment; things that define a human being. How carbon dioxide reacts in the atmosphere is not something that defines a human being.
This does, however, work to our benefit, because there are many people out there who might identify with the Democrats on moral issues, but not buy into the AGW hoax and think we ought to drill, baby, drill in ANWR and immediately start building a hundred nuclear power plants. So they end up being Independents simply because they have nowhere else to turn. And Independents usually study the facts and know some history and, in theory, will be able to deduce that keeping a socialist in the White House for another four years is perhaps not the best of ideas.
So this debate was a little more important than how it might appear at first glance. This is the one that goes to the core.
This has been floating around recently and I thought it deserved a spot here.
The Debt Generation speaks:
Dear Republican National Committee: Come the general election, please discourage our candidate from running any self-promotional ads. Just run variations of the above over and over and over and over and over again, covering all ages, styles, types and classes of Americans.
I was all enthused about this afternoon's debate because of its different style and fewer participants until I saw a link this morning to an article on American Thinker, a highly-respected right-wing blog site, and read Prepare Yourself for Obama's Second Term, a thorough and persuasive demolition of the GOP's chances.
So I guess we should call this the "Why bother?" debate. Because, let's face it, according to the above article, we're just wasting our time, and it would be a lot better and healthier for the nation as a whole to simply give up now and concede the election. I'm sure this national feeling of peace and harmony was at the forefront of the writer's mind, and possibly those who linked to it. What's four more short years of Obama compared to how an impassioned and contentious election would tear the nation apart? It's nice to see that someone out there is looking at the bigger picture and seeing what we little people don't.
Nevertheless, I guess I'll dourly plunder on with this post. Haven't got anything better to write about at the moment.
This afternoon's dour waste of everyone's time is brought to you by 'family' groups, such as Family Leader and the National Organization for Marriage.
"This is not a debate," dourly said Bob Vander Plaats, President and CEO of The FAMiLY LEADER. "Our meaningless purpose is simply to learn about their dour worldviews and to listen to their dour hearts on key family issues. The discussion will allow us to see a more personal side of the dour and meaningless candidates."
(I edited the above quote a bit to bring it up to modern standards.)
I dourly note that neither Romney or Huntsman will be participating. What might make the event interesting, albeit in a dour and meaningless way, is that it's being touted as a 'forum', rather than a 'debate', so that should be fun to see, even if it is a total waste of everyone's time.
The good news is that you won't lose any of your valuable TV time as it's only being streamed via the miracle of the World Wide Web. Better yet, it's on at a grossly early 5 pm EST, so hopefully the entire nation will be too busy to watch this inconsequential pile of platitudes leading up to a foregone election.
Update: I meaninglessly just spotted that the sponsor site says "64 television stations will carry either live or delayed broadcasts" so check your local listings, although I doubt any station carrying it would bother mentioning it.
Again, I think the nation as a whole owes a debt of gratitude to American Thinker and their clear understanding of our hopeless chances (as well as those who linked to their fine piece) and, like the way global warming is finally dead, so, too, is this election, and I'm sure we've all got more important things to do than stare at some stupid computer in the middle of a beautiful Saturday afternoon when we should be out there living life to its fullest and doing important things, like cleaning the garage and washing the car.
Or, you could completely disregard the article's defeatist message and approach this afternoon's event with the same zeal and enthusiasm with which you've approached the others in our determined effort to get this horseshit socialist out of the White House.
Has individual liberty been a prime value in American politics and policy since Coolidge? (We are defining liberty as freedom from the power and interference of the state.)
Do Americans talk liberty, but desire utilitariansm? Is real freedom too difficult or scarey for most people nowadays?
Secondly, three guys including Will Wilkinson discuss Libertarianism and Liberty in serious depth at Boston Review. At Maggie's, we believe that the "liberty cost" has to be a large factor in any policy equation, or else we aren't America anymore.
Today, you hear more about financial cost, health cost, and environmental cost, than about liberty cost. (Can I trademark the term "liberty cost," or has somebody else done that already?)
Seems to me that Repubs talk more liberty than the Dems, who have eliminated it from their political calculus since Woodrow Wilson. However, the Repubs talk it better than they act it. Have pols simply learned that, when it comes to voting, people want stuff more from the feds than they want freedom?
"And the centerfielder's going back... back... Home run, Team Republican!"
Sorry, just getting in the mood.
With this extraordinarily long lull between debates (an entire week), I thought I'd step back and take a fresh look at things. Armed with the very latest in caffeine-fortified psychotropic drugs and a Jack Daniels I.V. drip, I'm prepared to take on such challenging questions as, "Does bra size matter in a presidential race?", and "Would you vote for someone with an opposing astrological sign?" That's why Maggie hired me, to take on tough, penetrating questions like these that no other blogger dares address.
By the way, I had a rare insight while writing this post and have resolved not to say too many scornful, derisive, abusive, reprehensible things about Ron Paul ever again. So that's good news for our Ron Paul fan(s) out there.
"The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing."
A rambling and interesting essay by David Wemyss: 
I love the old phrase: "We have the answer. Now what was the question again?"
From Yuval's